Renaissance and Reformation

Renaissance and Reformation
Renaissance
et Réforme
New Series, Vol. IX, No. 1 Nouvelle Série, Vol. IX, No. 1
Old Series, Vol. XXI, No. 1 Ancienne Série, Vol. XXI, No. 1
February 1985 février
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Second class mail registration number 5448 ISSN 0034-429X
Renaissance
and
Reformation
Renaissance
et
Réforme
New Series, Vol. IX, No. 1

Old Series, Vol. XXI, No. 1
1985
Nouvelle Série, Vol. IX, No. 1

Ancienne Série, Vol. XXI, No. 1
Contents / Sommaire
ARTICLES
y
1
Past/Present: Leonardo Brum's History of Florence*
by Giuseppe Bisaccia
19
Littérature politique et exégèse biblique
(de 1570 à 1625)
par Pierre-Louis Vaillancourt
44
The Way of Caution:
Elenchus in Bacon's Essays
by K.J.H. Beriand
BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
58
Cobum Freer, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama,
reviewed by A.R. BraunmuUer
62
Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary
Lectures and Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides, reviewed by Paul E. Forte
66
John E. Booty éd., Richard Hooker, "Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity":
Attack and Response, reviewed by David Bevington
68
Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 6, The Correspondence of
Erasmus: Letters 842 to 992 (1518 to 1519),
reviewed by John F. McDiarmid
73
George M. Logan, The Meaning ofMore's "Utopia, "
reviewed by Elizabeth McCutcheon
Past/Present: Leonardo Bruni' s
History of Florence*
GIUSEPPE BISACCIA
I W "?Y
JAN /^/
The importance of historical consciousness in thejRenaissance is a fact

generally recognized by scholars of the period. From Petrarch on, it is
possible to discern a growing awareness of the past "men became more
and more conscious that all sorts of things — buildings, clothes, words,
laws-changed over time."* As Panofsky puts it, men "were convinced that
the period in which they lived was a 'new age' as sharply different from the
medieval past as the medieval past had been from classical antiquity."^
This heightened sense of the past is itself one of the manifestations of a

long civilizing process that still remains to be fully investigated. Some of
the forces at work in shaping historical consciousness are to be identified in
the progressive differentiation of social functions, which in turn favours the
gradual spreading of literacy among laity. ^ Already in the 13th and 14th
centuries the new demands of the communal civilization had redirected
cultural activities toward more marketable professions: alongside theolo-
gians, canonists, poets, physicians and scientists, we see more and more
jurists (particularly those versed in Roman law) notaries, lay clerks and
accountants — all people particularly sought out by the political leading
class and by the entrepreneurial and manufacturing classes."*
To meet the demand created by this progressive differentiation of social

functions, the Florentine society of the time, composed, as it was, mainly
of craftsmen and businessmen, sees to it that its children receive their
education through commercial practice. On the other hand, travels to
distant lands, contacts with different kinds of people, and lastly the mental
habit acquired through recording commercial transactions in time will lead
those very merchants to put down in writing much more than mere figures.
Thus the transition from simple ledgers to "libri segreti," "ricordanze,"
diaries, annals, and chronicles, which record in a neat and orderly fashion
events chronologically arranged in a well defined space. The place is
Florence, and particularly the miUeu of the merchant's family; the time
• A version of the first part of this paper was read at the meeting of the Canadian Society for
Renaissance Studies, held at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, in May 1981.
2 / Renaissance and Reformation
is a quantifiable one, according to the daily, monthly or yearly human

activity, which is now more precisely measured by the city's mechanical
clocks. Thus the universal and eternal dimensions of earlier medieval
chronicles are no longer to be found in the Florentine "ricordanze" of the
end of the 14th century. The recital of the Forentine merchant-chronicler
unfolds rather like a sequence of contemporary, or relatively recent, eco-
nomic and social events, centred in the family's or city's life, and occa-
sionally interspersed with ethical considerations.^
The Florentine humanist historiography of the early 15 th century moves
instead on a different plane. According to Alberto Tenenti, there are
similarities, but also marked differences in the way the merchant and the
humanist, respectively, approach and write history: namely, the former
writes chronicles, the latter historiae; the former easily accommodates in
his narrative God and the Divine Providence, the latter excludes both; the
former deals prominently with economic and social issues, the latter
disregards them altogether and deals, instead, mainly with political and
military matters, on a quite different level. ^ Furthermore, Tenenti, strongly
disagreeing with Christian Bee and indirectly even with Yves Renouard,
rejects the notion of these two scholars that there is merely a difference in
degree between the humanist and mercantile cultures. He contends that,
while it cannot be denied that at a certain time there was in fact a meeting of
minds in Florence between merchants and humanists, it still remains to be
fully investigated how and why this meeting of minds took place and which
group was most affected, positively or negatively, by the other. ^
The following pages on Leonardo Brum's History of Florence are

intended to help to bring into focus some modes of humanist thought, the
level on which humanists operated, and more specifically the way in which
Bruni himself related to the past
♦ «♦
While chroniclers seem to be content with recording in the vernacular the

mere sequence of the family's or city's life without trying to grasp its
underiying rationale, Leonardo Bruni writes instead in Latin and for a
selective audience, in a more detached way aiming above all at recon-
structing events.* He is quite aware of the difficulty of the task, "But writing
history requires a method continuously applied to so many things at once,
and calls for an explanation and judgment of each single fact."' In Brum's
History of Florence, *° the scope of the narration has gained breadth
compared with that of diaries and even most chronicles. No longer limited
to city events, it also embraces the Italian and transalpine scene insofar as
the internal affairs of Florence are considered intertwined and connected
to those of other states.
Bruni's narrative, in addition to expanding beyond the city walls, also
Renaissance et Réforme / 3
goes beyond the boundaries of individual memory, which was the source
and object of diaries, annals and most chronicles: ^^ "As far as I am
concerned, I have decided to write not only the present history, but also the
past history of this city, going as far back as memory allows." ^^ Thus
personal memory and written memory are essential to the reconstruction
of the past; Bruni sees this task as an important civic duty too often shunned
in the past.^^
Bruni, therefore, is about to weave the strands of the past, from which
lessons spring for the present and the future, and relies upon archival
documents whenever other sources — chronicles, annals or commentaries —
are unconvincing or incomplete. As far as more recent events are con-
cerned. Brum's main sources are obviously personal reminiscences and
those of his contemporaries, on the one hand, or archival documents, on
the other. The events narrated and handed down to posterity through
written memory are, therefore, those concerning the people of Florence,
more precisely the internal and external strife and other noteworthy peace
and wartime developments, along two separate lines set by the author
himself.^'
Indeed the annalistic framework of Bruni' s History is traditional, as is

the selection of historical facts, according to a long-established histor-
iographie criterion going back to Thucydides that dictates that only note-
worthy civic and military achievements should be narrated. Nonetheless,
following the example set by 14th-century Florentine chroniclers, other
episodes and phenomena affecting in one way or another the life of the city
are also recounted. The description of the "Whites' " processions, which
took place at the very end of the 14th century, stands out for its effective-
ness and sobriety. It was a spontaneous manifestation of popular piety
originating in France and spreading to Italy, and it was all the more striking
both for the author and the Florentines of the period because it marked, so
to say, a natural pause in the middle of the struggle against Giangaleazzo
Visconti. Swarms of men and women, garbed in white, went in procession
from one city to the other, calling for peace and mercy and swelling their
ranks with new proselytes. Yet Brum's description assumes in the course of
the narrative a rhetorical function; it marks a pause — as was the case in the
historical reality — between two phases of the war: "As long as the religious
fervor lasted, warfare and its dangers were on nobody's mind, but soon
after that fervor ceased, things got once again back to the previous cares of
the mind."^^
We can say that such an ebb and flow of human behavior, which is
equally present in the alternation of internecine conflicts and external
struggles, of war and peace, of unity and disunity, runs through Brum's
narrative and indeed constitutes the rhythm of historical time:
The external front had hardly quieted down when internal strifes, as never
experienced before, disturbed the city.
The following year everything was quiet on the external front, but inside
serious disturbances arose, and the citizens took up arms for the reasons we
are about to tell.
I think therefore that, after the barbarians ceased lo constitute a threat, for a
while peace prevailed among our cities; but pretty soon, as these cities were no
longer threatened from the outside, they started to grow in power, and were
beleaguered by envy and rivalry."*
Turning now to the theme of liberty and tyranny that underlies Bruni's
narrative, we find that the yearning for liberty becomes a tropism on a
universal scale: whenever liberty remains stifled, all life consequently
languishes; whenever it finds new space, life blossoms again:
As larger trees hamper the growth of young plants growing close to them, so
the overwhelming power of Rome in no way could tolerate that another city
would grow to be greater.
. . . little by littie the Italian cities began to turn their eyes to liberty . . . finally
. . . they started also to grow, flourish and regain the former authority.^'
If we consider now the rôle of classical models in Bruni's History, we

notice that for certain aspects their presence is more immediately dis-
cernible, namely in the few explicit references to ancient Rome and to
some specific sources (Cicero, Sallust, Vergil and Livy), in the pro-
minence of battle descriptions, in the use of fictitious orations (e.g.
Thucydides, Livy, Polybius), in the annalistic framework and in the tex-
ture of language — both derived from Livy — in the brevitas of the style, and
finally in the selection of facts worthy of memory, which should be of great
utility to the readers of the History:
And all these events seem to me particularly worthy of being preserved in

writing; and the knowledge of those facts, I thought, should be greatiy useful
both to statesmen and private citizens.
This entire story deserves indeed to be recorded, both as a lesson to citizens,

and as a warning to princes.''
The presence of classical models in Bruni's History is at times less con-

spicuous and obvious, as is the case for some reminiscences of Sallust' s
Bellum Catilinae and Bellum lugurthinum. ^^ Such a presence becomes
even more elusive whenever the ancient ethos finds itself in agreement with
the present to the point of being absorbed by it.
As far as the history of the communal period of Florence is concerned.
Bruni clearly outlines how far the people of Florence had progressed in the
previous two centuries, and invariably highlights the strife that had torn the
city apart and those instances where Florence, in spite of her ineptness,
had had Fortuna on her side. But it is the mercantile spirit and values that
clearly emerge from Brum's pages. In 1 329— and let us keep in mind that
Bruni was writing those pages precisely one hundred years later, when
Florence's designs on Lucca were once again manifest — the Florentines
were presented with the opportunity of purchasing Lucca from a garrison
of German mercenaries for 80,000 golden florins; but, in the end, the
citizens could not come to an agreement and nothing came of it. Through
Pino della Tosa, who supports the decision to purchase Lucca before the
"consiglio del popolo," Bruni voices the legitimate ambitions of a mer-
cantile society, which with its industriousness had brought prestige, power
and honour to the city. The rationale of ever-increasing gain, prominent in
Pina della Tosa' s address, exactly reflects the mentality of that society:
Indeed, as one who is familiar with communal life and customs, so I must
confess that I can't help being moved by all things which are commonly
regarded as good: broadening territorial boundaries, increasing power, exalt-
ing the glory and magnificence of one's city, providing security and profit:
now, if we do not agree that these things should be sought after, then the caring
for the republic, the love for our native land and indeed our whole way of life
would be subverted . . . Our ancestors, the Romans, would never have domin-
ated the world if, content with their lot, they had shirked any new military
venture and relative expenses. On the other hand we certainly cannot say that
the end of public and private life is the same one. Indeed the end of public life is
magnificence, which consists of glory and greatness; the end of private life
consists of modesty and frugality .^^
Such a mercantile cast of mind, operative on the socio-political level, sur-

faces in a palpable way even elsewhere in BninVsHistory. In each case the
assumption is identical: in pursuing a policy of growth or aggrandizement,
one must have a great quantity of money that can be accumulated and
gradually increased only by virtue of the spirit of initiative, the boldness,
and the providence that are pecoiliar to a merchant. In the following
passage, the Bolognesi apologize in 1 390 to the Florentines for not being
able to sustain any longer the common war effort against Giangaleazzo
Visconti:
The fact is that neither are our men endowed with the kind of ingenuity which
would make them particularly industrious in earning money, nor do they
travel over France and England for the purpose of trade; they are rather simple
men, content with their lot, happily enjoying what they have at home. We can
hardly say that such a style of life is conducive to wealth, which is accumulated
by industriousness, and increased by diligence. ^*
That the spirit of gain and love for daring also permeate the speeches of
Florentine orators shows how fully aware are the Florentines of their
legitimate claims. In 1273, for instance, the Florentines refuse to readmit
into the city the exiled Ghibellines as requested by Gregory X, rebutting
one by one the Pope's arguments. Directly addressing the Pope, they say at
a certain point.
Please, do not bind us to a too strict and rigorous norm of life: the rules
governing earth are not the same as those governing heaven . . . And that we
stood firm by the Church can be proved not only by facts, but also by various
letters of previous popes, filled with exhortations and commendations, which
are kept in the public archives. ^^
The actions of the past, committed to the written memory of the archives,
once again acquire a precise meaning in the context of the relations
between the Church and the Florentine Republic.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1 376, Florentine orators Alessandro

dalla Antella and Donato Barbadori, speaking to Pope Gregory XI, will
defend their city from the accusation of having helped in more than one
way the people of Città di Castello, Perugia, Spoleto, Todi, Gubbio, Forli,
Ascoli, Viterbo and Bologna to throw off the yoke of the apostolic dele-
gates. There is indeed deference for the papal office, though tinged some-
what by ostentation, but there is also full awareness of what is at stake,
namely the defense of civic liberties, which in turn implies the defense of
the economic interests and of the political and cultural heritage of Florence.
Particularly cutting, in contrast to the generally conciliatory tone of the
oration, is the following remark: "All the more your Holiness must lend a
very impartial ear to us, because, being so far from the scene, you didn't
think fit either to see with your own eyes or to listen with your ears to your
delegates' wrong doings. "^^
In conclusion. Brum's background is broad and composite. He was

particularly familiar with Cicero, Livy, Polybius, Thucydides, Plutarch,
Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio; he had done
extensive translation work, particularly from Plutarch, Aristotle and Plato,
and had acquired intellectual and political experience while he was part of
Salutati's circle and as a papal secretary and head of the Florentine
Chancery. All these elements contribute to his intellectual formation, but
equally so do his contacts with the Florentine mercantile milieu. We can
say, therefore, that an osmosis between the system of values of the mercan-
tile culture and that of Brum's humanistic culture enhances those values.
Later on, Alberti will propose them as ideal norms governing everyday life.
The merchant's mind, being so centered on profit and increasing gain, was
rather inclined to exalt "utilitas," "ratio," "industria," "ingenium," "dili-
gentia," "magnificentia," "modestia," and"frugalitas," all values that are
particularly prominent in Brum's History, and that he holds to be peculiar

to man as actor and master of his earthly fate. In this connection, one
should also keep in mind that the Florentine mercantile class was con-
sidered the supporting framework of the Republic by many of Bruni' s
generation. Since the mercantile culture is a constitutional part of Brum's
ethical horizon, it is hardly surprising to find it reflected in his History, and
more explicitly so in some of the fictitious orations. Furthermore, while in
the diaristic ("ricordanze") prose the data of memory are arranged on the
same level in a sort of unidimensional representation, in Brum's History
they are arranged in a relation of interdependence and of cause and effect,
placed on different levels, in a deeper temporal dimension. The selection of
historical data is effected through a critical evaluation of past chronicles,
as he chooses the more plausible accounts, or resorts when necessary to
archaeological and documental material. Bruni focuses not only on Florence's
internal and external affairs, but also on the social dynamics and the
partisan passions that stir it, leading to a "tyrannical" or "free" regime,
and on the origin and development of those civic institutions whose effects
are still felt in the present.^"* The systematic exploration and reconstruction
of the past actually serve to justify the present configuration of the Floren-
tine world.
The historiographie criterion of truth/ impartiality adopted by Bruni in

Ids History does operate in more than one way: in his rigorous research and
evaluation of sources; in his caution before reaching conclusions, when-
ever the evidence is less than sufficient; and in his willingness to point out
the ineptness and relative good fortune of the Florentines. How far we are
from the spirit of panegyric of the Laudatio florentinae urbis! Bruni
himself consciously distinguishes between the two genres: history is quite
different from panegyric; history "must closely follow truth" ("quidem
veritatem sequi debet"). ^^
It is also necessary to emphasize the narrowly political and mundane

perspective through which the Church and its relations with Florence are
regarded. Ethico-religious considerations are almost entirely missing in the
Historiae. ^^ Bruni goes on with his story to the year 1 375 before incidentally
remarking that since 1 342 the popes had been French and residing in France,
and the only reason he mentions this fact is to expose the maladministration
of the apostolic delegates in Italy." In short, nothing is said about the
uneasiness that the faithful might have felt because of the remoteness of the
Pope. On the other hand. Bruni does not fail to claim impartially privileges
and prerogatives of Florentine ecclesiastics and citizens.^* Liberty and
tyranny, oppression and civic life: these are in the final analysis the poles in
Brum's historical narrative.
*««
Further discussion of some aspects of Bruni' s work will show to what

extent he availed himself of the analytical tools common to his social and
intellectual milieu, and to what extent, conversely, he forged his own
analytical tools through the very process of reconstructing the past. In
short, was he altogether conditioned by the political and social norms
prevailing in the Florence of his day, to the extent of not being able to see
the past except through the eyes of the present; or was he, instead, able to
perceive the distance separating the former from the latter, so that he
actually obtained a binocular, rather than a monocular view of past and
present events? I think that, while dealing with past events in the frame-
work of time and space relationships, Bruni got closer and closer to the
specific conditions of the time in which such events were rooted, and
consequently gained a better understanding of the present Florentine
socio-political situation. For instance, the Florentine Guelfs' decision to
abandon their city without resistance as a result of their party's defeat at
Montaperti in 1 260 is for Bruni perfectly understandable, given the precise
circumstances, and not reprehensible as others had thought because of
unfamiliarity with those very circumstances.^^ Similarly, according to
him, the final outcome of the same course of action might be determined by
different circumstances, as when in 1280 Cardinal Latinus was able to
accomplish what only a few years before had eluded Pope Gregory X.^^
Summing up: though Bruni' s historical perspective is obviously determined
and shaped by present concerns, his evaluation of past events is based on
his appreciation of the precise circumstances that affected them. On the
other hand, past events are not considered by Bruni solely for their signi-
ficance at the time they occurred, but also as starting points of an evolu-
tionary process (for instance, an institutional change whose impact is still
felt in the present social and political situation). ^^
This interplay between past and present, which cast light on each other,
enables Bruni to grasp among other things the increasing inadequacy of a
popular Florentine regime that still relied on obsolete communal political
structures when confronted with the twofold problem of domestic stability
and external expansion. The issue of competence in public office and
effectiveness in the executive surfaces over and over again in the recount-
ing of past failures. Lx)oking backward. Bruni could indeed fully appreciate
the cumulative effect of recurring malfunctions in past Florentine govern-
ments." It is fair to say that his very ideal of civic liberty was as much
affected by his consideration and reconsideration of the past as by the
present political mutations in Florence. His cognitive powers were certainly
enhanced and his consciousness heightened by the gradual realization of
the varied causes that had produced certain effects. Toward the end of his
work, while Bruni was writing about the valiant Florentine resistance to
Giangaleazzo Visconti's hegemonic bid in Northern and Central Italy,
more and more things started to fall into place and the significance of those
years became clearer and clearer, offering him a better understanding of

present-day Medicean Florence." It was no longer a question of whether
political decisions, especially those concerning foreign affairs, should be
the direct expression of the wishes of all citizens, but rather of how an
efficient state could better provide for the needs and aspirations of a city
that aimed at acquiring a larger territorial basis. ^'^
In the process of drawing up his History of Florence, Bruni continued to

read the ancient authors over and over again, and also to take part in his
city's intellectual and political debate. Both discourses, that with the past
and that with the present, certainly helped to shape and refine his analytical
tools and also to weaken or strengthen some of his ideas. As far as the
dialogue with ancient authors was concerned, the reading of Thucydides
must have been for him particularly illuminating.^^ Though the differences
between Athens in the Peloponnesian war and Florence in its present
struggles are in more than one way significant, still there was one striking
similarity: both cities were quite conscious of their means and of their aims,
while facing similar political realities. For instance, both cities needed to
secure large sums of money to wage wars that would allow them to broaden
their sphere of influence and at the same time guarantee the preservation of
their cherished liberties, and both encountered, at times, the same obstacle —
the reluctance of the citizens to contribute to the expenses. In either case,
the citizens, in order to be persuaded, needed to be reminded of what was
actually at stake, namely their cherished liberties, the very basis of their
wealth. ^^
In this connection, the great prominence Bruni gives to wealth in the

History of Florence needs to be emphasized. The almost inexhaustible
ability of the Florentines to make and provide money for the sundriest
enterprises at home and abroad becomes a leitmotiv in the narrative and a
parameter of historical interpretation as well. ^^ Bruni the historian, obe-
dient to his set criterion of impartiality, recognizes that the greatness of
Florence cannot be accounted for without taking its wealth into proper
consideration. Conversely, he cannot help noticing that many past short-
comings of the city were the result of the incompetence of its public
officers;^* hence, his implicit comment that only qualified men should be
charged with pubHc responsibilities.
The emphasis Bruni places on wealth and the use of qualified men in
relation to the growth of Florence, pushes into the background the sub-
stantial rôle that a communal force like the guilds, for instance, actually
played in the development of the city.^^ Oddly enough, even the activity of
trading, per se, is discounted by Bruni as a significant factor in such a
growth.'*® Merchants are mainly seen by him as purveyors of money,'**
lacking the political or military experience necessary to carry out public
duties.'*^ In a way, their function is absorbed by the State.'*^
The dialectics between past and present that underlie Brum's historical
interpretation also reflect the kind of political debate that gradually devel-
oped in Florence after 1 406, as shown by the protocols of the "pratiche.'"*"*
The fact that the speakers of the "pratiche" would repeatedly re-evoke
events of the past and point to their significance in relation to the present
situation in order to lend more weight to their arguments is a demonstration
of how broad and well-articulated the political discourse had become.
Ideas that had until then been aired primarily in restricted intellectual
circles like Salutati's or in writing'*^ could now be verified in the larger
forum of public debate: their applicability to a concrete political situation
was thus tested on the basis of a past experience adapted to present
circumstances. A connection was established between theory and practice,
and this in turn infused new blood into the intellectual and political dis-
course. But most noteworthy is that the exchange of ideas and opinions
among people of diverse background and experience stimulated and re-
fined their analytical faculties, so that new contents found new modes of
expression. In the "pratiche" a genuine need arose for each speaker to
persuade his audience as well as he could, which made it necessary for him
to construct his speech in an orderly, logical, and suggestive manner.'*^
Some of the orations in Brum' s History of Florence point directiy to this style
and to the actual stimuli that prompted it in the Florentine "pratiche":
ORATIONS^^
"Please, let's put aside such
pompous rhetoric; let's get, as
I said, to the substance of the
matter!"
II -"As long as I can remember,

time and again, in various oc-
casions, because of our tend-
ency to act slowly and take
things lightly, we failed to make
decisions and implement them
at the right time. "
III - "As a matter of fact it is not

proper that issues concerning
so many people be decided by
a few, nor is it safe for the few
who decide."
"PRATICHE""
-The speaker is Gino Capponi:
"The proposal presented by Piero
Baroncelli was very nice but \?ic\i-
mg in substance.''
-The speaker is Sandro Altoviti:
"Issues under consideration de-
mand no long speeches but prompt
action."
-The speaker is Filippo Corsini:

"As Sallust recounts in his Catili-
naria, following Caesar's elegant
oration, Cato said: 'Present circum-
stances admit no delay: prompt ac-
tion is vital to our success.' And
because the Romans delayed their ac-
tion, Hannibal overtook Saguntum."
-The speaker is Agnolo Pandolfini:

" It is neither proper nor wise to ignore
decisk>ns made by and concerning so
many people; in any case, it is worse
to follow the advice of the few than the
advice of the many, even when it is
demonstrated that the implementa-
tion of the decision might result in
some inconvenience."
Renaissance et Réforme / 1 1
In each case the preoccupation seems to be the same: (i) the oration of the
Florentine who recommends that the exiled Ghibellines not be readmitted
into the city (year 1323) is a logically well-constructed and straightfor-
ward speech, aiming at the substance of the matter Ç'ad solidum'') as
much as Capponi's and Altoviti's speeches in the "pratiche"; (ii) the
oration of Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi in 1 399 reveals a concern for prompt and
substantive action similar to the one expressed by Filippo Corsini; (iii)
finally, the oration of the old Florentine citizen in 1351 advocates the
overall advantages of a broadly based decision process, as does Agnolo
Pandolfini in the "pratica" held in April 1423. Thus it can be said that, in
the composition of fictitious orations. Bruni was following not only an
ancient model but also a present one, recapturing through the latter the
ethos that pervaded the former. It can be added that the audience of the
"pratiche" would have easily recognized in Brum's History of Florence
the common conceptual fiâme of mind and the common disposition to
present different opinions. Bartolomeo Orlandini refers to such method of
procedure in the "pratiche" when he says that ". . . all opinions should be
expressed and aired in a large assembly of people, as has been the case so
far. . . . "^^ Bruni, on the other hand, presents, in binary orations, the opposing
views of disputing parties. ^° In addition, toward the end of his
work, he transcribes fi-om documents two speeches uttered by Viscontean
and Florentine orators in 1401, and invites the reader to use his own
judgment in evaluating them: "I shall submit the arguments of our adver-
saries along with our own reply, so that the reader might judge by
himself "^^ Both Bruni and the interlocutors of the "pratiche," whether
politicians or businessmen or lawyers or humanists, furthermore never
seem to lose sight of the fact that without concrete social and fmancial
support their personal aspirations, no matter how noble, are bound to
founder. This heightened civic consciousness, which is wary of fumous
projects and stands on the more solid ground of individual and collective
claims, finds its expression in some of Brum's fictitious orations examined
in the first part of this paper." That, in public affairs, the case should rest on
solid arguments rather than on theory was also the opinion of Agnolo
Pandolfini, who said in a "pratica," "The administration of public affairs
may not be conducted on the basis of theoretical knowledge, since it
primarily requires specific data."^^
After having considered the effects that education, reading, translating,

writing and participation in political life had on Brum's historical outlook,
only a few remarks remain to be made on his private life, vis-à-vis his
intellectual and civic concerns. As we know, he was a civis novus in
Florence, and consequently his steady effort through the years was to
reach a status that would allow him to feel at ease in his adopted home
towa The pursuit and attainment of honorary citizenship and of excep-
tional fiscal exemptions, his marriage with a woman belonging to a wealthy

and prestigious Florentine family, his profitable investments, and his
ability to walk a political tightrope when necessary, together with his
intellectual talents and scholarly achievements, offered Bruni, at least to a
certain extent, that material and psychological security also eagerly sought
by many other Florentines of his day. In many ways Bruni was much less of
an outsider in Florence than was Giovanni Cavalcanti, for example, who,
though a native Florentine and of noble descent, felt little at ease in his
city— indeed he felt like an outcast ^"^ At the opposite ends of the social
ladder, both were vying for social recognition, attainable in their time
mainly by entering the orbit of local influential families and by accum-
ulating a substantial patrimony. On the other hand. Bruni was certainly not
speaking casually, but showing awareness of what the privilege of being a
Florentine citizen precisely implied, when he proudly wrote in a letter to a
fiiend of his toward the end of 1416, " . . . ego, qui novus Florentinus civis
sum "^^ Such a privilege represented a stepping stone toward a further
climbing of the social and political ladder. Bruni was much better equipped
than Cavalcanti for the ascent he had a superior culture — the kind in tune
with the times — and legal, administrative and political experience, ac-
cumulated through the years. The two were actually far apart in more than
one way, but both wrote a history of Florence (Cavalcanti' s covered a
short period and only contemporary events) and both bore witness to their
times, though to a different extent and fk)m a different point of view.
Looking at them together also helps to bring forth what links them to-
gether, namely a common culture and common civic concerns, though by
no means an equal vision of reality. Cavalcanti, cut off as he was from any
direct participation in public life and rather immersed in self-indulgent
grief, could hardly develop a broader view of things. Bruni could instead
derive from his involvement in intellectual and political life a better com-
prehension of past and present realities. On the other hand, any Florentine
who kept minimally in touch with present realities had quite a clear notion
of what was absolutely needed to succeed in private affairs and public life:
personal, intellectual and political talents, strong ties with powerful fami-
lies,'^ and last but not least, a substantial patrimony to start with. Caval-
canti, echoing an old Florentine saying, said that "where prosperity is
wanting, friendship is missing too."" With the help of Juvenal, Bruni saw
broader implications in this deficiency: "Indeed wealth may be considered
useful, whenever it brings prestige to those who have it and enables them to
practise virtue. In fact, we may agree with our poet when he says that 'those
whose talents are impeded by family poverty have a lesser chance to prove
themselves in life.' "'*
In conclusion, one can see that Brum's discourse in the History of

Florence is permeated by various elements of the mercantile culture.
particularly by the logic of utility, which is applied to public life or private

affairs or foreign policy. This cast of mind at first simply equipped Bruni
with certain conceptual tools and values operative in the social and poli-
tical life of his day. It goes to Brum's credit that, by continuously testing
those tools inside and outside the political arena, and by repeatedly inter-
rogating the past and the present, he was then able to place those ordinary
values in the context of a long tradition, thus heightening their function in
Florentine culture. Through the systematic exploration and reconstruc-
tion of the past, the present configuration of the Florentine world became
clearer and clearer to him. That this was also the case for contemporary
readers is doubtful. They might indeed have shared with Bruni the same
conceptual frame of reference, but could not— as he had done — seize the
full implications of the reconstruction of the past They simply had not
gone through the same experience of connecting and weaving together the
strands of an entire tradition.
University of Massachusetts at Boston
Notes
1 P. Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: E. Arnold, 1969), p. 39. (The assertion is
supported by quotations from primary sources, on pp. 39-49.)
2 E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell,
1960), p. 36.
3 For the progressive differentiation of social functions, see N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Vol. 1:
New York: Urizen Books, 1978; Vol. 2: New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). For the high level of
literacy in a city Uke Florence around 1400, see D. De Robertis, '"La prosa familiare e civile," in E.
Cecchi and N. Sapegno, eds., Storia delta letteratura italiana (Milano: Garzanti, 1966), III,
377-384.
4 For the contents of this page, I rely heavily on A. Tenenti's chapter "L'umanesimo italiano del
Trecento e Quattrocento," in R Romano and A. Tenenti, // rinascimento e la riforma (1378-
1598), (Torino: UTET, 1976), II, 349-352.
5 On "ricordanze" literature see P.J. Jones, "Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the
Fourteenth Century," in P. Grierson and J.W. Perkins, eds., Studies in Italian Medieval History,
presented to Miss KM. Jameson (London: British School at Rome, 1956), pp. 183-205; V.
Branca, "Ricordi domestici nel Trecento e nel Quattrocento," in Dizionario critico della let-
teratura italiana (Torino: UTET, 1974), III, 189-192; F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in
Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1977), pp. 272-278; F. Pezzarossa, "La
memorialistica fiorentina tra Medioevo e Rinascimento" in Lettere italiane, 31 (1979), 97-138;
F. Pezzarossa, "La tradizione fiorentina della memorialistica," in G.M. Anselmi, F. Pezzarossa
and L. Avellini, La "memoria" dei mercatores: tendenze ideologiche, ricordanze, artigianato in
versi nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Bologna: Patron, 1980), pp. 41-91. On the broader subject
of historiography, see A. Tenenti, "La storiografia in Europa dal Quattro al Seicento," in Nuove
questioni di storia modema (Milano: Marzorati, 1964), D. Hay, Annalists and Historians:
Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 1977),
and E. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1981).
6 Above I have in part paraphrased and in part translated what A. Tenenti says on p. 1327 of his
critical note "Les marchands et la culture à Florence (1375-1434)," in Annales E.S.C., 23
(1968), pp. 1319-1329.

