Politique des “Amours”: Poetique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544–1560) (review)

This massive book aims to treat an equally massive subject: the emergence of a new, specifically French, poetic genre that Cécile Alduy dubs the “Amours,” defined as a collection of love poems by a sole author dedicated to a single mistress. Alduy limits her inquiry to those texts produced between 1544 — the date of Maurice Scève’s Délie — and 1560, the year that Ronsard published his Oeuvres, thus setting off a new trend toward publishing complete works that led to the relative demise of the Amours genre. This period of just over fifteen years witnessed the publication of no less than thirty-three examples of Amours, written by great writers (Scève, Du Bellay, Ronsard et al.) as well as virtual unknowns (Charles d’Espinay and Nicole de Mailly) whose works are not available in modern editions.

The purpose of this study is to examine various examples of the Amours on a macrotextual level: first by reviewing its genealogies, then by discussing its genesis, and finally by analyzing its poetics and structure. In this way, a large number of works are subjected to repeated interrogations on various specific points throughout the study, rather than treated one at a time in a more extended fashion. This modus operandi has some advantages and disadvantages. Readers interested in, say, Du Bellay’s L’Olive, would find discussions of that work dispersed in at least six main sections and innumerable smaller parts of the study, which sometimes seems redundant and other times a bit confusing. But this can be offset by the thorough and user-friendly index that Alduy provides. What is more, her organizational approach allows her to raise important questions about these works that have not yet been examined in any systematic, global fashion.

It is difficult to do justice to the scope of this encyclopedic work in a short review such as this. Nevertheless, a brief listing of the kinds of questions Alduy raises in the course of her analysis might be a useful way to proceed. These topics include: a historical overview of the poetic collections that preceded the publication of the first Amours, including those collections (canzonieri and anthologies) in the Italian as well as the French tradition; the choice of a single poetic form (the sonnet or dizains) vs. multiple forms; the choice of titles; the relationship or tension between the individual units of the work and its totality or the perception of unity vs. discontinuity within the work; the theory and practice of dispositio within these works; the role of paratexts; the importance of metatexts and meta-poetic imagery; the effect of an author’s later reworkings or rearrangements of a text; linear vs. circular patterns of presentation; the phenomenon of “continuations” or supplementary texts; frontispieces and other pseudo-architectural elements; common strategies for liminal poems; visual structuring devices such as emblems; narrativity or its absence; formal and verbal repetitions; and the relationship between the Amours and epic genres. These subtle analyses are supplemented by several appendices, including a very useful chronological table of the Amours genre or its analogs from 1539 to 1602 as well as several schematic descriptions of the organization of select examples of this genre. A comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources completes the book.

Alduy’s fine book is extremely well written and clear. Of course, some of her claims will appear more plausible than others, and, as is virtually inevitable in a book this extensive in range, a few inaccuracies or imprecisions seem to have crept in here and there. The discussion of the Amours as an alternative to the epic and the general rubric of a “politics” of this genre, for example, seem, to this reader at least, somewhat less persuasive than most of the book’s other theses. Additionally...