La Plume et la tribune, ii : Discours et correspondance by Michel de L’Hospital (review)

This edition of the discourses and correspondence of the major French sixteenth-century statesman Michel de L’Hospital allows us to perceive him through texts that he produced for a range of publics. Loris Petris’s Introduction is full of sensitivity to early modern oratory and discursive practices, and, in allowing L’Hospital to speak for himself, Petris has produced a worthy companion to the first volume of his study (published in 2002). The latter volume contained a handful of L’Hospital’s texts, to which this second volume adds his addresses to the parliaments of Paris, Rouen, and Bordeaux, and to the Privy Council — texts that date from 1563 to 1568. The present volume also reproduces letters to humanist correspondents across Europe, such as Pibrac, Doneau, Montaigne, Morvillier, and Olivier, as well as formal letters exchanged with parliamentary bodies and heads of both Church and State. It is entertaining to see the way in which the orator and statesman sought to conduct himself in public, in the context of the tumultuous events of his time, and always in keeping with his own understanding of the vir bonus. To understand this crucial detail is to grasp the energy that lies beneath the surface of all of L’Hospital’s writings, and Petris and David Amherdt continue to work to that end in the annotations. It is difficult to believe that it has taken almost two hundred years to see a new edition of a critical mass of L’Hospital’s work, but the need for the update becomes all the more apparent when one measures the usefulness of the notes in this edition. The comments and clarifications are clear and germane; the editor shows restraint and judgement by keeping the comprehension of the primary source as the focus. This is also apparent in the translations of the texts (or bibliographical indications of other extant translations and editions), a choice that is practical not only for those not fluent in Latin, but also for the time-pressed researcher attempting to locate just the right letters or discourses to pore over more closely in the original. Across the texts of this edition of L’Hospital’s corpus, we can see an ebb and flow between the rhetorician and his addressees. We also witness the struggle of a statesman confronted by the shortcomings of oratory in a context of religious and civil unrest: he came to understand the pragmatic limitations of the ars bene dicendi to elevate, persuade, and assure peace and order, and therefore the unfulfilled hopes for humanist learning. L’Hospital’s awareness of his own successes and failures as he attempts to put that learning into practice poses time and again the question of the utile and the honnête.