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  • Histoires de mariage: le mariage dans la fiction narrative française (1515–1559) par Laetitia Dion
  • Jean Braybrook
Histoires de mariage: le mariage dans la fiction narrative française (1515–1559). Par Laetitia Dion. (Bibliothèque de la Renaissance, 16.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017. 587 pp.

This meticulous and well-signposted study originated in a doctoral thesis. Laetitia Dion takes as her primary material thirteen diverse examples of prose fiction, some well known, such as L’Heptaméron and Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d’amour, some less so, such as Jean Maugin’s unusual Melicello. All, short or long, focus on conjugal life or the stages prior to a wedding; they either have no known direct source or differ markedly from their sources. Alongside these works Dion explores a large secondary corpus of texts in which marriage is not a central concern. She maintains that the theme of marriage contributes to a renewal of French prose fiction in the first two thirds of the sixteenth century. She divides her analysis into three sections, deftly blending cultural history and literary analysis. The first section surveys sixteenth-century marriage in its institutional, ideological, and cultural context, highlighting Christian doctrine and the writings of jurists, moralists, doctors, dramatists, and poets; it traces the role of family networks in the progressive affirmation of royal absolutism and is informative about debates on mariages clandestins, which provide in addition much material for Part Two. This second section considers many texts produced or published in the period, aiming to highlight the specific traits of the primary corpus and asking to what extent the fictions are marked by sociopolitical and doctrinal developments. The last part provides a closer examination of plot and character, didactic and hermeneutic devices in the primary corpus, suggesting how the texts innovate by questioning interpretation and the construction of meaning. Dion acknowledges her particular debt to Raphaël Baroni and Terence Cave and their theories concerning narrative tension and suspense. Drawing inspiration also from Maurice Daumas, Dion is enlightening regarding the topic of adultery. She is sensitive to the techniques of her female authors: she underlines the originality of the first-person narration and woman’s viewpoint in Les Angoisses douloureuses (a text that also explores the husband’s violent thoughts), and shows how Marguerite de Navarre gives her female characters [End Page 276] autonomy. Nouvelle 21 of the Heptaméron allows Dion to develop this point: Rolandine expresses personal judgements in direct speech, illustrating the argument that the works under consideration are moving towards a new conception of character based on ‘l’expression d’une intériorité’ (p. 351). Convincing, too, is the examination of the directing of the reader’s emotional reactions in a way that adumbrates the genre of the histoire tragique. A chapter devoted to Les Angoisses douloureuses, L’Amant resuscité, and Melicello cogently argues that they are part of the development of the roman sentimental and addressed primarily to women. Elsewhere, Dion maintains, it can be difficult to establish meaning (there may for instance be several narrators and divergent opinions); taking a different view from many critics on this issue, she suggests that the reading process can be used to develop the reader’s moral awareness. This challenging book based on close textual study makes a valuable contribution to the study of prose narrative fiction in the French Renaissance.

Jean Braybrook
Birkbeck College, London
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