, érudit, novateur, polémiste: Étude sur Ad Senecae lectionem Proodopoeiae (review)

Alexandre Tarrête

Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 228-230 (Review)

Published by Renaissance Society of America

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/212691

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 228 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY he was the rich and influential dean of St. Paul’s. Erasmus and More provide a better case. They were different in many ways, and they did not share the same religious sensibility or concept of religious reform, but they were soulmates from the time they first met. The Italians provide better examples. Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo Buonarroti (the artist), Reginald Pole (an exiled cousin of King Henry VIII but in intellectual and spiritual matters close to the Italian spirituali), and Vittoria Colonna constitute a defensible grouping for this study. Bembo, Michelangelo, and Colonna were the leading lyric poets of their generation. The other Italian figures who receive at- tention as learned spirituali here are Gasparo Contarini and Jacopo Sadoleto. Of the individuals studied, those who made sustained efforts to address gen- eral problems of spiritual and institutional reform, rather than just to seek personal fulfillment, were Erasmus, who had no intimate emotional link with any of this group except More, and three of the Italians: Contarini, Pole, and Sadoleto were major figures in the efforts of Pope Paul III to assert papal leadership and calm the religious upheaval. All three were made cardinals in 1535 and 1536; all were appointed to the reform commission that prepared the famous document that analyzed the failings of the Curia and proposed a serious and costly scheme of reforms. Colet was a genuine Catholic reformer, but only within a narrow scope. Bembo, also a cardinal, played a generally reformist role in curial politics but was primarily engaged in his literary work. For the others, the goal for spiritual friendships was their own personal fulfillment. They may have talked about general reform, but they did little or nothing to address this need. Essentially, they were interested in the religious and intellectual life of privileged and spiritually enlight- ened individuals like themselves, and they had little to say to the rest of society. Even Marguerite — who should not be identified here as “a French queen” (7), a title she never held — was concerned mainly with her own longing for spiritual security. She served as patron and protector of some French evangelicals who eventually played a more active role in religious reform, but she avoided actions that truly addressed the hard issues of French religious life. CHARLES G. NAUERT University of Missouri-Columbia

Denise Carabin. Henri Estienne, érudit, novateur, polémiste: Étude sur Ad Senecae lectionem Proodopoeiae. Études et Essais sur la Renaissance 66. : Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006. 346 pp. index. bibl. €65. ISBN: 2–7453–1354–1. Henri Estienne’s contribution to the rediscovery of ancient philosophy is well acknowledged but many of his books still lack detailed study. In a previous work (Les Idées stoïciennes dans la littérature morale des XVI e et XVII e siècles (1575–1642), 2004), D. Carabin considered the Neo-Stoic movement in early modern French literature from a general point of view: this new (and much shorter) book allows REVIEWS 229 her to complete the survey with a new chapter entirely devoted to the erudite publisher of Geneva, which was left aside in the former. This book, despite its comprehensive title, is in fact a close reading of the introduction and apology for Seneca that Estienne wrote in Latin and published in 1586, entitled Ad Senecae lectionem Proodopoeia (not Proodopoeiae, a misprint on the cover). The project cannot but remind the reader of his famous Apologia pro Herodoto (1566), but this time philology and philosophy prevail over history and satire. Who are the enemies of Seneca that Estienne decides to attack? Less the Ciceronians, grown weak by the end of the century, than the ancient critics themselves, namely and Quintilian, who did condemn the frivolity and bad taste of the philosopher. According to the author, Estienne’s contribution to the revival of Stoic ideas in the 1580s is significant — at a time when Montaigne and Lipsius were publishing works much influenced by the ideas of the Roman philosopher. Estienne’s defense of Seneca’s style helps building a countermodel to the still prevalent influence of Cicero. Religious antagonism also plays a part in this erudite project, since Estienne mainly wrote his Proodopoeia as a response to Muret’s edition of Seneca, published in Catholic in 1585. The book begins with a brief overview of the reception of Seneca in antiquity and during the Renaissance (part 1): Erasmus, Vivès, Muret, and Lipsius are closely dealt with, but Budé and Montaigne are rather neglected. Unfortunately, this part seems disconnected from the rest of the book, since Estienne is rarely mentioned in these first hundred pages: one could ask why the author has neglected here to build bridges with the following sections. The second part of the book is more satisfactory, tracing the genesis of Estienne’s project of an apology for Seneca and the use he makes of previous works in writing the Proodopoeia; the Ciceronianum lexicon graecolatinum (1557) and the Thesaurus graecae linguae (1572) constitute a useful basis to legitimate Seneca’s choice of certain philosophical words to express Stoic notions. Part 3 analyzes with accuracy Estienne’s approach to Seneca’s philosophical vocabulary, translated from the Greek and partly borrowed from Cicero (pathos is rendered by affectus, egemonikon by principale rather than principatum, and so forth). The following chapters show how Estienne underlines the specificity of Seneca’s own Stoicism within his own school, and how he opposes his philosophy to contemporary Epicurism and Platonism. Part 4 concentrates on Estienne’s views on Seneca’s literary style: the structure of sentences, the use of verbal tenses, the rhythm, the art of conciseness, the use of dialogue, and neologism. Estienne praises Seneca’s style for its natural flow and persuasiveness. Part 5 analyses Estienne’s own argu- mentative and polemic style. Estienne enlivens his erudite topic by dramatizing his opposition to his Catholic rival Muret, and by building a confident and peda- gogical relationship with the reader. The book’s general presentation is somewhat clumsy: one regrets the lack of introductions, at the beginning of the book and again at the beginning of each part, to announce the topic dealt with at each stage. The presentation of bibliographical references in footnotes and at the end is somewhat neglected and chaotic, with the name of the publisher or place of 230 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY printing sometimes missing. The final bibliography is rich, but is divided into so many subsections that it takes a lot of time to find the complete references to the books mentioned. Despite these flaws, this book gives precise and new information about Estienne’s reading of Seneca, and enriches our reading of the early modern period in various fields such as the history of philosophy, the history of rhetoric, and the knowledge of European humanist circles. ALEXANDRE TARRÊTE University of Paris IV — Sorbonne

