Le Printemps d’Yver by Jacques Yver (review)

Le Printemps d’Yver first appeared in 1572; it was to be the only work of Jacques Yver, a prosperous jurist of Niort, who died in that year. It was very successful in its own day: four separate editions appeared in 1572 alone, with over thirty by the beginning of the seventeenth century. And yet, despite this initial wave of enthusiastic readers, it remains relatively unknown today. In their new critical edition, Marie-Ange Maignan and Marie Madelaine Fontaine make a good case for re-evaluating the cultural impact of Yver’s work and its place in French literary history. An œuvre romanesque of considerable sophistication, Le Printemps is set in France during the reign of Charles IX — a time of civilreligious war. Five cultured young people (two male, three female) gather together in a Poitevin château; their host is a ‘sage dame’, who initiates and regulates a literary contest in which each youth narrates a story, inviting reaction from the others. The subject matter is largely conventional: tales of tragic love, suicide, friendship, and war, in a European geopolitical setting that covers contemporaneous France and the Rhineland, as well as Italy and England in previous eras. The strengths of the present edition of Le Printemps are manifold. In their illuminating Introduction, Maignan and Fontaine capably situate Yver socially and intellectually in the swathe of humanistic writers who shaped French prose narrative between Rabelais and Montaigne. Yver had demonstrable connections to a well-known compiler and translator, François de Belleforest, yet, according to the editors, he did not slavishly imitate him. (The editors perhaps unduly criticize Belleforest’s supposed lack of literary technique in their zeal to demonstrate Yver’s singularity.) Instead, Le Printemps emerges as a rich engagement with multiple sources and traditions, from the ancient (Achilles Tatius, Plutarch), to the more contemporary (Boccaccio, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre Boaistuau, Belleforest). Yver’s text is notable, moreover, for its verse insertions, which owe much to his favourite poets, Pierre de Ronsard and Rémy Belleau. In due course, Le Printemps would itself become a model for imitation: its influence is salient in Bénigne Poissenot’s L’Esté (1583). These various literary allusions are amply attested throughout the present edition, through a sound critical apparatus. Renaissance textual scholars will appreciate the three appendices, of which the first two give more detail on Yver’s use of Plutarch and Achilles Tatius, and the third provides a table of the various poems that appear throughout the text. Less specialist readers are not neglected, however, and a glossary of archaic language follows the appendices. The bibliography is extensive. In sum, Maignan and Fontaine have gone to great lengths to make Yver’s work accessible to a modern readership.