Carmina, I. ed. by Michel de L’Hospital (review)

This volume inaugurates the re-edition of the extensive Latin verses of Michel de L’Hospital, the Italian-trained jurist-magistrate and friend of the Pléiade, peace-keeping Erasmian and Gallican chancelier de France (1560–68), formerly conseiller au parlement de Paris (1537–47), ambassador to the Council of Trent (at Bologna, 1547–48), chancelier du Berry of Marguerite de France (1549–60), then maître des requêtes and surintendant des finances (1553–54). L’Hospital’s Horatian-style ‘conversational’ epistles (Epistolae seu sermones) were of an occasional, political, personal, religious, or meta-poetic nature, addressed between 1543 and 1560 to friends and patrons, key secular, ecclesiastical, or poetic figures, in a simple style appropriate to a poète-juriste (neither court poet, nor professional) and the dignity of a robin. Several of their themes, relating to exile or illness, travel to Italy, the desire or duty of return to France, Gallicanism, poetic hubris, and the fate of Icarus, anticipate or are in dialogue with the French and Latin verses of Joachim Du Bellay. Printed or circulating/remaining in manuscript during L’Hospital’s lifetime (c. 1506–1573), his verses were edited and successively augmented posthumously in six books of Epistolae seu sermones (ed. by J.-A. de Thou and others (Paris: Mamert Patisson, 1585; augmented ‘Lyon’ [Geneva]: Hugo Gazeius, 1592)), then nine as Carmina (Amsterdam: Balthasar Lakeman, 1732). This inaugural volume’s Introduction contextualizes historically, politically, theologically, socio-poetically, and stylistically the whole corpus and its ‘humble’ Horatian epistolary-conversational form and style (p. 11), relating these to Erasmian Christian piety, tinged with Evangelism and neo-Stoicism, and to the casual spontaneity of the Statian sylva and its Italian Quattrocento legacy (a poetics of affective ‘heat’ (calor) rather than inspiration), as well as to the (lyric) Horatian examples of the neo-Latin Jean Salmon Macrin (Carmina (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1528–30); Odarum libri tres (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1546)) and cardinal Jean Du Bellay (Poemata, 1546, included in the latter). It also sets out the publishing history, and the editorial choices stemming from that, based upon BnF autograph MS Dupuy 901, printed plaquettes contemporary with the author, and the 1732 edition, resulting in an apparatus of significant variants accompanying the Latin text. This authoritative edition and elegant French translation of the first book comprises fifteen epistles (spanning 1543 to 1556) — to the Muses, the chancelier de France Olivier, the robin Du Drac, Marguerite de France, her tutor Pontrone (replacing as addressee her poet-protégé Joachim Du Bellay), the cardinaux de Tournon, d’Armagnac, de Châtillon, and Du Bellay, the humanist theologian Espence, the Italian humanist Bocchi, the vernacular/neo-Latin poet-bishop Carles, and the maître de la librairie du roi Du Châtel — followed by two poetic epistolary responses (in annexes): from cardinal Du Bellay to L’Hospital (justifying his remaining in Rome); from the Toulouse jurist Boysonné (on L’Hospital’s epistle to Du Drac recounting the experience of Bologna and Italian political violence in 1547). Each poem is accompanied by an informative presentation (dating, the addressee, structure), analysis (poetic, political, religious themes), and commentary (sources, intertexts, historical references). The whole is served by indexes of names, places, and topics. This important edition demonstrates the centrality of L’Hospital’s poetry within the socio-poetic, theological, and politico-religious contexts of its time. It whets the appetite for the eight books to follow.