Renaissance and revolt: Essays in the intellectual and social history of early modern France (review)

Reviews 175 total number of sonnets could have been of no real consequence to him. It is unfortuante here that Robert Sidney's poems are not considered, as a series surviving in the author's hand. There are, however, some 40 pages of appendix, devoted to numerological oudines of the sequences discussed. Professor Roche's other major resort is to myth as the subtext of the sequence. Petrarch relies on the myth of Apollo and Daphne; Sidney's Penelope has Homeric resonances; Caelica draws on the Endymion myth. Jonson's A Celebration of Charis is brought in at the end to write finis to the whole tradition. There is much of incidental interest in the book; for example, in the pages questioning Frances Yates' view of Giordano Bruno or Yvor Winters on 'the plain style'. But generally the approaches which Professor Roche is refuting, dlied to the approaches he is advocating by way of replacement, make this a museum of twentieth-century criticism of the sonnet sequence. G. A. Wilkes Department of EngUsh University of Sydney Salmon, J. H. M., Renaissance and revolt: Essays in the intellectual and social history of early modern France, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1987. This book comprises eleven scholarly articles, ten of which have appeared over the past twenty years in a variety of periodicals, and one new to this volume. Individudly, they either summarize recent debate on issues ranging from peasant revolts and popular sedition to questions of sovereignty, obedience and resistance theory in early m o d e m Europe; or they extend and refine recent lines of research in the intellectud and socid history of sixteenth and seventeenth century France, rather than break new ground or propound a particular interpretation of the period. In many ways, therefore, they are more vduable for their individud and detailed insights, for their depth and sophistication of scholarship, and for the unusually dense ideological and istitutional glosses which they bring to a number of politicd, social and intellectual problems, than for any synoptic or andytical framework which they have to offer. Nevertheless, they are intended to span intellectual and socid history, to perform as a particular type of social history of ideas. The nature of this intersection and the distinctiveness of Salmon's genre, however, is rather difficult to define or locate. Clearly, as Salmon notes explicitly in his introduction, it is not that of the Annales and the history of mentalites; nor does it cultivate the anthropological models and the 'thick description' favoured by Princeton early modernists. Although, it may owe something to the work of Pocock and Skinner on the languages of politics, there is little of their emphasis on speech acts and intentionality or on discursive networks over time. I rather suspect the imprint of an altogether different writer, the late Walter Ullmann. 176 Reviews Here is all of Ullmann's emphasis on the institutional side of ideology and on ascending and descending theories of authority as the fundamental poles of politicd thought. Salmon certdnly makes no bones about privileging ideology over langauge or mentalite. Equally, he uses persondity and event to unravel changing meaning. For all that, and for all his attention to discontinuities and fissures in early modern France, he does appear to subscribe to the views associated with Dondd Kelly and George Huppert those which trace much of subsequent debate in early modem Europe on matters of authority and obedience, the nature of the state and the understanding of social institutions to a set of concerns articulated in sixteenth-century France. The title of the volume says it loud and clear: Renaissance and Revolt. The implications of this reading of sixteenth and seventeenth century France and England are especidly clear in what for this reviewer is the most interesting section of the book: Part II, which explores 'Sovereignty, resistance and Christian obedience'. Thus, 'Bodin and the monarchomachs' locates Bodin's theory of sovereignty within the context of the French Religious Wars and the resistance theories of Beza and Hotman, rather than in later categories ofjuridical absolutism. Following on this, Salmon then argues in 'An dtemative theory of popular resistance: Bucchanan, Rossaeus, and Locke', that late-seventeenthcentury English arguments for resistance...