7 "Or, on ne saurait contester qu'à un certain moment il y ait eu à Florence une rencontre et parfois
un accord entre mentalité et sensibilité marchande et humanisme. Mais plutôt que de célébrer cette
alliance sans plus, il fallait préciser comment et pourquoi elle s'était effectuée, et surtout jusqu'à
quel point, avec quels gains et pertes de part et d'autre" (Ibid., p. 1 325 ). In his critical note, Tenenti
reviews Christian Bec's book. Les marchands écrivains: affaires et humanisme à Florence, 13 75-
1434 (Paris- La Haye: Mouton, 1 967). Yves Renouard's ideas on the rapport between mercantile
and humanist culture in Italy, and particularly in Florence, can be read in his Les hommes
d'affaires italiens du moyen âge (Paris: Colin, 1968), pp. 217-247.
8 Cf Tenenti's chapter "Le culture nazionali e la storiografia," in R. Romano and A. Tenenti, //

rinascimento, II, 568.
9 " Historiam vero, in qua tot simul rerum longa et continuata ratio sit habenda, causaeque factorum
omnium singulatim explicandae . . . ," inL. Bnini,HistoriarumJlorentinipopuli libriXII, éd. E.
Santini, in "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores" (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1 9 1 4), L XIX, part III, p. 3; cf
Bruni's letter to Poggio Bracciolini (from Florence, Jan. 2, 1416): "Exegi Hbrum meum
. . . sed tantus est labor in quaerendis investigandisque rebus, ut jam plane me poeniteat in-
cepisse," in Leonardi Bruni Arretini Epistolarum libri VIII, éd. L. Mehus, (Florentiae: Ex
Typographia Bemardi Paperinii, 1741), part I, pp. 110-111. (AU the EngHsh translations from
Latin appearing in this paper are mine.)
10 On Bruni's History of Florence, see: E. Santini, "Leonardo Bruni Aretino e i suoi 'Historiarum
florentini populi libri XII,' " in " Annali della R. Scuola normale superiore de Pisa" (1910), XXII,
3-173; B.L. Ullman, "Leonardo Bruni and Humanistic Historiography," in his Studies in the
Italian Renaissance (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955), pp. 321-344; D.J. Wilcox,
The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1969), pp. 1-129; N.S. Struever, The Language in the Renaissance:
Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton U.P.,
1970), pp. 101-143; R. Fubini, "Osservazioni sugli 'Historiarum florentini populi libri XII' di
Leonardo Bruni," in Studi di storia medioevale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan (Firenze: Olschki,
1980), I, 403-448. Fundamental is Hans Baron's work on Bruni and his time, particularly The
Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (ItaUan revised edition: Firenze: Sansoni, 1970) and
From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
11 Cf R. Romano and A. Tenenti, // rinascimento. Vol. 2, p. 569.
1 2 "Ego autem non aetatis meae solum, verum etiam supra quantum haberi memoria potest, repeti-
tam huius civitatis historiam scribere constitui," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit., p. 4.
1 3 "Ita dum quisque vel quieti suae indulget, vel existimationi consulit, publica utilitas neglecta est, et
praestantissimorum virorum rerumque maximarum memoria pene obliterata," ibid. This deeply
felt public duty to transmit in writing the events of one's time goes back to the conversations held in
Salutati's circle and echoed by Vergerius: "Memoria etenim hominum, et quod transmittitur per
manus, sensim elabitur, et vix unius hominis aevum exsuperat Quod autem libris bene mandatum
est ... . Nam sunt litterae quidem ac libri certa rerum memoria, et scibilium omnium communis
apotheca," in P.P. Vergerius, De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis adulescentiae, ed. A.
Gnesotto, in " Atti e Memorie della R- Accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti di Padova," n. s. 34
(1918), p. 120.
14 "Nam, cum duae sunt historiae partes et quasi membra, foris gesta et domi, non minoris sane
putandum fuerit domesticos status quam externa bella cognoscere," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit , p.
78.
15 "Dum religio tenait animos, de periculis belli nihil cogitabatur; sed postquam fînis fuit dealba-
torum fervori ad primas rursus curas animi redierunt," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. ciL, p. 279.
16 "Extemam pacem intestinae confestim discordiae subsecutae, quantum numquam antea civi-
tatem turbarunt," ibid., p. 224; "Proximo dehinc anno quies fuit ab extemis bellis; domi autem
seditiones insuper coortae graves, et a civibus arma sumpta ex huiusmodi causa," ibid., p. 101;
"Atque ego puto per prima ilia tempora post barbarorum cessationem inter civitates nostras
concordiam viguisse; mox vero, ut crescere coeperunt, vacuas ab extemo metu, invidia et con-
tentione transversas agere," ibid., p. 25. See also following passage: " Secuta deinde quies ex pace
aliquot menses hominum curas exemit . . . ," ibid., p. 191.
17 "Ut enim ingénies arbores novellis plantis iuxta surgentibus afficere soient, nec ut altius crescant
permittere, six romanae urbis moles sua magnitudine vicinitatem premens, nullam Italiae civi-
tatem maiorem in modum crescere patiebatur," ibid., p. 7; "civitates Italiae paulatim ad libertatem
respicere . . . denique . . . crescere atque florere et in pristinam auctoritatem sese attollere coepe-
runt," ibid., p. 23.
1 8 "Haec mihi perdigna literis et memoria videbantur, ac earumdem cognitionem rerum utilissimam
privatim et publiée artibrabar," ibid., p. 3; "Res enim digna est quae literis annotetur, vel pro
admonitu civium, vel pro castigatione regnantium," ibid., p. 163.
19 Cf. A. La Penna, "Il significato di Sallustio nella storiografia e nel pensiero politico di Leonardo
Bruni," in his Sallustio e la rivoluzione romana (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968), pp. 409-431.
20 "Equidem, ut ista communi vita moribusque hominum utor, ita illa me moveri fateor quae bona
apud homines putantur: extendere fines, imperium augere, civitatis gloriam splendoremque ex-
tollere, securitatem utilitatemque asciscere: quae nisi expetenda dicamus, et cura reipublicae et
pietas in patriam et tota pêne haec vita nobis fueritpervertenda . . . Populus romanus parens noster
numquam orbis imperium nactus esset, si suis rebus contentus nova coepta impensasque refugis-
seL Nec sane idem propositum est homini publiée et privatim. Nam publiée quidem magnificentia
proposita est, quae in gloria amplitudineque consistit; privatim vero modestia et frugalitas," in L.
Bruni, Histor. ed. cit., p. 140.
21 "Non enim eo ingenio sunt homines nostri, ut industria multa in acquirendo utantur, nec uUi per
Galliam et Britanniam negotiaturi discursant; simplices magis homines ac suis rebus contenti, eo
quod habent domi laetis animis perfruuntur. In huiusmodi autem moribus, opulentia non fit, quam
industria parit, diligentia exauget," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p. 251.
22 "Noli, quaeso, nos ad hanc scrupolosam vivendi normam vocare: aliter enim coelum, aliter terra
regitur . . . Atqui stetisse nos pro ecclesia, praeterquam facta, literae quoque pontificum, quarum
infinitus pene numerus in publicis servatur archiviis, cohortationum et commendationum plenae,
testantur . . . ," ibid., p. 62.
23 "Quo enim longius abes, ac minus vel oculis inspicere malefacta gubematorum tuorum, vel
auribus percipere voluisti, eo magis debet tua sanctitas aures aequissimas nobis impertiri . . . ,"
ibid., p. 212.
24 Speaking of the institution of the "collegia" in 1 266, Bruni concludes: "Ea res quamquamparva
primo visa, tamen populum a dominantibus ad libertatem traducebant, arma capere et ad suum
quemque locum iubens," ibid., p. 48. Referring to the first hiring of mercenary troops in 1 35 1 , he
decries that decision for its dire consequences: " . . .parvis ab initio erratis permagna deinde
pariunt detrimenta," ibid., p. 186. Bruni also marks down the momentous creation of a consoli-
dated public debt in Florence, in 1344: "Eadem anno maximum est reipublicae fiindamentum,
parvo ex principio iaci coeptum . . . Quantitatis vero ipsas in unum coacervatas a similitudine
cumulandi wXgo Montent vocavere; idque in civitate postea servatum . . . ," ibid., p. 1 7 1 . See also:
for the change in the electoral system in 1 323 and its impact on the political structure of the city,
ibid., pp. 121-122; for the institution of the prior ate in 1282, ibid., p. 67; and for the institution of
the Gonfalonier in 1289, ibid., p. 79.
25 L. Bruni, Epistol., ed. cit, part II, bk. VIII, ep. IV, p. 1 12.
26 The indignation for the lack of responsibility displayed by the cardinals during the long vacancy of
the papal chair, from 1269 to 1272, and for the despicable behavior of the antipope in 1328, is
scarcely reflective of a genuine piety. (Cf. L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit., pp. 60, 135).
27 Cf ibid., p. 2 10. Elsewhere, in relating the events of the year 1351, Bruni simply mentions the fact
that the Pope and his court were in Avignon, when Florentine emissaries were sent to him (cf. ibid.,
p. 186).
28 "Principio insequentis anni [1345], crescente in potentiores odio, leges duae ad populum latae
sunt: una in clericos iniqua, per quam omnibus eorum privilegiis derogabatur; altera in
cives . . . , ibid., p. 171.
29 "... potius illorum conditionem temporum non satis notam reprehensoribus puto," ibid., p.
40.
30 "His de causis factum est, ut longe faciliorem viam ad res componendas Latinus haberet, quam
dudum eadem in causa atque re Gregorius habuisset," ibid., p. 66.
31 Cf. supra n. 24.
32 "Video enim, quantum ipse memoriam teneo, nos semper omnibus in rebus, ob tarditatem et
negligentiam nostram, providendi agendique tempora ignaviter perdidisse," Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi
says in 1399, and then adds: "... nos autem post res perditas remédia cogitamus" (L. Bruni,
Histor., ed. cit., p. 277)— the same sad conclusion already voiced by an old citizen in 1 35 1 , while
addressing the deliberative council during the war with Pistoia: "... vos autem (quod bona venia
dictum est) post rem actam consilium postulatis" (ibid., p. 175). Especially in foreign affairs,
where time factor and secrecy are paramount in any decision, "popular" regimes show their
weakness: "Res enim plerumque celeritatem et silentium poscunt, quibus décréta multitudinis
inimicissima sunt" (ibid., p. 277); "Civitates enim quae populariter reguntur neque celare sciunt
quod factum est neque possunt: quippe multorum deliberatione et conscientia in singulis decretis
opus est" (ibid., p. 236).
33 In 1 439, while working on the last part of his History of Florence, Bruni outlined for a friend the
constitution of the Florentine Republic. In this writing he is quite aware of the fact that in Florence
there had been for a while a mixed form of government, partly democratic and partly aristocratic,
that the process of change from a full democracy to a mixed form of government had gradually
started in 1351, when mercenary soldiers were for the first time hired by the Republic, and that
consequently the city relies now more than ever on the wisdom of the aristocrats and on the
financial resources provided by rich citizens. In this connection see H. Baron, The Crisis of the
Early Italian Renaissance (Italian rev. edition: Firenze: Sansoni, 1 970, pp. 464-465 ), and supra,
n. 24. Once again the analogy between Periclean Athens and Medicean Florence must not have
escaped Bruni: both cities could no longer be considered pure democracies: a first citizen had
emerged, few qualified citizens held the most prestigious offices— or at least it was meant to be so —
while a certain equality among citizens still existed (cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II
37,65).
34 Cf. L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, pp. 276-278 (Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi' s oration), and supra n. 32.
35 Cf B. Reynolds, "Bruni and Perotti present a Greek historian," in "Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et

Renaissance," XVI (1954), p. 112; R. Fubini, "Osservazioni ..." cit, p. 425, n. 69. Cf. also
supra n. 33.
36 In 1 390 the Florentines exhort the Bolognesi to continue to be their allies in the war against the
Milanese tyrant: "Sunt enim pergraves omnibus belli sumptus, sed praesertim populis ac multi-
tudini, quae futurapericula non discemunt. . . Amissa enim libertate, in potestatem victoris omnia
transmigrant et insuper dedecus et infamia servitutis adest quae etiam morte est a generosis
hominibus repellenda . . . Enimvero, non valet bononiensis populus onera belli perferre? at longe
maiora feret, si libertatem amittet quae enim nunc gravia videntur, tunc levia fuisse putabuntur,"
in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p. 252 (cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II 62).
37 Remembering how much money Florence had spent in the period extending from Charles I of
Anjou to Charles II, Bruni comments "... inexhausta quaedam pecuniarum materia Florentia
illis fuit ut si quis a Carolo primo Siciliae rege ad hunc alterum quem modo diximus Carolum
pecunias numeret supra fidem supraque modum videatur populum unum tantis oneribus suf-
fecisse" (in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p. 138). And again, recounting Florence's endurance and the
amount of military forces and financial resources employed in the war against Giangaleazzo
Visconti, he concludes: " . . . ut admirandum sit populum unum ad tantas res gerendas vel magni-
tudine animorum vel opibus sufFecisse" (ibid., p. 246).
38 "Haec et huiusmodi permulta rerumpublicarum a gubematoribus imperitis committuntur . . . ,"

ibid., p. 186.
39 Cf. J. M. Najemi, " ' Arti' and 'Ordini' in Machiavelli's 'Istorie florentine', " in S. Bertelli and G.
YLBûTcvdkxx^tds., Essays presented to Myron P. Gilmore (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978), 1, 164-
168.
40 "Mercaturae quoque, si quis forte earn partem ad incrementum civitatis attinere quidquam
existimet non alibi per id tempus quam Romae commodius exercebatur," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed.
cit, p. 7. See also R Fubini, "Osservazioni ..." cit, pp. 417, 428-429.
41 "Societates Florentinorum permultae et maximae in Roberti Regno et Galliarum partibus . . .

fidem abrumpere coactae sunt cum incredibili damno civitatis, " in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p.
160; "Ea res inopinata et gravis, cum multorum patrimonia afîlixisset, traxit post se ruinam
minorum societatum . . . Decoquentibus itaque permultis, inaestimabilem iacturam civitas subi-
vit, fidesque angusta in foro omnia perturbatur", ibid., p. 1 7 1 (in both instances, in 1 342 and 1 345,
the bankruptcy of medium and small trading companies greatly reduces the influx of money into the
city). See also the oration of the Bolognese envoys, exalting the entrepreneurial talents of Floren-
tine merchants active in France and in England (ibid., p. 251).
42 "... scientia enim rei militaris vix illis qui tota nihil aliud meditati sunt contingit, ne dum homines
plebeii et otio mercaturisque assueti illam possideant," ibid., p. 200.
43 On the other hand, as we will see toward the end of this paper, wealth is deemed indispensable by
Bruni for the success of an individual, in private and public life.
44 Cf. G. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton U.P.,
1 977), pp. 283-302, especially pp. 289-295, 299-302.
45 Cf. supra n. 13.
46 Cf G. Brucker, The Civic World . . . cit., pp. 299-300.
47 "Mitte, quaeso, hanc verborum pompam, ad solidum, ut ita dixerim accede," "Video enim,
quantum ipse memoriam teneo, nos semper omnibus in rebus, ob tarditatem et negligentiam
nostram, providendi agendique tempora ignaviter perdidisse," "Nam ea quae multorum sunt, a
paucis determinari nee honestum est, nee illis ipsis qui determinant tutum" (in L. Bruni, Histor.,
ed. cit., pp. 120,277, 176).
48 "Consilium Pieri de Baroncellis fuerat pulchrum sed parvum substantiae," "Sermones longos
proposita non requirunt sed executionem citam," "Utrecitat Salustius in Catilinario, postomatam
orationem Cesaris, Cato dixit 'Tempus non esse dilationem adhibere, sed cito ad rem, unde salus
procédât venire.' Et propter dilationes Romanorum, Anibal Saguntum vincit," "A consultis tam
unite discedere et pro tot non debemus nee convenit et quamvis ostensum sit quod id sequendum,
ineonveniens sequi posset, tamen peius esse consilium paueorum sequi quam multorum." (In G.
Brucker, The Civic World . . . eit, p. 286 n. 188, p. 293 n. 217, p. 307 n. 274. The original
passages are to be found in Firenze, Archivio di Stato, CP, 39, f. 1 17r, ibid., 43, f. 15r, ibid., 42, f
124r, ibid., 45, f lOlr.)
49 "Quod opinionis est ut omnia dici et exprimi debeant in numéro copioso populi ut ad presens ..."
(in G. Brucker, Tlie Civic World . . . cit., p. 307 n, 277: original passage in Firenze, Archivio di
Stato, CP, 45, f 8v.)
50 Some of these binary orations are: Gregory X addressing the Florentines and the Florentines'
reply (year 1273); the Ghibellines in exile addressing the Florentines at home and a Florentine
adviser's reply (year 1323); altercation between Castruccio Castracani and Guido Tarlati in the
presence of Louis of Bavaria (year 1 327); the Perugini complaining with the Florentines and the
Florentines' reply (year 1336); Alessandro dalla Antella and Donato Barbadori addressing
Gregory XI and Gregory's reply (year 1376); the Bolognesi addressing the Florentines and the
Florentines' reply (year 1 390); the Venetian ambassadors addressing the Florentine ambassadors
and the Florentine ambassadors' reply (year 1401).
51 "Subiciam vero quae tune obiecta ab adversariis et quae responsa sunt, ut iustitiae causa a
legentibus examinari possit" (in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. eit, p. 284).
52 They are the orations of the Florentines addressing Gregory X in 1273 (ibid., pp. 62-63), of a
Florentine citizen in 1 323 (ibid., p. 120), and of Alessandro dalla Antella and Donato Barbadori
addressing Gregory XI in 1376 (ibid., pp. 21 1-214).
53 "Gubemacula rerum publiearum per scientiam haberi non possunt, cum particulariter requirant
determinationes ..." (in G. Brucker, The Civic World . . . eit, p. 290 n. 204: original passage in
Firenze, Archivio di Stato, CP, 42, f. 103r.)
54 For Bruni, see L. Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists. 1390-1460 (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1963), pp. 117-123, 165-176. For Cavalcanti, see my article "A
proposito delle 'Istorie florentine' di Giovanni Cavalcanti," in Quademi d'italianistica, 1 ( 1 980),
171-181.
55 In L. Bruni, EpistoL, ed. eit, part I, p. 1 1 7. At a certain point (year 1 340), in his History, Bruni
makes the remark that the punishment reserved to citizens for their misconduct should never be so
18/ Renaissance and Reformation
severe that one easily forgets that after all they are citizens: "Gives enim sic odendi sunt, ut tamen
cives illos esse meminerimus," in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p. 158.
56 For the family in Italy and in Florence, see R.A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance
Florence, a study of four families (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1968); E. Sestan, "La
famiglia nella société del Quattrocento," in Convegno intemazionale indetto nel V. centenario di
Leon Battista Alberti {Roma: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), pp. 235-258; F.W. Kent,
Household ... cit ; G. Brucker, The Civic World . . . cit, pp. 1 4 and ff., 28, 29; and D. Kent The
Rise ofthe Medici Faction in Florence. 1426-1434 (Oxford: OxfordU.P., 1978), pp. 15, 16-17.
The social and political support that bonds— not only among close relatives but also among
friends— could provide for the individual is a reality quite familiar to Bruni. In his reconstruction of
the past (year 1291), he does not fail to see the negative aspects of such coahtions: "Homines
longis stipati clientelis, et multis, ut par erat propinquitatibus subnixi, imbecillos honesta veluti
servitute premehant; fréquentes ab his pulsatos mediocris fortunae homines, fréquentes bonis
spoliatos, praediis ejectos fuisse constatabaf (one can almost hear G. Cavalcanti's similar
complaints concerning other families' and his own predicament cf. my article "A proposito ..."
cit, pp. 178-179 and notes 16, 17), in L. Bruni, Histor., ed. cit, p. 81.
57 "dove manca la prosperità I'amicizia non si trova," in G. Cavalcanti, I storie florentine XIII 10,
ed. G. Di Pino(Milano: Martello, 1944), p. 380.
58 Bruni's quote is from Juvenal, Satira III, 164. The entire passage is taken from the preface to the
Latin translation ofthe pseudo- Aristotle's £'conom/c5, addressed in 1420 to Cosimo de' Medici:
''Sunt vero utiles divitiae, cum et omamento sint possidentibus et ad virtutem exercendum
suppeditent facultatem. Prosunt etiam natis, qui facilius per illas ad honorem dignitatesque
sublevantur. Nam 'quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi, haud facile emergunt', ut poetae
nostri dictât sententia," in L. Bruni, Humanistisch-Philosophische Schriften, ed. H. Baron
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1 928) pp. 1 20-1 2 1 . Bruni rehearses the same argument concerning the possi-
bility of enhancing one's virtue, and more specifically "magnificentia" by means of wealth in a
letter to Tommaso Cambiatore (from Florence: 1 420/28): "Nam de omamento quidem non bene
accipis. Nam enim de spintere, aut fimbria, neque de histrionis auro, sed de magnificentia diximus.
Haec enim virtus ad omatum pertinet adeoque divitias exigit, ut pauper magnificus esse non
possit. Miror igitur, quid in me reprehendas, cimi et ob id utiles esse scripserim, quia ad virtutem
exercendam facultatem praeberent etprodesse natis eadem ratione, ne illorum virtutibus rei
familiaris obstaret angustia" in L. Bruni, Epistol., ed. cit, part II, p. 14.
Littérature politique et exégèe biblique
(de 1570 à 1625)
PIERRE-LOUIS VAILLANCOURT
Le recours à la Bible
A la fin de la Renaissance, la Bible n'est plus au coeur de la pensée

politique, mais elle reste l'instrument de sa justification. Les traités poli-
tiques se réclament sans cesse de la Bible pour confirmer la valeur de leurs
théories. Même si la Bible est présentée comme la source apparente de
celles-ci, elle sert plutôt à garantir leur validité. Les premiers écrivains de
la Réforme, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin et Melanchthon avaient contribué,
dans la première partie du seizième siècle, à redonner à la Bible une
autorité éminente dans l'élaboration des concepts même sociaux et à
assurer sa prépondérance sur les instances usuelles de la vérité: la tradi-
tion, la papauté, l'Eglise, la scolastique. Parole directe de Dieu, la Bible
redevient la pierre de touche de tout savoir, le lieu de résolution de toutes
les controverses. Si Luther a accordé la priorité au Nouveau Testament,
Calvin et Zwingli mettront sur le même plan Ancien et Nouveau Testa-
ment, comme "règle unique de vraye et parfaite sagesse" {unica perfectae
sapientiae régula)} Très tôt, les dangers de cette orientation apparurent,
et les paysans révoltés, rappelant à Luther qu'ils ne trouvaient pas dans la
Bible la dîme du bétail à payer, obligèrent celui-ci à accorder l'inspiration
divine et le contexte social. L'entreprise de la Réforme détermina cepen-
dant un respect prononcé pour la Bible qui s'étendit aux scolastiques
catholiques, entraînés à répondre à la lettre des arguments de leurs adver-
saires par d'autres puisés au même fonds, et aux penseurs les plus laïcs,
soucieux de réconcilier l'influence antique, les faits contemporains et
l'enseignement biblique. Le rétablissement marqué avec éclat de la Tradi-
tion et de la Vulgate au Concile de Trente, témoigne a contrario de
l'audience acquise par le livre sacré, sous l'impulsion des Réformés habi-
tués à l'utiliser pour la recherche de toute vérité, religieuse ou politique.
Cette primauté reconnue astreint à de subtiles adaptations les auteurs de
toutes tendances, mais en particulier ceux dont les principes temporels
semblent l'emporter sur les spirituels. Il n'est pas aisé, ni possible, déjuger
erroné ou sans fondement une leçon biblique, comme pourrait l'être un
jugement d'Aristote. La Bible impose une direction d'interprétation. Dis-

cutant de la punition des attentats commis contre François I^"" et Henri II,
Bodin termine sa démonstration par ces mots: "Et à fin qu'on ne die point
que les hommes ont faict ces loix, & donné ces arrests, nous lisons en la
saincteEscriture, queNabuchodonosor. . . . "^ Le texte biblique toujours
appelé à corroborer une opinion ne peut jamais être explicitement contre-
dit Aussi Bodin dresse-t-il une liste des tyrans de la Bible envers lesquels
les prophètes ont recommandé la soumission et ajoute: "Il n'ya rien de plus
frequent en toute l'escripture saincte, que la defense, non pas seulement de
tuer y attenter à la vie ou à l'honneur du Prince: ains aussi des Magistrats,
ores (dit l'Escriture) qu'ils soyent meschans."^
Les partisans de la Réforme témoignent évidemment d'un attachement

plus vif encore. Lorsque Bèze s'interroge à son tour sur les devoirs des
sujets envers un roi devenu tyran, il passe en revue les prérogatives des
citoyens de Rome, d'Athènes, du Danemark, d'Ecosse, de Lacédémone,
d'Angleterre, de Pologne, de Venise, d'Espagne, en citant le rôle de
différents corps pour limiter l'arbitraire du pouvoir, mais l'exemple égale-
ment évoqué d'Israël commande un traitement particulier et plus élaboré. "*
Il ne présente pas uniquement des exemples mais discute longuement des
textes de la Bible consacrés aux monarchies divine et temporelle. Tous les
théoriciens réformés partagent cette considération. Ainsi Buchanan mul-
tiplie les nuances sur les concepts de l'autorité séculière dans le Nouveau
Testament.^ Languet, cherchant s'il est légal de résister à un prince qui
viole la loi divine, énonce les principes qui le guident: "si nous nous en
tenons au dire de l'Escriture saincte, elle nous en résoudra."^ Lorsque plus
tard Jacques P"" d'Angleterre désire tout au contraire prôner l'obéissance
inconditionnelle et non pas la résistance conditionnelle, c'est au moyen de
divers extraits de la Bible qu'il défendra le pouvoir des rois.^ Autre écrivain
inspiré par la Réforme, Althusius utilise plus souvent la Bible que toute
autre source parce qu'il croyait en la supériorité de l'organisation étatique
juive.*
Bien que plus liés à l'enseignement de l'Eglise et des Pères, les théori-
ciens scolastiques subissent l'influence de cette vénération. Juan de Mar-
quez, religieux de l'ordre de saint Augustin et prédicateur de Sa Majesté
catholique, donne ce titre éloquent à son tiSLiié: L'Homme d'Estat Chres-
tien, tiré des vies de Moyse et Josué Princes du peuple de Dieu. '
Et Suarez, une des gloires de la Compagnie de Jésus, apologiste des

Pères et de la pédagogie ecclésiastique, apporte volontiers les diverses
interprétations d'un passage biblique, pour les commenter, les réfuter ou
en proposer de nouvelles.'® Absolutistes, monarchomaques huguenots et
scolastiques exigent tous de la Bible une sanction favorable à leur parti
pris.
Il est possible que tous les auteurs de cette époque n'aient pas eu une
conscience vive des rôles multiples et parfois contradictoires que jouaient

les références bibliques mais cette situation n'a pas échappé à la clair-
voyance d'un Du Perron, par exemple, qui souligne, mais sans ironie, la
difficulté d'asseoir une position ferme et nette sur la Bible, car elle est
brandie par tous les partis.
Et donc quel article de foy ne sera point arraché du tribunal de l'Eglise, &
exposé en proye à la présomption des hérétiques, s'il suffit de dire qu'il est si
clair dans l'Escriture qu'il n'y eschet ny dispute ny jugement? A la vérité cela
auroit quelque apparence, si ceux qui tiennent l'une des propositions alle-
guoient l'Escriture pour eux, & que les autres ne l'alléguassent point Mais
tant ceux que tiennent l'affirmative, que ceux qui tiennent la negative, argu-
mentent par l'Escriture, répondent par l'Escriture, & répliquent par l'Escri-
ture.''
Mais du Perron tombe à son tour dans cette habitude lorsque, discutant de
la forme des gouvernements dans les premières cités humaines, il écrit
"Mais vray dire nul auteur gentil en peut avoir parlé avec certitude laquelle
nous tirerons des sainctes escriptures."^^
La Bible devant F état
Nombreux sont les textes qui dans les deux Testaments entretiennent un
rapport plus ou moins étroit avec la constitution des sociétés, mais aucun
n'avance une théorie spécifique sur l'origine des communautés. La Chute
et sa conséquence, la nature déficiente de l'homme, ont servi à justifier la
nécessité d'un ordre politique mais ont aussi alimenté la méfiance augus-
tinienne à l'égard d'un ordre établi par une faute et dans la violence: la cité
d'Enoch ayant été fondée par Caïn, un fratricide. ^^ Cette carence thé-
orique permet à saint Thomas d'intégrer les idées aristotéliciennes d'une
tendance innée au lien social chez les hommes et d'une finalité bénéfique
du pouvoir, supposant, pour sa formation et son maintien, l'intervention de
Dieu comme causa remota}^ La Bible ne présente pas non plus la théorie,
chère à Bodin, d'une croissance naturelle de l'état à partir de la cellule
familiale. Elle ne précise pas si les premiers rois de l'humanité ont été
choisis ou se sont imposés par la violence. La Genèse mentionne brièvement
que le premier potentat a été Nemrod, vaillant chasseur qui fonda im empire
composé des villes de Babel, Ereq et Akkad. ^ ^ Seul est décrit en détail dans le
Livre de Samuel l'établissement de la monarchie en Israël.
S'ils ne 'elles ont varié selon les impéra-

tifs stratégiques du moment. Par sa théorie des deux glaives, Luther se
désintéresse en principe de l'autorité séculière, car le royaume d'ici-bas est
disqualifié par rapport à l'au-delà, et il se contente de prôner une obéis-
sance qui n'engage pas l'âme. Les révoltes des paysans, les débordements
radicaux de ses disciples, en particulier des anabaptistes, le besoin de la
protection des princes l'amènent à préciser sa doctrine, en cinq textes
principaux. Intéressé surtout au Nouveau Testament, Luther maintient au
coeur des principes régissant les rapports du chrétien à l'Etat l'enseigne-
ment de l'épître de saint Paul aux Romains dont il a fait un commentaire.
Toutes les admonestations et tous les appels de saint Paul et de saint Pierre
à l'obéissance sont confirmée et renforcés, notamment dans son com-
mentaire de l'épître de saint Paul."*^ Luther néglige le texte de Samuel alors
que Calvin, qui traite longuement des gouvernements civils dans le ving-
tième chapitre de son Institution le cite au moment où il s'interroge sur le
meilleur régime."*^ Il observe qu'il est "bien vray qu'un Roy, ou autre, à qui
appartient la domination aisément décline à estre tyran,'"*^ ce qui lui fait
favoriser une direction multiple. Comme ses prédécesseurs, il estime
qu'un "mauvais Roy est une ire de Dieu sur la terre (lob, 34, 30; Isa, 3, 4;
Osée, 3, 1 1; Deut. 28, 29.)'"*^ Les exhortations de Jérémie de prier pour
Nabuchodonosor et pour la prospérité de Babylone servent à faire valoir
l'honneur dû à un roi même "pervers et cruel.'"** Abordant les méfaits
prévus par Samuel, Calvin les explique ainsi:
Certes les Rois ne pouvoyent faire cela justement, lesquels par la Loy estoyent
instruits à garder toute tempérance et sobriété (Deut. 17,16 ss.). Mais Samuel
appelloit Puissance sur le peuple, pourtant qu'il luy estoit nécessaire d'y obéir,
et n'estoit licite d'y résister. Comme s'il eust dit: La cupidité des Rois
s'estendra à faire tous ces outrages, lesquels ce ne sera pas à vous de réprimer,
mais seulement vous restera d'entendre à leurs commandemens, et d'y
obéir. '•'
Le respect gardé par David envers Saûl témoigne du caractère inviolable

