Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century France and Ireland (review)

This acta book appears more than four years after the conference which it documents. The Trinity College Dublin colloquium was held in November 1999 to mark the acquisition of a collection of rare seventeenth-century texts. The present collection of essays is, in editor Stacey's words, "based largely on the papers given at that conference," with no further detail on the editorial process that produced the book. The body of the book consists of 18 essays which have very much the general tenor of the conference paper about them, but are of uniformly good quality and scholarly interest.

Editor Véronique Desnain opens the collection's first section on "Women, men and texts in conflict" with an essay on biblical sources of Racine's last two tragedies, comparing plays to scripture in bases of faith and in culture, and contrasting characters' gender roles. Racine's thematics prove to work to the detriment of female characters.

The following article by Kate Curry, a study of both the biographies and the writings of Madame de Saint Balmont, paints a contrasting picture of woman refusing subservience and detects that refusal in Saint Balmont's theater. This is a very interesting reading of a little-known work.

Rebecca Wilkin's essay on seventeenth-century treatises on generation deals with fatherhood and conflict in the writing process. Grounded in Foucault, the article focuses on the assertion of authorial possession and compares maternal and paternal models of authorship in works of Bayle, Harvey and others.

Next is Jean-Paul Pittion's article on medicine and religion in seventeenth-century France which examines closely the evolving rapport between Catholic and Protestant medical practitioners in La Rochelle. It arrives at the interesting conclusion that religious conflict played a decisive role in defining medical protocols throughout France.

The fifth essay, by Craig Moyes, is a study of Furetière's Roman bourgeois which attempts with some success to shed interpretive light on the novel by situating it in the context of its publication, reading it as a pessimistic reaction to the downfall of Fouquet and the subsequent retrenchment of patronage.

Editor Sarah Alyn Stacey's very engaging article on harmony and disharmony in Saint-Amant closes the book's first section. It points up a "paradoxical attraction to the unattractive" (82) and a characterization of "mythical and supernatural creatures" (96) which would make of Saint-Amant something of a pre-Romantic.

The book's second section, "Moral conflicts," opens with Michael Moriarty's study of the problem of freedom in Arnauld's apologia for Jansen. Moriarty's revealing conclusion is that Arnauld departs in some measure from Jansen's doctrine in an effort to find common ground with other theological codes.

Next is Mark Bannister's thematically related study. This deals as well with the question of free will, but in setting the ideological context of Camus' Histoires Tragiques. Bannister's reading proposes a literary, rather than theological, perspective on the texts despite their apparent moralizing or didactic purpose.

The ninth essay, David Culprin's study of the conflict between raillery and the image of the honnête homme, looks at seventeenth-century opposing views on the propriety of comic effect in rhetoric.

The second section's final piece is by Pascale Feuillée-Kendall, and it details the legal reforms enacted by Louis XIV and Colbert and their severe measures taken to suppress rebellion. This is a very informative study on the matter of individual dissent in an age of ostensible harmony.

The book's third section, "The theater in conflict," begins with Andrew Calder's essay on Molière and Congreve. It is a comparative work which detects widely contrasting world views between the two playwrights, this despite a common technique of satirizing human foibles.

There follows Henry Philips' synthetic survey of seventeenth-century debates in England and France over the nature of theater, most interesting for its analysis of moralists...