Renaissance Keywords Edited by Ita Mac Carthy (review)

Taking its inspiration from Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976; rev. edn, 1983), this collection addresses seven terms — ‘Sense’, ‘Disegno’, ‘Allegory’, ‘Grace’, ‘Scandal’, ‘Discretion’, ‘Modern’ — and what they reveal about Renaissance culture and society. Timothy Chesters points out just how ‘key’ certain terms could be during the Reformation: he cites Montaigne’s ironic yet telling comment, ‘Combien de querelles et combien importantes a produit au monde le doubte du sens de cette syllabe, HOC!’ (‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ (II. 12), in Les Essais, ed. by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1965), p. 527a), an allusion to Jesus’s words at the Last Supper in Matthew 26. 26, ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ [This is my body], and ensuing debates about transubstantiation. The essays range over different European vernaculars, especially French and Italian, as well as neo-Latin, to analyse shifting meanings of keywords and the debates surrounding them in various fields, which both reflected and helped shape broader ideological changes. Three of the chapters will be of particular relevance to those working in French studies. Ann Moss’s essay on ‘Allegory’ convincingly argues that Michel Foucault’s view that, for the Renaissance, ‘allegory was the key to all knowledge’ (p. 47), should be revised, since the view of allegory changed as humanists took an ever more erudite view of ancient works as the sixteenth century progressed. Chesters’s essay on ‘Discretion’ takes a similar line on the Foucauldian thesis: since ‘discretion’ could mean ‘separation or discrimination’, not everything was connected in a vast allegorical web (p. 105). Furthermore, he argues that the supposedly more modern meaning of discrétion as being reserved in speech may be prefigured in Jean Gerson’s discussions of discretio spirituum, or the ability to tell holy spirits, so to speak, from demonic ones (p. 110). Emily Butterworth and Rowan Tomlinson’s piece on ‘Scandal’ also traces this intermingling of ecclesiastical and secular connotations of their chosen keyword, in the contexts of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, by Calvin and François de Sales respectively, in the very different context of Pierre de Brantôme’s salacious memoirs, and finally in Rabelais, who, they argue, explores ‘scandal’s pleasures’ as a source of ‘poetic creativity’ (p. 96). These chapters share an approach, drawing insights from close attention to both dictionary definitions and uses of terms in different contexts, and thereby provide excellent examples of ‘word histories’ or ‘philology’, as Richard Scholar terms it in his Introduction (p. 6). The book will therefore be of interest to scholars who pursue such philological approaches and, of course, to those interested in the histories of its various keywords.