de la majesté. "Nous devons tous à noz supérieurs, tant qu'ils dominent sur
nous, une telle affection de révérence que celle que nous voyons en David,
mesme quelsqui'ils soyent"*^ Calvin maintient en somme les mêmes exi-
gences de loyauté que Luther, mais à l'aide de références à l'Ancien
Testament. Ces longues exhortations à la patience s'achèvent cependant
sur un ton ambigu et menaçant, par l'évocation des cas où le meurtrier du
roi est l'instrument du châtiment divin et par l'approbation des résistances
organisées par les magistrats inférieurs.
L'exégèse du texte de Samuel entre 1570 et 1625
Afin de conserver le fil dans le labyrinthe des variations exégétiques autour

du texte de Samuel, il conviendrait d'en présenter les données les plus
significatives, en tenant compte des intérêts et des factions de l'époque. La
première démarche consistera à reconnaître les positions extrêmes (et non
pas extrémistes), c'est-à-dire celles qui s'opposent point par point les unes
aux autres et, à partir de ces données, dresser une Ugne médiane. Glo-
balement considéré, le texte de Samuel apparaît comme un désaveu par
Dieu de la monarchie. Cette position de contestation aurait pu être adoptée
par les monarchomaques; elle ne le fut pas. Mais leurs écrits nous per-
mettent de retrouver le camp qui l'adopta. Dans \qs Mémoires de VEstat de
France, un auteur anonyme tente de définir une position raisonnable en
s' attaquant à deux abus présumés: celui des anabaptistes, s' autorisant de
ce texte pour rejeter la monarchie, et celui des absolutistes, liant les droits
des rois aux conséquences prévues par Samuel."*^ Ce renseignement pré-
cieux compense faiblement la perte des nombreux écrits des anabaptistes
mais il confirme l'existence, autrement hypothétique ou à inférer logique-
ment, d'une opposition radicale aux énoncés des absolutistes. Mais l'op-
position entre les deux interprétations se situe à des niveaux différents.
Dans un cas, la désapprobation est déduite de la considération de tout le
texte de Samuel, dans l'autre, de la partie intitulée Inconvénients de la
monarchie, où Samuel présente comme des droits les malversations ex-
ercées par le roi et termine sur l'impossibilité dans laquelle seront les
Israélites de se plaindre ou de revenir en arrière. Dans cette perspective, il
appert qu'un roi même tyrannique mérite une obéissance sans conditions.
Selon l'argumentation anabaptiste, la plus contestatrice, un roi, de l'avis
de Dieu, sera toujours un tyran (roi= tyran; toujours et partout). Bodin
attribue à Melanchthon un énoncé de ce principe et lui reproche d' avoir tiré
cette conclusion du texte de Samuel: "En quoy Melanchthon s'est mes-
pris, qui a pensé que les droits de la majesté soyent les abus & tyrannies que
Samuel dit au peuple en sa harangue.'"**
Bodin semble avoir tiré cette réflexion des commentaires de Melanch-

thon sur les Politiques d'Aristote. Dans ce passage, il est écrit:
Dans les Histoires des Rois, où le droit des rois est décrit par Samuel, les
formes les plus acerbes de commandement sont approuvées, ornées de ce titre:
que cela soit le droit des rois. L'esprit saint signifie ainsi que le pouvoir
légitime, même s'il est dur, est approuvé de Dieu/'
Melanchthon se contente donc d'affirmer que Dieu a approuvé les formes

les plus pénibles du pouvoir légitime. Son ouvrage contient d'ailleurs des
incitations analogues à celles de Luther et de Calvin pour le respect des
pouvoir établis. Il y soutient les distinctions habituelles du tyrannicide
commis par des magistrats en fonction, ou par des particuliers. L'opinion

des anabaptistes ne trouve certes pas sa source chez ce théologien, auteur
précisément d'un traité Contra Anabaptistas. ^° Mais les accusations de
Bodin s'imposeront plus que les nuances de Melanchthon et Marquez les
reprendra sans vérification: "Cete interpretation, comme dit Bodin, est de
Melanchthon, & partant suspecte. "^^
Selon les argumentations de caractère absolutiste. Dieu recommande

plutôt, dans ce texte comme dans d'autres, d'obéir même à un tyran. Donc
à plus forte raison faut-il se soumettre à un bon roi (roi et/ou tyran). Les
conséquences de ces interprétations sont aux antipodes. La désapproba-
tion de Dieu d'une forme toujours tyrannique commande son rejet, selon
les anabaptistes. La description des droits des rois implique au contraire
une obéissance inconditionnelle, selon la thèse opposée. Cette dernière
position pourrait être imputée à des absolutistes comme Bodin. Mais dans
sa forme extrême, elle est surtout défendue par Jacques P»", par W. Barclay
et par Adam Blackwood, défenseur de Marie Stuart contre Buchanan.
Bodin, tout comme vraisemblablement le parti des Politiques qu'il repré-
sente, apporte deux réserves. S'il admet qu'on doive respect même à un
tyran, il refuse de considérer la liste de Samuel comme celle des droits et
encore moins des habitudes d'un roi et il estime qu'il s'agit d'une liste
d'abus d'un tyran. Cette position rejoint celle de la plupart des auteurs
catholiques.
Comment se définit la place intermédiaire? Elle est d'abord adoptée par

les monarchomaques réformés, conformément à leur situation ambiguë
entre le respect et la contestation du pouvoir temporel, selon les circon-
stances. Confiants en la dignité et en la valeur de l'autorité séculière mais
parfois forcés de s'y opposer, les monarchomaques jouent sur les deux
tableaux et n'excluent aucune partie du texte. Les anabaptistes les obligent
à expliquer la colère de Dieu. Et les inconvénients annoncés ne leur
paraissent pas des droits reconnus, mais de simples menaces faites par
Samuel pour dissuader les Hébreux. Le texte révèle à la fois la facilité avec
laquelle un roi devient un tyran (roi -^ tyran) et l'habitude des rois de cette
époque et de cette région, l'Asie, de se comporter en tyran (Roi -^ tyran,
alors-là). Les monarchomaques en déduisent la nécessité d'un contrôle,
d'une Loi ou d'un système capable de brider les rois, comme les Etats. Les
monarchomaques catholiques reprennent, quand ils s'intéressent à ce
texte, ce qui est rare, cette ligne médiane d'une opposition à certains
monarques plutôt qu'à la monarchie." Ils défendent, à l'instar des scolas-
tiques, les avantages d'une monarchie tempérée, non par les lois fonda-
mentales, comme le souhaitent les Réformés, mais par celles de Dieu et de
l'Eglise. Guillaume Rose, dès son premier chapitre, insiste sur la supério-
rité de la monarchie et renoue ensuite avec la version de saint Cyprien, à
l'effet que le passage de Samuel contient des prédictions de ce que Saùl
allait faire, non des prescriptions de ce que les rois peuvent faire.
Le schéma suivant illustre l'éventail des points de vue:
ANABAPTISTES
TEXTE
UTILISE:
INTERPRE-
TATION:
(espace)
(temps)
CONSE-
QUENCES:
MONARCHOMAQUES
protestante (et
catholiques)
ABSOLUTISTES
intransigeants
SCOLASTIQUES
Melanchthon
Institution
delà
royauté
Désapprobation
delà
monarchie
par Dieu
I
(roi= tyran)
(partout)
(toujours)
Rejet de
l'autorité
papale.
Résistance.
Beliarmin Suarez
Mariana
Lois de
Dieu et
de l'Eglise
pour contrôle.
Languet
Bèze
Hotman
Buchanan
Institution
et inconvénients
Tenutive
de dissuasion
des
Israélites.
(roi— tvran)
là
(aïoii)
Lois ou
Etats pour
contrôle.
Obéissance
conditionnelle.
Résistance.
Descrip-
tion des
abus des
tyrans
Jacques I"
Blackwood
Barclay
Les inconvéniens
delà
royauté
Description
des droits
des rois.
(roi et/ou tyran)
Obéissance
inconditionnelle.
Bien qu'en général fidèles à ces grandes lignes, les interprétations de détail
peuvent varier et les catégories sont moins étanches que ne le suggère le
schéma." Rien n'empêcherait par exemple les anabaptistes de relever la
propension des rois à devenir tyrans. Les absolutistes de leur côté ont
intérêt à reprendre à leur compte l'explication historique souvent pré-
sentée chez les monarchomaques et à attribuer la colère de Dieu à des
facteurs circonstanciels, ce qui atténue la portée du désaveu. Telle est bien
l'argumentation développée par Belloy:
Dont toutefois Dieu ne se courrouça pas contre son peuple; par ce qu'il ne
ratiffîast & n'approuvast l'Estat Royal, mais pour le peu d'asseurance &
deffîance des Israelites, comme si sa Majesté divine n'eust peu bien disposer
de leur Estât, soubs autre police que souz la Royauté: ainsi qu'ils se mescon-
tentoient de Samuel qui s'estoit monstre fidelle serviteur de Dieu & du public.*"
L'explication est reprise par Jacquer pr.
La place des scolastiques catholiques reste à déterminer. D'une façon

générale, ils pouvaient sans difficultés reprendre l'enseignement des Pères
et prendre leurs distances à l'égard de la monarchie. Or la plupart étaient
plus favorables à la monarchie, système bien établi, qu'à tout autre régime.
A la suite des changements d'allégeance religieuse des souverains, ils
durent passer bien contre leur gré dans le camp des ennemis de la royauté,
devant la menace d'un roi huguenot en France et sous le règne d'Elisabeth
en Angleterre. Leur opinion rejoint alors, même s'ils n'en ont pas toujours
conscience, celle des monarchomaques, c'est-à-dire une opposition diri-
gée bien plus contre la personne du roi que contre la monarchie. Marquez
soutient par exemple que les calvinistes utilisent le texte de Samuel pour
attaquer la monarchie, ce qui n'est le cas, on l'a vu, que des anabaptistes.
La position des scolastiques varie aussi selon la situation géographique des
auteurs. L'italien Bellarmin relève simplement qu'il n'a pas plu à Dieu
d'accorder un roi à son peuple. Les espagnols Marquez et Ribadeneyra,
ardents partisans de la monarchie, adoptent à peu près la solution de Bodin
et des monarchomaques, et considèrent le texte comme une série de
menaces, non de droits, s' appuyant pour cela sur les arguments de saint
Grégoire le Grand. S' opposant à des monarques mais non à la monarchie,
ils font valoir les avantages d'un système régi par les lois de Dieu et de
l'Eglise. Le jésuite Nicholas Sanders en Angleterre et l'évêque Guillaume
Rose en France abondent dans le même sens.
Le livre de Samuel suscite enfin quelques commentaires marginaux.

Lipse et Parsons se contentent de relever que la monarchie y est décrite
comme la forme de gouvernement la plus répandue, "la plus ordinaire."^^
Surtout les modalités décrites d'accession au pouvoir par Saûl servent
certaines causes. Enfin, le rôle de Samuel envers le peuple et envers Dieu
n'est pas négligé.
Examen détaillé des diverses thèses
L'argumentation anabaptiste représentée dans le Politique comporte trois

motifs pour l'exclusion de la royauté: le refus de Jésus de devenir roi,
l'origine violente de la monarchie avec Nemrod,^^ la colère de Dieu dans
Samuel et Osée. Un passage de VEpître aux Corinthiens incitant les
chrétiens à régler entre eux leurs différends sans d'adresser à des juges
couronne cet exposé.
La conviction monarchiste atténuée des monarchomaques est égale-

ment illustrée dans Le Politique. A l'appui de la thèse reconnaissant la
monarchie comme le meilleur des régimes sont citées les opinions des
philosophes anciens, les discussions des sages de Perse et de Venise, un
extrait de la Genèse sur la domination d'Adam comme modèle d'économie
domestique. Les excès sont cependant blâmés, et à propos du droit des
rois, il est dit que Samuel a été mal interprété "car ce n'est pas une
ordonnance, mais une menace, que le peuple aurait au lieu de Roys des
superbes tyrans."" Cela s'est vérifié par les règnes d' Achab et de Jézabel.
S' intéressant à l'interdiction faite par Jésus à Pierre de tirer son glaive,
l'auteur du Politique expose la thèse courante qu'un simple particulier,
comme l'était alors l'apôtre Pierre, n'a pas la "vocation légitime"^^ de
résister et de prendre les armes.
Bodin s'intéresse peu au texte de Samuel. L'essentiel se trouve déjà

exprimé dans saMéthode.^^ A son avis, dans les paroles de Samuel "ce
n'est pas la royauté, mais bien la tyrannie qui est visée, n'en déplaise à
Melanchthon."^® Bodin a tout intérêt à se démarquer d'un texte si négatif à
l'égard des monarques. Dans saRépublique, il le mentionne surtout pour
des problèmes fortuits, comme l'élection ou la succession, les devoirs des
rois pour la justice et la guerre; il souligne la popularité du régime attestée
par ce passage.^^ Pour Bodin, Dieu se sent rejeté lorsque ses lieutenants sur
terre, rois ou princes, comme l'était Samuel, sont repoussés. ^^ Ses objurga-
tions à l'obéissance enchâssent plutôt des extraits de Jérémie sur Nabuch-
odonosor.^^ Il cite le respect de David pour Saiil et ajoute:
Il n'y a rien plus frequent en toute l'escripture saincte, que la defense, non pas
seulement de tuer, ny attenter à la vie ou à l'honneur du Prince: ains aussi des
Magistrats, ores (dit l'Escriture) qu'ils soyent meschans.*'*
La prudence compréhensible de Bodin lui est dictée par son désir de

légitimer une monarchie puissante sans en évoquer les risques.
Blackwood, polémisant contre Buchanan, illustre mieux la position des

absolutistes. Il s'élève contre la "maligne interprétation" de l'Ecossais et
ironisant sur les détours de l'exégèse de cet érudit pourtant grave et
expérimenté, il rappelle que les Israélites ont bien demandé un roi, non un
tyran, et qu'on ne saurait donc considérer le texte comme une liste d'abus
tyranniques mais bien comme des droits royaux légitimes, accordés par
Dieu.^^ Bien sûr, selon Blackwood, cela ne veut pas dire que les rois
doivent faire tout cela, mais qu'ils peuvent le faire, quand les temps et les
circonstances difficiles le commandent, et il n'y a rien dans cette formulation
qui s'oppose aux prescriptions du Deutéronome. Pour Blackwood, le peuple
a demandé un roi. Dieu a agréé cette demande et ceux qui régnèrent sur
Israël furent des rois, non des tyrans. Ce qui veut dire qu'il faut également
supporter des pouvoirs qui ont dégénéré car ils ont reçu l'aval de Dieu.^*^
Blackwood pousse l'interprétation dans un sens si favorable à la monar-
chie qu'il utilise ce texte pour attribuer au roi la propriété des choses; leur
usage et leur possession seuls revenant aux particuliers.^^ Une telle pré-
tention fait contre elle l'unanimité à cette époque, aussi bien des Politiques
que des scolastiques et des monarchomaques, réformés et catholiques.
Languet, Marquez, Du Perron, l'auteur du "Politique" dans \es Mémoires

de VEstat de France et Guillaume Rose sont fort explicites la-dessus.^* Ce
dernier par exemple s'indigne qu'une seule phrase de Samuel ait pu laisser
croire que les rois pouvaient disposer des biens de leurs sujets, alors que
l'indignation du Prophète lorsqu'Achab et Jézabel s'emparent de la vigne
de Naboth illustre une situation toute opposée.
P. de Belloy, dans son plaidoyer en faveur d'Henri IV, tombe dans

l'ornière absolutiste. L'institution de la royauté chez les Juifs signifie à son
avis l'approbation divine de ce régime. Cette institution avait d'ailleurs été
annoncée bien avant, lorsque Dieu avait promis à Abraham et à Sara que
leurs descendants porteraient le sceptre. William Barclay, autre adver-
saire déclaré des thèses de Buchanan, suit de très près les énoncés de
Blackwood. Il ne voit pas de contradictions dans la Bible, mais une
différence de niveau: Samuel montre ce qu'un roi peut faire, le Deutéro-
nome ce qu'un roi doit faire. ^^ Surtout, la réponse du peuple et l'acceptation
de Dieu indiquent bien le caractère irréversible de l'institution et l'im-
possibilité d'échapper aux contraintes parfois dures de la royauté. Barclay
consacre plusieurs pages au passage de Samuel, s'élevant notamment
contre l'intention de Buchanan de voir dans cette description uniquement
des abus, à cette époque de rois généralement bien plus mauvais. Pour
Barclay, les rois de ce temps étaient pourtant légitimes et le texte contient
le droit royal tel que prescrit au peuple. ^^ Jacques P"" partage évidemment
sans scrupules, en raison de ses fonctions, cet avis et il présente dans le
Basilikon Doron une perspective carrément absolutiste.^^ Ecrivant en
1599, il a pu connaître les opinions des monarchomaques et il aborde
l'argumentation historique. Comme toute l'Ecriture est inspirée, cela
signifie que les paroles de Samuel ne lui sont pas dictées par l'ambition de
se maintenir au pouvoir en noircissant les rois, Samuel ne fait pas non plus
une prédiction de ce que sera le règne de Saiil, puisque ce dernier a été
désigné par Dieu pour ses vertus et qu'il n'a commis ensuite aucune action
vraiment reprehensible. Il s'agit donc, dit- il, d'un discours pour préparer
les peuples à obéir et à ne pas résister même aux tyrans intolérables, car
Dieu seul a le pouvoir de faire et défaire les rois. Dieu prévient en effet le
peuple qu'il ne servira à rien de murmurer, de rechigner car le renoncement
est irréversible. Après ces énoncés généraux, Jacque P"" s'attache au détail
des points de justice et d'équité qu'un roi peut transgresser impunément Si
le peuple, après ces avertissements a continué à réclamer un roi, c'est qu'il
acceptait ces divers inconvénients pour les avantages retirés au chapitre de
la justice et de la guerre. Le texte présente donc l'étendue des pouvoirs
possibles du roi, en comparaison desquels ceux des rois chrétiens s'avèrent
fort modérés. Donc leur sujets ont encore moins de motifs légitimes pour se
rebeller. Jacques P"" complète sa démonstration par les témoignages de
respect affichés par David, par les appels de Jérémie, et par une longue

exposition de VEpître aux Romains.
Le Politique résume assez bien les différentes thèses en présence et

propose la version soutenue habituellement par les monarchomaques .
Ceux-ci, tels Goodman, Buchanan, Bèze et Languet, accordent pour la
plupart une attention aussi grande que Jacques P"" au passage de Samuel.
Goodman, compagnon d'exil de John Knox à Genève, le cite au complet
Il estime qu'il présente des menaces de punition pour avoir rejeté le règne
direct de Dieu:
Wherfore to avoyde the daungers upon both partes, it is more than necessarie
that bothe be subjecte to that Rule, and with all diligent care, labour to reteyne
it, wherby both maye leame their duetie, and be constrayned justly to execute
the same.^^
Bèze développe la thèse historique à peine esquissée chez Goodman. Au

commencement, 'i'Etemel seul lui-mesme ... a esté le Monarque.''^
Malgré leur chance d'avoir un roi "qui ne pouvoit jamais devenir Tyran,"''*
les Israélites demandent un roi, alors que l'histoire enseigne qu'il n'y a
point de roi qui n'ait abusé de son état
Le Seigneur, justement irrité contre son Peuple et lui voulant enseigner ce qui
lui devoit advenir de ce fol appétit qui les menoit, leur prédit par Samuel ce qui
est nommé en ceste histoire là, le droit du Roi couché en termes merveilleuse-
ment estranges, et portans en somme, que le Roi feroit tout ce qui lui plairoit
tant des personnes que des biens de ses subjets: chose vraiment tyrannique et
non point Roialle."
Or, selon Bèze, Dieu seul peut exiger quelque chose de sa volonté sans
avoir à se justifier, mais la volonté des hommes et des rois doit plier à la
raison et être guidée par de bonnes et saintes histoires.
Ceux-là donc se trompent grandement, qui prennent ces paroUes de Samuel

comme si elles authorisoient les Rois en tout ce que bon leur semble, suivant
l'exécrable parolle de ceste villaine incestueuse. Si libet, licet, qui n'a esté que
trop souvent prattiquee de nostre temps. Ains il faut entendre les parolles de
Samuel, comme s'il disoit à Israël, "Vous ne vous contentés point que Dieu
soit vostre Monarque, comme il a esté jusques à present d'une façon spéciale et
particulière, et voulez en avoir un à la façon des autres peuples. Vous en aurez
un donc, mais voici la belle justice qu' il vous fera, et tout le droit duquel il usera
envers vous."''
Bèze y voit enfin la preuve que les magistrats sont issus du peuple et choisis
par lui. Quant aux relations entre Saiil et David, il reconnaît le déférence
de ce dernier mais rappelle qu'il s'était armé légitimement, l'onction du
Seigneur l'établissant comme "Officier du Roiaume":
Ce néant moins il appert que son intention a esté de se garantir, voire mesmes
par les armes, à l'occasion que dessus. Car autrement, pourquoi se feust-il
accompagné de gents de guerre?"
Buchanan mène conjointement l'analyse des textes de Paul and de

Samuel. Amateur de distinguos, il pose ainsi les cadres de son analyse:
I desire you to consider first, what the people requested of God; next, what
their reasons were for a new request; and lastly, what was God's answer?^*
Leur requête, celle d'avoir un roi, était fondée sur la corruptions des fils
de Samuel et sur leur désir d'avoir un juge et un chef de guerre. A cette
époque régnaient en Asie, sur des peuple à l'esprit plus soumis, des tyrans
non limités par les lois. Une telle situation augmenta la colère de Dieu. Le
texte décrit les pratiques tyranniques en usage alors, et non les droits des
rois, lesquels sont présentés dans le Deutéronome. Et cette dernière liste
contredit 1' enumeration de Samuel. Buchanan balise de la même façon le
texte de Jérémie, où "the prophet does not command the Jews to obey all
tyrants, but only the king of the Assyrians. Therefore if, from a single and
particular command, you should be inclined to collect the form of a general
law, you cannot be ignorant . . . of what an absurdity you will be guilty."'^
Car un conseil spécifique ne saurait fonder une loi générale. Enfin, si les
Israélites n'ont jamais renversé leurs rois, c'est que Dieu, les établissant,
conservait le privilège de les destituer. En d'autres circonstances, les lois et
les coutumes des royaumes doivent être respectées. Cela permet à
Buchanan de motiver la déposition de Marie Stuart par la noblesse
écossaise.
Languet s'arrête avec encore plus de minutie aux éléments du texte et sa

synthèse est la plus achevée. Tous les voies ouvertes par les monarcho-
maques se retrouvent:
— la propriété des biens: non autorisée par le texte.
— le motif de la requête: corruption des fils et exemple des nations

voisines.
— l'argument historique: le gouvernement direct de Dieu, indirect par

Samuel. Le rejet de Samuel comme rejet de Dieu et sa colère.
— les rôles respectifs du peuple et de Dieu dans le choix du roi: à Dieu

l'élection, au peuple l'étabUssement Le scénario se répète pour le
choix de David, désigné puis confirmé. Cet aspect longuement déve-
loppé permet l'amalgame des deux sources bibliques contradictoires.
— les buts poursuivis dans l'institution de la royauté: justice et guerre.
— le recours au texte du Deutéronome pour distinguer droits et abus;
— r affirmation d'une propension naturelle à la tyrannie.*^
Languet reconnaît franchement les difficultés posées par cette description

d'un roi tyrannique. Déplorant à son tour les interprétations qui légitiment
les injustices, il propose la solution habituelle: le peuple ingrat s'est mérité
un avertissement.
En somme c'est comme si Samuel eust dit, vous avez demandé un Roy à
l'exemple des autres nations, lesquelles pour la pluspart sont mastinees par
des tyrans. Vous desirez un Roy qui vous administre justice: mais plusieurs
d'entre eux estiment tout ce qu'ils veulent leur estre loisible. Cependant vous
délaissez de gay été de coeur le Seigneur Dieu, la volonté duquel est l'infaillible
reigle de justice."'
Les scolastiques
Quant aux interprètes fidèles de la tradition scolastique, ils auront plutôt

tendance, comme le rapporte J.A. Maravall pour la période contem-
poraine à notre étude, à esquiver le texte de Samuel, en raison de leur
attachement à la monarchie.*^ En Espagne, l'un des plus illustres d'entre
eux, Suarez, ne s'y intéresse pas. Quant à Mariana, il ne s'y attarde guère,
et se contente de dire qu'on aurait tort de s'appuyer sur ce texte pour
préférer le régime démocratique au monarchique. Mariana pousse l'es-
quive à un point rarement atteint, soutenant qu'il en est des formes de
gouvernements comme des goûts en matière de vêtements, de chaussures
et d'habitation: les meilleures choses plaisent aux uns et déplaisent aux
autres. Il conclut que les meilleurs raisons l'inclinent à favoriser le
gouvernement d'un seul.*^ Quelques années auparavant, Ribadeneyra
avait été plus sensible aux difficultés inhérentes du texte, en particuHer sur
le droit de propriété. En s' appuyant largement sur les commentaires de
saint Grégoire et de saint Jean Chrysostome, il conteste vigoureusement
cette prétention, notamment, comme il est d'usage, par l'exemple de la
vigne de Naboth. Il reprend aussi l'argument que certains rois, ainsi que le
furent Sennacherib, Nabuchodonosor, Attila et Tamerlan, sont des fléaux
de Dieu et les instruments de sa colère, comme le dit le prophète Osée,
contre les péchés du peuple.*'' De tous. Marquez sera le plus prolixe, sans
cependant innover beaucoup. Comme Ribadeneyra, il rejette la théorie du
droit de propriété des rois sur les biens de leurs sujets en s' appuyant encore
sur saint Grégoire mais également sur Bodin, pour lequel le texte relève les
abus et non les droits des rois. Plus loin, il justifie la colère de Dieu selon
l'argument habituel d'un gouvernement direct de Dieu. Marquez attribue
les interprétations abusives d'abord aux courtisans flatteurs, puis dans son
second livre, aux calvinistes comme Melanchthon, les premiers se
servant de Samuel pour renforcer les pouvoirs du roi, le second pour
attaquer la "monarchie ecclésiastique," c'est-à-dire de "calomnier la

souveraine puissance du vicaire de Jésus Christ."*^ Marquez représente
ainsi le double tranchant du texte, à la fois utile et néfaste à la monarchie. Il
fait enfin une recension erudite de tous les penseurs favorables à la
monarchie.*^
En France, le cardinal Du Perron renoue avec une perspective de

l'interprétation grégorienne, celle qui consiste à assimiler Samuel à un
prélat, ce qui lui permet d'affirmer les droits du pape à déposer les rois.*^
Mais le détail du texte retient moins l'attention de Du Perron que la
généralité des événements et leur similitude avec d'autres dépositions,
faites par les prophètes, de Roboam et d' Achab. Cette question du statut
"ecclésiastique" de Samuel sépare les absolutistes des scolastiques.
Bodin présente toujours Samuel et les Juges comme des magistrats tem-
porels, rempUssant des fonctions qui passeront ensuite aux rois. Barclay
parlera du mandat extraordinaire de Samuel, qui n'était pas prêtre,
argument que Du Perron se sentira obligé d'examiner.**
Enfin d'Italie parvient une troisième voix officielle de l'Eglise, celle du

cardinal Bellarmin, la plus détachée des controverses et des querelles qui
agitent la période étudiée. Bellarmin lit dans toute la Bible une réserve
générale de Dieu à l'égard du pouvoir temporel. "Nous devons première-
ment remarquer, que dès le commencement, il ne luy plût pas que ses
fidelles eussent charge des hommes hors de leurs familles, mais seulement
du bestail, à cause peut estre du danger qu'il y a de gouverne les
peuples."*^
L'attribution du pouvoir à des Juges, et non à des rois, confirme cette

méfiance. Aussi lorsque les Israélites demandèrent un roi. Dieu "leur fit
parestre en plusieurs façons, qu'il n'avoit pas agréable la resolution qu'ils
avoient prize de se soumettre tous à la volonté d'un seul, ainsi que les
autres nations avoient fait."^° Dieu leur fit aussi connaître "combien étoit
difficile à supporter le joug que les Roys avoient accoutumé d'imposer à
leurs sujets."'^ Et Bellarmin de conclure: "Tout cecy montre évidemment
que Dieu n'eust pas agréable que son peuple eust des Roys absolus, ainsi
que les infidelles en avoient," car "Il prévoyait qu'ils abuseroient de leur
puissance."^^ Bellarmin estime que les avertissements de Dieu n'étaient
pas vains, comme le prouve le petit nombre de rois élevés à la sainteté
(environ 20) depuis l'établissement de l'Eglise, en proportion de celui des
évêques (environ 900). Bellarmin, proche des anabaptistes sur l'inter-
prétation générale, ne tire cependant aucune conclusion et n'invite pas au
rejet des régimes en place. Par sa simplicité et sa proximité de la Bible, son
témoignage apparaît paradoxalement comme le plus radical, si bien qu'il
aurait été quaJiifîé d'hérétique s'il avait été rendu par une autre personne.
La fortune du texte
Bien que courte, l'interprétation de Grotius marque un tournant qui

achève le cycle des transformations subies par le texte de Samuel.
Maravall signale pour la période postérieure à notre étude que les penseurs
espagnols du 17« siècle ont prolongé l'interprétation réservée et plutôt
défensive des scolastiques, afin de sauvegarder leur adhésion au régime
monarchique. Grotius, quant à lui, inaugure une présentation davantage
légaliste:
A l'égard des paroles de Samuel, touchant le droit du Roi, si l'on examine

bient le passage, on trouvera, qu'il ne faut l'entendre ni d'un véritable droit,
c'est-à-dire, du pouvoir de faire quelque chose honnêtement & légitimement
(car dans l'endroit de la Loi, qui traite des Devoirs du Roi, on lui prescrit une
toute autre manière de vivre); ni d'un simple pouvoir de fait (car il n'y auroit-là
rien de singulier, puisque les Particuliers se font aussi très-souvent du tort les
uns aux autres): mais qu'il s'agit d'un acte, qui, quoi qu'injuste, a quelque effet
de droit, je veux dire, qui emporte l'obligation de ne pas résister. C'est pour
cela que le Prophète ajoute, que, quand le Peuple feroit opprimé par les
mauvais traitemens du Roi, il imploreroit le secours de Dieu; comme n'ayant
alors aucune ressource humaine. C'est donc xmdroit, dans le même sens qu'il
est dit que le Préteur rend justice, lors même qu'il prononce un Arrêt
Il se situe entre ceux qui ne voient dans ce texte qu'une annonce de

malheurs et ceux qui prétendent qu'il s'agit d'une liste des droits. Cette
voie moyenne est nouvelle, car si elle atténue ou rejette les prétentions
juridiques à une puissance illimitée, elle n'en couvre pas moins ses effets et
élimine les velléités de résistance à des contraintes fondées sur une légiti-
mité précaire. L'euphémisme "effet de droit" n'empêche donc pas le
retour à la vision de Jacques I«^ . Au siècle suivant, Pufendorf situera sa
position dans la foulée de Grotius et en accentura les conséquences.
Samuel avait eu raison, dit-il, de prévenir les Hébreux car un roi, pour son
train royal, peut et doit prendre les garçons pour en faire des soldats, les
filles pour en faire des cuisinières, parfumeuses, boulangères; il peut aussi
s'emparer des champs, des vignes, et des oliviers s'il est pressé par des
besoins d'argent Le discours de Samuel est encore une fois réduit à une
paraphrase:
En un mot, si vous voulez avoir un Roi, il faudra que vous l'entreteniez d'une
manière convenable à sa dignité & que vois lui assigniez pour cela certains
revenus. Mais, si dans la suite vous venez à trouver ces charges trop pesantes,
vous aurez beau souhaitter d'en être délivrez, vous ne pourrez point le
détrôner, parce qu'en le choisissant pour vôtre Souverain, vous lui aurez
donné un droit, dont il ne vous sera plus permis de le dépouiller sans son
consentement'*
Les seules bornes de ces droits sont la loi ou le droit naturel, ou les
conventions établies par les sociétés.
La distribution des résultats de l'interprétation selon un axe délimitant
des extrêmes et un centre, illustre l'éventail des exégèses possible entre
1570 et 1625, et des médiations opérées. Mais les versions moyennes,
selon le tableau, n'offrent pas de garanties plus sûres de vérité et cette
questions de pertinence ou de justesse ne mérite pas d'être posée. Seule
compte la présence des variantes et des invariants d'interprétation. L'écart
obtenu et les compromis effectués nous dévoilent la dépendance de
l'exégèse des conditions idéologiques globales et historiques particulières.
La véritable dichotomie ne se situe pas dans les oppositions de thèses mais
entre la volonté invariablement proclamée partout de respecter l'enseigne-
ment biblique et cette autre volonté, moins prononcée, parfois occultée,
d'accorder le sens de la Bible à des intérêts politiques précis. Révélatrice
d'une mauvaise foi inconsciente, cette dichotomie illustre bien la difficulté
qu'il y a à accorder un crédit illimité à un texte dont on néglige souvent le
propre contexte historique et social. Elle manifeste aussi les obligations
faites aux auteurs d'ajuster leurs perspectives ou de défendre leurs intérêts
en fonction des contraintes du milieu et de l'évolution, alors accélérée, des
conditions politiques. Cet écartement porte les germes d'un progrès car il
oblige le lecteur étonné de toute ces divergences à s'interroger sur la
capacité d'un livre, dont on prône unanimement le respect le plus total, à
régir en détail l'activité humaine. L'influence directe et immédiate de la
Bible, comme arbre de vérité, peut se trouver en apparence affaiblie par
tous ces courants interprétatifs, mais cet affaiblissement peut renforcer la
position de ceux qui sont plus attentifs à l'esprit qu'à la lettre et qui
recherchent moins dans la Bible un code qu'une inspiration.
Université d'Ottawa
Notes
1 Paroles de Calvin citées par Samuel Berger, in La Bible au XVIe siècle. Etude sur les origines de
la critique biblique (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), p. 38. (Réimp. de l'édition de Paris,
1879).
2 Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (Lyon: du Puys, 1580), p. 303, (1* éd: Paris,
1576).
3 Ibid., p. 305.
4 Thédore de Bèze, Du droit des magistrats, Intr. et notes de Robert M. Kingdon (Genève: Droz,
1970), p. 24 et ss, (1* éd: Genève, 1574).
5 George Buchanan, De jure regni apud Scotos: A Dialogue concerning the Rights of the crown in
Scotland, publié au sein de l'ouvrage du Rév. S. Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or the Law and the Prince
(Edinburgh; Ogle & Oliver & Boyd, 1843), p. 268, (1« éd: Edimbourg, 1579).
6 Hubert Languet, pseud. Etienne Junius Brutus, Vindiciae contra tyrannos, trad, franc, de 1581,
édition de A. Jouanna et alii (Genève: Droz, Coll. Les classiques de la pensée politique, 1979), p.
46. Le titre de la traduction française est De la puissance légitime du Prince sur le peuple et du
peuple sur le Prince. longtemps considéré comme l'oeuvre de Duplessis-Momay, le fameux

