Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought ed. by Emma Gilby and Paul White (review)
- Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought ed. by Emma Gilby and Paul White
This timely and important volume addresses the role of narration in revealing early modern French belief patterns, by soliciting perspectives from eight different scholars on how ‘the language of verisimilitude, veracity, proof and invention’ (p. 5) is embedded across genres and other media of narrative expression between the end of the French Renaissance and the dawn of the French Enlightenment. As the editors explain in a tightly written and informative Introduction, the concept of narratio has been a subject of theoretical inquiry since ancient times, owing in large part to the fact that narratives, as intentionally fashioned devices of representation, provide a basic strategy for organizing and making sense of the human experience. Unlike annals, lists, instruction manuals, conversational remarks, or scientific modes of explanation, narratives do not simply convey information as isolated instances related or not to a general covering law or universal centre. Narratives organize information in a way that is ‘rich in connections and explorations of detail’ (p. 1). As such, regardless of whether or not they are true (historia), verisimilar (argumentum), or obviously fictitious (fabula), narratives allow humans to come to terms with time, process, and change by imparting order, causality, and meaning to the diverse experiences that constitute their lives. The eight essays included in the volume are organized chronologically and address the relationship between narrative and thought from a range of generic perspectives. John O’Brien reveals how Montaigne’s essays shift and reconfigure their own symbolic framework, complicating the relationship between the known and the unknown; Rowan Tomlinson shows how seventeenth-century thinkers negotiated philosophical controversies by surveying sixteenth-century French narratives on the death of Pliny the Elder; Anthony Ossa-Richardson addresses how early modern religious controversy is thematized in the anti-Calvinist writings of the Jesuit Louis Richeome; Alexander Roose explores Emanuele Tesauro’s reworking of Aristotelian [End Page 542] reflections on similarity and difference; Michael Moriarty examines the role of anecdote in La Rochefoucauld’s maxims; Katherine Ibbett addresses the narrative status of fiction in the works of Madame de Villedieu; Isabelle Moreau considers how diverse narrative techniques including fiction, anecdote, and constructed dialogue are used to validate the empirical approach of François Bernier’s translations of Gassendi; and John D. Lyons explores how discourse and image emerge as rival systems of signs in Lafayette’s Zayde. In demonstrating the range of ways in which early modern authors reconfigure and renegotiate narrative’s relationship to thought, argument, and proof, the contributors to this volume together add critical understanding to the complex articulation of fable, history, and argument in the early modern period.
