L'Astrée, deuxième partie de Honoré d'Urfé (review)

At last L'Astrée is acquiring the critical edition it deserves. Until about fifteen years ago, when digital versions of the text began to appear, the only complete modern edition was that of Hugues Vaganay (5 vols (Lyon: Masson, 1925–28)), which offered no scholarly apparatus and made no claims other than presenting a virtually unknown work to the reading public. Delphine Denis and her team, however, are committed to providing all the information necessary to place d'Urfé's work in its context, the latter term being of primary significance. The General Introduction, published in the first volume (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), warns against the recent tendency to seek out signs of modernity—dialogisme, multiplicity of points of view, feminism—in order to bring the novel into our world. Since the world of d'Urfé is radically different from ours, it is argued, we must abandon our prejudices and recognize its alterity. The temptation to modernize or emphasize the timeless qualities of masterpieces should be resisted. The editors' aim is therefore straightforward: 'donner à lire L'Astrée à la lumière de son propre temps pour mieux en saisir les significations et les enjeux' (p. 8). That aim is certainly achieved owing to the consistently high level of erudition applied to every aspect of the work. Although the first version of Part Two was published in 1610, the text chosen here is that of the 1614 edition of 932 pages (rather than the alternative of 904 pages preferred by Vaganay) on the grounds that it was the foundation of the great majority of seventeenth-century editions and was the one revised by Balthazar Baro after d'Urfé's death. Writing at a time of reaction against the galimatias and linguistic laxity of earlier generations, but before the reforms of Vaugelas, d'Urfé reveals in the corrections he made to his text in successive editions over eighteen years his desire to keep abreast of rapidly changing syntactical and grammatical conventions. This importance of L'Astrée, as an indicator of the extent to which the French language was changing, is a major concern of the editors and accounts for perhaps a majority of the notes. Some received opinions are dismissed: for instance, the long-standing belief that L'Astrée is a roman à clef, dating from the seventeenth century and still being advocated by Antoine Adam and Henri Coulet in the twentieth, is rejected for lack of evidence. But the real strength of the work lies in the abundance of precise detail illuminating L'Astrée's place in the literary, intellectual, ideological, and axiological context of the early seventeenth century, as when d'Urfé's theory of love, often characterized as simply a reformulation of Ficino, is shown to owe much to Leone Ebreo, Mario Equicola, Pietro Bembo, and others, or when the Histoire de Damon et Madonthe, one of the darkest tiroirs in the novel, is elucidated in the light of the legal background concerning illegitimate births. We shall have to wait several years to enjoy the benefit of full indexes, but that is a trivial price to pay for this superlative edition.