Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France by Nora Martin Peterson (review)

observation. A participant in the defense of Paris, Daudet wasted no time translating his experiences into the literary texts that comprise the first part of Les contes du lundi. Because the Prussian occupation was still fresh in the readers’minds when the collection was published in 1873, the stories “ont atteint une portée littéraire quasi immédiate” (168). Understandably, perhaps, given that the majority of the volume’s contributors are Spanish academics, la matière d’Espagne is either a primary or secondary focus of many of the studies. To be sure, many nouvellistes—among them Stendhal, Hugo, and Mérimée—drew from Spanish history and culture, the result of, María del Rosario Álvarez Rubio asserts, the Romantic portrayal of Spain as a“terre de sang et de rituels, de passions et de conflits”(231). If the influence of Anglophone writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Scott on the nineteenth-century French short story has long been established, the inspiration that Spain provided those same authors has yet to be fully explored by scholars on this side of the Atlantic. It is precisely this Iberian optic that makes the volume unique.At times, the discussion carries us far afield from the volume’s organizing principle (for instance, the consideration of the Spanish translations of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s work), and the editing is occasionally slipshod. These minor criticisms do not, however, detract from the overall quality and interest of the essays. University of Arkansas Kathy Comfort Peterson, Nora Martin. Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2016. ISBN 978-1-61149-625-3. Pp. 159. Examining cultural and literary works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the vernacular, this cross-disciplinary study brings together the notions of body, self, and text in a way that highlights their “fluidity” and “messy ambiguity” (xiv) in the face of conflict between flesh and mind. Preferring to read those tensions as key elements of the early modern self, Peterson focuses on the various expressions of body language rather than on discursive superiority, and posits that they perpetuate and undermine discourse, endangering the possibility of truth. The study is divided into three parts that juxtapose cultural discourse with literary texts in areas that all have in common the experience of confession: religion, torture, and court culture. In each part, Peterson diligently anchors the examination of documents in their historical context and discusses respectively: the content of confession manuals; of treatises concerning legal torture; and of courtly handbooks. She considers Italian texts in regard to the notion of “sprezzatura”that inspired later conduct books in France. Her inquiry was largely inspired by Michel Foucault’s discourse on power in History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. But because she draws attention to the importance of the body and its involuntary slips that undermine the effort to conceal one’s 264 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 265 emotions, she challenges Foucault’s focus on discourse at the expense of those less apprehensible elements. The numerous occurrences of the expression of loss of bodily control are signs that link text, body, and self in various works such as the Princesse de Clèves or Montaigne’s Essays. The main thrust of this study pertinently highlights the tension between coded discourse and the negotiation of a sense of self at odds with the dominant culture, but that cannot quite come to terms with another, clear identity in the context of the Ancien Régime. By being careful to acknowledge that body and self are, in this study, always mediated by a text, Peterson makes clear that literary works reveal negotiations of the self that may differ from their authors’ personal beliefs, as in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. This research, along with other recent scholarship , moves away from an overwhelmingly rationalistic approach and explores the challenging issues of suppression (and resurgence) of that which is more experiential. Each part of the book is balanced: the selection of cultural texts is as large and appropriate as the literary pieces. They are all discussed with equal sophistication and nuanced analyses, based on agreeing with, but also...