Biography in Early Modern France 1540–1630: Forms and Functions (review)

In her study of a selection of biographies (and one autobiography) from early modern France, Katherine MacDonald trains her attention on the biographers rather than on their subjects. As she observes in her introduction, this is both a departure from the practice of Renaissance theoreticians of biography, interested either in its potential to increase the fame of its subjects or in its edifying effect on readers, and a departure from the approaches of more recent critics of the genre. Up until the late twentieth century, biography was largely construed as straightforward evidence of the protagonist’s greatness. However, scholars then began paying close attention to various modes of “Renaissance self-fashioning”; in their own biographies of key early modern figures, scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Mario Biagioli, and Lisa Jardine analyzed their subjects’ efforts at self-advancement through compliance with the dictates of court culture. MacDonald points to Judith Anderson and Kevin Pask as commentators who have built on that new focus on intentional self-representation by early modern figures. In their studies of biography from the period, they have explored its creative use of truth and fiction in shaping the identities of its subjects. However, all of these scholars have concentrated on the early modern protagonist of biography, whereas MacDonald proposes to examine the consequences of the creative representation for the biographers themselves. She makes use of insights from those earlier studies, and she is also helped in her new orientation by the work of Claude-Gilbert Dubois, who has investigated the social conditions of production for early modern biography. MacDonald’s reading of each of five example cases explores the strategies for self-advancement that appear to underlie the biographers’ choices of subject, patron, key themes, and rhetorical tactics.

The works that MacDonald considers, with a chapter devoted to each, are Louis Le Roy’s life of Budé (1540), Charles Paschal’s of Pibrac (1584), Claude Binet’s of Ronsard (1586), Nicolas Nancel’s of Ramus (1599), and Agrippa d’Aubigné’s account of his own life, composed for his children (1629). She chooses her examples from among monographs written by and about men of letters, since these fit the project she proposes: she contends that they can help to illuminate the process of social ascent underway in sixteenth-century France for the class of intellectual elite whose need for social capital and credibility was served by such works.

In the first two chapters, MacDonald cites a number of similar characteristics in Le Roy’s and Paschal’s works. Each was written in the year of its subject’s death, composed in Latin for an international readership, and dedicated to a patron who was both a friend of the subject and an influential member of the royal administration (François I’s chancellor Guillaume Poyet in the first case, and in the second, Pierre Forget, an officer in Henri III’s administration but also closely tied to Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV). MacDonald reads these dedications as more or less bald plays for support from the patrons, and notes the extent to which they appear to have succeeded, based on the posts held subsequently by the biographers. She continues by interpreting the themes and rhetorical strategies of each as parts of their projects of self-definition, in which they sought to represent themselves as worthy heirs to the accomplished men whose lives they recorded. Le Roy set out to prove his bona fides as a Hellenist by writing on Budé, the recognized dean of Greek studies in France and founding force behind the humanist Collège royal, and by treating the progressively deeper “crises” within the humanist community to which Budé was party. Furthermore, MacDonald argues that Le Roy used the biography to demonstrate his independent intellect by treating it as a vehicle for his theory of history; he discerned in Budé’s life a microcosm of his view that all...