Biography in Early Modern France 1540–1630: Forms and Functions (review)

Early seventeenth-century readers were able to learn about the lives of famous Frenchmen from the compilations of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe and his translator Guillaume Colletet; sixteenth-century readers had to work a little harder to get their biography, and from a variety of sources — the poetic tumulus or the oraison funèbre, for example, but both of these genres were frequently incomplete and notoriously partial. The number of monograph biographies might have increased during the sixteenth century, but their purpose and their format remained a standard one: to impart information about the subject to the reader, often leaving the biographer in the background. Katherine MacDonald’s relatively short work offers a different and more imaginative approach to the practice of Renaissance biography, restoring the biographer to a position of importance between subject and reader. Taking Bacon’s image (after Ariosto) of the biographer as the swan who carried the medal of famous dead men into the Temple of Fame, biography is here invested with a propagandist end; writing about a famous master or patron allowed the biographer to use that relationship to fashion his own career across a variety of professional activities. Writing about others, therefore, became a means of self-fashioning. After a short introduction to contemporary biographical method, this work offers five case studies (four biographies, and one, rather special, autobiography by Agrippa d’Aubigné to his children) that show how biographers attempted to enhance their own career prospects as humanists, courtiers, diplomats, academics, and doctors by writing about the lives and works of their famous subjects. First, Louis Le Roy (who would later become famous in his own right as the French translator of a number of Platonic dialogues) composed his Gulielmi Budaei Vita (1540) not just to celebrate Budé’s achievements, but also to further his own intellectual ambitions at court. His career would echo Budé’s own, but in a minor key. Similarly, Charles Paschal would write the life of Guy du Faur de Pibrac (1584), using the example of Pibrac’s diplomatic career (and in so doing, omitting to narrate the less savoury aspects of it) to suggest that he himself possessed all the attributes of the ideal diplomat. In the same perspective, Binet’s Vie de Ronsard (1586) advances the biographer’s case to emulate Ronsard’s carefully constructed image as the proteiform court poet. Perhaps the case study that is of widest application and greatest interest is Nancel’s life of Petrus Ramus (1599), where Nancel uses both Galenic and contemporary theories and manuals of regimen and physiognomy to inform his description of Ramus’s physical appearance and temperament; in claiming such close association with Ramus, he would make his own appeal to have his own medical works published. Whilst all of these case studies are very readable, one of the conclusions offered is that these strategies of self-fashioning (on the back of a prestigious host) were, in the main, unsuccessful; the reasons for that lack of success might have been more fully developed. But all of the chapters offer interesting and original interpretations of biographies in which reading between the lines was every bit as important as the lines themselves.