Le livre et la chaire: les pratiques d’écriture et de publication de Bossuet par by Cinthia Meli (review)

once a reference work for approaches to the surrealist document, and a dry, but always rigorous and thoughtful contextualization of such documents. Virginia Tech Alexander Dickow Meli, Cinthia. Le livre et la chaire: les pratiques d’écriture et de publication de Bossuet. Paris: Champion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7453-2740-6. Pp. 529. 55 a. This book approaches Bossuet’s practices in writing, preaching and occasionally publishing his sermons with a two-fold purpose. Meli seeks to restore Bossuet to a context in which authorship and publication were understood differently than in the nineteenth century, when he entered the literary canon. But she also argues that the discovery in the late 1700s of the manuscripts of 200 unpublished sermons confronted editors with dilemmas that shaped the emerging discipline of literary criticism. Meli is thus concerned with Bossuet’s sermons and their belated reception, which she views as having been shaped by the Mémoires of the bishop’s secretary Ledieu, omnipresent in this study. The first chapter argues that contemporaries regarded Bossuet more as ecclesiastic than man of letters, an identity that Ledieu perpetuated and modified (35). Chapter two assesses Bossuet’s and Ledieu’s narratives of publication, suggesting that, for Bossuet, authorship served primarily to impose his ecclesiastical authority. Chapter three examines Bossuet’s preaching career and his methods of sermon preparation as depicted by Ledieu who, Meli shows, struggled to reconcile the bishop’s worldly success with his disinterested apostolic persona. Chapter four, devoted to the publication of the few sermons to appear in print during Bossuet’s lifetime, emphasizes the importance of clientelism in the decision to publish the famous funeral orations. It concludes that, contrary to current assumptions tying authorship to print publication , Bossuet behaved as an author concerned to shape his public image, even when rejecting the avenue of print publication. Chapter five situates Bossuet within the world of letters, examining his role as courtier, academician, and participant in literary debates. Turning in chapters six and seven to the sermon manuscripts, Meli contends that a century’s worth of editorial attempts to arrive at the definitive texts for the Œuvres oratoires rested on conflicting notions of author, text, and work. She then makes her own attempt to define the contested relationship between Bossuet’s untidy manuscripts and his performed sermons, concluding that a manuscript is the“fiction” of a future sermon (390).The final chapter compares the discursive theory that emerges from Bossuet’s sermons with that implied by his criticism of the theater, emphasizing the central role he allots audiences. This book offers a nuanced portrait of Bossuet in his mundane and spiritual dimensions, while making an important contribution to current work on print and oral publication in the seventeenth century. Meli’s exploration of preaching is especially enlightening as is her reading of Bossuet’s meditations on pulpit and stage. Likewise, her treatment of Bossuet as a test case for definitions of 242 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 243 literature is highly suggestive. However, her shifts between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries can lead to confusion and, as in many books based on French theses, her exhaustive research sometimes overshadows her conclusions. More foregrounding of the basic lines of argument and an expanded conclusion would have been helpful. Nevertheless, this book repays readers’attention, demonstrating that the interactions between book and pulpit can shed new light both on seventeenth-century France and on the larger literary field. Dartmouth College Kathleen Wine Mostefai, Ourida. Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique: querelles, disputes et controverses au siècle des Lumières. Leiden: Brill, 2015. ISBN 978-90-030862-6. Pp. 202. 60 a. Mostefai’s book is a clear and enlightening study of Rousseau’s lifelong career as a polemicist. She analyzes the deliberately polemical nature of Rousseau’s writings and personal life. She uses Kant’s later definition of the categories of polemics: dispute, conflict, and quarrel. The first is a disagreement based on general metaphysical principles, the second is more narrowly ideological, while the third is a more personal confrontation. She emphasizes the idea that in Rousseau’s conflicts with contemporary thinkers and writers, as well as religious and political authorities, it is...