Œuvres complètes, IV: Paedotrophiae libri III; Publications des années 1580–1587; Poemata 1587; Publications des années 1588–1572 by Scévole de Sainte-Marthe (review)

Although recent decades have seen a healthy increase in research on neo-Latin authors of sixteenth-century France, poets of that period's latter half remain relatively neglected in comparison with the Humanists of the early Valois court. Jean Brunel's edition of the works of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, the first volume of which appeared with Droz in 2010, now happily constitutes a major contribution to the field. This fourth instalment contains the three-book Latin poem entitled Paedotrophia, which, as Brunel notes in his Introduction, the author himself probably regarded as his magnum opus. It also contains several other works from the decade between 1582 and 1592. In the interests of space, the present review will consider the Paedotrophia as a representative sampling of the volume's entirety. The Paedotrophia is preceded by a thirty-three-page Introduction, which reconstructs with admirable clarity the genesis of this didactic poem on childbirth and the education of children, first establishing the probable date of an early (1579) partial edition attested today in just two known copies. Such a task is rendered all the more difficult by the fact that the definitive edition of Sainte-Marthe's poetic masterpiece appeared only some five years later, in a 1584 print dedicated to Henri III, which adds a new third book to the initial fragment. Of the original text, the second book in particular was for Sainte-Marthe the object of much significant rewriting, so that its first two versions diverge considerably. Instead of publishing the 1579 version of the Paedotrophia in its original, unfinished form, Brunel has adopted the strategy of presenting the poem's three books together, 'comme si l'ouvrage avait déjà été achevé en 1579' (p. 44). The result is a three-book epic containing several interpolations from the 1584 text, as well as a critical apparatus indicating variants and omissions. The parallel French translation combines the fragments rendered by the author himself and those later provided by his grandson, Abel (II) de Sainte-Marthe, as well as several passages culled from even later editions, here translated by the editor. Despite the complexity of this undertaking, Brunel succeeds in providing modern French readers with an accessible text and translation of one of sixteenth-century France's most important Latin poems. He also provides an annotation, with references to contemporary sources; exhaustivity is of course impossible in this format. The volume's second part contains Sainte-Marthe's publications from 1582 to 1587, including several occasional poems such as those that appear in the Christophori Thuani Tumulus, the Tombeau de Monsieur Rouxel, and the Tombeau de Pierre de Ronsard. In the volume's third and final section, Brunel presents the reader with Sainte-Marthe's monumental 1587 Poemata, with a lengthy Introduction. Seiziémistes (and especially the neo-Latinists among them) may now read the major poetic works of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe in Brunel's excellent modern edition.