Vindiciae a été attribué à Languet dans cette édition. Sur la série des diverses attributions,
consulter la bibliographie de Myriam Yardeni, La Conscience nationale en France pendant les
guerres de religion (1559-1598) ( Paris- Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1971), p. 91 et ss. L'article le
plus récent sur cette question est de M.P. Raitière, "Hubert Languet's authorship of the Vindiciae
contra tyrannos," in II Pensiero politico,^* (1981), (!« éd: Bale, 1579).
7 Cf. The Political Works of James I, Intr. de Charles Howard Mcllwain (New York: Russel &
Russel, 1965).
8 Johanes Althusius, Politica Methodice Digesta. Intr. de C.J. Friedrich (Cambridge: At the
University Press, 1932). (1« éd: Groningue, 1603).
9 Trad. D. Virion, Nancy, J. Gamich, 1621 (1« éd: Pampelune, 1615).
10 Francisco Suarez, Selections from three works. Ed. par J. Brown Scott, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1944), I, 688 et ss.
1 1 Jacques Davy, cardinal Du Perron, Haranguefaicte de la Part de la Chambre ecclésiastique, En

celle du tiers Estât, sur l'Article du Serment (Paris: Antoine Estienne, 1615), p. 65. Discours
prononcé le 27 octobre 1614 devant le Tiers Etat
12 Ibid., p. 23.
1 3 " La Genèse", 4: 1 7, in La Sainte Bible, traduite en français sous la direction de l'école biblique de
Jérusalem (Paris: Ed. du cerf, 1961). Toutes les références et citations ultérieures renverront à
cette édition.
14 Cf Otto Gierke, Political Theories ofthe Middle Ages, Trad. F.W. Maitland( Cambridge: Atthe
University Press, 1951), p. 89.
15 La Genèse, 10, 9-10.
16 Mémoires de TEstat de France sous Charles neuviesme (Meidelbourg: H. Wolf, 1 1, 1576-1577;

LII, 1578; till, 1578-1579).
17 S&int Paul, Epître aux Romains, 13: 1-5.
1 8 Première epître de saint Pierre, 2: 13-17.
19 Livre de Jérémie, 27: 1-1 1 .
20 Livre de Daniel, 3: 1-51.
21 Ibid., 6:1-25.
22 Le Deutéronome, 17: 16-19.
23 Premier livre de Samuel, 8: 1-22.
24 De la royauté.
Je vais te détruire, Israël;
qui te pourra secourir?
Ou donc est- il ton roi, qu'il te sauve?
tes chefs, qu'ils te protègent?
ceux-là dont tu disais:
"Donne-moi un roi et des chefs."
Un roi, je te l'ai donné dans ma colère
et, dans ma fureur, je te l'enlève. Osée, 13,9-11.
25 L'épisode souvent cité de la vigne de Naboth apparaît au Premier livre des Rois, 21: 1-16.
26 Saint Grégoire le Grand, Primum Regum Expositiones, L. IV, chap. I-II, pp. 217-233, in
Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Patres latini. Series prima, t 79, 1849. Le texte de Samuel
permet à saint Grégoire de faire de nombreux exposés sur des sujets connexes, comme la distri-
bution des châtiments et des récompenses selon les mérites des hommes, le rôle du Christ dans la
rédemption depuis le péché d'Adam, etc.
27 "His autem, qui vivebant sub spiritali regimine, regem petere quid aliud est quam eamdem
spiritalem praelationem in saecularem dominationem transferre gestire."Op. cit., p. 219.
28 Grégoire souligne qu'il n'est pas écrit "displicuitsermo Samueli," mais bien"inoculis Samuelis."
Ibid.
29 "Pro reproba voluntate maie petentes populi, petitus rex conceditur pro vindicta." Op. cit., p.
221.
30 ". . quia dum reprobam vitam laudant, camalem mentem tyranne ad exercendam pravitatem
roborant." Op. cit., p. 227.
31 Le terme carnalis et ses dérivés sont très souvent utilisés par saint Grégoire.
32 Cf. The Anti-Nicene Fathers (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1925). Saint Ignace (I, 60), saint
Cyprien (V, 340, 366, 373), Constitutions des Saints Apôtres (VII, 412). Et The Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, saint Chrysostome (XIII, 481).
33 Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Somme théologique. La loi ancienne, t II, la Ilae, Q. 105, art 5. (Paris-
Toumai-Rome: Desclée et cie, 1971), p. 238.
34 Ibid., p. 243. La Bible hébraïque comprenait le livre de Samuel et celui des Rois, alors que la
version grecque de la Septante intitulait les deux textes Règnes, amalgame repris par la Vulgate
latine, citée par saint Thomas, sous le titre de Rois. Les versions modernes retiennent la division du
texte hébreu. (Renseignements gracieusement communiqués par le professeur Jean Calloud de
Lyon, dont les remarques ont également influencé la présente conclusion.)
35 Ibid., p. 246.
36 Ibid., p. 238.
37 Abravanel, Commentary of the Bible. Texte traduit par Robert Sacks dans Medieval Political
Philosophy. A Sourcebook, éd. parR. LemeretM. Mahdi( Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), p.
262 et ss.
38 11 écrit: "Ail of them accepted the notion that there was a positive commandment laid upon Israel to
ask for a king. But I am not of this opinion." Op. cit., p. 265.
39 Consulter notamment L.H. Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther (New York: Ken-
nikat, 1968); Joël Lefebvre, Luther et l'autorité temporelle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1973);
Pierre Mesnard, L 'Essor de la ph ilosophie politique a u XVI^ siècle ( Paris: Vrin, 1 95 1 ), pp. 1 8 1 -
235.
40 Martin Luther, "Commentaire de l'épître aux Romains," 1 5 1 5-1 5 16, /« Luther's Works, éd. par
F. Sherman (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), vol 47: "The Christian in Society," p. 109.
41 Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chrétienne (Paris: Vrin, 1961), t IV, Livre IV, chap. XX:
"Du gouvernement civil," pp. 510-511. Sur la pensée politique de Calvin, voir aussi Marc-
Edouard Chenièvre, La Pensée politique de Calvin (Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 383 p.; André
Biéler, La Pensée économique et sociale de Calvin (Genève: Librairie de l'Université, 1 959), 562
p.; Pierre Mesnard, op. cit., p. 235 et ss.
42 Ibid., p. 512.
43 Ibid., p. 530.
44 Ibid., p. 532.
45 Ibid., p. 531-532.
46 Ibid., p. 533.
47 "Le Politique. Dialogue traittant de la puissance, authorite, & du Devoir des Princes . . . , in
Mémoires, L III, 1578-1579, pp. 69-70.
48 J. Bodin, op. cit., L.I, chap. X, p. 212.
49 "In Historis regum, ubi Samueli jus regni describitur, probatur acerbissima forma imperii, omatur
hoc titulo, quod jus sit regum. Significat enim spiritus sanctus legitimum imperium, quamvis durum
sit, tamen Deo probari". Philip Melanchthon, "In Aristotelis aliquot libros, (Philippi Melanch-
thonis) Commentaria," in Philosophiae Moralis Epitome ( Lyon: Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1 5 38), p.
60. La traduction est de nous.
50 Melanchthon s'oppose dans ce texte aux thèses des anabaptistes sur le baptême. Il partage
l'opinion de Luther sur l'autorité civile et cite deux fois dans \es Loci communes theologici l'épître
aux Romains. Il fait cependant suivre le passage de saint Paul d'un extrait dts Actes des Apôtres (5,
29), disant qu'il faut obéir à Dieu plutôt qu'aux hommes.
51 J. Marquez, op. cit., p. 156.
52 Cf. par exemple Guillaume Rose, De Justa Reipub, christianae in reges impios et haereticos
authoritate (Anvers: J. Keerbergium, 1592), pp. 8 et 103.
53 Les interprétations des scolastiques et de Bodin seront expliquées plus loin dans le texte.
54 P. Belloy, 0/7. cit., p. 19
55 Juste Lipse, dans ses Conseils et exemples politiques, écrit dans le chapitre "De la principauté"
(L. II, I): "Qu'elle est la plus ordinaire. - Pour le temps passé, les histoires sacrées le monstrent, là
où les Juifs demandant un Roy, parlent en ceste sorte: Pourvoiez nous d'un Roy, comme TOUTES
les nations en sont pourvues." (Paris: J. Richer, 1 606), p. 766. Cette constatation constitue aussi le
seul commentaire du texte de Samuel fait par Robert Parsons, jésuite écrivant sur la succession
d'Elisabeth, dans A Conference about the next succession to the crowne oflngland, (s.l.: R
Doleman, 1 594). "When the children of Israel did aske a kynge at the hands of Samuel, which was
a thousand years before the coming of Christ, they alleaged for one reason that al nations round
about them had kings for their govemours, and at the very same tyme, the chiefest cyties and
commonwealths of Greece," (p. 16).
56 "Le Politique," in Mémoires, t III, p. 78 et ss. Bodin aussi estime que Nemrod fut le premier qui
" assubjectit les hommes par force & violence." (Op. cit., p. 69). II soutient deux autres fois dans sa
République l'origine violente de la royauté, toujours à l'aide de ce fragment (p. 504 et 511).
Pourtant, il est seulement dit dans la Bible que " Kush engendra Nemrod, qui fut le premier potentat
sur la terre, c'était un vaillant chasseur devant Yahvé, et c'est pourquoi l'on dit: "Comme Nemrod,
vaillant chasseur devant Yahvé." Les prémices de son empire furent Babel, Ereq et Akkad, villes
qui sont toutes au pays de Shinéar." Genèse, 1 0, 1 0. L'interprétation de Bodin est déjà contredite
dès cette époque par Marquez, qui rappelle que la Bible qualifie Nemrod de vaillant chasseur et de
fondateur de villes, "meu du désir de profiter à tous." Op. cit., p. 23.
57 Op. cit., p. 79. L'auteur dxiPolitique continue ainsi: "Vous tiendrez pour flatteurs (comme dire le
vray ils semblent bien en tenir) ceux qui alléguant le droit du Roy recité par Samuel . ..." Il est
difficile de savoir qui sont ces "flatteurs" favorables aux droits illimités des rois sur les héritages, le
bétail, les personnes mêmes, car les écrits de Blackwood et de Jacques l*^ sont postérieurs à ce
texte.
58 Ibid., p. 125.
59 J. Bod^n, La Méthode de l'histoire. Trad Pierre Mesnard (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1941).(l«éd:
1572).
60 Ibid., p. 275.
61 J. Bodin, La République, pp. 6 10-6 11, 970, 988.
62 Ibid., p. 212.
63 Ibid., p. 303-304.
64 Ibid., p. 304-305.
65 A. Blackwood, Adversus Georgii Buchanani dialogum, de Jure regni apud Scotos, pro regibus
apologia (Pictavis: Apud Franciscum Pagaeum, 1581), pp. 229 et ss.
66 "Nam quae disputantur eo loci, toleranda regum imperia significant, quamvis in tyrannos dégén-
érant, & benignitate numinis, a quo potestatem acceperunt abutantur." Ibid., p. 238.
67 "Regum enim onia sunt dominio, singulorum usu. Regum sunt omnia proprietate, singulorum
possessione." Ibid., p. 232.
68 Cf. surtout H. Languet, op. cit., pp. 162, 174-176; les Mémoires, p. 78; G. Rose, op. cit., p.
101.
69 "Moyses quid debeat Rex facere, Samuel quid posset enunciat" W. Barclay, op. cit., p. 64.
70 "Utrumque jus regni est, & iisdem Regibus, populoque prescriptum." Ibid. p. 63.
71 Jacques I«^ "Basilikon Doron," 1599, in op. cit., pp. 213 et ss.
72 Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to be obeyed of their subjects, and Wherin
they may lawfully by God's Worde be disobeyed and resisted (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1931), p. 151. (1« éd: Genève, 1558).
73 T. de Bèze, Du droit, p. 28.
74 Ibid., p. 29.
75 Ibid., pp. 29-30.
76 Ibid., p. 9.
77 Ibid., p. 22.
78 G. Buchanan, op. cit., p. 268.
79 Ibid., p. 270.
80 H. Languet,op. cit., pp. 180-183.
81 Ibid.,'p. 182.
82 José-Antonio Maravall, La Philosophie politique espagnole au XVIIe siècle dans ses rapports
avec l'esprit de la Contre-Réforme. Traduit et présenté par Lx)uis Gazes et Pierre Mesnard (Paris:
Vrin, 1955), pp. 135 et ss.
83 P. Juan de Mariana, Del Rey y de la institucion real, in Bibliotheca de autores espanoles

(Madrid Ed. Altas, 1950), t. 31, p. 471.
84 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Traité de la Religion que doit suivre le prince chrestien et des vertus qu 'il
doit avoir pour bien gouverner et conserver son Estât. Contre la doctrine de Nicolas Machiavel &
des Politiques de nostre temps, trad. Antoine de Balinghem (Douay: Jean Bogart, 1610), pp. 480
etss. (l«éd: Madrid, 1595).
85 J. Marquez, op. cit., pp. 141-142.
86 "Philonjuif, Platon, Aristote, Seneque, Plutarque, Isocrate, Hérodote, Xenophon, Saint Justin
martyr, S. Atanaze, S. Cyprian, S. Hierosme, S. Thomas, Bartole, Dion Crisostome & autres
immumerables." /Wi/., p. 141.
87 Du Perron, op. cit., pp. 64-65.
88 W. Barclay, op. cit., p. 38 1 . Un autre absolutiste, Belloy, pour montrer que Dieu s'irrite lorsque les
rois sont méprisés, cite l'exemple de sa colère lorsque Samuel fut rejeté. Op. cit., p. 45 b.
89 Robert Bellarmin, Le Monarque parfait ou le Devoir d'un prince chrétien, trad. Jean de Lannel
(Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy, 1625), pp. 299-300.
90 Ibid.,^.ZO\.
91 Ibid., p. 302.
92 Ibid., p. 305.
93 Hugo de Groot, dit Grotius, Le Droit de la guerre et de la paix, trad. J. Barbeyrac (Basle: E.
Toumeisen), t. I, p. 174, (!« éd: Paris, 1625).
94 Samuel de Pufendorf, Le Droit de la nature et des gens, trad. J. Barbeyrac, (Amsterdam: Pierre de
Coup, 1734), t II, p. 369.
N.B.: Les recherches pour la rédaction de cet article one été rendues possibles par une subvention
du Conseil de recherches en science humaines du Canada.
The Way of Caution:

Elenchus in Bacon's Essays
KJ.H. BERLAND
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing

and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very
foundations, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and
contemptible progress.
— Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
Bacon employs three literary modes or strategies of what he would call

Tradition (i.e., transitive knowledge) in his prose: the Expository or
Didactic, the Parabolic, and the Dialectic. The first of these modes is, of
course, the conventional method of teaching. Much of Bacon's larger
works, including The Advancement of Learning and most of the New
Organon, consists of orderly sequences of investigations and definitions.
Tradition here is straightforward, because Bacon's language is explicitly
referential and pragmatic.
The Parabolic mode consists of any literary effort in which the literary
form is designed consciously to conceal (at least partly) the content of
meaning beneath an initially acceptable literal level of meaning. Since the
degree of concealment can vary enormously, interpretation is often tricky:
"Parables have been used in two ways, and (which is strange) for contra-
dictory purposes; For they serve to disguise and veil the meaning, and they
serve also to clear and throw light upon it."^ Thus, all hieroglyphic forms,
such as emblem, aphorism, similitude, and fable, add the pleasure of
discovery to the satisfaction of knowledge gained, in that the form must be
"opened" to be complete. The literal husk conceals a kernel of essential
communication; knowledge cannot simply pass like a bubble from one
mind to another; rather, it must emerge from the respondent's active
involvement, a combined action of imagination and intellect. Bacon him-
self states that knowledge should be delivered "as a thread to be spun on"
(Advancement, 124).
The enigmatical method of parabolic Tradition masquerades as a pro-

tective screen for esoteric knowledge, but it actually serves to furnish a
reward for solving puzzles. Bacon explains that the assumed disguise is
really a kind of challenge: "The pretence whereof is, to remove the vulgar
capacities from being admitted to the secrets of knowledges, and to reserve
them to selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil"
(Advancement, 124-5). In the earlier works, when Bacon is busy devel-
oping his program of inductive science, he regards the Parabolic mode with
suspicion, although later (especially in The Wisdom of the Ancients) he
employs it because it encourages individual discovery.^ "Discoveries are
as it were new creations" (Novum Organum, 300). Bacon frequently
refers to Solomon, the scriptural exemplar of wisdom, as the model dis-
coverer, emphasizing what that great king chose to celebrate: "The glory of
God is to conceal a thing; the glory of a king is to seek it out" (Novum
Organum, 300).
The Dialectic mode is not so easily defined. The task is immediately

complicated by the fact that in the seventeenth century the term "dialectic"
was understood to refer to the art of classifying information in spoken or
written discourse.^ Ramus, for instance, considered it practically synon-
ymous with "logic": "Dialectic is the art of discussing well and is also
called logic.""* The particular use of this art was pedagogical, and it was
turned to the discovery of probable explanations; Bacon's adversaries, the
schoolmen, were dialecticians in this sense. The similarity of this dialectic
to its sister art, rhetoric, rests in the common standard of success — a
plausible, convincing effect.
However, the process of seeking definitions ought to be accompanied by

a parallel process of rejecting insufficient or fallacious material.
Melanchthon thus included both elements in his definition of dialectic as
"the art or way of teaching correctly, perspicuously, and in an orderly
fashion, which is achieved by correctly defining, dividing, linking true
statements, and unravelling and refuting inconsistent or false ones."^ The
last part of this definition is particularly important if we are to consider
dialectic as more than a mere subcategory of rhetoric. Dialectic is a mode
of inquiry. The model is Socratic discourse, the starting point of which is a
negative, antithetical movement, designed to attack those stubborn opin-
ions which impede the progress toward wisdom. Certainly Bacon's end is
radically different— Socrates directed his respondents toward an inward
discovery of immanent, potential truth, while Bacon secularizes and in-
verts the Socratic process, preferring external evidences. Nonetheless, at
least one major component of Bacon's method draws on the Socratic
method.
Bacon's great debt to the Platonic Socrates is in his adoption of the
Elenchus, the systematic reduction of false knowledge. Bacon seeks to
replace both false information and the fallacious methods of attaining this
so-called knowledge. He maintains that the forms of logic employed by the
schoolmen are excessively self-justifying: syllogistical arguments owe

their structure and their outcome not to any verifiable connection to the
subject at hand, but to codified logic, the very set of conceptual tools
initially designed as aids to discovery. Logic has become a kind of de-
corum, and the "invention of arguments" has supplanted true discovery.
Because syllogistic logic establishes purely verbal premises, it depends for
whatever truth it contains upon what is known already. Bacon's writings
abound with censures of those who succumb to the temptation of easy
victory, such as the syllogism can afford: "Some in their discourse desire
rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of
judgment, in discerning what is true, as if it were a praise to know what
might be said, and not what should be thought" ("Of Discourse," 775).
Bacon considered such established methods of discourse to be part and
parcel of the Idols that block the way of progressive certainty.
***
The Doctrine of Idols is to the interpretation of Nature what the Doctrine of

the Refutation of Sophisms is to common Logic. ^
There are three ways of overcoming Idols. The ideal method, of course, is
to start out right— that is, to begin by applying the inductive method: "The
formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper
remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols."
Should it already be too late for preventive measures, however, attempting
to understand and name the idols is the next best thing: "The formation of
ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be
applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out,
however, is of great use" (Novum Organum, 164).
The third option is more complex; it is the antithetical movement of

dialectic, the elenchus. The original Socratic discourse (of which elenchus
is a part) is essentially ironic. Pretending to complete ignorance, Socrates
addressed his respondents, questioning them about received notions of
virtue and wisdom that they prided themselves on knowing. He had an
uncanny eye for fallacious reasoning, and undermined arguments on their
own terms until they collapsed under the weight of their own absurdity.
Richard Robinson defines the process:
"Elenchus" in the wider sense means examining a person with regard to a

statement he has made, by putting to him questions calling for further state-
ments, in the hope that they will determine the meaning and truth- value of his
first statement The whole essence ofthe elenchus lies in making visible to
the answerer the link between certain of his actual beliefs and the contra-
dictory of his present thesis. This link must be visible to the questioner before
the process begins.^
Because of its attritional nature, elenchus has often been criticized as a

purely negative tactic; nonetheless, the ultimate purpose of elenchus is
usually constructive. Robinson explains how this operates for Socrates:
Of two ignorant persons ... the one who knows that he is ignorant is better off
than the one who supposes that he knows; and that is because the one has, and
the other has not, a drive within him that may lead to real knowledge. The
elenchus changes ignorant men from the state of falsely supposing that they
know to the state of recognizing that they do not know; and this is an important
step along the road to knowledge, because the recognition that we do not know
at once arouses the desire to know, and thus supplies the motive that was
lacking before. Philosophy begins in wonder, and the assertion here made is
that elenchus suppHes the wonder.^
Socrates, then, used the elenchus to produce a catharsis of humility, a

purgation of false knowledge, and a desire for true knowledge. Such a
process, which simultaneously demolishes old opinions and their method-
ologies, and stimulates the wonder that drives philosophical inquiry, must
have been immeasurably attractive to Bacon. It is clearly an ideal weapon
in the battle against the Idols, in that it works explicitly against inherent
contradictions in fallacious opinion. Indeed, Bacon's commitment to el-
enctic tactics is everywhere apparent, and he discusses his use and advo-
cacy of elenchus on numerous occasions:
I begin the inquiry nearer the source than men have done heretofore, sub-
mitting to examination those things which the common logic takes on trust
("The Plan of the Work", The Great Instauration, 250)
The "common logic" is used too often to bolster up the opinions of those
who suppose they know. Bacon insists that the old must be cleared away to
make room for the new:
And therefore that art of Logic coming (as I said) too late to the rescue, and no
way able to set matters right again, has had the effect of fixing errors rather
than disclosing the truth. There remains but one course for the recovery of a
healthy and sound condition; namely, that the entire work of the understanding
be commenced afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to
take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business to be done as if
by machinery. (Preface, Novum Organum, 256)
To commence afresh, it would seem, requires a sweeping change:
The entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not
much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven, whereunto none
may enter except as a little child. (Novum Organum, 274)
Bacon's program of preparatory negative guidance involves both elenctic

means and dialectical end. His most complete acknowledgement of elen-
chus comes in the section oïThe Advancement of Learning that deals with
the Art of Judgment After he has questioned the value of syllogistic, he
notes that Judgment may be divided into two parts, the first of which he
calls "the way of direction," including analytic logic and exposition. The
second part, "the way of caution," is elenchus; it will be useftil to quote
Bacon's account at length:
The second method of doctrine was introduced for expedite use and assur-
ance sake; discovering the more subtile forms of sophisms and illaqueations
with their redargutions, which is that which is iennedelenches. For although in
the more gross sorts of fallacies it happeneth (as Seneca maketh the compar-
ison well) as in juggling feats, which, though we know not how they are done,
yet we know well it is not as it seemeth to be; yet the more subtile sort of them
doth not only put a man beside his answer, but doth many times abuse his
judgment.
This partconcemingelenches is excellently handled by Aristotle in precept,

but more excellently handled by Plato in example; not only in the persons of
the Sophists, but even in Socrates himself, who, professing to affirm nothing,
but to infirm that which was affirmed by another, hath exactly expressed all the
forms of objection, fallace, and redargution. And although we have said that
the use of this doctrine is for redargution, yet it is manifest the degenerate and
corrupt use is for caption and contradiction, which passeth for a great faculty,
and no doubt is of very great advantage ....
But yet further, this doctrine of clenches hath a more ample latitude and
extent than is perceived; namely, unto divers parts of knowledge; whereof
some are laboured and others omitted. For first, I conceive (though it may
seem at first somewhat strange) that that part which is variably referred,
sometimes to logic, sometimes to metaphysic, touching the common adjuncts
of essences, is but an clenche. For the great sophism of all sophisms being
equivocation or ambiguity of words or phrase, specially of such words as are
most general and intervene in every inquiry, it seemeth to me that the true and
fruitful use (leaving vain subtilties and speculations) of the inquiry of majority,
minority, priority, posteriority, identity, diversity, possibility, act, totality,
parts, existence, privation, and the like, are but wise cautions against ambigu-
ities of speech. So again the distribution of things into certain tribes, which we
call categories or predicaments, are but cautions against the confusion of
definitions and divisions. {Advancement, 117-118)
Elenchus may be carried out with little or no apparent connection with a

parallel positive movement; even Socrates has been misunderstood to
imply that knowledge is not actually attainable. Bacon is clearly concerned
that his readers should not similarly mistake his intention when he uses
elenchus to expose ambiguous and confused language. He is careful to
point out that the suspension of judgment he encourages in his readers and
followers is not Acatalepsia, "a denial of the capacity of the mind to
comprehend Truth," but Eucatalepsia, a "provision for understanding
truly" by means of induction {Novum Organum, 299).
Bacon's dialectic moves through the antithetical reduction of elenchus

toward a positive synthesis. He is confident that the purgation of Idols will
result in the recognition of the superiority of induction, and in significant
advances in learning and in the conditions of daily existence. There can be
no doubt that he beheved in the ameliorative power of his philosophy. He
projects a happy conclusion after the elimination of the Idols, celebrating
the new age which will follow the comus marking the integration of man
and universe:
All that can be done is to . . . lay it down once for all as a fixed and established
maxim that the intellect is not qualified to judge except by means of induction,
and induction in its legitimate form. This doctrine then of the expurgation of
the intellect to qualify it for dealing with the truth is comprised in three
refutations: the refutations of the Philosophies; the refutation of the Demon-
strations; and the refutation of the Natural Human Reason. The explanation of
which things, and of the true relation between the nature of things and the
nature of the mind, is as the strewing and decoration of the bridal chamber of
the Mind and the Universe, the Divine Goodness assisting; out of which
marriage let us hope (and this be the prayer of the bridal song) that there may
spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree
subdue and overcome the necessities of humanity. ("Plan of the Work," The
Great Instauration, 25 1 )
Bacon's grand scheme is laid out in all its breathtaking optimism. It is
surely of the utmost significance that Bacon assigns such an important
place to the three refutations, here emphatically linked to the preparations
for the visionary marriage of mind and universe.
« * He
T\iQ Essayes or Counsels combine all three modes of literary presentation,

but they are ftmdamentally dialectical, and particularly elenctic. That is,
they involve all three of the reftitations, and operate upon the reader very
much like aphorisms, which (Bacon explains) represent "a knowledge
broken," that invite "men to inquire further." Bacon contrasts this with
logical systems, which "carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if
they were at ftirthest" {Advancement, 125).
Stanley Fish points out that aphorisms, for Bacon, are "seeds" as words
are for Plato: "Their function is heuristic rather than expressive or mimetic
and part of an effort to bring men 'to the highest degree of happiness
possible' by putting them in direct touch with reality."^ Fish goes on to
argue that Bacon's dialectic is severely limited because it only prepares
man for truth about, not above, the phenomenal world (p. 153). He
concludes that the limitations implicit in Bacon's insistence upon fine
distinctions as a path to empirical verification must be judged in the light of
other philosophers and poets, for whom the empirical is merely something
to be transcended.
The error here is that Fish attempts to judge the success of Bacon's
efforts by a standard that Bacon himself strove to render irrelevant. The
higher truth for which Fish correctly notes that Plato, Augustine, and
Donne all sought, is available only to those who subscribe to a traditional
vision of cosmic order and unity. Bacon, on the other hand, after he has
nodded toward the First Cause, turns toward the fragmented phenomenal
world that he suspects is to be found after the concept of the cosmos
originating in desire for order, not observation, has been shown to be an
Idol, has been exposed and purged. Bacon's dialectic is designed for this
purpose: "The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose
the existence of more order in the world than it finds .... The human
understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and
affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one
would.' For what a man had rather be true he more readily believes"
{Novum Organum, 265, 267).
It is Fish's contention that the effect ofBacon' s Essays on the reader is

