Self and Other in Sixteenth-Century France: Proceedings of the Seventh Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium 7-9 July 2001 (review)

This engaging collection of articles deals with a notion central to French Renaissance literature. The awareness of difference, the inevitable result of "the discovery of the world and of man," permeates sixteenth-century literature and thought, and the dozen articles in this volume, spanning the century from Jean Lemaire de Belges to Béroalde de Verville, confirm its importance as they investigate "alterities of religion, geography, culture, gender, and sexuality" (ix). Let us proceed by genre.

Examining Scève's debt, in dizain 247, to the Premiere Epistre de l'Amant Vert, Mary McKinley uncovers several instances of alterity: Jean Lemaire's hero, an exotic foreigner who fails precisely because of difference; the courtier poet, whose otherness is intensified by the urbanity of the court and its language; and Scève's Délie, the perfect Other, whose perfection can be won by Perfect Love, which alone "can transcend the alterity that separates imperfection from perfection" (13). This Neoplatonist conclusion is further explored by Cathy Hampton in her well-developed essay, "The Heterosexual Quest for Oneness," based on a close reading of Leone Ebreo's Dialogui d'amore, with examples from Pernette du Guillet,Pontus de Tyard, and the Heptaméron. Accordingly, in perfect love individuals overcome difference to gain a spiritual equality, a union of virtue and sensuality, of male desire and female chastity.

Alterity can provide meaningful clues to an understanding of narrative.Cathleen Bauschatz would redeem parts 2 and 3 of the Angoysses douloureuses, traditionally maligned and even dismissed by critics and editors. In "Narrative Cross-Dressing," she argues that the change in the narrative in part 2 is due to a change in narrative voice, for once Helisenne assumes the narrative voice of Guenelic, she likewise develops topics that will appeal to male readers. The piece demonstrates once again the dangers of imposing classical notions of art upon Renaissance literature. According to Julia Horn, "The 'Pagan' in Amadis de Gaule" reorients the novel as the narrative leaves the Celtic-Arthurian Gaul of Amadis 1–4 and confronts the non-Christian Other in the following books not only to satisfy curiosity about the outsider, but also to probe more effectively the very nature of Christian and chivalric virtue. Turning to the Rabelaisian chronicles, Frank Lestringant explores the "demons and wonders" of Scandinavia, Iceland, and Lapland through the eyes of the Swedish theologian, historian, and geographer, Olaus Magnus. His widely circulated Carta Marina (1539) will be an important source for cosmographers and teratologists alike, and the drawings will suggest to Rabelais specific episodes in the narrative of QL 33–34 and 35–36. Finally, since the Other is of necessity the object of satire, Emily Butterworth examines the ways in which Béroalde de Verville avoids outright calumny and defamation.

Montaigne's relativistic world of change invites the consideration of alterity, which André Tournon's challenging contribution establishes as a fundamental principle of the Essais, not only in the author's quest for the self, involving a detached awareness of one's alterities, but in the very method and style of the essays. Wes Willaims culls from the Essais "Some Monsters," those signs of otherness that "give legible shape to things imagined" (151), and become ultimately "constitutive of the self" (145).

Leaving the literary for the political/religious scene, Paul A. Scott reassesses the role of the polemical writings of Jean Boucher, whose comparison of Henri III to Edward II of England defamed the Valois king by insinuation and undermined his authority through indirect accusations of heresy, tyranny, sorcery, and homosexuality. The Other portrayed by "Boucher's polemical output was to prove as instrumental in the King's murder as the dagger used by Jacques Clément" (125). And George Hoffmann contributes a stunning...