Le Secrettaire (1588) by Gabriel Chappuys (review)

Gabriel Chappuys’s French translation of Francesco Sansovino’s instruction for secretaries (Del secretario, libri quattro (Venice: Rampazetto, 1564); many later expanding editions) is an intriguing example of the many questions surrounding the problem of cultural transfer between Italy and France in the sixteenth century. This excellent critical edition offers scholars access to a key source, and perhaps even a tool to tackle these questions anew. Chappuys, who held a post as royal historiographer and translator under Henri III — albeit for Spanish, at which he was not particularly competent — in fact presented this book as an original work. In some ways it was, as he did not merely translate and ‘plagiarize’ Sansovino. In translating, he adapted the original, sometimes misunderstanding it, sometimes inserting references in the manner of a ‘product placement’ to advertise other publications by himself or his friends. He also covered his tracks by suppressing most of Sansovino’s paratext. Furthermore, Chappuys rearranged some of the seventy-four exemplary letters that Sansovino had sourced elsewhere: the majority were letters from the correspondence of the papal envoy Roberto Boschetto reflecting the political context of the years surrounding the sack of Rome; seven letters were extracted from Dionigi Atanagi’s Lettere di XIII huomini illustri (1554) and linked to Lodovico Canossa, a protagonist of Castiglione’s book on the courtier (Il libro del cortegiano, 1528). Curiously, although Chappuys had translated the latter, his rendering of the letters partly obscured the ideological and intellectual significance of the famous epistles. Chappuys also replaced the final chapters, in which Sansovino had presented samples of his own epistolary production. Instead, he poached a set of letters that were of interest to a French audience (Marguerite de Navarre, François I^er, and others) from Atanagi’s anthology, and he concluded his work with a truncated version of Boccaccio’s letter to Fiammetta, which had introduced the Teseida (c. 1339). In light of the editor’s excellent Introduction — and as one follows her meticulous critical apparatus, which tracks even the slightest variations as well as Sansovino’s relation to his own source, Franciscus Niger — a number of questions arise that she does not seem to want to answer here, but which might be topics for future research. What was the status of translators in early modern printing culture? What were the religious and political stakes of their activities? It is well known that libri di lettere in Italy were often vehicles of communication for the spirituali. This cannot have passed unobserved in France, which was under high religious tension in the 1580s. It does not seem coincidental either that Chappuys was also engaged in translating ‘spiritual letters’ that emerged from the bustling laboratory of the nascent Tridentine Reform. In the end, one wonders not only how the French target audience made sense of Chappuys’s hotchpotch adaptation, but also what sense Chappuys himself wanted to give to it. Evidently, handbooks for secretaries were not mere devices for the teaching of the rhetoric of letter-writing, or an ideology-free transmission of ‘humanism’: they carried a canopy of cultural and political information that could resonate in many unexpected ways with the audience.