largely superficial, because it does not effect the kind of mystical transcen-
dance Fish (on his own hobbyhorse, or, to use the apposite terminology,
with his perceptions coloured by his own Idols of the Cave) is accustomed
to discover:
His words may be, as he terms them, seeds, Hving not so much in their
reference as in their effects, but they will flower in other words rather than in a
vision, and in words which do have the referential adequacy that is presently
inavailable. For all their provisionality the Essays are finally objects;
they . . . remain valuable as source material for future consultation, for they
reflect quite accurately the partial (not irrelevant) understanding of the mind
that fashioned them and of the minds that read them. (p. 154)
Bacon's "vision" necessarily differs from the other models Fish presents
in Self-Consuming Artifacts, all of which involve a dialectic based on
medieval cosmology. Bacon is not content to act as a spokesman for
received attitudes, as Fish implies when he states that the Essays reflect
the minds of both author and reader. To be sure, they do contain some
immediately valuable insights — I have already noted that the modes are
mixed, and the presence of the Dialectic by no means precludes the
Expository mode. Bacon's objective is not to produce the final word, but to
establish a "way." He repeatedly insists that although induction has
provided true and certain results in certain areas, he has no universal
theory to propose.
Despite such disclaimers, Bacon has at least an inkling of a universal

theory that he expects the practitioner of induction will discover. Requisite
to the dialectic I have endeavoured to outline here is the conviction that

with the application of the proper method, the necessary intellectual
discipline, the respondent can make a similar discovery. That Bacon had
such a faith in his philosophical tools is abundantly clear:
I am now therefore to speak touching Hope, especially as I am not a dealer in

promises, and wish neither to force nor ensnare men's judgments, but to lead
them by the hand with their good will. And though the strongest means of
inspiring hope will be to bring men to particulars . . . nevertheless that every-
thing may be done with gentleness, I will proceed with my plan of preparing
men's minds, of which preparation to give hope is no unimportant part. For
without it the rest tends rather to make men sad (by giving them a worse and a
meaner opinion of things as they are than they now have, and making them
more fully to feel and know the unhappiness of their own condition) than to
induce any alacrity or to whet their industry in making trial. {Novum Or-
ganum, 287)
With this background, we can see why attempts to extract a coherent

program of sententious content from Bacon's Essays are generally
doomed to failure. Bacon tends to talk around the nominal subjects, and,
rather than coming to grips with abstract definitions, he surveys a variety of
human attitudes toward the subject These he discusses from behind a
mask of objectivity, but he often ironically undercuts the received notions
he ostensibly wants to describe. As refutations, the Essays are designed to
approach the problem of ambiguity and confusion of definition and divi-
sion, not by replacing earlier versions, but by applying the way of caution
to "sciences as one would" to make way for the advancement of learning.
Fish, therefore, is completely off" the mark when he maintains that "the
essays advocate nothing (except perhaps a certain openness and alertness
of mind); they are descriptive, and description is ethically neutral, al-
though, if it is accurate, it may contribute to the development of a true, that
is, responsible, ethics" (p. 94). This evaluation is more than a little blimted.
While the Essays may advocate very little directly, they are certainly not
merely descriptive. Bacon simply does not describe the most readily
discernible phenomena. The very selectivity of description is heavily
weighted to produce varying degrees of elenctic response in the reader.
Fish provides an important piece of evidence — although he does not follow
the impHcation through — in Bacon's cancelled dedication to the 1612
edition: "My hope is that they may be as graynes of salte, that will rather
give you an appetite, than offend you with satiety" (p. 78).
««♦
A close reading of seweral Essays , beginning with the essay "Of Truth"
(736), will demonstrate the negative operation of this elenctic stage of
Bacon's educational dialetic.
" What is Truthi said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."
It is ironic that, of all times in Christian history, the incident with which this
essay (ostensibly concerned with establishing the nature of truth) begins,
was the most opportune moment for a man to receive a divine answer to the
question. However, Pilate only jests as he puts the question; from the very
outset it is man's equivocal attitude toward truth — not truth itself— that is
the object of scrutiny. Bacon insinuates, rather obliquely, that even when
the means of achieving an understanding of truth are at hand, man seems to
be constitutionally predisposed to turn away from it. This turning away is
stylistically emphasized by the violent conflict in syntactic emphasis the
first sentence makes by opening with such a strong interrogative move-
ment, only to abandon it immediately. Man imposes his desire on the
picture he allows himself to see, and Bacon attributes this to "a natural and
corrupt love of the lie itself." Pilate's jest is itself a repudiation of the
ordered universe accessible through understanding of truth. He is so
complacent in his vision that he mocks truth incarnate — yet how could he
be expected to recognize truth when he saw it?
Bacon continues, observing that the world holds truth in poor esteem. It
is a "naked and open daylight," perhaps a trifle banal or vulgar, coming
only to "the price of a pearl." On the other hand. Bacon compliments the
lie elaborately — it can be seen "daintily by candlelights" and is likened to a
many-faceted diamond or carbuncle. But the implicit opposition here is
between the naturally valuable and the artificially valuable, the pearl of
great price and the meretricious attraction of the stone of "varied
lights."
"A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure." This is indeed a very curious
statement, delivered as it is in almost a "deadpan" tone. The full effect,
however, is incremental, and can only be understood properly as part of the
continuing affective pattern of the entire essay. It depends on the ironic
inversion of what is truly valuable. Bacon has just commented on the
common confusion of values; thus it should be clear that although a lie may
bring pleasure, pleasure is a questionable goal in and of itself. The apparent
benefits of falsehood are obliquely and subtly undercut, but not too subtly
for the reader to catch.
The next sentence ironically suggests the function of the essay itself:
"Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain
opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would,
and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken
things?" Bacon does not intend that this should be taken to apply to the
mental faculties of mankind in general; the purgation he describes here is
precisely what he wishes to effect in the cases of all who are blocked by
Idols. Indeed, the list of things to be removed reads like a stock definition of
Idols. Unfortunately, there remains in man the proclivity to puff himself up
with the flattering He "that sinketh and settleth in," and that can be counter-
acted only by inquiry, knowledge, and the frank acceptance of truth in clear
demonstrations. Bacon follows this declaration with an appeal to the
authority of Scripture to provide himself with a mandate for his empirical,
inductive method: just as God first created matter and then light, so for man
reason must follow sense, judgment must follow perception.
Bacon next lauds the great material benefits of possessing truth, cau-
tiously tempering the advantage of the position by advocating charity.
Then, with what might seem to be a prodigious leap (ornon-sequitur), he is
suddenly weighing the pragmatic benefits of honesty on the business
world, and just as suddenly he introduces the argument of the fear of God
as inducement to truth-telling. The essay ends with a resonant millenarian
note.
What exactly has been said? Bacon has certainly not approached the
nature of "truth" itself. Rather, while maintaining the mask of discussing
truth, he endeavours to establish in the reader's consciousness the diffi-
culty — or impossibility — of the task. The reader is caught up in the tension
between the promise of the nominal subject and the commentary Bacon
actually delivers. A study of truth that concerns itself primarily with lying
should touch a sensitive area in the reader, implying as it does that man is
often most familiar with truth obliquely, in his acquaintance with its
opposite.
Behind Bacon's discussion of the human tendency to embrace falsehood
lies the Doctrine of Idols. The essay "Of Truth," then, is designed to
undermine self-complacency, and to bring about careful scrutiny of the
issues at hand by applying "wise cautions against ambiguities of speech."
There is no explicit positive ethical reference within the discussion, except
the moral tag at the end. Still, once the elenctic effect has come about, the
respondent (or reader) should turn to a new way of looking for truth, a new
way of seeing the world.
««*
The essay "Of Death" (737) again concerns a variety of attitudes toward
the titular subject The essay opens with a simple analogy: fear of death is
like a child's fear of the dark, and Bacon demonstrates the similarity of the
growth of fear in both instances. With the second sentence, the essay
divides neatly in half— Bacon draws a distinction between religious con-
templation of death and the weak (albeit natural) fear of death. The latter
element is drawn out in a vivid passage, which purports to allay the fear of
death by "reasoning" that the pain of accidental injury may be harder to
endure than many ways of dying. Bacon "argues" that it is the "outward
shows" of death, rather than death itself, which engender fear. None-
theless, it is only through these outward shows that man can know anything
about death before experiencing it first hand. Bacon notes that other
passions — love, honour, grief, fear, pity, even fastidiousness— can out-
weigh the fear of death.
There follows a series of loci classici, essentially ways in which people

have turned death to suit their own purposes. The sentences that come after
this return to the "rational" arguments ostensibly designed to reconcile
man to death: death is as natural as birth; both birth and death may be
painful; the distraction provided by the contemplation of "somewhat that
is good" may diminish pain.
Bacon's final argument is an appeal to the traditional solace of making a

good end: "But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is nunc dimittis;
when a man hath obtained worthy ends." In isolation, this sentence seems
straightforward enough: well-dying is a fitting and welcome completion of
well-Hving. But the way in which Bacon's style conditions this meaning is
significant. While the rest of the essay is devoted to suggestions and
assertions concerned with reconciling the reader to death's disadvantages
in a general, abstract, coolly rational manner, the interjection, "beHeve it,"
is sudden, personal, and has the effect of isolating the concluding sentence
as a matter of faith or speculation, as opposed to reason. This effect works
backwards into the ostensibly consolatory parts of the essay, implying that
the self-consciously careful structures of reason are not genuine. They are
certainly not convincing, and the reader is left with the feeling that, after all,
reason is incapable of mastering the fear of death, and that only faith can
help.
Finally, however, even the gravity of this observation is undercut by the
closing comment that death is the gateway to fame and posterity. The faith
that supersedes fear and other passions has itself been supplanted by the
passionate ambition to survive in posterity. Reason, which has been given
the upper hand in most of the essay, is ultimately debunked. The reader's
complacent faith in the competence of received wisdom and traditional
logic to reason away fear of death has been undermined to the point of
collapse.
«♦«
The essay "Of Studies" (797) opens with a neat treble structure, which
leads the reader to expect a regular and pervasive pattern. Such patterns
are favourite devices of Renaissance authors, and, indeed, the 1597 ver-
sion of this essay consists in a string of observations, all neatly divided in
three. In the later versions, however, despite the highly stylized form that
initially invites attention, there is no discernible pattern, no systematic
ordering of ascent or descent. Furthermore, the triplicity of form is highly
irregular:
STUDIES SERVE FOR-
DELIGHT
ORNAMENT
ABILITY
chief use:
privateness
and retiring
discourse
judgment, disposi-
tion of business
excess, abuse:
sloth
(crafty men
condemn it
affectation
(simple men
admire it)
eccentric judgment
(wise men use
studies)
why read?
not to conftite
not to take
not to find talk
but to weigh and consider
books are to be:
tasted
swallowed
chewed and
digested
or read:
partially
casually
wholly
reading makes
a whole man
conference
a ready man
writing an
exact man
It is already clear that this last triplet does not conform to the headings or
divisions used previously; the next triplet introduces a peculiar negative
inversion: without reading, a man must be cunning to seem to know what he
does not/ without conference, a man must have wit to seem to know what he
does not/without writing, a man must have memory to seem to know what
he does not
The treble pattern, already confusing, is then deliberately broken by the

introduction of a fourth term in the next stage: History makes men wise,
poets witty / Mathematics makes wise men subtle / Natural Philosophy
makes men deep, moral, and grave / Rhetoric and Logic make men able to
contend.
The effect of this stylistic disjunction is mildly disconcerting, especially

if the reader has attempted to follow the pattern of division initially set out.
The problem of connecting pattern and significance is further complicated
by Bacon's use of an elaborate metaphor at the close of the essay. Just as
"studies go to form character," so do they have a therapeutic value. Bacon
draws a parallel with the therapeutic effects of various physical exercises:
"Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast;
gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like." Each one
of these appHcations is really an appropriation of use from the thing itself.
Bowling, for instance, is primarily a game, and the effects Bacon describes
are surely accidental and secondary, nothing to do with bowling qua
bowling. By logical extension back into the essay, the careful reader will
note thai every thing Bacon discusses is Ukewise an appropriation of sec-
ondary effect, in isolation from the true nature of studies. After all, though
Bacon never touches upon this point, studies involve primarily a search for
truth. They are only secondarily a useful discipline for improvement of
character.
The essay "Of Studies" makes use of its own complex form — highly
artificial, with a structure implying significance but deliberately empty and
misleading — to undercut stock assumptions about the social utility of
learning. The whole effect is ironically, even viciously, underscored by the
extension of the therapeutic analogy:
So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics, for in demon-
strations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit
be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for
they are cymini sectores . If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one
thing and prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyer's cases. So
every defect of the mind may have special receipt
Bacon's readers may well find the light mockery of plodding mathema-
ticians, hair-splitting schoolmen, ingenious lawyers, and their students
somewhat amusing. Less welcome, perhaps, is the way in which Bacon
implicitly turns the mockery against the readers themselves: Bacon's essay
is itself a form of Study, and its readers are (to a certain extent) students. To
what defect of the mind does Bacon address this receipt?
*««
Thus it can be seen that a close reading oïXhQEssays forces us back to the
question of whether Bacon is concerned with engendering Acatalepsia or
Eucatalepsia in his reader. Despite the frequent appearance of individual
bursts of clear didactic statement— eminently quotable apothegms —
found throughout his prose, ihQ Essays do not hold together as systematic-
ally didactic or expository means of tradition, whether we consider the
collection as a whole or each essay separately.
Too often this has been attributed to the history of stylistic influence, or
to Bacon's intention to project a tone of muted skepticism or worldly
wisdom. Accordingly, there has been too little effort to reconcile the
essayist with the systematic philosopher. Did a different Bacon write with
the left hand than with the right? Everywhere outside ihc Essays, Bacon is
firmly committed to outlining or developing clear, verifiable systems.
Surely the omission of this characteristic quality in ihe Essays ought to be
sufficient in itself to place students of Bacon's method on their guard.
Further exercises in close reading will corroborate what I have un-

dertaken to demonstrate here. The strategy oïiht Essays is founded on the
Doctrine of the Three Refutations. If the intellect is truly not qualified to
judge except by means of induction, what are people to do with the vast
accumulation of mere prejudices, folk-tales, received opinions, "sciences

as one would," and traditional logical demonstrations — all of which they
have accepted as legitimate judgments? Bacon wishes to begin anew, to
initiate a real progress. Elenchus serves to reduce "the great sophism of all
sophisms," ambiguity, equivocation, and confusion of important terms.
His dialectic begins when he launches the negative, elenctic movement of
refutation, and directs his readers along the way of caution.
The Pennsylvania State University
Notes:
1 Preface, The Wisdom of the Ancients, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, reprinted
from the translations and texts of Ellis and Spedding, ed. John Mackinnon Robertson (London and
New York, 1905), p. 823. Further references to this edition will be noted parenthetically in the
text.
2 See Paolo Rossi's account of Bacon's changing attitude toward the Parabolic mode, in Francis
Bacon: From Magic to Science, tr. Sacha Rabinovich (London, 1968), especially Chapter III,
"The Classical Fable."
3 See Walter J. Ong,/?am«5,A/ef/io<i, and the Decay of Dialogue {C2imhnd%Q,M2iSS., 1958),p.42ef

passim; cf Lisa M. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge,
1974), p. 20.
4 Dialectique {1555), as quoted by Rossi, p. 63.
5 Jardine, p. 35.
6 Jardine, p. 83.
7 "Elenchus," in The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. Gregory Vlastos (New York, 1971), pp. 78,
89.
8 Ibid., pp. 83-4.
9 Stanley Fish, Self Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972), p. 88. Further references will be noted
parenthetically in the text. My reading of Bacon owes something to Fish, in that the seeds of some of
my arguments are present in his observations. We see much the same evidence, but draw very
different conclusions.
Book Reviews/ Comptes Rendus
Coburn Freer. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981. Pp. xix, 256. $22.50
Schooling her son, Volumnia claims "Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th'
ignorant / More learned then the eares." Coburn Freer would teach a very
different lesson about Jacobean dramatic verse because it "bears a unique
relation to the other elements of dramatic meaning" and "finally takes on the
force of metaphor itself (p. xii). Identifying that "metaphoric" capacity would
be much easier, if also more mechanical, if one could construct "a prosody
relating verse patterns to the dramatic contexts in which they occur," but Freer
rejects that project because "interpretation of the dramatic context of any given
line would depend upon one's reading of the whole play, just as interpretation of
the rhythm of a single line would depend upon hearing the rhythms present in
similar lines, some of which will have the misfortune to occur in very different
dramatic contexts" (p. xvi). Freer thus dismisses one version of the hermeneutic
circle — the mutual interplay and inter-correction of part and whole in the
progressive construal of a text (or dramatic performance)— but other versions
will return.
Chapter one, "Poetry in the Mode of Action," reviews previous studies (few
and unsatisfactory), defines ''poetry in the drama" (p. 7: "the ten-syllable five-
stress line in all its variations"), and discusses how dramatic verse differs
from narrative or lyric verse (p. 24: "a dramatic speech . . . lives among many
speeches"). Several important features of Freer's argument appear: his interest
in dramatic character and the way narrative demands threaten coherence (p.
17); poetry as a universal glue (p. 19: "There do seem to be many Jacobean
plays that hang together chiefly in their verse"); poetry as the universal solvent
(p. 26: "plot, the pattern of repetition of event as reflected in the current of the
verse," for example, or "poetry as a function of physical movement").
Freer next takes up some central questions: can dramatic poetry validly be
separated from other elements in a performance? Was it so separated in the
Renaissance? What is the relation between the reader's experience of a printed
text and the spectator's experience of a performed one? Misjudging the humor of
Joseph Hall's attack on bad meter, an attack that deliberately mismatches its
own meters. Freer maintains what he confesses "might seem to the modern
reader a highly implausible fiction"— "that an audience could distinguish
among different metrical feet, while hearing lines from the stage for the very first
time" (p. 36). This incredible claim sinks toward probability when we learn that
a theatre audience could distinguish verse from prose (p. 41 , a capacity happily
still extant), and, later, when the "attentive playgoer" is granted the ability to
hear "the verse as rhythmic, metered speech, not simply as a subspecies of formal
rhetoric, or as a vehicle for theme and plot, or as a local diversion" (p. 48). On
these large issues, Freer adduces three categories of evidence: dramatic dis-
cussion of dramatic speech; prefaces and puffs for printed texts; contemporary,
ear- witness testimony. Hamlet's advice to the Players— "Speak the speech
trippingly on the tongue" rather than mouthing it like the town-crier— leads to this
generalization: "concern for the accurate transmission of the meter makes
sense only if dramatic poetry is assumed to have an existence apart from
performance" (p. 50). And when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
(not the Players, as Freer states), "the lady shall speak her mind freely, or the
blank verse shall halt for't," Freer believes "we know that the audience Hamlet
imagines would be able to hear the lady's meter and tell when it was lame. If she
is to "speak her mind," presumably her language will convey some agitation or
disturbance; and that agitation must be very different from the agitation of
halting and lame meters" (p. 34). Perhaps, but this "lady" is not Gertrude, only
one of a stock collection of dramatic characters (king, adventurous knight,
lover, humorous man, clown), and Dr. Johnson's note seems just: "The lady
shall have no obstruction, unless from the lameness of the verse." Hamlet is
here more literary critic than a student of actors and audiences.
Many authorial prefaces and friendly blurb writers testify that "dramatic
poetry" has "an existence apart from performance." The very circumstances
make it inevitable that an author or his friends will defend, even exaggerate, the
joys awaiting the buyer. One can, therefore, invert Freer' s argument and find it
fairly remarkable that authors ever mention the performed play (as Chapman
and Webster among others did) while trying to send the reader not to the theatre
but to the study or St. Paul's, lighter by six pence or so. All this changed after the
Restoration, according to Freer, when dramatists subordinated language to
other qualities in a play and the reading of plays became more common. When
John Dennis writes in 1702, "Tis not the Lines, 'tis the Plot makes the Play. /
The Soul of every Poem's the design, / And words but serve to make that move
and shine" (p. 52), he seems to reverse the equation Freer believes John Ford
makes in a prefatory poem of 1632, "The Body of the Plot is drawn so faire, /
That the Soûles language quickens, with fresh ayre, / This well-limb'dPoëm."
(p. 39). Earlier evidence upsets the claim for an historical change. Marston's
preface to The Malcontent (Q3, 1604) praises playing over reading and, like
Dennis, makes action the soul: he entreats that "the vnhandsome shape which
this trifle in reading presents, may be pardoned, for the pleasure it once afforded
you, when it was presented with the soule of lively action." We may detect some
privy marks of irony, but the tenor is undeniable. From the 1 647 Beaumont and
Fletcher folio, Freer quotes James Shirley's remarkable lines on how readers
find themselves "at last grown insensibly the very same person you read" (pp.
59-60), but Freer does not quote Shirley's preceding paragraph. There we
find— obliquely and politicly made— the standard concession: "And now

Reader in this Tragicall Age where the Theater hath been so much out-acted,
congratulate thy owne happinesse, that in this silence of the Stage, thou hast a
liberty to reade these inimitable Playes." For himself, for other dramatists, and
for us, Shirley wishes the silenced stage were at liberty to perform plays, rather
than the reader free to read them.
Freer gleans a thin crop of contemporary, non-professional comment on

dramatic poetry. Certainly audiences took away memorable scraps and re-
peated them, and satirists claimed that would-be wits, poetasters, and feeble
playwrights actually took their tables to the theatre. Yet Manningham at
Twelfth Night or Forman at The Winter's Tale found plot and spectacle
memorable, not the poetry. Indeed, E. A. J. Honigmann has recently suggested
thatBen Jonson's contemptuous attitude toward Shakespeare changed marked-
ly when he had the chance to read (about 1623, as he prepared his Folio
tributes), rather than merely to see and hear, many of Shakespeare's plays (see
Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries [1982], pp. 36-37). Honig-
mann' s speculation supports some of Freer' s argument (dramatic poetry is
separable from performance), but it works against other parts (the contention
that an audience— here Jonson— grasped powerful, refined, complex poetry at
first hearing). This second chapter, then, is better at uncovering difficulties with
the argument than solving them (and I have omitted Freer' s thoughtful con-
sideration of several other points: the auditory base of Elizabethan education,
for example, and the nature of actors' elocution).
The bulk of the book studies, chapter by chapter. The Revenger's Tragedy,
Cymbeline, Webster's two tragedies, and The Broken Heart, and Freer con-
siders much more than the verse alone. These five plays have been chosen
because of the varying ways their verse displays "congruence with dramatic
situation and characterization" (p. 201): very close in The Revenger's Tragedy
and The Broken Heart; very distant in Cymbeline; intermittent in Webster's
plays, depending on whether he was copying his notebooks or writing for
himself. Careful as many readings are, they often fall into a curious circularity.
For example: "These two levels of style, the metaphors and the verse, are both
aspects of the chief organizing agent, Vindice's mind" (p. 79) could logically be
reversed: "Vindice's mind is chiefly organized and represented as mind through
two levels of style, the metaphors and the verse." Elsewhere in the treatment of
Vindice (e.g., pp. 70-71), one might object that the formal, prosodie elements
are simply what they are and that the critic derives his interpretation of Vindice
from other sources and then regards the verse's formal properties as supporting
or conveying that meaning. Bosola and Flamineo are Freer's chief subjects
when he turns to Webster: "Each is endowed with a different kind of reality, and
this is emphasized by the different kinds of verse they are given" (p. 137), but
"emphasized" saps the primacy verse had for the interpretation of Vindice.
Observing of Posthumus that he "seems continually to break off, qualify, or
chop at what he has just said," Freer acknowledges, "someone who is distraught
does not automatically speak blank verse with a great many pauses; the verse
might just as well tumble out in long gushes" (p. 1 1 6), as indeed do the speeches
of distraught characters in Shakespeare's earlier plays. If distress can take two
such prosodically different forms, then the verse itself does not clearly dis-
tinguish among emotions.
The hermeneutic circle has come round again: one's interpretation of a

character or a play does not usually (or perhaps ever) originate with the verse's
formal properties; rather, those formal properties — if they are rigorously
defined — may be seen to support and to create in an audience the predisposition
to accept an interpretation arrived at by other means. Yet Freer does claim an
originating power for the verse; for example, Fletcher's "control of an entire act
originates in the choice of individual words" (p. 59). Although "control" is a
murky word, the lines from Herrick's prefatory poem entered as evidence will
not do: "Here's words with lines, and lines with Scenes consent, / To raise an
Act to full astonishment." "Consent" sounds like the "perfect Harmony"
Webster claimed among "Action," "decency [i.e., docorum?] of Language,"
and "Ingenious structure of the Scaene" {The Devil's Law-Case), and while
"raise" may be a building image, metaphorically suiting Freer's claim, it also
has "astonishment" as its object. More argument is needed before we may
consent that "in verse drama as in other forms of life, ontogeny repeats
phylogeny" (p. 59).
Perhaps inevitably. Freer devotes his fullest attention to the problems

knotted around the word character. When we read that "something goes out of
Vindice as a poet after he has killed the Duke" (p. 62, italics original), we may
recall, for example, Peter Ure's objections to the interpretation of Richard II
as a poet (Arden edition [rpt. 1966], pp. Ixix and Ixxi). Like Shakespeare,
Tourneur uses whatever media he commands, including "poetry," to achieve
the ends he requires; creating Vindice and his mind's imagined variety are
among those ends, but creating a Vindice characterized as a poet is not. Else-
where, Freer wonders "how can Webster fragment a character's consciousness
enough to justify feeding into his speeches all manner of tidbits from the author's
voracious reading, yet still make the character seem real enough to be a
plausible factor in the play's action?" (p. 136). But why should the "tidbits"
ipso facto disrupt a character's coherence unless (perhaps not even then) we
postulate an audience as well acquainted with Webster's reading as R. W.
Dent? One answer is that Freer very much prefers "verse" that grows "out of an
immediate situation instead of the author's library" (p. 164; cf. p. 160). A
further reason might be that formal properties of " imported" text, whether verse
or prose, cannot so easily be attributed to this character in this situation,
although any reader-spectator who believes some human experience to be
universal would not be dismayed to find that The Arcadia or Florio's Montaigne
could help define life and death in an imaginary Amalfi as well as in London or
southern France.
Webster's characters are irregularly "deep," depending upon their engage-

ment and their creator's resort to his library; Ford's are almost all subject to a
"controlled thinness of characterization" (p. 188). While most of the cast of
The Broken Heart are thin characters allowed only to "become more intense
without having changed fundamentally" (p. 173), Bassanes and Penthea are
different, and their relation "generates" the play's "most interesting poetry" (p.
184). Freer's treatment of Bassanes' verse is an admirable tour de force and
almost always convincing, although his very first speech, called "an extra-
ordinary poetry" (p. 185), surely derives from Jonson's Corvino, a figure far
more conventional than Freer elsewhere shows Bassanes to be. Coherence,

sincerity,plausibility, "depth" of character, and speech that arises from situation
are the criteria Freer usually employs to match prosodie features with character
and action, but he includes Cymbeline to show "how far it was possible to go in
exploiting the gap between a character's poetry and that character's self-
awareness, or between this gap and our own sense of the relations between the
characters" (p. 209). lachimo introduces a different model of character, and
Freer's bravura reading of lachimo's long concluding speeches finds him "the
play's chief poetic ventriloquist" (p. 135), a character, as Richard Lanham
would argue, without a " central self." Posthumus and Imogen develop, lachimo
does not, and his character as well as a certain amount of "archaism" and "an
older rhetoric viewed through a refracting prism" (p. 126) frame and distance
the play's action.
My review has not considered any examples of what the author might well
claim as his major contribution, the patient and usually sensitive record of how
the verse sounds and how it might affect us in each of these plays. Critics,
teachers, and students of these plays will learn much from these analyses, but
the careful study they deserve and reward cannot be undertaken in a review.
Nor have Freer's many fine interpretations been fully noticed: the view that
" Vindice is obsessed by his own experience of the court" (p. 64), for instance, or
that Posthumus's "own consciousness of his failings and his distinct sense of
being Imogen's inferior are attitudes he must shake, and by suspecting her of
being unfaithful, that whole great weight can be canceled, that sense of perpetual
obligation removed" (p. 11 3), or that "In the beginning Flamineo seems more a
character of prose comedy than a verse-speaking tragic principal. Up to the trial
scene he is close to being merely a stand-up comedian" (p. 1 38). Instead, I have
sought to trace the argument's contours, and I find it to be a prosody of dramatic
character, with all the difficulties that argument entails.
A. R. BRAUNMULLER, University of California, Los Angeles
Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures

and Essays. Edited by C.A. Patrides. Columbia & London: The University of
Missouri Press, 1982, Pp. 187.
Modern Scholarship on Sir Thomas Browne has tended to follow one of two
traditions. The first seeks to establish Browne's credibility as a thinker, to
remove any suspicion that he was not a serious and purposeful scientist. Its
contributions include the great edition of Browne's works published by Sir
Geoffrey Keynes (6 vols., London, 1928-31), which made available a critical
text of his writings and correspondence; the essays of E. S. Merton, which
evaluated Browne's experiments in plant reproduction, embryology, and diges
tion; the monographs of R. R. Cawley and George Yost(Studies in Sir Thomas,
Browne [Eugene, Oregon, 1965] ), which underscored Browne's wide range ol
learning and his debt to Aristotle; and more recently, the edition ofPseudodoxi
Epidemica or "Vulgar Errors" published by Robin Robbins (2 vols., Oxford
s-
1981), which recreated the historic context of Browne's most ambitious work
and defined the role Browne played in the scientific world of the late Renaissance.
From these and other studies, we have come to understand better the purpose of
Browne's investigations in such diverse fields as astronomy, mathematics,
botany, zoology, physiology, mineralogy, chemistry, and of course, medicine.
Browne, we now realize, was not a Baconian empiricist, much less a systematic
philosopher, but a debunker of myth and a recorder of scientific discovery, an
educator determined to clear away the residuum of fantastic learning though not
able to resist the attraction that certain of its elements had for him.
The second and more familiar tradition of Browne scholarship focuses on

Browne the writer, the author of Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia. Ùrne-Burial,
The Garden of Cyrus, and miscellaneous works of literary interest. This
tradition, which includes Johnson and Cowper in the eighteenth century,
Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Melville, and Pater in the nineteenth century, and
Morris Croll, E. R. Curtius, and Jorge Luis Borges among others in our own,
celebrates Browne as a craftsman and metaphysical wit. It views Browne's
worth as lying not only in his style, one of the most original and brilliant in the
language, but in his imagination, his half-whimsical, half-inspired genius for
drawing connections between disparate phenomena. In the words of Coleridge,
we "wonder at and admire his entireness in every subject which is before him —
he is totus in illo\ he follows it; he never wanders from it, — and he has no
occasion to wander; — for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamor-
phoses all nature into it."
This volume, which consists of fifteen lectures and essays commemorating

the three hundredth anniversary of Browne's death in 1682, falls squarely
within the second tradition. Its contributors are for the most part literary
scholars and historians, with interests in politics, art, and religious culture. This
is not to suggest that there is anything monotonous about the collection. The
editor, C. A. Patrides, Professor of English Literature at the University of
Michigan, has wisely refrained from imposing either theme or method on his
colleagues, so that a variety of perspectives emerges. As in his earlier critical
anthologies on Milton and Marvell, Patrides has arranged the essays "accord-
ing to an order that coincidentally advances from general studies to particular
ones."
Of the "general studies," two are especially worth noting, that by Patrides
himself and that by Professor Frank Warnke of the University of Georgia.
Patrides's essay focuses on what he calls Browne's "strategy of indirection," his
use of irony and paradox to dramatize the complexity of truth. Patrides shows
that like Erasmus, Browne distances himself from his "narrator." The result is a
gravity "at once intensified and tempered by a playfulness assertive of a sym-
pathetic response to the oddities of human behavior" (p. 47). For example, in a
posthumous piece entitled Mwêwm Clausam, or Bibliotheca Abscondita, a
Rabelaisian catalogue of books, pictures, and rarities whose origins and where-
abouts are dubious, Browne satirizes the mania for recondite objects that in his
time was preoccupying many of the learned of Europe at the expense of true
scientific research. A similar strategy is apparent in Hydriotaphia, which
exposes the vanity and absurdity of man's quest for physical permanence even
as it discourses with vast erudition of the various burial customs of men

throughout the ages. In these and other works, Browne balances the solemn and
the joyful, the tragic and the comic in such a way as to contrast human folly with
divine wisdom.
Frank Warnke's essay is a critique of Stanley Fish's now-famous reading of

