Le poète et son œuvre de la composition à la publication: Actes du colloque de Valenciennes (20-21 mai 1999) (review)

Medieval and Renaissance literary scholars have recently devoted increasing attention to textual materiality, recognizing that features such as illustration, anthologization, and paratext both reflect and influence texts' reception. Most studies of this type have focused on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the early decades of printing's technical and commercial development. By contrast, relatively little attention has been devoted to the physical presentation of literature in the later sixteenth century, whether in print or in manuscript. This is precisely the area on which Jean-Eudes Girot's collection focuses: the differing forms in which poetry was published, and these forms' aesthetic and ideological implications, primarily in a French-language context. In scope, the collection is timely; in quality, it constitutes a very worthy addition to existing scholarship on materiality.

This is a protean domain, covering a wide range of linguistic and visual elements: any group of relevant studies will inevitably be somewhat diffuse. Girot's collection is no exception; indeed, it is perhaps for this reason that it lacks an overall introduction, regrettably in view of the potential for methodological reflection on the field. In most respects, however, the volume's heterogeneity is a strength; in any case, many articles form complementary pairs. Two pieces address the activity of collectors: Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer briefly describes François Rasse des Neux's collection of printed tombeaux, while Chiara Lastraioli surveys the anonymous verse texts owned by Johannes Schenckbecher of Strasbourg. Primarily polemical and satirical, and of broadly Protestant inspiration, these poems (largely copied from printed flysheets) form a polyglot collection which offers intriguing insights into the reception of topical literature. Another pair of studies examines publication as a process. Amaury Flégès offers a thorough analysis of the tombeau of Christophe de Thou, its compilation and publication by his sonJacques-Auguste, and the normative discourse it conveys; equally illuminatingly, Silvia D'Amico traces the publication processes of Germain Audebert's Venetiæ, and their implications for Renaissance notions of authorship. A third pair engages with questions of poetic reputations: Mireille Huchon perceptively tracesRonsard's evolving presence in Antoine Fouquelin's Rhetorique, while Frank Lestringant delineates André de La Vigne's profile in the Vergier d'Honneur anthology, persuasively charting the relationships between La Vigne's works and the names of literary guarantors.

More loosely related to the volume's remit are two editions: of LouisDorléans's De la naissance de Jésus-Christ (Anne-Bérangère Rothenburger), and of Jacques Gohory's Ægloga de Monarchia with an accompanying French translation (Jean Dupèbe). Nevertheless, these texts' original transmission, in manuscript form alone, is itself a salutary reminder of the realities of "publication" in the mid- and late sixteenth century, while the editors provide useful critical comments on each poem. Three other contributors concentrate upon anthologies of relatively short pieces. Jean Balsamo astutely identifies the effects of the shifting patterns of anthologization of Desportes's Sonnets spirituels; Rosanna Gorris Camos provides a richly-documented treatment of Le Fèvre de La Boderie's anthologies, relating their organization to wider semantic structures in the poet's work; and Line Amselem-Szende supplies a valuable perspective from beyond the Pyrenees by outlining the image which the printed devotional volume Vergel de flores divinas presents of its compiler, Juan López de Úbeda. Anthologies of a different kind are discussed by Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn, and by Frank Dobbins. The former devote a thorough and perceptive study to collections of occasional verse in the silva tradition, focusing especially on the apologetic strategies used in prefaces; the latter produces a valuable bibliographical synthesis of multiauthor collections of poetry, particularly those containing music.

Three articles form the collection's structural and methodological skeleton. The opening contribution, an...