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Harmonie Divine et Subjectivité Poétique chez Maurice Scève by James Helgeson Review by: Randolph Runyon The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 877-878 Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477081 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 12:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sixteenth Century Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.208 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:38:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Harmonie Divine et Subjectivité Poétique chez Maurice Scèveby James Helgeson

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Harmonie Divine et Subjectivité Poétique chez Maurice Scève by James HelgesonReview by: Randolph RunyonThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 877-878Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477081 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 12:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

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Book Reviews 877

contemporary secular situation. Since it appears that La Garde was a bookseller (see Philippe Renouard, Repertoire des imprimeurs parisiens [Paris: Minard, 1965]) and not (as Renouard had earlier thought) also a printer, it would be interesting to know by what commercial relations the Fantaisies blocks came to be in this volume.Each anecdote is followed by a moralizing allegorization or lesson, a technique still current in reduced form decades later in the Comptes du monde aventureux, and from which one might see the devisants discussions in the Heptameron as an elegant, morally sophisticated, and evolved form. The moralizations, which here leave nothing to the reader's judgment, are given pride of place. Not only are they frequently as long or longer than the anecdotes, but the title given each section is frequently derived from the moralization rather than the story. These moralizations seem to come from the pen of someone with experience in the pulpit. In French, the first of these is addressed to "Tres chiers seigneurs et dames," giving a somewhat more secular tone than the Latin Gesta's for

mula, "Carissimi." Later moralizations generally omit the initial vocative, or occasionally use others: "tres chiers enfans." In nearly all of them one learns, as Hope remarks in the intro duction, that the tale is actually about "le conflit entre Dieu et le monde," in which the reader's soul is at stake (xiii). The success of this translation, three editions in eight years, speaks to the survival through the third decade of the sixteenth century of a medieval pattern of thought, rejected by humanists such as Erasmus, privileging the allegorical over the literal. The bulk of the frequent biblical citations remain in the Latin of the Vulgate, taking a con servative position on the question of rendering the Bible in the vernacular, or perhaps the supposition was that the text would generally be received orally, in which case the reader

might be expected to provide listeners with translations on the spot. The Violier's frequent errors of quotation of chapter and verse, caused no doubt by citing from memory, are made apparent when they are corrected in notes at the bottom of the page, making this edition a fine place to study how memory worked in an age when it was so frequently relied upon.

While there is a slight sense of regret that more of the information contained in the end notes is not reflected in some synthesized form in the introduction, some of this is to be found in Hope's earlier article on the Violier ("Tales of Literacy and Authority in the Violier (1521):The French Gesta Romanorum," BHR 59 [1997]: 353-63), and one can only admire the learning and patience demonstrated in this useful edition.

Harmonie Divine et Subjectivite Poetique chez Maurice Sceve. James Helgeson. Geneva: Droz, 2001. 151 pp. SF 78.00. ISBN 2-600-00486-6.

REVIEWED BY: Randolph Runyon, Miami University

Is music the concord of opposites, as Eryximachus suggested in Plato's Symposium, com menting on Heraclitus's cryptic assertion, "The one in conflict with itself is held together like the harmony of the bow and of the lyre" (187a)? After a survey of the various ways music

was defined by the Greeks, in the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, including music as law (nomos), as measurement, and as all the arts inspired by the muses, James Helgeson says of Maurice Sceve that what should be emphasized in his poetry is less the concord than the violence that must be exerted to maintain that concord.

Helgeson begins his reading of the Lyonnais poet with a systematic study of the myth of Orpheus in Sceve's works. The early Arion, an eclogue on the death of the dauphin, recounts the tale of the poet who fell off a ship and was rescued by a dolphin (dauphin); this pun and other wordplay betray a grand rhe'toriqueur influence Sceve would later abandon.

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878 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/3 (2004)

Orpheus is not mentioned in the poem, but Arlon is a kind of Orpheus, Helgeson argues, evoking the sad singer with a broken lyre, despairing in the wilderness, no longer singing to the animals that used to gather round. Delie's emblem 20 would later depict that scene; dizains 316 and 445 would focus on the musician's failed attempt to lead Eurydice out of Hades. But as Helgeson reveals, in dizain 316 one cannot easily identify Eurydice with D&lie. Rather, the tear the poet cannot draw from his beloved's eye is the real analog to the shade

Orpheus could not draw out of the infernal realm. In dizain 445, Maurice Sceve's Orpheus (1544) wants to draw his Eurydice out of the hell of eternal oblivion through the music of his poetry.The animals gathered about the singer in the emblem become the circle of Delie's admirers in the afterlife that Sceve's poem will award them both. Helgeson reads Saulsaye (1547) as a pastoral version of the orphic myth. In Microcosme (1562) the Adam who is chased from paradise becomes an anti-Orpheus, introducing chaos into the world in the place of harmony. But Christ will play the orphic role, drawing souls from hell, more successfully than did Orpheus, while the power that the Holy Spirit exerts upon souls is akin to that of

music. Helgeson for his part draws out some intriguing intertextual links connecting De'lie (1544), Saulsaye, and Microcosme.

Delie, he writes, is unsettling because it is at the same time Platonic and Petrarchan, both allegorical of higher meanings and the expression of physical desire. He analyzes the inter textual connections between Sc&ve and the poet who may have been the focus of his desire (a biographical detail that he argues is ultimately irrelevant), Pernette du Guillet. Although the allusions to Sceve in her poems have been known for some time, the attention here placed on her casting Sceve as Acteon to her Diana allows yet another orphic allusion to

emerge, as Acteon's dismemberment by his dogs parallels Orpheus's by the Bacchantes. Acteon is the subject of De'lie's emblem 19, and Orpheus, as it happens, of the neighboring emblem 20. Halfway between lie dizains 172 and 173, which are unusual in that for once a theme is continued between one dizain and the next. In both Delie is "ceincte," girded,

which in this interpretation "signals her kinship with divine harmony" (88).Yet that har mony may be discordant, as in dizain 392, where the beloved is likened to a world torn by "continuelz discor[d]s."

Other topics discussed include the theme of music in Pernette du Guillet and Louise Lab6, numerological readings of De'lie (which he finds unhelpful), and a comparison of Sc&ve with Mallarm&. Helgeson analyzes at length some twenty-five of De'lie's dizains, always atten tive to alternate readings, and throughout his study is consistently engaged with the critical literature on this important and difficult poet. The book is enhanced by a masterful knowl

edge of classical and medieval writings on music. Though his argument may at times be

obscure, this is nevertheless an important study for Sceve specialists.

Ma Bibliotheque Poetique: Quatrieme Partie. Vol. 1, Contemporains et succes seurs de Ronsard: De Desportes a la Boetie. Jean Paul Barbier. Geneva: Droz, 2001. 600 pp. SF 100.00. ISBN 2-600-00605-2.

REVIEWED BY: Andrea Walkden, Yale University

The possessive "ma" stands proudly at the start of the book's title and offers the first clue about the passionate bibliography to follow.This volume is but one part of a larger, ongoing ten-volume project that will include all books of early modern French poetry (and Italian poetry from Petrarch to the cinquecento) in Jean Paul Barbier's extensive collection.

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