François Habert, poète français (1508?–1562?) ed. by Bruno Petey-Girard, with Sylviane Bokdam (review)

This collection, originating in a colloquium at the Université de Paris-Est Créteil in 2011, contributes considerably to the literature on the neglected poet François Habert, a prolific and (it seems) even influential member of the circle of Clément Marot’s followers. The book is in three, somewhat loosely organized parts. The first considers Habert’s connections with booksellers, musicians, and lawyers; the second, Habert’s relationship to the poetic tradition and to the Pléiade; the third, Habert’s religious convictions, the consensus being that Habert was committed to a moderate, non-schismatic variety of evangelical thought, particularly in an Erasmian vein, although he was also influenced by Marguerite de Navarre and, significantly, Rabelais. The collection contains a helpful Introduction and a useful response-summary; the articles are uniformly informative, and in some cases very impressive. The volume is rich in erudite, elegant digests of vast amounts of material, such as Jean Balsamo’s overview of Habert’s fifty-five or so publications, and Michelle Clément’s lucid analysis of Habert’s relationship with Marot and the marotiques. Jean Vignes’s notes on Habert’s Horace translations are also impressive, containing, as well, a handy short chart of proportions in translations between Latin hexameters and French decasyllables (p. 148). Habert has a reputation for prolixity (for example in his 1557 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses); Marine Molins returns to his longueurs (p. 175), coming to slightly divergent conclusions. (A cross-reference here, harmonizing her article and that of Vignes, would have been useful.) Sylviane Bokdam’s fascinating article on Habert’s 1542 Le Songe de Pantagruel also stands out. A few reservations: since Habert was largely a translator, one might have wished for a section devoted more exclusively to his translation practice and that of his contemporaries. Moreover, it is disconcerting that the heading announcing the second example in Isabelle His’s valuable, if slightly oddly structured, article about the two known musical settings of Habert, by Jean Guyon and François Le Fevre, is followed (pp. 50–51) by a lengthy discussion of a work by Guillaume Costeley, admittedly on the same subject, the fall of Calais, but not presented here. (The two known settings of Habert’s poetry, by relatively unknown musicians, are transcribed in the volume under review, pp. 59–62; Costeley’s work can be found in H. Expert’s edition of the Musique of 1570. See Les Maîtres musiciens de la Renaissance française (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1894–1908), vol. xviii–xix. A PDF of the 1570 edition is downloadable from the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library.) It might have been revealing to think about Habert in relationship with his almost exact contemporary Maurice Scève, who is mentioned only twice (or three times if the ‘Seve’ appearing on p. 57 is Scève). The volume contains a few typographical errors and some careless mistakes, such as a few surprising missing adjectival agreements (pp. 27 and 36). But these are minor quibbles: the collection is valuable, far beyond the narrow channel of études habertines, in what it reveals about how poets can fall through the cracks of literary history, or indeed into the chasm opened up by Du Bellay’s 1549 manifesto and its reception.

doi:10.1093/fs/knw028