La Renaissance décentrée: Actes du Colloque de Genève (28–29 septembre 2006) (review)

Renaissance writing and art have long been celebrated for their decentred view on things. This collection takes such perspectives as its theme, which it examines from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Probably the most fundamental decentring of the period arises from Copernican astronomy, subject to much debate, even among astronomers, as Isabelle Pantin shows. Importantly, according to contemporary physics, the centre was not a good place to be, because it was where all the rubbish of the heavens would gather, hence Galileo can claim that shifting away from the centre is a good thing (p. 17). A rather different shift occurs in the extraordinary physics of Giordano Bruno, here given an exposition by Antonella Del Prete. Bruno’s infinity of worlds precludes the possibility of a centre, thereby making the centre everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At the same time, as Copernicus was declaring the earth not to be at the centre of things, artists in northern Europe were practising what Dürer apparently called ‘Landschaftmaler’ (p. 74), a process of shifting the main action of a painting, as in Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, famously evoked by W. H. Auden in his ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’. Frédéric Elsig gives a rapid survey of such decentred Renaissance art and Victor Stoichita offers a case study of a painting by Titian. Travel writing also provides a rich set of possibilities not only for decentring during the Renaissance, but also for a decentring of our view of the Renaissance as a predominantly European phenomenon, as Frédéric Tinguely points out (p. 61). Ullrich Langer argues that Valla, Vives and Montaigne all call an ethical golden mean into question, thereby displacing or unsettling the central spot between two extremes. Patricia Eichel-Lojkine examines shifts of perspective in the satire of the Letters of Obscure Men, a work Rabelais knew well. Rabelais is the subject for Emmanuel Naya’s densely written piece, which argues that fideism and suspension of judgement, both inspired by Pyrrhonism, offer a model for reading Rabelais. Rabelais’s meaning is constantly and deliberately displaced or suspended, in a process that gestures towards an ineffable truth (p. 192). This reading of Rabelais is intriguing and dynamic, but it appears to miss vital moments at which Rabelais takes a stand on religious and other issues. In a particularly entertaining piece, Marie-Luce Demonet takes aim at scholars who have sought out a centre to Rabelais’s works, a critical process she shows to be ‘discutable’. The final decentring of the book is in Dominique Brancher’s piece on how writers imagined the intellectual life of plants, thereby challenging notions of what it is to be human. There is much here, then, that will be of interest to specialists. A shame that the articles were not brought together as a more coherent whole, although it is perhaps appropriate that the collection is itself decentred as a result.