La Morocosmie; ou, De la folie, vanité, et inconstance du Monde. Avec deux chants Doriques, de l'Amour céleste et du Souverain bien (review)

Joseph Du Chesne (1544/6-1609) is better known in the history of medicine than in literary studies. He was a doctor and diplomat who served François de Valois and Henri IV, published a number of medical treatises, and acquired a medical reputation that extended throughout Europe. He played a central role in the Genevan controversy between doctors and alchemists, maintaining that insights from Paracelsianism should be employed to complement the traditional medical knowledge derived from Hippocrates and Galen. However, Du Chesne was also a poet. His literary output has much to offer scholars interested in religious literature and especially Calvinist poetry, as well as in 'scientific poetry' and the relationship between literature and medicine, and, more broadly, literature and knowledge. As a poet, Du Chesne is probably best known for his Grand Miroir du monde, an encyclopedic poem published in several editions in the 1580s and 1590s, which is indebted to Du Bartas's Sepmaine and, like the Sepmaine, appeared together with a commentary by Simon Goulart. However, among other poems, Du Chesne also composed the Morocosmie, a work that, prior to Lucile Gibert's new edition, had not been republished since it first appeared in Lyon in 1583. As Gibert amply demonstrates, the Morocosmie casts light on Calvinist poetry and Reformation spirituality, as well as on Du Chesne's conception of poetry's 'therapeutic' goals. Gibert provides a rich discussion of the poem's themes, style, sources, literary context, and composition, as well as a useful chronology of the poet's life. In particular, she illuminates Du Chesne's innovations with respect to poetic form: Du Chesne borrows the octonaire from Chandieu but develops it in new ways, and he composes chants doriques, which resemble the hymne and the ode but also prefigure the genre of the stances. Gibert also demonstrates how the Morocosmie is informed by alchemical medicine: the poet highlights the presence of evil in the world yet also proposes to extract a remedy from it, thus aping the Paracelsian doctor who separates the impure from the pure in order to obtain medicine from poison. Du Chesne's literary endeavour, like that of Rabelais, is inextricably bound up with his practice of medicine. It could have been useful to situate the Morocosmie more clearly in the context of Du Chesne's other poetry, especially the Grand Miroir and its own relationship to Paracelsianism (see, for example, Isabelle Pantin, 'Paracelse en poésie', in Microcosmo, macrocosmo, ed. by Rosanna Gorris Camos (Fasano: Schena, 2004), pp. 259-76). Occasional errors have escaped correction: Du Bartas's Sepmaine was first published in 1578 (p. 32 n. 94). These quibbles aside, Gibert's edition of the Morocosmie provides rich insights into Reformation literature and its relationships to medicine and religion.