The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance by Katherine Crawford (review)

CRAWFORD, KATHERINE. The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-74950-3. Pp. 312. $33. This book is a natural outgrowth of the author’s previous publications and is based on her solid command of scholarship in the areas of European gender and sexuality and in Early Modern French history. The premise of this study is that we who look back at the ways in which sexuality and sexual expression were understood during the French Renaissance might well find those views strange. Crawford states that her choice to use an innovative approach to conduct a study on Renaissance France was done “with an eye to the larger frame of the emergence of modern sexuality” (248) amid the current battles over sexual meaning. In this interdisciplinary study, Crawford pulls together a multitude of elements that went into the shaping of the sexual culture of the French Renaissance, including figures from Antiquity, astrology, Neoplatonism, Petrarchan verse, the treatises and works of writers of the Italian Renaissance, and the politics of the time. She explores the nationalist impulse of the French in the years spanning roughly 1494 to 1610 and the linguistic patriotism of poets such as Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Sébillet in their defense and use of the French vernacular. The goal of poets, writers, and humanists during the French Renaissance was to establish that France was a fertile and fecund land and that poetry written in the French language was as good as that of the authors of Antiquity or the poets of the Italian Renaissance. “Ideas about the fertility of France were central to royal ideology” (103) and tie into the belief that a strong monarchy was reflected in the development of an influential national language. Fertility in this instance encompasses the generational power of the French language, nation, and especially monarchy. Indeed, the Renaissance French kings’ sexual prowess was linked with the natural abundance of the country, thus the strong interest at the time in the kings’ family life, progeny (legitimate as well as illegitimate), mistresses, and varied sexual activities —from François I through Henri IV and even beyond. The power of generation as central to love and desire was a pivotal theme for the Neoplatonic poets and writers, even for the writers of the abundant “dirty ditties” such as Marot and Ronsard, who were endeavoring to articulate a normative heterosexuality. Crawford’s work bears strong implications for the history of European sexuality and politics, and demonstrates an impressive knowledge of primary sources. The author is well versed in the scholarship by her colleagues and predecessors, and she indulges in a kind of dialogue with some of them, attempting to clarify or expand on their ideas. A 45-page critical apparatus includes lists of manuscripts and sources consulted for what the author calls her project “about making and changing meanings of sex and sexuality in Renaissance France” (xii). Despite a few technical flaws, such as translations into English that are not quite faithful to the source text and an occasional confusion of the genders of articles accompanying French nouns, this work will certainly be of interest to Renaissance scholars and, perhaps, to a wider readership eager to learn more about cultural difference. Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis Rosalie A. Vermette 378 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 ...