Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610-1715) (review)

In the Introduction to this slim monograph, Nicholas Hammond remarks that previous treatments of gossip and gender have generally focused on the negative depiction of women. Drawing from seventeenth-century French material, Hammond takes a different tack: his thesis is that gossip, with its characteristic combination of innuendo, complicity, and anonymity, provides a discursive 'borderland', a space where marginal identities and sexual practices can be accommodated. After a first chapter that provides a useful overview of the various seventeenth-century French terms that correspond to the English 'gossip' (babil, badinage, bavardise, bruit, caquet, causerie, commerage, commerce, comperage, médisance, etc.), Hammond devotes the central chapters of his study to the relationship of gossip and same-sex desire. The parade of historical characters will be well known to readers familiar with recent work on homosexuality in the seventeenth century: the musician Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV's brother Philippe d'Orléans, Richelieu's créature François le Métel de Boisrobert, the duc de Vendôme, among others. Hammond closely examines the ways in which gossip about the sexual proclivities of these figures circulated by word of mouth and in print. Relying primarily on the Chansonnier Maurepas, a fascinating collection of mostly anonymous songs, he argues that gossip did not necessarily lead to scandal. Within sexual subcultures, gossip could also function as a 'shared language' by which acolytes could recognize each other. Outside of such groups, too, rumours about 'sodomites' were not always accompanied by moral censure, suggesting a tacit acceptance of same-sex desire. These are intriguing insights, although it is regrettable that Hammond does not engage more directly with the extensive body of scholarship on the subject of same-sex relationships in the period. Major works such as Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) and Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992) are absent from the bibliography and notes. The last chapter of the study concentrates on a rereading of Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves. For Hammond, in contrast to other commentators, gossip is a largely positive force in the novel, fostering reciprocity and 'shared happiness' (p. 157). Indeed, he suggests that the entire novel, with its long digressions, could be understood as a literary form of gossip intended to educate the reader about the ways of the world. It should be noted that Nicholas Paige, in his 2011 monograph Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel, has taken a different approach to this question; Lafayette, he argues, breaks with tradition by introducing a protagonist who has no historical counterpart and about whom it is therefore impossible to gossip. As this brief overview suggests, Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France covers a great deal of territory in a relatively small number of pages. While there is more than enough evidence here to substantiate the conclusion that 'there is nothing little' about gossip (p. 142), it is to be hoped that the author will flesh out his arguments and their historical implications in future work.