Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne by Ullrich Langer (review)

Ullrich Langer begins by carefully distinguishing between the ‘lyric’ poetry of pre-modern times and what the term has come to mean since the eighteenth century. However, he finds in early modern poetry a ‘hint of modernity’ that also separates it from classical poetry ‘through the existential singular which it puts forth especially with and after Petrarch’ (p. 6). Langer covers a great deal of critical ground in relatively few pages, with chapters devoted to Petrarch, Charles d’Orléans, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and, less predictably, Montaigne. As he points out, his choice of authors, which could have included Marot, Scève, or Labé, is somewhat ‘arbitrary’ (p. 18). This is therefore not a comprehensive study of the widespread influence of Petrarchism, which was of course not limited to France. Instead, Langer considers what ‘Petrarch does’ or achieves in the Canzoniere, and how the textual practices of subsequent authors reflect ‘the intensity of certain features of Petrarch’s poetic language’— authors who were not necessarily influenced by direct contact with Petrarch’s poetry, but who picked up ‘elements of his writing through the mediation of later poets and editors’ (p. 17). In the first chapter, appropriately devoted to Petrarch, Langer seeks to differentiate between the ‘existential singular’ that characterizes the poet’s lyric production and the ‘classical rhetorical common place’ (p. 26). Petrarch’s poetry, due to its insistence on the intensity of love and its effects on an isolated individual, cannot be reconciled with the shared premises and the goal of persuasion of classical rhetoric. To buttress his arguments, Langer provides close readings of excerpts from the Canzoniere, comparing some of them with quotes from Ovid and Horace. In the following chapters, Langer finds variations on Petrarchan ‘singularity’ within the works of the French authors he has chosen, all of whom echo the fact that ‘Petrarch’s Canzoniere is not foremost an exemplary document in which all those struck by Petrarchan love can find general truths’ (p. 49). Within the context of the pervasive melancholy or nonchaloir of Charles d’Orléans, ‘the particular emerges in questions “why am I this?” or “why have I been lost?” and in answers to those self-interrogations’ (p. 52). In Les Amours de Cassandre, Ronsard’s lyric ‘is complementing and softening Petrarch’s radicalness, in representing mutuality at the heart of erotic longing’ (p. 101). At once an imitator and a satirist (‘Contre les Pétrarquistes’) of the Petrarchan tradition, Du Bellay, whose poetry often ‘seems closer to prose, closer to commentary’ (p. 104), also provides a transition to Montaigne. Langer justifies his inclusion of the Essais in his book by asserting that Montaigne shows ‘both an awareness of the singularity of lyric language and an acute appreciation of the ethical (or anti-ethical) scenarios implied by love lyric’ (p. 125). Whether or not the chapter on Montaigne is appropriately placed within this work, readers will find it to be, like the rest of the book, well informed and insightful. Langer’s detailed, erudite, yet very readable study will be of interest to a wide readership.