Johannes Secundus. Elegiarum libri tres. Ed. Roland Guillot. Volume 2 of Œuvres complètes. Textes de la Renaissance 99. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2005. 500 pp. + 8 b/w pls. index. illus. tbls. bibl. €84. ISBN: 2–7453–1322–3. The second of the five volumes of the complete works of Johannes Secundus in Roland Guillot’s edition is dedicated to the three books of Elegies, originally included in the 1541 Utrecht edition of the Dutchman’s poetic works which his brothers, Grudius and Marius, saw through the press. In some ways, Guillot’s edition of the Elegies is more successful than his edition of the Basia. Without the weight of the latter’s Nachleben to burden him, he treats this collection in a more balanced way, and the introduction offers a generally informative view of the collection. After considering the importance of the elegy in Renaissance Latin works, the editor goes on to analyze the arrangement of the individual poems in the collection, assess Secundus’s elegiac style and the sources which he drew on, and finish with a word on his humor. As in the first volume, the Latin text is accompanied by a largely accurate French translation, though once again greater care could have been taken when reproducing the Latin. Just to give a few examples from the opening poems, quam appears as “quem” in Elegy 1.1, line 4, stringentem as “strigentem” (Elegy 1.2, line 33), and in Elegy 1.4 we find “repto” instead of reperto in line 3, and the long s has been reproduced as an f in line 7 (“fit” instead of sit), even though the text has been translated as if it were sit (“Mais que cette loi s’applique aussi à toi”). Clearly, this kind of carelessness militates against this text’s ever being considered seriously as an authoritative one. It also suffers, as in the first volume, from having been set out with little regard to elegance: blank pages again abound, and far greater care could have been taken over the typographical layout. Nevertheless, the notes which accompany the text are for the most part helpful, providing useful background details about how the elegies relate to the poet’s life and on the identity of the various people mentioned by the poet, as well as offering a host of possible sources for individual expressions, perhaps at times a little indiscriminately. On the other hand, there is no real comment on aspects of versification, such as the unusual spondaic fifth foot in Elegy 1.2.81, “Quid juvat Assyriis in odoribus elanguentem,” and despite the generally full references to modern critical sources, there is one surprising omission, the first volume of