Le Sang embaumé des roses: Sang et passion dans la poésie amoureuse de Pierre de Ronsard (review)

This impressive volume of nearly 600 pages constitutes the revised version of a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Paris in 2003. Its objective is to analyze the love poetry of Ronsard through the imagery of blood. With the perspective of scholarship on melancholy in the Renaissance advanced by R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl — and more recently by O. Pot (Inspiration et mélancolie. L'épistémologie poétique dans les Amours de Ronsard, 1990) — Marc Carnel undertakes to observe the energy, the pathologies, and the dreams of blood in Ronsard's amorous poems. Ronsard's poetry shows a diagnostic of the "maladie d'amour" for which he sometimes offers the cures. The physical and moral effects felt by the poet are caused, Carnel argues, by the irregularities of passionate blood determined by the influence of Eros.

In the first section of his book, Carnel presents the important place of blood in Renaissance medical theory. He shows that blood is related to the other "humeurs" and that Ronsard's love poetry of echoes his contemporary physiological doctrine, inherited from Galen and Hippocrates. Carnel continues with an interpretation of "innamoramento" in Ronsard's poetry in the light of Neoplatonic theories popularized by Ficino in sixteenth-century Europe. He convincingly shows how commonplaces of love poetry such as the "coup de foudre" can be understood when they are compared to their medical and philosophical sources.

The third section focuses on the negative effects produced by the blood when it circulates through the body of the loving poet. Little by little, blood transforms into poison and fires the soul of the lover, who suffers all kinds of fevers. Then the other three "humeurs" (melancoly, bile, and phlegm) attack and burn the intellectual faculties of the brain, which Ronsard compares in the different sections of his Amours to Cassandre, Marie, and Hélène. His obsessive images related to blood are all linked to the sacrifice of the lover and the martyrdom he suffers with resignation. As a new Prometheus, the poet of love must bleed through the words of his poems because poetry is his best therapy: "Le texte amoureux se trouve lié à tous les épanchements d'une pléthore sanguine, il vise ouvertement l'hémorragie" (477).

In focusing on the physical vocabulary of Ronsard's poetic works, and more specifically on blood, Carnel provides an insightful and new approach to Ronsardian studies and produces a valuable piece of scholarship: a significant contribution that offers abundant food for thought to scholars working on the medical and the metaphorical aspects of Ronsard's poetry.