Lemaire de Belges, Homère belgeois: le mythe troyen à la Renaissance by Adeline Desbois-Ientile (review)

Adeline Desbois-Ientile's formidable volume is the first book-length study of Jean Lemaire de Belges's sixteenth-century Les Illustrations de Gaule in nearly thirty years and the most analytically exhaustive in almost fifty (see Jacques Abélard, 'Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye' de Jean Lemaire de Belges: étude des éditions, genèse de l'œuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1976); and Judy Kem, Jean Lemaire de Belges's 'Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye': The Trojan Legend in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York: Peter Lang, 1994)). It is thus an invaluable elucidation of a work as obscure today as it once was popular and provocative. Its author focuses on the reception and reworking of the myth of the Trojan origins of France in the Illustrations de Gaule. For Desbois-Ientile, the Trojan myth is a paragon of the generic intersection of historiography, myth, and fantasy which has long been her object of study (see, for example, L'Histoire à la Renaissance: à la croisée des genres et des pratiques, ed. by Rachel Darmon, Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Adrienne Petit, and Alice Vintenon (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015)). In the present volume, the author argues that Lemaire deploys 'modèles d'écriture différenciés' throughout the Illustrations de Gaule, depending on whether he is privileging '[l']histoire', 'la narration vraisemblable', or 'la narration fabuleuse' (p. 23), a phenomenon designated by the term '[r]hétorique registrale' (Part Three). Desbois-Ientile contends that by strict rhetorical analysis of Lemaire's use of the Trojan myth one can uncover the fault-lines between these apparently seamlessly interwoven discursive threads. Indeed, strict rhetorical analysis—made possible by the author's masterful knowledge of the rhetorical tradition—forms the backbone of this study. Its tripartite division ('Histoire d'un mythe et d'un texte'; 'Poétique de la variation'; 'Rhétorique registrale') is inspired and guided by the rhetorical categories of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio—the finding, arranging, and expression of the discursive materia—thus testifying to the rich hermeneutic potential still afforded by the intellectual traditions of the Renaissance authors themselves. Given the focus on sources this approach entails, Desbois-Ientile's volume is also a rich resource for the wider study of the Trojan myth in France up to the Renaissance. Importantly, however, the author's encounter with the Illustrations de Gaule is productive of more than an exposition of sources and structure; it also offers a welcome reappraisal of the very nature of the French Renaissance. Combining a rhetorically grounded method of enquiry with a focus on the phenomenon of the 'entredeux' (p. 7), Desbois-Ientile uncovers a pivotal moment in the emergence of a consciousness of Renaissance in sixteenth-century France in the work of Jean Lemaire de Belges, a poet born at the threshold of two eras, two traditions, and even two 'nations' (the Kingdom of France and the Burgundian Netherlands). Analysis of Lemaire's engagement with his medieval and ancient inheritances thus allows Desbois-Ientile to argue for the Renaissance in France as a phenomenon characterized by a sophisticated intermingling of the historical and the fantastic, and grounded in an intimate receptivity to native textual and iconographical traditions (see the final section, 'Ut pictura poesis').