Browne in Self-Consuming Artifacts ( 1 972). Warnke rejects Fish's verdict that
Browne must ultimately be deemed a "bad physician" because he does not
challenge our assumptions or confront our values like Donne or Bacon or
Milton. Warnke acknowledges that Browne dwells on the surface level of our
consciousness, spellbinding us with the pyrotechnics of his verbal art. But this,
according to Warnke, is not the evil that Fish makes it out to be. What Browne is
concerned with is the immortality of the soul and its relation to the deity, the
paradoxical and mysterious world of being. This he accomplishes, explains
Warnke, by means of an indirect method that "liberates us into the aesthetic"
(p. 59). For Browne, it is not the matter of the sentence that counts, but the
manner or experience of the sentence. Attention is focused not on the meaning
communicated, but on a stylistic virtuosity that convulses and thrills the imagi-
nation, shocking the mind out of common ratiocinative modes of thinking and
awakening in it a sense of wonder at the extremes of human experience. Like the
architectural feats of Bernini or the paintings of El Greco, Browne's prose
stupefies its audience, dazzles them with a power they can only interpret as
divine. Is such art good for us, Warnke asks? The answer, he submits, is yes, if
we can move beyond the puritanical attitudes that continue to encumber our
appreciation of literature and especially the baroque.
The essays in the volume treating of particular problems and individual works
within the Browne canon are without exception stimulating, and what is unfor-
tunately too rare in literary criticism today, readable. It is impossible to discuss
all of them here, but a few might be mentioned in passing. Murray Roston
presents the thesis that Browne's style was not, as Croll and others have argued,
expressive of the searching, tortuous mentality of the baroque movement, with
its doubts concerning the possibility of knowledge, but rather emblematic of a
more resolved sensibility, of the "achieved equilibrium of spirit" associated
with classical art and with rationalistic writers like Dryden. D. W. Jefferson
also notes Browne's "philosophical repose," explaining it, however, not as an
individual phenomenon but as part of the larger social movement that found
relief from the turmoil of the English civil war in the cultivation of the intellect
and in the development of professional interests. Raymond Waddington and
Michael Wilding adopt a different view of Browne. Writing on the Religio
Medici, they see him as a more politically charged writer, mounting a subtle but
deliberate defence of Anglican principles and institutions against Puritan
"innovation." John R. Knott, Jr., and Frank L. Huntley both write on The
Garden of Cyrus, the former considering Browne's fascination with the figure of
the labyrinth as suggestive of an admiration for the divine creation and of a self-
conscious recognition of man's capacity for error, the latter illumining an aspect
of Browne that has hitherto gone undetected (or at any rate unexplored)— his
prophetic and millenarian anticipation of the end of history and the establish-
ment of the kingdom of heaven. These critics have opened up what has
proved to be Browne's most hermetic work, casting new light on Browne's use of
symbol, allegory, hieroglyph, typology, and numerology. The last essay to be
noted is that of Marie Boas Hall, who brings a wealth of historical knowledge to
bear on Browne's connections with the scientific community of the seventeenth
century. Professor Hall's essay adds immeasurably to the value of the volume,
as it clarifies the nature of Browne's approach to scientific problems. Hall shows
how, although Browne was a careful recorder of observed fact, he never lost his
humanist love of authority and of books; how, although his studies brought him
into close contact with the College of Physicians and the Royal Society, he
remained apart from the new science of the century, which tended to divorce its
aims from those of religion. It was for these reasons that he was indifferent to or
unable to grasp the significance of certain scientific breakthroughs, such as
Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Copernicus' s model of the
solar system (he remained an adherent of the Ptolemaic astronomy throughout
his career). According to Hall, Browne is best described as a "naturalist," an
historian of natural and cultural facts, passing his informed judgment on all that
came within his ken, but doing little to further theoretical understanding.
Given the richness of the essays here collected, it will seem a little unreason-
able to complain of omissions, but two areas might have been addressed with
profit. First, Browne's philology. Though not of the rank of a Scaliger or a
Bentley, Browne was a respectable grammarian and scholar. In addition to his
mastery of classical and modem European languages, he was a forerunner of
comparative linguistics, as his fragment "Of Languages, and particularly of the
Saxon Tongue," and certain passages of the Pseudodoxia attest. He was
especially intrigued by the origin of language, noting the effects of natural,
technological, and historical events on its development. An inquiry into the
extent of his research in this area would contribute greatly to an understanding
of his humanism, as well as provide us with insights into the sources of his
diction.
The other area is biography. No effort has been made to provide any new
perspective on Browne himeself Although it is widely agreed that a large
measure of the interest Browne's writings have for us derives from his per-
sonality ("a fine mixture of the humourist, genius, and pedant," as Coleridge
put it), little attention has been paid to Browne the man. One regrets the absence
of a biographical essay reflecting the historic scholarship of this century. Much
could be said of Browne's humanist education at Montpellier, Padua, and
Leiden; of his friendships with Henry Power, John Evelyn, Nicolas Bacon,
William Dugdale, and other distinguished scholars; and of his credulity, which
had, at least on one occasion (the 1 664 witchcraft trial of Amy Duny and Rose
Cullender), most unfortunate consequences.
Aside from these caveats, however. Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne is a
balanced and judicious volume. Certainly in terms of addressing the critical
issues and concerns of contemporary literary scholarship on Browne it is un-
paralleled. Professor Patrides and his colleagues have done a splendid job in
putting before us a classic of English literature, and in showing us new ways to
appreciate his achievement.
PAUL E. FORTE, University of Massachusetts at Boston
John E. Booty, editor. Richard Hooker, ''Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical

Polity'': Attack and Response. The Folger Library Edition of The Works of
Richard Hooker, volume IV. W. Speed Hill, general editor. Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1 982, Pp. li, 274.
$45.00.
Earlier volumes in the Folger Library edition of the works of Richard Hooker
have provided us a solid critical edition of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,
including a discussion of the extraordinary textual problems and opportunities
that are afforded us by Book V when we compare the carefully printed and
proofread edition of 1 597 with the printer's manuscript in Hooker's own hand.
This present volume offers us material no less unusual and challenging, though
of a different sort. It provides a contemporary commentary on the Laws in the
form of a polemical attack and Hooker's preparations for a rejoinder to that
attack. As the editor, John Booty, remarks, rarely do we find autograph notes of
this sort in the controversial literature of the sixteenth century, and rarely is such
controversy based on a central document of such magnitude.
Much of the present volume is taken up with^ Christian Letter of Certaine

English Protestants (1599), written against Hooker by an individual clergyman
or a group of Calvinist, anti-Arminian, reform-minded Anglican clerics moved
by the necessity of refuting Hooker's purported errors in basic Christian
doctrine. Interspersed in the text of ^ Christian Letter itself are Hooker's
marginal observations, written in preparation for a more formal answer that was
cut off by Hooker's death in November of 1 600. The letter and its marginalia are
followed in this volume by Hooker's autograph notes toward a fragment on
predestination (Trinity College, Dublin, MS 364, f. 80), and three longer
sections in draft form also from Dublin (MS 121) on grace and free will, the
sacraments, and predestination. Together these materials make up the only
recorded refutation of Hooker's Law5, and the basis upon which he intended to
reply. William Covel did publish in 1603, evidently with the authority and
encouragement of Bishop Whitgift, A Just and Temperate Defence of the Five
Books of Ecclesiastical Policie {STC 5881), though without access to Hooker's
notes and fragments and relying heavily on Hooker's own words in the first five
books of the Laws then in print. The materials in this present volume go far
beyond Covel, for they provide the outline of Hooker's own answer to his
critics.
What troubles these critics especially are Hooker's non-Calvinist views on

grace and predestination and his seeming tolerance of Catholic doctrine. To the
author or authors of^ Christian Letter, the two points are of course connected,
for Hooker's insistence that in God's plan "all mankind should be saved, that
did live answerable to that degree of grace which he had offered, or afforded
them" (xxvi) suggests to Hooker's critics the Pelagian heresy of assuming that
human will is itself capable of good. Hooker's doctrine thereby (in the reformers'
view) encourages a Catholic emphasis on works. Hooker is of course no
Pelagian, for he accepts the doctrine of original sin (as does the Catholic
Church), but his allowance for some operation of human acceptance or non-
acceptance goes too far for the Calvinist or Calvinists who undertake to refute
him.
These reforming divines are not extremists. John Booty ably shows the
nonconformist nature of their positions, and tentatively identifies one of them as
Andrew Willet, a loyal Anglican who was Calvinist in theology, anti-Roman
Catholic, a protester against the Act of Uniformity, and a questioner of the
soundness of Hooker's doctrines. The author or authors, whether or not Willet
was one of them, base their attacks against Hooker on the Thirty-Nine Articles,
together with relevant passages of Scripture and the Fathers of the early
Church. They admire the style and simplicity of the early Fathers and of
Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Jewel, and others, as opposed to the ornate formality
of Hooker's style and his reliance on Schoolmen such as Aquinas. Their
greatest fear is that Hooker's erroneous doctrines signal a malaise in the very
heart of the establishment upon which the spiritual health of the Protestant
world must depend.
Although we lack Hooker's polished response, the gist of his intended reply is
fully apparent in his notes. In fact, they are so frank that they reveal to us a
Hooker that the published version might have obscured. We see Hooker here as
one openly contemptuous of Calvinist zealots who are never content with the
authority of the Church Fathers until "they find out somewhat in Calvin to
justify them selves" (3). Hooker is determined to maintain a compassionate and
dignified tone no matter how much "this fellow" (1, 47) may goad him into
anger. He bridles at "pettie quarrels" and at being asked to attend to "every
particular mans humor" (xxix). "Ignorant asse!" he exclaims. "It is not I that
scatter but you that gather more then ever was let fall" (22,24). "What bedlam
would ask such a question?" (30). "You ly, sir" (41). "How this asse runneth
kicking up his heeles as if a summerfly had stung him" (42). The pungent wit and
asperity of Hooker's replies are prompted no doubt by the suggestion that he,
"under the shewe of inveighing against Puritanes," broaches many "chiefest
pointes of popish blasphemie" (7). One suspects that some of Hooker's satirical
tone would have found its way into his published reply, since a reply of this sort
is by its nature more directly controversial than the Laws, but we are still given
insights by these marginal notes that are refreshingly candid.
As Booty observes, Hooker's "Notes toward a Fragment" are contained on

one leaf of MS 264, Trinity College, Dublin, previously identified by P. G.
Stan wood as Hooker's and transcribed in Volume III of the Folger Library
edition. Their importance here is to show an intermediate process between the
marginal notes to A Christian Letter and the drafts in the so-called Dublin
Fragments. We have, in other words. Hooker's working notes at various stages
of development and expansion. The Dublin Fragments are the closest we have
to a completed answer, and in them the tone is more restrained. The longest of
the three essays, on predestination, may actually have been drafted earlier,
between 1595 and 1600, in response to Walter Travers (a leader of the
disciplinary Puritans) rather than to A Christian Letter, though it serves its
purpose here, redrafted for the present occasion, and is indeed the culmination
of what Booty justly calls "the most detailed and sustained exposition of grace
and predestination in Hooker's works" (xxxvii). Together, the Fragments

outline an important treatise on free will, grace, and predestination, the most
vexed topics raised by A Christian Letter. This material is an expansion and
clarification of Hooker's earlier work rather than a new departure, but it repre-
sents the cause to which Hooker fervently devoted his last energies. He clears
himself especially of the charges of urging too great a freedom of the will, and of
teaching the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. He shows a rever-
ence for Calvin along with a profound distrust of Calvin's followers who, like
many Roman Catholics, make of their church an institution that professes to be
above human error.
Hooker's marginal notes, at times very difficult to read, are here scrupulously
transcribed with the help of two seventeenth-century transcriptions, themselves
not always reliable. The sole sixteenth-century quarto of ^4 Christian Letter
itself poses no special textual difficulties. The copy text for the Dublin Frag-
ments is evidently a seventeenth- century transcription. Variants between copy
text and adopted reading throughout this volume are nonsubstantive, such as the
correcting of obvious misprints or changing Italian font to roman. An appendix
records all such departures from copy text. A learned and thorough commentary
deals chiefly with Church authorities and clarification of doctrinal points. The
editor is sympathetic toward Hooker but without scholarly bias. The volume is
handsomely and generously illustrated with sample pages, chiefly showing
Hooker's careful writing in the margins and his alteration of words as he
proceeded. This is an attractively prepared volume, and a fitting commentary on
those that have gone before.
DAVID BEVINGTON, University of Chicago
Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 6, The Correspondence of Erasmus:

Letters 842 to 992 (1518 to 1519). Translated by R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S.
Thomson, annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz. Toronto, Buffalo, London: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1982. Pp. xxii, 448. $75.00.
The glory of this volume is the quality of the translation, for which the Preface
assigns specific responsibility to R. A.B. Mynors. Only a few of these letters have
been translated into English previously, some by Francis M. Nichols {The
Epistles of Erasmus, 3 [New York: Longmans, 1918]), by Marcus A. Haworth,
S. J., ( in Erasmus and his Age: Selected Letters ofDesiderius Erasmus, ed. Hans
J. Hillerbrand [New York: Harper and Row, 1970]) and by Barbara Flowers
(appended to the English edition of Huizinga's Erasmus of Rotterdam [New
York: Phaidon, 1 952]). These earlier versions involve intelligent scholarship and
writing. However, in comparison with them Professor Mynors' work clearly
stands out as that of an exceptionally gifted English stylist, whose talent for
English fluently transmits Erasmus' for Latin.
Mynors continually produces a vivacious English that corresponds to the

stylistic regions through which these letters mainly range. Many sentences come
fast, with syntax that (only) seems unstudied. Over four and a half centuries later,
the reader feels the impulse of that ' ' running hand which I use to keep pace with the
flow of my ideas" (letter 990: 65). The translator shares with his author a taste for
breadth, raciness and vividness of diction, and Mynors reaches for drama and
concreteness when he can. "Eloquentia, quam divus Augustinus non vult usquam
ab hera sua [i.e. sapientia) digredi" is for Nichols ''that eloquence" which is
''never to be parted from" Mistress Wisdom (p. 435); for Haworth, a maid who
"never wants to be separated from her mistress" (p. 1 3 1 ); for Mynors, a handmaid
whom Augustine "wishes never to leave her mistress' side" (862: 49). Mynors
exploits more than the other two the phrase's physical, imagistic possibilities,
including those in digredior's etymology. (The Latin, of course, is that of P.S.
AWen' s Opus Epis to larum, 3, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913]; letter numbers in
Allen and the volume under review correspond.) An even smaller variation: "hie
meus labor . . . molitur mendas sacrorum voluminum" — my labor "corrects the
mistakes" in Scripture for Nichols (p. 43 1 ), "removes the errors" for Haworth (p.
129) — becomes "this labor of mine . . . removes blemishes from" Scripture in
Mynors (860: 55). Again, physical presence in the translations arises, in echt
Erasmian fashion, from comprehension of all a word's meanings: "menda" is a
blunder in writing for Aulus Gellius but a defect of body for Ovid (see Lewis and
Short). Small choices like these, much more than renderings of developed
metaphors, make Erasmus' normal epistolary text in Mynors' English what it is in
Latin: a lively, peopled scene.
Mynors responds not only to Erasmus' most characteristic note but to his and
his correspondents' full stylistic range (see e.g. 850, 914). Most worth quoting,
Mynors can rise with Erasmus to eloquence, for instance in characterizing St.
Paul:
He maintained the rights of the kingdom of heaven with heavenly weapons and fought
the battles of the Gospel with the resources which the Gospel supplies. Tentmaker and
pontiff, offscouring of the world and chosen instrument of Christ, who picked this
sublime humility, this tongue-tied eloquence ... to spread the glory of his name. . . .
(916:237-242)
The intelligence, and the power of figured balances in the passage not only carry
over the strong Latin frame Erasmus had constructed:
Coeleste regnum coelestibus armis asservit, et Evangelicam militiam Evangelicis

opibus gessit. Coriarius pontifex, peripsema mundi, sed electum organum Christi. . . .
Mynors' practice summarizes much of what English gained, from the sixteenth
century on, from its writers' sharing in Latin classical tradition.
Almost the only slightly troubling feature of the edition related to the translation
is the absence of systematic notice of uses of Greek in the letters. Even for the non-
specialist audience whom the Toronto edition should reach, the sense of the texts'
participation in a non-modem world of learning, their pastness and absence from
us, needs to be suggested as well as their potential immediacy. It should quickly be
said that many other aspects of the edition do help with this historical task, and the
Greek is a tricky problem: regular indications in the letter introductions or foot-
notes might help, for letters containing substantial Greek passages. (Sometimes
especially sensitive passages appear in Greek, e.g. 911: 58ff., 872: 13ff.; some-
times the footnotes indicate these. Would it be worthwhile for the editors to
Central among the activities that these letters portray is the clear sequence of
tasks related to the promulgation of the Gospel. The bulk of actual revision of the
1516 New Testament text had been finished when this volume opens. The next
step, equally important for the Humanist orator- in-print, was insuring that the text
reached its audience in the clearest and most potent form possible. Hence the work
of the summer of 1518, the trip up the Rhine to supervise the work of Froben's
press whose types were "the clearest and most elegant and agreeable that one can
image" (925: 20). Hence also the pursuit through several letters of a papal brief,
whichshouldunderminethenewwork'spossibleopponents(860, 864, 865,905).
Back in Louvain, while he waits through the winter for publication, and while he
consider an appendix on such use of Greek for a future volume of the corres-
pondence?)
In other respects besides the translation, this volume is adapted to the range of
purposes and audiences the Toronto editors have set for themselves. The very few
emendations of Allen's datings of letters and identifications of correspondents are
sensible. In the notes. Professor Bietenholz does a good job of boiling down
available data to what most readers need to know, but also supplements what
could be gained from Allen with revised citations and cross-references and
selected references to recent secondary works. He is especially strong on the
historical articulation of controversies that increasingly enmeshed Erasmus in
1518-1519.
The volume could be better served by its index. Careful use of the text (not a
specific check of the index) yielded about a dozen cases in which the index missed
page references or gave wrong ones. The volume's two really important references
to St. Cyprian (pp. 385-386, 396) are not indexed under the saint's name, but only
in the listings of Erasmus' works. One wonders why Erasmus' servant Hovius
goes by the name Thomas under the index entry for Maarten Lips, while every-
where else in the volume he is Johannes. About another dozen misprints similarly
emerged in and immediately around the text itself. For instance, the date of Ulrich
of Wùrttemberg's conquest of Reutlingen given in a note on p. 263 clearly should
be 1 5 1 9, not 1 5 1 8; a cross-reference in the introduction for letter 926, concerning
Erasmus' stay in Mechelen, should be to letter 952, not 951.
The scholarship of Professors Mynors and Bietenholz has in this volume been
engaged on letters that document continuity and a culmination in Erasmus'
intellectual life, but also an early stage in the second great clearly-defined
modification of its course. About twenty years earlier, Erasmus had definitely set
out on his intellectual and spiritual way of choice, that of ethical and rhetorical
Humanism oriented by Christ's philosophy, the Gospel. The work of publishing
his revised edition of the New Testament controlled Erasmus for the first half of
the period this volume reflects. He regarded the edition as his career's triumph:
with Froben completing the printing, Erasmus could say "I have . . . built a
monument to bear witness to posterity that I existed" (867: 293). Fulfillment was
qualified in 1519, however, by some vicissitudes of fairly familiar kinds, but
increasingly by the more and more distinctive impact of Luther. Change generated
by Luther and his associates began to invade Erasmus' life, unlike the earlier
change that had been chosen, and Erasmus began clearly to figure in his ultimate
rôle as maker and subject of a complex period.
undergoes illness and is jolted by new traditionalist attacks, nevertheless Erasmus

moves on to sequels and postscripts of the climactic New Testament publication:
more paraphrases to simplify access to Scripture for many (916, 952, 956);
further editorial work on the Fathers, guides to Scripture's meaning whom
Erasmus has used and now will introduce to a wider public (844, 860, 9 1 6, 975).
Perseverance with Christian Humanism's essential positive program, in spite of
distractions and controversy, is Erasmus' basic course over these months— one he
repeatedly advises younger scholars also to pursue (941, 967 A).
Other important publications of these months were also revised editions, of the
Institutio principis christiani and the Enchiridion, strengthening one's impression
of this as a time of culmination and completion (853, 858). On the other hand,
Erasmus for the first time tries to grapple with publication of his colloquies (909).
Besides prefacing or alluding to publications, the letters also embody other kinds
of Humanistic activity, notably interaction with fellow scholars. Erasmus fulfills a
growing responsibility to encourage a whole movement finding inspiration in him,
particularly, as Professor Bietenholz points out, to German Humanists, who
receive over a third of the letters ( see p. xvii). Erasmus' prestige by this time is such
that men travel across Germany simply to see him. He deprecates these pil-
grimages in the same terms as he did those to religious shrines: he tells the young
men from Erfurt that they could see more of him in his writings than in his physical
presence, just as in Paraclesis (1516) he had told Christians to meet Christ in
Scripture instead of going to touch His relics {LB VI, *4^).
Although a climax for Erasmianism in some ways, however, 1518-1519

brought no resolution of conflicts between it and the older intellectual and religious
forms; instead, battle on long-fought lines intensified. A surprisingly major worry
was criticism from Edward Lee. Erasmus' major letter to the intermediary Lips
( 843 ) suggests little in the content of this disagreement that did not go back through
the 1514-1515 exchange with Dorp (see CWE 3) — indeed the issues were
essentially still the ones addressed in Erasmus' 1 505 letter to Christopher Fisher
defending Valla ( letter 1 82, in C WE 2). The difference with Lee drags on through
these months' letters and beyond. Early in 1 5 1 9, basically more serious problems
arise, a series of attacks by Louvain theologians directly or indirectly threatening
the Collegium Trilingue, with which Erasmus was identified. The rather sudden
upsurge of menaces could seem to make Erasmus' whole achievement insecure:
repeatedly in early 1519 he portrays the good new studies as jeopardized (930,
936).
A letter of 1518 expresses a rather non-specific, floating sense that "a great
change in human affairs is under way, and there must be danger in it" (855: 78).
Luther's work, which was to affect powerfully Erasmus' affairs as well as
Europe's, first becomes a frequent topic in this volume's letters. The complexity of
Erasmus' attitude towards Luther becomes evident quickly. In the first place,
Erasmus expressed support especially for Luther's early writing on indulgences,
and still make favorable comments on Luther's ideas even as the latter' s conflict
with Rome developed greater impHcations (858, 872, 939, 947, 980). In May
1519 Erasmus expressed sympathy with "Luther's idea of liberty" (983: 1 1); as
Professor Oberman has pointed out, Humanists found common ground with
Lutherans in the idea of freedom from medieval ecclesiasticism, whereas the will's
bondage was later to appear clearly as the Lutheran certainty that Erasmus could
not accept {Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era, ed. Heiko Oberman,
Leiden: Brill, 1974, pp. 46ff.).
In the 1518-1519 letters, that intellectual opposition had not explicitly

developed; however, Erasmus (and Luther) already knew there was difference as
well as some sympathy and overlap between their positions (for Luther, cf. Allen,
introduction to letter 933). Specifically, Erasmus knew Luther's basis was not
"the ancient tongues and good writing and humane culture" (939: 57, 948: 96).
Luther notices that he is a stranger to the correspondences' sphere of stylistic
exactness and classical learning, as he comes into it for the first time in a letter of
March 1519 (933). Furthermore, Erasmus is highly critical not only of Luther's
intemperate, obscurantist opponents (939, 980, 983) but also of Luther's own
combativeness, because of its potential for disruption of Christendom (872, 947,
980, 983).
Beyond the sympathy and separateness Erasmus feels towards aspects of

Luther's thought and strategy, however, one more factor enters into his complete
response: namely, the commitment and fears for Christian Humanism that we
have seen him expressing in the rest of his letters. The old interpretation of
Erasmus' qualified response to Luther as merely timid (cf. e.g. Huizinga, p. 131)
missed the fact that he was defending something he deeply cared for, and which he
knew was not Luther's deep concern — also the fact that Erasmus' reform was
potentially, like Luther's, a radical and comprehensive new theology (cf. Charles
Trinkaus, "Erasmus, Augustine and the Nominalists," ARG 67 [1976], pp.
5032). Erasmus repeatedly expresses the fear not just that Luther will disrupt
Christendom but that he will provide more opposition to all kinds of reform and
thus make Erasmianworkmoredifficult(936, 948, 967, 980)— as in fact began to
happen soon after this volume's close. From Erasmus' point of view, Lutheranism
was shaping up as another problem like Reuchlinism: thought about which he had
reservations (like Reuchlin's interest in the Cabbala), tactics he deplored, a
hazard to the large program he himself was pursuing with determination and
sophistication (967). The volume ends before it had become clear that the
Lutheran problem, while it would remain theoretically aligned towards Erasmus
in the way outlined, would grow to have a much larger impact. We know that for
Erasmus an unending difficulty is beginning.
The large categories of Erasmus' concern in these letters, with Christian

Humanism and its intellectual and rehgious surroundings, have become the
categories of sixteenth-century intellectual history. An attraction of collected
letters, as Erasmus pointed out, is that in them concerns that have "gone public"
are set back into their original (and, for Humanists, most genuine) context, the
ethos of an individual (Allen, letter 1206, translated in Hillerbrand, Haworth, pp.
1-3). Undoubtedly the most entertaining letter in Volume Six is 867, in which the
Humanistic career goes forward through a mass of irrelevant, lively personal
experiences on the road from Basel back to Louvain. The character that may be
abstracted from the letters in general is first of all a determined and an extremely
energetic one. The achievements and controversies described earlier were efforts
made through a "black" year of illness (887). Erasmus' pace of work was not only
rapid, but unremitting: a correspondent corroborates our impression of "the
indefatigable energy with which you work" (932: 14).
Part of this energy could be otherwise analyzed as unease, and nervousness and
sensitivity certainly emerge here. Very little else emerges, indeed, in the long,
tedious correspondence with Budé: in substance, these letters consist almost
entirely of accusations about what you said about what I said about what you said.
Erasmus is working out left-over severe anxiety about his disagreement with
Lefevre {seeClVE 5). Untoward anxiety is also aroused by Edward Lee, after all
a very junior figure in relation to Erasmus.
Along with these symptoms of distortive nervous energy, however, there are
convincing images in these letters of a much more friendly nature. The letters keep
in touch with old friends, and recall happy personal scenes from years before
(868). Of course they respond favorably to praise; they also respond warmly.
Erasmus is not only gratified, but touched by the enthusiasm of Christoph
Eschenfelder, customs officer on the Rhine, who when he discovers he is meeting
Erasmus drags him home to be seen by wife, children and neighbors, and bribes the
boatmen with wine to make them tolerate the delay (867: 50ff.). Erasmus writes a
friendly letter back to him a few weeks after the encounter, teUing a good story
about the remarkable effects of Eschenfelder' s wine on the boatman's wife
(879).
The volume portrays not an untroubled but an ulfimately positive personality.

Through Erasmus' choices and in the midst of his other vicissitudes, Christian
Humanism develops to an important point and begins to undergo one of its greatest
stresses. Professors Mynors and Bietenholz transmit this material to us as
classical e/ocwr/o directs, clearly, aptly and elegantly. They are excellent students
and Humanistic imitators of Erasmus, and encourage us to imitate them.
JOHN F. McDIARMID, Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University
George M. Logan. The Meaning of More' s "Utopia." Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1983. Pp. xv, 296. $27.50.
In this boldly titled book, George Logan has set out to solve two of the most vexing
problems in Morean scholarship. What were More's intentions in writing Utopial
And what kind of work is it? Despite a plethora of studies in the many relevant
disciplines, More's Utopia has proven so resistant to even the most brilliant and
rigorous analyses to which it has been subjected that there is no agreement on a
solution for these (and other) problems. Professor Logan begins by telling us what
the Utopia is not. It is neither a. Jeu d'esprit nor a mirror of normative political
ideas, he claims. Nor is it to be viewed as satire, whether directed at England and/
or Europe or at itself, and, more particularly, its second book and its narrator,
Raphael Hythlodaeus. Logan is especially adamant in attacking the latter notion.
He takes issue, then, with the many literary critics (who are otherwise too diverse
in the critical principles they follow to be called a school in any formal sense)
who — aware of the incongruities, real and apparent, in the presentation and
substance of Utopia — have come to see the work, in part or whole, as undermining
the radical idealism that the Utopia, read at face value, seems to espouse. If this
view is followed to its logical conclusion, indeed, the Utopia becomes an anti-
Utopia. But how then can we interpret the cry for justice that animates the text?
For this and other reasons, Logan argues that we cannot understand Utopia
without understanding its context, by which he means Western poHtical theory.
And he ahgns himself with the ''humanistic" school of interpreters, that is, those
who are in some sense historical in their orientation. The most important such
interpreters, for his purposes, are J. H. Hexter, Edward Surtz, S. J., and Quentin
Skinner. But their assumptions and specific interpretations are often more diverse,
and more at odds with one another, than Logan altogether acknowledges. Both the
achievements and the limitations of his own study, then, partially depend upon the
degree to which he successfully modifies and integrates such different perspec-
tives with a more explicitly literary analysis of a text that he reads as a piece of
political theory. For Logan, in short, the Utopia is "a serious work of political
philosophy" (p. ix) that takes the strict form of a best-commonwealth exercise and
"deserves a place among the most advanced and creative political writings of its
era" (p. x).
Logan rightly insists upon reading "consecutively" (p. x) in developing his case,
and he treats the three parts of Utopia in the order in which More arranged them.
Chapter One is devoted to the too-frequently ignored prefatory letter to Peter
Giles, viewed as an introduction to the whole work. Logan points to puzzlements
with respect to chronology, etc., and sketches some of the many questions the text
raises about its matter, order, style, and purpose. He also acknowledges the
peculiar mode of the work, noting how the latter both calls attention to itself as
fiction and mocks itself, an observation that could have been pursued, since it
raises questions about the idea of Utopia as political philosophy that are not
wholly worked out. But Logan's major concern, a crucial one, is to clarify Utopia's
original audience. This is characterized as humanists, that is, "sophisticated
literary scholars" (p. 23) who shared More's ideas and concerns. It follows, for
Logan, that Utopia cannot be a speculum principis, for it would be absurd to
imagine More offering "a disguised rehash of humanist prescriptions" (p. 26) to
such an audience. The point is valid so far as it goes, but Logan's sense of audience
seems to me too narrow. Most of More's fellow humanists were administrators as
well as literary scholars: Peter Giles was secretary of Antwerp and the title-page
of the Utopia identifies More as a citizen and sheriff of London. Additionally,
More wrote to Erasmus in September, 1516, asking him to obtain letters of
support from well-placed statesmen as well as intellectuals. It seems, then, that the
Utopia was intended for persons with first-hand experience with problems of
governance in an autocratic and power-hungry period. This is a point with far-
reaching implications; for Logan, the Utopia is an abstract and rigorous intel-
lectual construct, rationally following its own premises independent of the con-
temporaneous situation, whereas I think More expected readers who would bring
a strong sense of political and social actualities to a work which impresses, in part,
by its feignings and concreteness.
Logan's second chapter juxtaposes sections treating portions of the dialogue in

