Étienne Dolet, 1509-2009 ed. by Michèle Clément (review)

This coherent and well-edited volume of conference proceedings presents a sympathetic but unromanticized portrait of Étienne Dolet as he would have been perceived in his lifetime: not as a future martyr, but as the often pugnacious yet highly erudite humanist responsible for an array of scholarly editions and texts. The volume is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on aspects of Dolet's biography. Five articles examine Dolet's connections and relations with the circles in which he moved, initially as a student in Toulouse (Didier Foucault), and later under the patronage of the Du Bellay family (Richard Cooper) and, more ambivalently, of Jean de Langeac (David Amherdt). Laurent Calvié and Jean-François Vallée disagree violently over Dolet's relationship with Bonaventure Des Périers and his involvement in the banning of the Cymbalum mundi. Claude Bocquet argues that the translation for which Dolet was condemned to death was consistent with his original but apparently uncontroversial theory of translation, and Marcel Picquier assesses the physical and psychological effects of the long-term 'fièvre quarte' from which Dolet suffered and of the melancholia it triggered in him. The second section focuses on Dolet as an author and editor, with articles analysing the Commentaires de la langue latine (Marie-Luce Demonet, Martine Furno), the Carmina (Philip Ford^†, Catherine Langlois-Pézeret), and the Gestes (Sophie Astier). Michel Magnien extends Claude Longeon's inventory of Dolet's correspondence with a catalogue of letters addressed to Dolet that charts his shift in status from the writer who begs for a reply to the busy and illustrious recipient whom his correspondents berate for his epistolary silence. Four articles in the third section, which focuses on Dolet's activities as a printer, consider his troubled relations with other members of his profession. Michel Jourde reappraises Dolet's friendship with Jean de Tournes and suggests that Tournes's publication of Dolet's editions after his imprisonment in 1542 was part of a mutually beneficial strategy rather than an unscrupulous bid to profit from a rival's incarceration. In contrast, Dolet's less ethical editorial decisions are shown to have prompted the considerable decline in his professional relations with François Juste (Élise Rajchenbach-Teller), Marot (Guillaume Berthon), and Rabelais (Mireille Huchon). Two articles focus on Dolet's editorial policies: Valérie Worth-Stylianou examines the ideology and importance of Dolet's medical editions, arguing that beyond simply commercial acumen they reflect Dolet's real interest in the subject, while Gérard Morisse provides a general overview of Dolet's activities as a printer as well as an updated bibliography of his works. The section concludes with two reception histories of Dolet in the eighteenth century: while Dominique Varry re-emphasizes the value and originality of Née de La Rochelle's 1779 biography of Dolet, Raphaële Mourin demonstrates that eighteenth-century bibliophiles appreciated Dolet's editions more for their rarity value and the legendary nature of his death than for their content. Overall, the essays offer a valuable reassessment of Dolet's life and works, in a book that is, by turns, both as scholarly and as pugnacious as its subject.