Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616 by Katherine S Maynard (review)

If literary history has failed to consecrate a canonical French epic, critics increasingly contest the commonplace that epic practice in Renaissance France must therefore have been lacking in literary and cultural seriousness. Katherine Maynard takes this trend a step further by arguing that the Wars of Religion spurred poets' engagement with epic. Each of her chapters treats one poet's epic production as a direct response to the current political situation, highlighting the communities that poets imagine in response to the conflict. Maynard frames her study with Ronsard's attempt in the Franciade to imagine French community under Charles IX: in so doing, she argues, the poet erases the Protestant side of the current conflict, substituting imperial fantasies for the vital role played by memory in the Aeneid. The heart of the book concerns three poetic advocates of Henri IV. In his long poems, the Protestant Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas links his own various identities to differing visions of community, from his creation of a regional Protestant refuge in La Judit to the emergence in the Seconde sepmaine of an imperial Henri IV who resolves internal tensions the better to focus on external enemies. The installments of Sébastien Garnier's Henriade offer conflicting visions of community: in the first, a warrior Henri rallies his countrymen against Spaniards the poet depicts in opposition to a French national identity, whereas in the second, the king's soon-to-be legendary clemency recreates a shared sense of unity. In his Heptaméron de la Navarride (1602), Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet, a poet who converted along with Henri, deploys the Virgilian theme of a renewed golden age which, although it offers no space for Protestants, does at least remember the religious conflict. Maynard's concluding chapter on Les tragiques serves as a bookend to the Franciade, since Agrippa d'Aubigné founds the Protestant community of the future on the cultivation of the very memories Ronsard had erased. As in her previous readings, Maynard grounds the Protestant epic in the contemporary situation. Reading the poem in light of d'Aubigné's decision to publish in 1616, she argues that the work's move toward a divine outcome does not preclude engagement with the political present. This deceptively slim volume offers a rich and coherent account of how Virgilian tradition enabled poets of differing religious and political persuasions to address a common set of problems. At the same time, Maynard's readings, contextualized by well-chosen literary, historical and artistic materials, and in constant dialogue with prior scholarship, take a strikingly individual approach to each poet and poem, offering fresh insights on a wide variety of topics, from Du Bartas's dedicatees, to Palma-Cayet's depiction of Henri IV's marriages, or the role of d'Aubigné's poet in mediating the celestial ekphrases in book five of Les tragiques. This book will inspire a renewed appreciation both for the vitality of an often-ignored chapter in French literary history and for the intrinsic capacities of epic, "the ideal genre with which to address the disunity and seemingly impossible reconciliation of warring Frenchmen" (128).