Book I with sections where political theories are described at length. The con-
nections between foreground and background are not always obvious, especially
when the proof offered is more speculative than textual. But Logan's sense of
More's "systemic" or liolistic view of society and his concern with the methods
More used are salutory. Arguing that More anticipated modern model theory, he
turns to Renaissance theorists in Northern Italy and to classical political thinkers
to explain More' s preoccupation. He divides the former into two groups, the pre-
humanists, who stressed the need for the virtuous citizen, and the scholastics, who
stressed the good institution and the machinery of government, and he maintains
that Hythlodaeus has affinities with the latter. I am not convinced by this apparent
parallel, since it is not clear that public interest meant the same thing to both
parties and since the particular system that Hythlodaeus describes seems quite
opposite to the political model assumed in Italy, where class structure remained
and factions were controlled, not eliminated. In any case, Logan admits that there
is no real evidence for More' s famiharity with these Italian theorists. He does,
however, argue for the influence of Greek and Roman political theorists, whom he
divides into two groups: one, rhetorical, Roman, and Stoic, he portrays as in-
fluencing the early humanists; the other philosophical, Platonic, and Aristotelian,
as influencing the scholastics. Asking the crucial question — what is the best form
of the polis — this second tradition led to the city-state preoccupations of the
Italian humanists. By contrast, the Northern humanists remained true to a Stoic
and normative point of view. But such distinctions, it appears, are broken down in
the course of Utopia. For Logan argues that More is trying "to fuse humanist and
scholastic political theory" and to grapple with the classical works behind them ( p.
94). The conclusion he draws is twofold. On the one hand, he remarks that More is
less original than he is usually viewed. On the other, he grants that More signi-
ficantly deviates from this classical pattern of political analysis. Unlike the
Greeks, in other words. More is interested in testing the experiment and in the use
of imaginative models. And he is preoccupied with the question of what is
expedient and what is moral. These differences seem to me even more radical than
they do to Logan. In fact, I think that one of the most important contributions this
chapter makes is its repeated recognition of More' s vital concern with the relation-
ship between honestas and utilitas.
When he comes to Book II oï Utopia, Logan abandons his consecutive reading,

choosing instead to define and discuss the constituents of the best-commonwealth
exercise that, he believes. More is both replicating and criticizing in his Utopian
republic. Logan identifies four steps in this exercise, which finds its prototypes in
Herodotus, Plato's Republic andLaw^, and Aristotle's Politics, and has "at its
core the conception of the polis as a system of reciprocally- affecting parts" (p.
132). Step 1 is the determination of the best life for the individual; step 2, the
overall goal of the commonwealth; step 3, the elaboration of the component parts;
and step 4, the forms these must take (p. 136). We could recognize this pattern
immediately, Logan maintains, were it not for the form More adopted. By sub-
stituting a model for Greek dialectics and by presenting that model "as a fictional
travelogue" (p. 139) More has doubly suppressed or disguised his dialectical
substructure and reorganized his topics "for the rather different order ( or disorder)
of the traveler's tale" (p. 1 40). Logan subsequently recreates the "cornerstone" or
step 1 of More's model, namely Utopia's moral philosophy. This philosophy of
virtuous pleasure (or pleasurable virtue) is inherently paradoxical. Logan grants
this, but aims to reduce it to a "logical sequence" (p. 147). It seems to me that he
has paraphrased its constituent parts instead, for as paradox it often relies on
verbal sleights and errors in logic. To put this another way, not only is Utopia's
Epicureanism ''contaminated" (p. 155) by Stoicism; it is radically altered by
concealed Platonic and Christian concepts that could lead us to ask what
Epicureanism comes to mean in Utopia. I am, then, less convinced than Logan is
that "purely rational considerations" (p. 180) operate here (or at those points in
Book II where More seems to be creating red herrings), although I would agree
that this section of Utopia is central to our understanding of what Utopia is.
Logan further argues that "the main aspects of the Utopian constitution" follow
from Utopian conclusions about the best life (p. 1 82) and that a// the substantial
features of Utopia are related to the section on moral philosophy (p. 185). He
insists, then, that there is no necessary connection between England (or Europe)
and Utopia: only in "indifferent features" (p. 193) may the two agree, as in the
case of Utopia's location in the new world. Here and elsewhere I think Logan
discounts evidence, both intrinsic and extrinsic, regarding relationships (which
are sometimes inverted or reversed mirror-images) between the actual world and
More's fictive one. Utopia's geography is deliberately antipodean, and Erasmus'
point (in his letter to Ulrich von Hutten) about More's writing Utopia with the
English constitution in mind deserves consideration, as do the marginal glosses.
But if Logan is not much interested in the details of life in Utopia or in the nature of
Utopian negation, and virtually ignores the first half of Book II, he does not ignore
the unpleasant aspects of this state, wrestling, for example, with the thorny
problems of war and foreign policy. Admitting that these are unsolved (and
perhaps unsolvable), he sees them as the logical result of More's best-common-
wealth exercise. He argues, too, that More is well aware of the tensions between
Utopian values and Utopian actions; national security and the need to equalize
pleasure collide, as do the goals of freedom and stability (and this explains
Utopia's repressiveness). His own final view of Utopia is double. As a best-
commonwealth exercise of "unprecedented sophistication" (p. 248) it is, he says,
both " a protest against the ideas of secular theorists" and " a corrective to the naive
optimism" of More's fellow Christian humanists (p. 249). It is deeply indebted to
classical political theory, and is preeminently a product of Renaissance humanism.
But it cannot be read as prescriptive theory. Rather, it is a thoughtful critique of
humanistic ideals and an attack upon realpolitisch tendencies.
This is an ambitious interpretation of a perplexing text, and it would be Utopian

indeed to expect complete agreement from any one reader. I find More's Utopia a
much funnier (though no less serious) work than Logan does, and accordingly
would interpret individual passages rather differently. I worry about his tendency
to treat the fictive elements as so much sugar-coating; like other aspects of the
work, the aesthetic too is unusually sophisticated and accomplished. And I would
urge a much less restrictive sense of context; More's intentions, I believe, were
more complex, and the resulting work more protean, flexible, and fully imagined
and felt than the one portrayed here. But The Meaning of More's "Utopia " is a
significant exploration of theoretical political aspects. Bringing an enormous
amount of material to bear upon our understanding of Utopia, it reopens funda-
mental issues that much recent criticism has evaded. Logan's concern for a
historical perspective and his determination to redress readings that may trivialize
or otherwise diminish a major work impress, as does his willingness to tackle the
truly tough, central questions. And I would agree that a "primary purpose of
Utopia was to stimulate political thought" (p. 252), or, more particularly, to
exercise the mind, imagination, and moral sense of the reader on the question of
the best commonwealth.
ELIZABETH McCUTCHEON, University of Hawaii
News / Nouvelles
CSRS - A Call for Papers for Montreal, 1985
At the General Meeting we decided on the following broad areas for sessions
our meetings at the University of Montreal in the spring of 1 985 . The deadline foJ
the submission of papers is February 1 . The subjects proposed for the informal
discussions and papers are: Pierre Ronsard, The Historical Imagination, Sym-
posia on Major Research Projects in Canada, Open Topics.
Members are urged to submit proposals or suggestions for papers, colloquia,

or panels exploring different aspects of the suggested topics. In particular, sug-
gestions are invited for sessions involving several participants who will either
present position papers, or otherwise act as respondents or collaborate in their
approaches to a topic. Members are also asked to make suggestions for a guest
speaker who might be invited to speak on an appropriate topic. Proposals should
be sent to: Robert Melançon, Etudes françaises et littérature comparée,
University of Montreal, P.O. Box 6128, Station A, MONTREAL, (Québec),
H3C 3J7
SCER- Un appel pour des communications, Montreal, 1985
A l'Assemblée générale nous avons décidé d'adopter certain grands sujets pour les
sessions lors de nos rencontres au printemps de 1985 à l'Université de Montréal.
La date limite pour présenter des communications est le l^"" février. Les sujets de
communications pour nos réunions seront: Pierre Ronsard, L'Imagination
historique. Symposiums sur de grands projets de recherches au Canada, Sujets
divers.
Nos membres sont invités à soumettre des propositions ou des suggestions

pour les conférences, les colloques, ou les tables rondes afin d'explorer les diffé-
rents aspects des sujets suggérés. En particulier, nous voulons des suggestions de
sessions qui impliqueront plusiers participants. Ceux-ci présenteront des con-
férences ou, autrement, ils agiront de discussion. Les membres sont aussi priés d<
proposer le nom d'un conférencier qui pourrait traiter d'un sujet approprié. TouU
proposition devrait être envoyée à:
Robert Melançon, Études françaises et littérature comparée. Université d<

Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale A, MONTREAL, (Québec), H3C 3J7
RSA Annual Meeting
The Renaissance Conference of Southern California will be host to the annua

meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, March 21-23, 1985 at th
Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. Seventy
five papers on the Itahan and Northern Renaissance will be presented in a variet
of sessions. Evening events will include a Renaissance banquet at Occidents
College, Los Angeles, and a reception and gallery exhibit at the J. Paul Gett
Museum, Malibu. The Conference will feature the RSA interdiscipUnary pane
the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture, and the Francis Bacon Foundatio,
Lecture. For further information write to Wendy Furman, Secretary TreasureiL
Renaissance Conference of Southern California, Whittier College, WhittieiP
California 90608. "^
RenaissancB 1^
and
Reformation
>r» * - ^ *■!
^/5 is» «^
^5
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RenaissaWâe
et
Réforme
Pêw Series, Vol. IX, No. 2

hi

May 1985 mai
Ik
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme is published quarterly (February, May,

August, and November); parait quatre fois l'an (février, mai, août, et novembre).
(CSRS / SCER)
North Central Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (NCC)
Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference (PNWRC)
Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC)
Victoria University Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS). 1985.
Editor
R.W. Van Fossen

Directeur Adjoint
Claude Sutto (Université de Montréal)
Book Review Editor

Thomas Martone
Responsable de la rubrique des livres

Pierre-Louis Vaillancourt (Université de Montréal)
Managing Editor
Glenn Loney
Editorial Board/Comité de rédaction
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Renaissance
and
Reformation
Renaissance
et
Réforme

Old Series, Vol. XXL No. 2
1985

Contents / Sommaire
ARTICLES
19- to 3
Towards a Study of the Tamiglia' of the Sforza court at Pesaro
by Sabine Eiche
104
La Description de la nouveauté dans les récits
de voyage de Cartier et de Rabelais
par Jean-Phillipe Beaulieu
111
Daniel, Rainolde, Demonsthenes,
and the Degree Speech of Shakespeare's Ulysses
by Clifford J. Ronan
119
Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto.
A Comparative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics,
reviewed by Madison U. Sowell.
121
Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke:

Spenser and the Structures of Discourse,
reviewed by G.L. Teskey
129
Jacques Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal
en France à la fin du moyen âge,
compte rendu par Suzanne Gaumond
131-
Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland,

reviewed by Konrad Eisenbichler
134
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety.
Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England,
reviewed by James F. Ccx)per, Jr.
137
Joyce Main Hanks, Ronsard and Biblical Tradition,
reviewed by Thomas Thomson
139
The Entry of Henri II into Paris 16 June 1549,
introduction and notes by I.D. McFarlane,
reviewed by Nigel G. Brooks
142
R. V. Young, Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age,
reviewed by Antony Raspa
144
Jules Brody, Lectures de Montaigne,
compte rendu par François Paré
147
Brian Tiemey, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought,
1150-1650,
reviewed by Gary J. Nederman
150
Pierre- Victor Palma-Cayet, L 'Histoire Prodigieuse du Docteur Fauste,
introduction et notes par Yves Cazaux,
reviewed by Ellen S. Ginsberg
152
Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney's Arcadia,
reviewed by Margaret Smart
154
The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland:
Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson,
ed. Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw,
reviewed by Thomas F. Mayer
NEWS / NOUVELLES
Towards a Study of the 'Famiglia'

of the Sforza Court at Pesaro
SABINE EICHE
In recent years, scholars of the Italian Renaissance have revived an

interest in the social customs of the period, directed towards a better
understanding and evaluation of the modes of Ufe of the Renaissance
individual. Contemporary biographies, diaries and correspondence, as
well as account books and inventories, which already had greatly stimu-
lated the curiosity of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pre-
decessors in the fîeld, are once again being assiduously studied and
gleaned for insights.
Another potential tool for these investigations has been overlooked

more often dian not: the structure of a courtly household, thefamiglia.^ It
should be said at this point that the iermfamiglia was an elastic one in the
period under consideration, and that as a result its precise meaning in a
given context is not always immediately clear to the modem reader. With
reference to a courtly establishment such as that in Milan, Ferrara,
Mantua, Urbino, Pesaro, and so forth, the ûûefamiglia describes not only
the family and relatives of the lord, but also the attendants, and will be used
by me in the sense of all those who served the lord.
Thefamiglia, then, was composed of staff", who assisted thesignore in

the running of his state, and of domestics, whose concern was the lord's
personal well-being. The size and complexity of afamiglia depended on
the political and economic rank of the court, but a basic framework will
have been common to most. From the types offamigliari employed we can
gain an idea of the administrative policies of the ruler, of his activities and
social pretensions. The relationship between thefamiglia and the lord was
effective in both directions; that is, just as they served him, so he too had
certain obligations on their behalf. Therefore, by studying the household,
we can also learn something about how the court, in the narrower sense of
the palace, functioned as a domestic unit.
The list offamigliari serving at the Pesaro court in the fifteenth century
was compiled by me from a variety of sources (see Appendix below). Quite
different and more fortunate is the situation in neighbouring Urbino. At the
beginning of the sixteenth century, a page who had once been in the employ
of Federigo da Montefeltro, made a list of the former Duke' s famiglia , the
names arranged under the headings of the appropriate offices.^ Probably
not all two hundred members noted by the page were in service at the same
time; and the same applies to a chronicler's statement thatLo Ill.o Signor
Duca Federico Feltrio Duca d'Urbino . . . teneva alii serviti sui, bocche
No. 800 . . . ^ The Pesaro list covers an even wider time span than that of
Urbino (the Sforza ruled in Pesaro 1445-1512; Federigo was lord of
Urbino from 1444-82), and thus cannot reflect the actual structure of the
court at any specific moment. It is ahnost certainly incomplete, since we
can expect that documents which I have not yet had the chance to examine
will reveal still more names. Nevertheless, for reasons pertaining mainly to
the financial and political standing of the court, the Pesaro register, for the
period of any one of its Sforza signori, will always be surpassed by that of
Urbino.
Names and titles are little more than statistics until we know something
about the duties of thefamigliari. Once again Urbino enters into the
picture, for there survives from the Renaissance an enlightening treatise
entitled Ordini et ojjïtij alla corte del Serenissimo Signor Duca
d*Urbino.* The author, who remains anonymous although he must have
been one of Federigo's court, painstakingly describes the responsibiUties
of various functionaries, mainly domestic, down to details concerning their
personal hygiene. The states of Urbino and Pesaro were structured similarly
and were closely linked, not only geographically and politically, but also
through inter-marriages, and therefore in an examination of the Sforza
court we can safely be guided by some of the instructions written down in
the Ordini et offitij of Urbino.
Before embarking on a discussion of the Fesaxofamiglia , it will be useful

to introduce the court by way of a historical sketch of the town and its
rulers.^ A port on the Adriatic to the south of Rimini, Pesaro had been a
free commune since the late twelfth century. From the late thirteenth until
mid-fifteenth centuries, the town was ruled by a branch of the Malatesta
family, first in the guise of Podestà, and then as Papal Vicars. In 1445 the
inept Galeazzo Malatesta sold the town to Francesco Sforza on the
condition that Francesco's brother, Alessandro, just married to Galeazzo's
granddaughter, Costanza Varano, be installed as a ruler. The negotiation
was in fact highly irregular, since Pesaro was a vicariate of the Church, and
it resulted in Pope Eugenius IV excommunicating all parties to the
contract. But Alessandro, determined not to relinquish his newly acquired
state, persevered and in 1447 Eugenius's successor, Nicholas V, removed
the ban and appointed him Papal Vicar.
Alessandro's wife, Costanza, died that same year, leaving him with two
children, Battista (future Countess of Urbino) and Costanzo, who were to
be his only legitimate offspring. In 1448 he married again, choosing Sveva
da Montefeltro, half-sister of Federigo, Count of Urbino. The alliance was
disastrous and after a few years ended as so many did, with the wife seeking
refuge in a convent
Like his father and brother, Alessandro was a professional soldier, an

occupation that denoted long absences from home. While his two consorts
were at the court, they could take care of whatever matters, state or
otherwise, appeared on the agenda.^ By 1457 Sveva had fled, and the
responsibility devolved upon Alessandro' s son, ably guided during the
early years by members of the staff.
Costanzo became Signore of Pesaro after Alessandro died in 1473.

Two years later he contracted a brilliant marriage with Camilla d'Aragona,
niece of King Ferdinando of Naples. Costanzo outlived his father by only
ten years, and, having no legitimate children, was succeeded to the rule by
his bastard son, Giovanni. Camilla, by many accounts a wise and chari-
table stepmother, shared the government of the town with Giovanni until
he attained his majority in 1489. In May 1490, when he married Mad-
dalena Gonzaga, Camilla left the court forever, withdrawing to the estate
of Torricella, near Parma.
Giovanni married three times, his second union ( 1493-97) being the ill-
fated one to Lucrezia Borgia. In October of 1500 he temporarily lost his
state to his former brother-in-law, Cesare Borgia, but with the assistance of
Venice was back in power in 1503. Giovanni ruled without further inter-
ruptions until his death in 1510.
The new Lord was the infant Costanzo II, a son Giovanni had with his
third wife, the Venetian Ginevra Tiepolo. According to the terms of his
will, Giovanni's natural brother, Galeazzo, was to be appointed regent
until Costanzo II was of age. The heir, however, died within two years of
his father's demise, after which Galeazzo prepared to assume power in his
own name. But Pope Julius II, long interested in Pesaro, bought out
Galeazzo, and added the town to the dominions of his nephew, Francesco
Maria della Rovere, for whom he had already previously ( 1 504) managed
to secure the succession to the Dukedom of Urbino.
By the time Alessandro Sforza ruled the town, the government of Pesaro
can be described as a co-operative effort between the commune and the
lord. Two councils, the consiglio générale and the consiglio di credenza
(of nobles), constituted the main bodies of communal authority. The lord
of Pesaro for his part, invested with the rule as Papal Vicar, governed in the
name of the Church, at least in theory if not always in deed. However, clear
distinction between communal and vicarial/seigneurial power is not in fact
possible since the lord, if and when he chose, could have regulated the size,
and therefore the executive potential, of the two municipal councils. Fur-
thermore, and the situation is not peculiar to Pesaro, an officer of the
commune could at the same time have been in the employment of the
signore.'' Thus it is not surprising to learn that the lord could intervene even
in the appointment of municipal servants.*
When compared to the organization of the administrative offices of the

Duchy of Milan, the relative simplicity of the personnel at Pesaro is clearly
indicative of the court's secondary role in the political structure of
fifteenth-century Italy.^ The staff* assisting the ruler of Pesaro in running
his state was headed by three ministers: the luogotenente, the segretario or
cancelliere, and the referendario. ^^ The auditore, who counselled and had
jurisdictional powers, also will have been an important functionary. Ap-
pointments do not seem to have been restrictive, for we read in the docu-
ments that an individual could serve in more than one high capacity
simultaneously; and in at least two instances the Sforza's personal doctor
performed ministerial duties: Benedetto Reguardati da Norcia was phy-
sician and luogotenente of Alessandro, and Giovanni's doctor, Bernardo
Monaldi, was also his segretario^ not to mention occasional agent in
Venice.
Essentially the signore's principal representative, the luogotenente ob-

viously had to be someone ftilly in the ruler's confidence. If satisfactory, he
held his post for a long time and could survive a change of signori. For
instance, the name of Niccolô della Palude is encountered frequently in the
documents, first serving Alessandro, then Costanzo. Being one of high
rank in the lord' s famiglia, the luogotenente was clothed and housed by his
employer. ^ Mn a debit account of Alessandro' s we can read that he had paid
two lire, ten soldi, to a shoemaker for Niccolô' s boots, and ftirther down in
the same list is an entry amounting to twenty lire that he had given for
clothes for Niccolô and Angelo (de Probis d'Atri, segretario ?). Niccolô
lived in a room iuxta camera domicellarum of the Sforza residence. ^^
Giovanni's luogotenente, Dulcius, still had his quarters in the ruler's
palace, but by the time of Guidobaldo della Rovere, in the mid-sixteenth
century, the Duke's luogotenente was assigned rooms in the newly con-
structed Palazzo Comunale.^^
Cancellieri, and the segretario, a superior cancelliere, handled cor-

respondence and related matters. As the Urbino Ordini et offitij tells us,
such officers should be pochU pratichi, boni, svfficienti et fidelissimi
quantopiù sepossessedire, Tht segretario kept the seal, which could also
be delegated to a trusted cancelliere. Letters sent fi-om the court did not
leave without being checked by him, and he kept and filed incoming
correspondence per modo che omne una, per minima, bisognando se
retrovasse.^* Giovanni, in his will, echoes some of these recommenda-
tions: Item voglio, che tutte le expeditioni importante del Stato, passino
per mano de* Turricella (his segretario/cancelliere), et che sotto lui se

toglia uno Cancelliero per le expeditioni occorenti, le quai tutte si
habbiano ad expedire seconda Vordine et commissione di mio Fratello
(Galeazzo).*^
The referendario (sometimes called re v/ôre), third of the three top state
officials, administered the finances.^* Helping him and the cancellieri in
the execution of their duties were the computista, cassiero, avvocato
fiscale, scrittore, depositario, tesoriere, and maestro delle entrate.
Many of the officials engaged in state affairs had their working quarters
in the palace. The cancelleria of the Pesaro court initially was located on
the ground floor of the Sforza palace, near the entrance portico. By the
early sixteenth century it had been moved to the upper storey of the
residence, although still in the front wing, into the former music room. Near
the ground floor cancelleria was the audientia of the referendario. It was
most efficient to have the offices of the staff concentrated in one part of the
palace, but the Pesaro residence, unlike that of Federigo da Montefeltro,
was not built anew with few restrictions, and thus never achieved the ideal
organization of spaces prescribed by Renaissance architectural theorists.
In fact, documents reveal that in the 1 450's the room of the computista , at
that time the Florentine Giovanni Battista dell'Antella, was in the rear
wing of the residence, on an upper floor, close to the private apartment of
the young Costanzo Sforza.*^
A courtly staff was not limited to internal functionaries; important roles
were played also by the oratori, or ambassadors, in foreign centres. They
served primarily as diplomats and informers. We know that Alessandro
had a man, Roberto Ondedei, in Venice; Costanzo sent Domenico di
Barignano and Giacomo Probo d' Atria to Rome as oratori; Giovanni as
well kept ambassadors at those two courts, and also in Milan. Like the
luogotenente, the ambassadors were men of the utmost confidence, so that
when they served well, they served long. Or, as Giovanni phrased it in his
will: Item si mantenga sempre un * Ambasciadore résidente in Roma il
quale per esserestatofedele, et haver diligentemente servito, non mi pare,
se habbia ad mutare}*
Before turning from state to domestic officials, reference should be made

to the Sforza' s other occupation as mercenary soldiers. It was a profession
that in time of war required the maintenance of a large retinue of men-at-
arms. When Alessandro was hired by the Venetian Republic in 1 467, it is
said that his contract stipulated 600 calvary and 2,000 infantry.*' Top
officers were chosen from among the Sforza intimates. Costanzo, for
instance, selected as two of his capi di squadra or squadreri, Niccolô di
Barignano, his segretario , and Raniero Almerici, equitis, who in 1 468 had
been created Count Palatine, probably at the urging of Alessandro.
The Sforza court employed a large body of personnel, whose tasks ran
from the purely banal to the intellectual and spiritual. Household chores,
for example the putting in order of rooms in the morning, were carried out
by massari, as we can read in a letter of 1457 reporting on a domestic
crisis. ^° Their status cannot have been too low, however, for as is written in
another letter of 1 45 8 directed by Pier Sante da Samano to the Duchess of
Milan, the twelve-year-old Battista during her father's absence from the
court was attended by numerous ladies-in-waiting and massare da bene}^
A variety of servants were occupied with the preparation and serving of

food at court The Urbino Ordini et offitij recommended separate cooks
for thefamiglia, the guests, and the lord. We cannot be certain that the
Sforza followed the prescribed arrangement since the documents found to
date are virtually silent on this aspect of daily life at the court. The name of
only one cook, Giovanni di Pietro alias Riccio del fu Scaramuccia di
Torricella parmense, serving in 1493, has come to Hght. The only other
information we have is that the kitchens in the Sforza residence were
located below ground level." To inspect these quarters in the morning and
at night was the duty of the scalco or siniscalco , who had to ensure that the
lord was served according to his tastes. All matters pertaining to the lord's
table were his responsibility. The scalco was rated superior to all other
servants, with the exception of the maestro dicasa, ragioniere, andfattore
générale, this latter in charge of the numerous country estates." Revealing
for the confidential position of the scalco is a remark by the above men-
tioned Pier Sante in the same letter of 1 45 8: for the six-month period when
Alessandro was away on a mission to France and the Netherlands, Marco
Monaldi, his scalco , was the one who had la cura principale de Constantio
ad ogni ora . Benedetto Reguardati da Norcia confirms this when he writes,
likewise in a letter of 1458 to the Duchess of Milan: Persuo (Costanzo's)
gubemo sta Marco Monaldi scalco. ^^ The eleven-year-old Costanzo at
the same time had his own personal scalco, Francesco de maestro
Angelo.
Assisting the scalco at the table was the credenziere, who saw to it that
the silver and table linens were impeccably clean. He furthermore had to
guard the silver and other precious things consigned to his care by the
maestro di casa, scalco and maestro di guardaroba. In view of his extra
duty as watchman, it was suggested that he live in a conveniently located
room in the palace."
A splendid picture of the ritual at table can be gained from the descrip-
tion of Costanzo's wedding celebrations in 1475. At the banquet, two
siniscalchi, in this case the young relatives Carlo Sforza and Ercole
Bentivoglio, were deputed to the head table. Each carried a golden baton to
mark his elevated status among the attendants, and brought to the seated
guests a golden basket filled with cutlery and napkins. Thirty garzoni and
servitori helped the siniscalchi to wait^*
On the occasion of such great feasts, and at times also for more ordinary
events, musicians, singers and dancers would entertain. Costanzo's
wedding meal was enlivened by pijferi, trombetti, tamburini, an organist
and thirty-six singers." History has remembered the names of only two
fifteenth-century ballerini at the court of Pesaro. Guglielmo ebreo was
choreographer of the dances at Alessandro's wedding in December 1 444,
and later in 1463 he dedicated a dance treatise to Galeazzo Maria Sforza
of Milan. The services rendered at Pesaro by the second ballerino,
Giovanni Ambrogio, are not known, although a treatise by him figures in
the Sforza library inventory drawn up in 1 500. A letter written in 1 466 by
Giovanni Ambrogio reveals that shortly before that date he had come from
the court of Milan to that of Naples to instruct the young Eleonora
d'Aragonaa/o ballare lombardi.^^
Valet of the signore was the cameriere maggiore, assisting him to dress
and undress, and ascertaining that everything in the lord's room was to his
satisfaction. Should the signore decide to wear jewels, the cameriere
maggiore was held responsible for their safety until they were restored to
their place in the guardaroba .^^
The Urbino Ordini et qffîtij laid great stress on cleanliness and hygien-
ics, and one of the people engaged to maintain the desired standard at court
was the barbiere. Whereas the barber ofthefamiglia was required to be
able to pull teeth and treat cirrhosis, the personal barber of the lord, uno
giovene pulito, discreto, concerned himself with washing the hair of the
pages, or of anyone else sent to him by the signore. He had to make sure
that the cloths designated for use by the lord were kept white and clean, and
the razors and other instruments in good working order. It was recom-
mended that he have a shop in the palace, and in the case of Alessandro we
know that his barbiere was assigned a room on the courtyard of the
residence.^®
The maggiordomo, or maestro di casa, oversaw the entire domestic

staff. Representing the authority of his master, he had to ensure that all the
lord's orders were carried out. Accordingly, he was to be given a room in
the palace in honorato loco, dove el discorso de tucto sia facillissimo ?^
Administering to the religious needs at court was the cappellano. We

learn from the letter of Pier Sante, describing the situation at Pesaro during
Alessandro's extended absence, that the young Battista and Costanzo had
el capellano che ogni di gli dice messa in casa. ^^ When necessary the
chaplain could also act as confessor. Regarding Alessandro, this service
would not have been required after 1 470 because on 29 May of that year he
had been granted SiBolla con uno breve apostolica depossere hautre dui
confessori religiosi apresso se.^^ The cappellano was fiirthermore m-
structed to give the maestro di casa and the scalco two days notice of tucte
le vigilie comandate et quatro tempore et quaresima.^*
An essential member of the famiglia was the humanist tutor. Instead of

sending his children to be educated at a foreign court, such as that of
Ferrara where he himself as a young boy had attended classes, Alessandro
hired grammar masters to instruct Battista and Costanzo at home. One of
these was Matteo da Sassoferrato, father of the famous Pandolfo Col-
lenuccio. Perhaps Matteo, also trained as a notary andcancelliere, did not
possess all the himianistic skills desired by Alessandro, since in 1459
when the children had reached the ages of twelve and thirteen he replaced
him with the more illustrious Martino Filetico, pupil of Guarino Guarini.
Like the Montefeltro, the Sforza of Pesaro owned a notable collection of

manuscripts and employed a librarian to take care of them. Vespasiano da
Bisticci, in his biography of Alessandro, wrote that he had uno uomo
dotissimo con buona provisione sopra questa libreria?^ It is the only
mention I have found to date of the Sforza librarian, and not even his name
is known to us. A chapter in the Ordini et offîtij outiining the librarian's
responsibilities can also serve to shed light on the Sforza man's daily
routine. Besides keeping an inventory of all the manuscripts, and a record
of those lent out, the bibliotecario was required to shelve the works
according to an orderly system so that any manuscript would always be
easy to locate. He should endeavour to prevent thefts, of which there was
always the danger when many people (multitudine) thronged in the lib-
rary. The manuscripts were to be guarded from the silly, the ignorant, the
filthy and the disgusting. Care was to be taken that no one creased pages or
turned back to the same page too often, et, quando se mustrano a persona
ignorante che per curiosità li volesse vedere, se non è di troppo auctorità,
basta una ochiata^^
Federigo da Montefeltro maintained a team of scribes and illuminators,

but there is no evidence that Alessandro did the same. Probably he had to
content himself with commissioning artists at foreign courts to produce the
manuscripts for him. It is not until the time of Costanzo that we encounter
the name of sicopista at court, and it is still unclear if he was alone or part of
a workshop."
Housing Federigo's Hbrary in the palace at Urbino was a room of

modest dimensions, located at ground level between the entrance vesti-
bule and the stairs to the upper storey.'* Also Alessandro built a library in
his town palace, but it does not survive and once again Vespasiano's words
remain the only reference to its appearance: . . .fecefare uno degnissimo
luogo nel suo palagio con armarii intomo dove erano per ordine tutti
quegli libri?^ Further evidence for concluding that the design and organ-
ization of the Sforza library must have been admirable is provided by a
letter that Vespasiano addressed to Alessandro, requesting his highly-
valued opinion on a new arrangement of the Medici library.*® We cannot
be absolutely sure of the room's location in the Sforza palace, but I have
li
proposed elsewhere, on the basis of a late fifteenth- century document, that

already from the time of Alessandro the library had been one of the rooms
overlooking the garden near S.Agata/^
Another part of the famiglia was occupied with construction and repair
work at the court. Under the heading oïlngegneri, etArchitetti the Urbino
Ust proudly includes Luciano da Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio, two
names difficult to surpass in the 1460' s and MTO's.'*^ Although Alessan-
dro sometimes requested Laurana' s intervention in building projects at
Pesaro, he never engaged him as court architect '^^ The situation changed
with Alessandro's son. From 1476 until his death in 1479, Laurana, who
by then had left Urbino, figures in the documents as the engineer of
Costanzo Sforza. It is to him that the design of the Rocca Costanza is
attributed, the most important construction underway in Pesaro during
those years. Cherubino di Milano was another of Costanzo' s engineers,
and he continued to work for Giovanni. A document of 1 492 describes him
as the superintendent of all work on fortifications, bridges, roads, dams,
etc.
Finally, a word can be said about the recruitment of individuals for the
household. In at least two instances, that of Francesco Becci and that of
Marco Citara, we know that the servants had been merchants prior to their
employment at court. Although to us such social mobility may suggest an
enUghtened tolerance, the procedure could have been simply the most
expedient way of satisfying a need. The names of thefamigliari at the
Sforza court reveal that often members of the same family continued to
serve for more than one generation, or that more than one individual of the
same generation was engaged. In this regard, the most prominent family
was that of the Ahnerici, who could boast at least six famigliari at the
court, and who remained one of the most important aristocratic families of
the town long after the Sforza had died out.
The purpose of this essay has been twofold. On the one hand, I have tried
to indicate the useftilness of studying the organization of a noble house-
hold, in the hope of encouraging similar examinations for other Italian
courts. Furthermore, with the focus on Pesaro, I have wanted to begin to
remove some of the obscurity that shrouds so many aspects of Renaissance
life in that town, and to stimulate the search for more documents which
would broaden and clarify our picture of the Sforza court
Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence
Notes
1 Cardinal'syàmi^/ze, on the other hand, have received considerable attention; see, for instance, A.
Paravicini Bagliani, Cardinali di Curia e "Familiae" cardinalizie . . . 1227-54, 2 vols., Padua
1972, especially pp.443-516; N. Zacour, "Papal Regulations of Cardinals' Households in the
Fourteenth Century," Speculum, (1975), pp. 434-55; K. Weil-Garris and J.F. D'Amico, The
Renaissance Cardinal's Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Cortesi'sDe Cardinalatu, Rome, 1980;
ly Aim\co,Renaisance Humanism in Papal Rome, Baltimore, 1983, pp.3 8flF. An examination of a
royal household, but primarily from the administrational point of view is included by A. Ryder, The
Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnanimous, Oxford, 1 976, pp.54-90. Some stirrings of
interest in die functions of a Renaissance courtly household can be found in W. Gundersheimer,
Ferrara, Princeton, 1973, pp.5 Iff, 285-96. An excellent and stimulating account of noble house-
holds, but in England rather than Italy, is in M. Girouard,L(^ in the English Country House, New
Haven, 1978.
2 Vatican Library cod. Urb. lat. 1 204,Memoriafelicissima deU'illustrissimo signorduca Federico

e delta suafamiglia che tenea, cc.97v ff. The author is Susech of Casteldurante. G. Zannoni
pubUshed it, but not without mistakes, in Scrittori cortegiani dei Montefeltro, Rome 1 894, pp.80-
85; the errors are corrected by L. Venturi in "Studi sul Palazzo Ducsie," L'Arte vol. 17,1914, pp.
470-71 . Also G, Ermini printed it, as the Appendix to his publication of the Vatican Library cod.
Urb. lat. 1248, Ordini et offttij alia corte del Serenissimo SignorDuca d'Urbino, Urbino 1932.
See also C.H. Clough, "Federigo da Montefeltro's Patronage of the Arts, 1 468-82," /ottma/ of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vo\M, 1973, pp. 131-32 and n. 17. At the Cowve^/iorfj
studi su Federico da Montefeltro, Urbino 3-8 October 1 982, P. Peruzzi delivered a paper entitled
"Ordine et officij: lavorare a Corte," stressing the poUtical significance of the household. A list of
court officials exists also for Ferrara in the fifteenth century, contained in the chronicle of Ugo
Caleffini, Vatican Library cod. Chig. LL4; see Gimdersheimer, Ferrara, pp.285ff.
3 Clough, "Federigo," pp. 13 1-32. The chronicle is published by G. Baccini, "Ristretto di fatti
d'ltalia e specialmente d'Urbino dal 1404 al 1444," Zibaldone, Florence 1888, p.93.
4 See n.2 above. All my references to the Ordini et offitij will be to the Ermini edition.
5 For what follows see my dissertation, .4/e55andro Sforza and Pesaro: A Study in Urbanism and
Architectural Patronage, Princeton 1982.
6 See for instance Pesaro, Biblioteca Oliveriana (hereafter Bibl.Oliv.) 45 5, vol. 1, cc. 129-31: Sup-
plica di Nofria moglie del fu Niccolô delli Balignani {sic. ) da Pesaro a Costanza, moglie di
Alessandro Sforza, che govemava in assenza del marito a Roma (22 March 1 447); c. 1 90: Ordine
di Sveva Sforza, in assenza del marito Alessandro, al Conte Vano dei Bonifazi da Samano,
Podestà di Pesaro per I'appello d'una causa che verteva tra Bonaccursio di Pietro de' Monaldi e
Madonna Raffaella figlia di Giovanni di Oddo di Taddeo delli Ranieri (22 April 1450); c.326:
Madonna Sveva, moglie d'Alessandro Sforza, sottoscrive una supplica del Dottore Antonio
Silvestri per alcuni beni comprati da forestieri (2 January 1455); 455, vol.11, cc.153-63: La
Contessa Sveva dispensa della guardia per l'età Pietro Buxio (22 May 1456).
7 Clough, "Sources for the Economic History of the Duchy of Urbino, 1474-1508," Manuscripta
vol.10, 1966, p.9; Gundersheimer, /'errara, p.292.
8 For instance, on 9 December 1488, Giovaimi and Camilla nominated Vincenzo de' Fedeli di
Pesaro and Alberto Alberti as the Ufficiali dei Pupilli; see Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VI, c.422. On 8
March 1496 Giovanni appointed Pier Matteo Giordani as Ufficiale dei danni, reconfirmed in
1498, 1499, and 1503; see Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.IX, cc.136-37.
9 For Milan see the excellent modem study by C. Santoro, Gli uffici del dominio ôrzesco ( 1 450-
1500), Milan 1948, especiaUy the introduction, pp.xv-xxxiii, where she defines the duties of the
various officers. Also useful here is G. Rezasco, Dizionario del linguaggio italiano storico ed
amministrativo, Florence 1881, rpt. Bologna 1966.
10 B. FeliciangeU, Sull'acquisto di Pesaro fatto da Cesare Borgia, Camerino 1900, p.53 n.2.
1 1 See the Ordini et offttij, pp.36, 37-39.
12 The accounts page is published in my dissertation (see n.5), pp.478-79; for the reference to
Niccolô's room in the palace see my dissertation, p.483, docs. 17, 18.
13 For Dulcius see my dissertation, p.496 doc. 70, p.497 doc.73, p.498, doc. 76. For the Duke's
luogotenente see G. Waccai, Pesaro, Pesaro 1909, p. 123.
14 Ordini et qffîtij, pp.76-80. The cancellieri and segreterio should be "few in number, capable,
superior and as faithful as possible;" the segretario filed the letters "systematically so that they
could always be easily found again."
1 5 "I want Turricella to be in charge of all important correspondence pertaining to the affairs of state,
and he should have a cancelliere to help him, and everything must be carried out according to the
orders of my brother." Giovanni's testament will be fully transcribed by me in a forthcoming
study.
16 But cf. Gundersheimer, Ferrara, p.56: the referendarius served as head of the cancelleria.
Giovanni's will makes it clear that in Pesaro he was in charge of the accounts: Item che '1 faccia
rivedere tutti i conti vecchi da qui in dreto, et chi hà ad dare dia, et chi hà ad havere sia soddisfatto,
talmente che ogni uno habbia il suo credito, et se '1 non si potesse cosi al présente, satisfacciati
quando si potrà, purche una volta sieno contenti, et ch'el se striga tutti li conti vecchi, et ad questo
sarà buono Marco Cithera (his referendario and maestro délie entrate) per essere instrutto.
17 See my dissertation, pp.166, 171, 480-81 doc.5, 487 doc.31, 490 does. 44, 46, 491 doc.50, 492
doc.51, 493-94 doc.59.
1 8 "There should always be a resident ambassador in Rome, and if he is faithful and serves diligently,
it is not necessary to replace him."
19 G. Soranzo, Cronaca di Anonimo Veronese 1446-1488, Monument! di Storia Patria, ser.3.

Cronache e diarii, vol.IV, Venice 1915, p.243. A very useful study, explaining condottieri' s
contracts, is that by M. Mallett, "Venice and its Condottieri, 1404-54," in Renaissance Venice,
ed. Hale, London 1973, pp. 12 1-45.
20 A. Madiai, "Nuovi document! su Sveva Montefeltro Sforza," Le Marche vol.IX, 1909, p.l 11.
But cf. Ordini et offitij, pp.58-59, on the massaro.
21 Feliciangeh, Alcuni documenti relativi all'adolescenza di Battista e Costanzo Sforza, Turin

1903, p.9.
21 Ordini et qffîtij, pp.5 1-54; for the Pesaro kitchens see my dissertation, p.l67.
23 Ordini et offitij, PP.3-6, 54-57.
24 Feliciangeli,5amsto, pp.10, 13.
25 Ordini et offitij, pp. 1 0- 1 1 .
26 M. Tabarrini, Descrizione del convito e delle feste fatte in Pesaro, Florence 1870, p.l4.
27 Tabarrini, Descrizione, pp. 1 1 , 1 2, 1 3, 37; see also Ordini et offitij, pp.64-65 . Interesting in this
connection is an article by M. Mamini, "Documenti quattrocenteschi di vita musicale aile Corti
Feltresca e Malatestiana," Studi Urbinati n.s.B, anno XL VIII, 1974, pp.1 15-28.
28 Guglielmo's treatise is in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, cod. ital. 973; see G. Mazzatinti,
Inventario dei manoscritti italiani delle biblioteche di Francia, vol.1, Rome 1886, p. 172. On
Guglielmo see also E. Motta, "Musica alia corte degli Sforza,"^rcAmo Storico Lombardo ser.2,
vol.IV, anno XIV, 1887, pp.62-63 n.2; E. Rodocanachi, La Femme Italienne à l'Epoque de la
Renaissance, Paris 1907, p.l98; F. Malaguzzi Valeri,La corte di Lodovico il Moro ,\o\.\. Milan
1913, ^.5^9; Arte lombarda dei Visconti agli Sforza, exhibition catalogue. Milan 1958, p.89
no.271; E. Pellegrin, La Bibliothèque des Visconti et des Sforza, Supplement, Florence 1969,
pp.40-41 . The inventory of the Sforza library is in Bibl.Oliv. 387, see on c.36 the work entitled/o.
Ambrosio ballarino . A. Vemarecci has published the inventory: "La libreria di Giovanni Sforza,"
Archivio Storico per I'Umbria e le Marche vol.III, 1886, see p.518. A treatise by Giovanni
Ambrogio is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, cod. ital. 476; see Mazzatinti,//ive«rano, p.98.
The letter by Giovanni Ambrogio is published by Motta, "Musica," pp.6 1 -62; see also Storia di
Milano, vol.IX, Milan 1961, p.814.
29 Ordini et offitif, pp.16-19. SeealsoSuscch'scommeniontheCambrieridelDuca (as published by

Zannoni, Scrittori, p.82): per tenere a ordine le camere e le sale et ad invitare le donne per le
feste.
30 For a discussion of the principles of sanitation and neatness to be observed, see especially pp.20-
22 of the Ordini et qffîtij; for the barber, pp.22-23. Regarding the location of the room in
Alessandro's palace, see my dissertation, p.481 doc.7.
31 Ordini et offitij, pp. 1-3. The maestro di casa should be given a room "in an honourable place,
where it will be easy to discuss all matters."
32 Feliciangeli, Battista , p. 1 0. The children had "the chaplain who says the mass for them at home
every day."
33 "Bull with an apostolic brief allowing him to have two personal religious confessors." See the
inventory of Alessandro's private papers in Bibl.Oliv. 44 1 , c,20, but without the year; the date is
given in Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VII, c.84.
34 Ordini et offitij, pp.63-64. The chaplain had to remind them of "all the fast-days ordered by the
Church, the Ember Days, and Lent."
35 Le vite, éd. A. Greco, vol.1, Florence 1 970, p.423: "a most learned man, well paid, who is in charge
of this library."
36 Ordini et offîtij, pp.75-76. And when the librarian "shows a manuscript to someone ignorant who
wants to see it out of curiosity, if he is not an important person a quick glance will do."
37 See my dissertation, p. 142.
3 8 After having been closed for many years, and subsequent to a thorough restoration, the library was
re-opened to the public on the occasion of the Convegno di studi su Federico da Montefeltro. P.
Dal Poggetto gave a paper discussing this among other restorations: "Nuove letture di ambienti e
opere d'arte federiciane: la Biblioteca, il Bagno della Duchessa, la Neviera." See also Clough,
"The library of the Dukes of Urbino," L/7>ran«/n vol.IX, 1966, pp.101-104.
39 Le vite, p.423: "he had a noble room built in his palace, with shelves all along the walls on which the
books were set in a well-ordered fashion."
40 A. Cagni, Vespasiano da Bisticci e il suo epistolario, Rome 1969, p. 159.
4 1 See my dissertation, pp. 179-81.
42 Zannoni, Scrittori, p.82; Ordini et offitij. Appendix p.v.
43 See my dissertation, pp. 190-94.
APPENDIX: The Sforza 'famiglia'
Abbreviations:
ASF: Archivio di Stato of Florence
ASPN: Archivio di Stato of Pesaro (Notarile)
Bibl.Oliv.: Biblioteca Oliveriana, Pesaro
Cinelli: C. CmeWx, Pandolfo Collenuccio, Pesaro 1880
Feliciangeli, Battista: B. Feliciangeli, Alcuni documenti relativi all'adolescenza di Battista e
Costanzo Sforza, Turin 1903
, Costanza: Notizie sulla vita e sugli scritti di Costanza Varano Sforza, Turin n.d.
, Elisabetta: Notizie della vita di Elisabetta Malatesta Varano, Ascoli Piceno 1911
^^—, L'itinerario: "L'itinerario d'lsabella d'Este Gonzaga attraverso la Marca e I'Umbria
nell, apriledel 1494," Atti e Memorie della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Marche n.s. vol. VIII,
1912,pp.l-119.
, Lettere: Lettere di Galeazzo Sforza alfratello Giovanni signore di Pesaro ottobre -
novembre MDII, Sanseverino-Marche 1915.
, Lucrezia: II matrimonio di Lucrezia Borgia, Turin 1901
, SulVacquisto: SulVacquisto di Pesaro fatto da Cesare Borgia, Camerino 1900
, Sveva: Sulla monacazione di Sveva Montefeltro, Pistoia 1903
Gregorovius: F. Gregorovius, Lttcrezio Borgia, Stuttgart 1874
Madiai: A. Madiai, "Nuovi documenti su Sveva Montefeltro Sforza," Le Marche IX, 1909,
pp.94- 142.
Miniature: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Miniature del Rinascimento , exhibition
catalogue 1950
Olivieri, Appendice: A. Olivieri, Appendice aile memorie di Alessandro Sforza, Pesaro 1786
__, Diplovatazio: Memorie di Tommaso Diplovatazio, Pesaro 1771
. , Gradara: Memorie di Gradara, Pesaro 1775
_, Lettera: Lettera sopra un medaglione non ancor osservato, Pesaro 1 781 .
, Michelina: Delia patria délia B. Michelina e del B. Cecco, Pesaro 1772
, S. Tommaso: Memorie délia badia di S. Tommaso in Foglia, Pesaro 1778
, Sforza: Memorie di Alessandro Sforza, Pesaro 1785
,Zecca: Delia zecca di Pesaro e délie monete pesaresi dei secoli bassi in G. A. Zanetti,iV«ova
raccolta délie monete e zecche d'Italia, vol.I, Bologna 1775, pp. 179-246.
Paltroni: P. Paltroni, Commentari délia vita etgesti deU'illustrissimo Federico Duca d'Urbino, éd.
W. Tommasoli, Urbino 1 966
Pellegrin: E. ^é[\Q^n, La Bibliothèque des Visconti et des Sforza, Supplement, Florence 1969
Ratti: N. Ratti, Delia famiglia Sforze, vol.I, Rome 1794
Rodocanachi: E. Rodocanachi, La Femme Italienne à l'Epoque de la Renaissance, Paris 1907.
Sajanello: G.B. Sa}ane]lo,Historica Monumenta Ordinis Sancti Hieronymi Congregationis B. Petri
de Pisis, vol.II, 2nd éd., Rome 1760

Saviotti: A, Saviotti, "Giacomo da Pesaro," i4/rAiv/o Storicoper VUmbria e le Marche IV, 1888,
pp.73-81.
Soranzo,>4«o/i/mo: G. Soranzo, Cronaca di Anonimo Veronese 1446-1488, Monument! di Storia
Patria, ser.3, Cronache e Diarii, vol.IV, Venice 1915
Soranzo, Cronaca sconosciuta: "Di una cronaca sconosciuta del secolo XV e del suo anonimo
mtore,'' Nuovo Archivio Veneto XIII, 1907, pp.68-103
Tabarrini: M. Tabarrini, Descrizione del convito e délie feste fatte in Pesaro, Florence 1870
Vaccai, Ginevra: G. Vaccai, "Il quadro votivo di Ginevra Tiepolo," Rassegna Marchigiana VII,
1928-29, pp. 167-72
^ , Le nozze: "Le nozze di Costanzo Sforza con Camilla di Aragona," Picenum XIX, 1922,
pp.28-37
, Le ville: "Le ville del monte Accio e la societa pesarese nel secolo XVI," Picenum XVin,
1921,pp.260-68.
, \9Q9: Pesaro, Pesaro 1909
, 1 928: La vita municipale sotto i Malatesta, gli Sforza e i Delia Rovere, Signori di Pesaro,
Pesaro 1928
Vemarecci, L'incendio: A. Vemarecci, "L'incendio délia libreria di Giovanni Sforza," Archivio
Storicoper l'Umbria e le Marche III, 1886, pp.790-92.
— - , La libreria: "La libreria di Giovanni Sforza," Archivio Storicoper l'Umbria e le
Marche m, 1SS6, pp.501-23
Glossary
Allevato: one raised at the court Cappellano: chaplain
Armigero (Uomo d'arme): man-at-arms Cassiero: treasurer
Auditore: a counsellor with jurisdictional powers Castellano: commander of the fortress
Avvocato fiscale: magistrate of the revenue Cavalière: knight
Balestriero: crossbowman Commensale: one who ate at the lord's table
Ballerino: dancer Commissario: commissary
Barbiere: barber Computista: accountant
Bibliotecario: librarian Connestabile: constable in command of the

Cameriere maggiore: head manservant, valet town gates
Cancel Here: chancellor Consigliere: counsellor
Consultore: counsellor
Copista: scribe
Corriere: messenger
Credenziere: head servant overseeing the table;
originally one who tasted all the food to be
served to the lord

Curiale: courtier
Damigella (Domicella, Donna di compa-
gnia): lady-in-waiting
Depositario: treasurer
Dispensiere: steward of the household
Equitis: knight
Fattore générale', steward of the estates

Fomaio: baker
Fomiciaro: one who bakes bricks, etc.

Garzone: young servant
Giureconsulto: iurisconsuli
Luogotenente: lieutenant
Maestro di casa (Maggiordomo): majordomo
Maestro delle entrate: master of the revenue
Maestro di guardaroba: master of the wardrobe
Maestro di stalla: head of the stables
Marescalco: farrier
Massaro: domestic steward
Muratore: brick-layer
Notaio: notary
Oratore: ambassador
Procuratore: procurator, agent
Piffero: piper
Ragioniere: accountant
Rappresentante: delegate, representative
Referendario (Revisore): comptroller
Sagitarrio: archer
Scalco (Sescalco, Siniscalco): head servant
overseeing the meals; originally denoted a
carver
Scrittore: official writer
Scudiero: equerry
Segretario: secretary
Sopraintendente: superintendent
Soprastante: overseer, usually of construction
work
Squadrero (Capo di squadra): leader of troops
Stqffîere: messenger
Tamburino: dnunmer
Tesoriere: treasurer
Trombetto: trumpeter
Vicario delle gabelle e delle appellazioni:
officer in charge of taxes and appeals
Famigliari:
N.b. The order is alphabetical by first name. Included are members of the Malatesta court at Pesaro
who continued to work for the Sforza. The dates given are those found in the documents. Where
there is more than one year per entry, the archival and bibliographical references are arranged
chronologically according to these dates.
Alberto Albergati da Bologna

1503
procuratore for Giovarmi Sforza, to borrow

money for the restitution of the Rocca Costanza
Feliciangeli, LeWere, p.41 n,20
Alessandro di Matteo dei Collenucci di Pesaro
1489, 1493
capitano of Montelevecchie
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.VI,cc.421, 418
Alessandro Pugliano (Pogliano) de Interamna

(Introcinis, Introcinio) de Benevento (Rieti)
1464
famigliare of Alessandro Sforza

Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.1, cc.440v-441; SajaneUo,
p.377; Olivieri, Sforza, p.LXXXIV
Ahnerico Ahnerici
1464, 1470, 1490; died 1492
vicario delle gabelle e delle appellazioni for
Alessandro; podestà of Pesaro; avvocato fis-
cale della camera for Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, cc.630v-631; Bibl.Oliv.
376, vol.I, c.442v; Bibl.OUv. 376, vol. VI, c.412;
Olivien, Diplovatazio , p.XI
Almoro Brandolin da Mestre
1500
oratore for Giovanni in Venice
Feliciangeli, SuU'acquisto, pp.3 1-92, 32 n.l

Alo, detto Battaglino del fu Ranaldo di Arquata
1457
servo of Alessandro
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, c.396
Alovisio (Aloisi, Luigi) Basicaretri
1457
credenziere and dispensiere of Alessandro
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.56; Madiai, pp.95,97
Mro Andrea di Girolamo de S. Angelo

1509; dead by 1512
ingegnere of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.11, c. 1 39v; ASPN, Domen-

ico Zucchella, vol.47, 2 April 1512, page un-
numbered
Angelo de Probis d'Atri
1457,c.l463, 1467
s^retario, cancelliere, famigliare of Alessandro
Olivieri, Michelina, p.LIX; idem., Sforza,
p.LXXIII; Madiai, p.96; Soranzo, ^non/mo,
p.243n.l
Antonello del fii Matteo Panzano
1491
curiale of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VI, c.370
Antonello Picinino
1458
one of the servants named as having the care of
Battista Sforza during Alessandro's absence
1457-58
Feliciangeli, Battista , pp. 10, 1 2
Antonello da Tortona
1492
siniscalco of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.11, c. 17
Ms Antonio
Barbiere of Giovaimi
Cinelli, p.57
Ser Antonio de Tabbate (family came fh>m
Brescia to Pesaro in 1 393)
1458; died 1478
cancelliere of Costanza Sforza, then served
Alessandro and Costanzo; named as having the
care of Battista during Alessandro's absence
1457-58
Feliciangeli, 5am.sto, p. 10
Antonio dalla Badia
1493
balestriero of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 455, voULc. 106
Antonio da Brescia (same as Ser Antonio de
rabbate ?)
C.1457, 1460s
cameriere, cameriere scalco of Alessandro
Madiai, pp.94, 97; Bibl.Oliv. 374, vol.1, c.57-
57v
Antonio Ferrarese di Francesco Forzate
1457
allevato of Alessandro (he carried letters back
and forth between Alessandro and his mistress)
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p. 17; Madiai, p.l 12
Antonio di Gaspare gia di Montecicardo
1498
capitano of Monte Gaudio

Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.VI, c.425
Ser Antonio de StruUis da Coldazzo

1430s; died c. 1460
grammar instructor to Costanza Varano

Feliciangeli, Battista, p.6; idem., Costanza,
p. 17 note
Arcangelo Ayberti (d'Ayberto da Trevi)

scalco of Giovanni
Feliciangeli, Lttcrezia, p.78; idem., Sull'acquisto,

p.47no.3, p.72n.l
Ser Baldo del fu Paolo di Urbiiio
1486
maggiordomo of Camilla and Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.VI, c.383v
Bartolommeo dei Cavalière da Ferrara
1493
Giovaimi's oratore at the court of Milan
Feliciangeli, Lucrezia , p. 32 n. 1
Mro Bartolomeo di Zanno da Vigevano (M.

Bartolo Janini de Vigena)
1463, 1470
fomiciaro of Alessandro
BibLOliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.S, c.39; ASPN,
Matteoli, vol.3, 13 January 1470, page un-
numbered
Battaglino da Rieti
1457
famigliare of Alessandro
Madiai, p. 109
Battista di Leilo degli Almerici da Pesaro
1512
capitano of the port
BiblOliv. 455, vol.1, c.534; BibLOliv. 455,
vol.II, C.137
Battista de' Moregni di Mantova

1490
cappellano of Maddalena Sforza dei Gonzaga
in Pesaro
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, c.567
Battista PoUato
1515
cameriere of Galeazzo Sforza
ASF, Urbino, Cl.III, Fa. 38, c.209
Benedetto Reguardati da Norcia
bomc.1398/99; 1453, 1457, 1458
doctor of Alessandro and Sveva; ministro and
luogotenente of Alessandro; had the care of
Battista during Alessandro' s absence 1457-
58
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.l2; idem., Battista, p. 10
Benvenuto
died 1467
squadrero of Alessandro
Paltroni, p.225
Berardino Samperoli
1458
companion to Costanzo (brother of Mattea,
Alessandro' s mistress before Pacifica)
Feliciangeli, Battista, p.l 3
Don Bemabeo di Giovanni
1465
soprastante of construction on Alessandro' s
palace
BibLOliv. 937, voI.IV, Sq.S, c.l4v; ASPN,
Sepolcri, vol.2, c.235v
Bernardino
died 1510
fomaio di corte of Giovanni
Bibl.01iv.455, vol.II, c.l61; Cinelli, p.l33
Bernardino
1515
servant of Galeazzo
ASF, Urbino, Cl.III, Fa. 38, c.209
Ser Bernardino di Ser Gaspare Fattori
1503,1512
procuratore for Galeazzo for the rendering of
the Rocca Costanza; segretario of Galeazzo
(also cancelliere of Pesaro)
Feliciangeli, Lettere, p.43 n.27
Bernardino Superchi
1497
tesoriere of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, vol.IX, c.221
Bernardo detto Abbate dei Bossi del fii Pietro

1477
famigliare of Costanzo
BibLOliv. 376, voLII, c.455
Bernardo Monaldi
1503, 1504
segretario and medico of Giovanni; his agent in
Venice
Feliciangeli, Lettere, p. 42 n.21; idem., Lucre-
zia, p.43; Vaccai, Ginevra, p. 168
Bertolda di Perugia
1457
donna di compagnia of Sveva
Madiai, p. 108
Blaxio
1515
servant of Galeazzo
ASF, Urbino, Cl.III, Fa.38, c.209
Camillo Leonardi
1500
doctor
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p. 44
Camillo Samperoli
1512
ambassador sent to Rome by Galeazzo
Feliciangeli, Lettere, p. 10
Carlo del q. messer Benedetto delli Reguardati
da Norsia
1473
cava//ere of Costanzo
BibLOliv. 937, voLV, Sq.AB, c.l3v
Carlo Sforza
bomc.1461; 1475, 1481
siniscalco at Costanzo's wedding banquet
Tabarrini, p. 14; ASPN, Sepolcri, vol. 10, c.407v
Cesare Alberti
scalco of Giovanni
Vaccai, Ginevra, p. 172
Mro Cherubino di Milano

1476, 1478, 1479, 1483, 1491, 1492; died
1494/95
muratore, muratoris ac etiam ingegnerii of

Costanzo; given patent of ingegnere by Gio-
vanni (1491); sopraintendente di tutti i lavori
difortificazione, ponti, strode, chiuse, ecc. , for
Giovanni
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.8, cc.l62v, 242; vol.9,

cl 90; ASPN, Matteo Lepri, vol. 10, c.l38v;
Bibl.Oliv. 384, c.229; ASPN, Sepolcri, vol. 1 1 ,
ce. 137, 146; Vaccai, 1909, p.80; Bibl.Oliv.
376, vol.1, C.64; Feliciangeli, SuU'acquisto,
p.58; BibLOliv. 376, vol.I, cc.258, 259v-260
Chiarelmo de Spoleto
1515
segretario of Galeazzo
ASF, Urbino, Cl. III, Fa. 38, c.208v
Christoforo delli Perusini
1479, 1481
luogotenente of Costanzo
ASPN, Matteo Lepri, vol. 10, c.l38v; Vaccai,
1928, p.202
Domenico
1500
maestro di stalla of Galeazzo
Feliciangeli, SuU'acquisto, doc. VIII, p.83
Domenico di Barignano
1474, 1481, 1490
sent by Costanzo to the Patriarch of Aquilea to

announce his forthcoming marriage; ambassa-
dor in Rome for Costanzo; procuratore for
Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.I, c.330; Bibl. Oliv. 376,

vol.VI, CC.325, 325V-326, 332v-333
Ser Dominico
1468
cancelliere of Alessandro
Olivieri, Sforza, p.C
Donato Stephano da Cotignola
1500,1515
cameriere and sescalco of Galeazzo
Bibl.Oliv. 387, c.38v; Vemarecci, Libreria,
p.523; ASF, Urbino, CI. Ill, Fa.38, c.208
Dulcius
1506
luogotenente of Giovanni
ASPN, Matteo Lepri, vol. 37, c.lO; Domenico
Zucchella, vol. 39, c.l07
Ercole Bentivoglio
bomc.1461; 1475, 1481
siniscalco at Costanzo's wedding banquet
Tabarrini, p. 14; ASPN, Sepolcri, vol 10, c.407v
Ercole Sforza (illegitimate brother of Costanzo?)

bomc.1461; 1475
cavalière
Tabarrini, p. 13
Factorino Picinino
1458
one of the servants who had the care of Battista
during Alessandro' s absence in 1457-58
Feliciangeli, Battista, p. 10
Federico
1476
cameriere of Costanzo
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.8, c.l56
Federico del fu Ser Gualtiero di Bartolomeo da
S. Angelo in Vado
1485
siniscalco of Camilla and Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, vol.I, cc.383-85
Filippo de Neapoli
1476
depositario denariorum for construction of the
Rocca Costanza
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol. 8, c.256
Fra Francesco d'Ancona
1466
confessor of Alessandro
Olivieri, Sforza, p.XC

Francesco di Andrea delli Piccini da Todi

1464, 1465, 1467, 1479, 1480, 1487
referendario o revisore of Alessandro; vice
podestà of PesaTo;giureconsulto andpodestà
of Pesaro; auditore of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.T, cc.21v, 42; ASF,
Urbino, Cl.I, Div.B, Fa. 10, c.1042; Olivieri,
Sforza, p.XCVI; Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, c.461 ;
ASPN, Germano Germani, vol.4, c.249v
Francesco di maestro Angelo
1458
scalco of Costanzo
Francesco Arduini
1512
ambassador sent to Rome to plead for Galeazzo
Francesco del fu (Orlandino ?) di Borgo S.
Donnino
1491
curiale of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, vol. VI, c.368v
Francesco di Bartolomeo da Crespolano
1482
servitore of Costanzo
BibLOliv. 455, vol.1, cc. 138-39
Francesco del q. Stefano Becci (Bezio) da
Fiorenza
1473, 1486, 1493; died C.15 10
a speziale (spice merchant) who became mag-
giordomo of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 937, voL V, Sq.AB, c. 1 3v; BibLOliv.
455, voLI, C.37 1 ; Olivieri, Diplovatazio, p.XIV;

Gregorovius, Appendix p.3 1 , doc.9; Bibl.Oliv.
376, voLI, C.327
Francesco delli Beni
1481
referendario and revisore of Costanzo
Vaccai, 1928, p.202
Francesco di Bonadia de' Zanchis

1464
famigliare of Alessandro
BibLOliv. 455, voLII,c.l03v
Francesco da Cotignola
1470, 1473
cassiero of Alessandro and Costanzo
BibLOliv. 374, vol.I, c.106; BibLOliv. 937,
voLV, Sq.AB, c.l3v
Francesco di Gerolamo da Monte Milone,
detto Milone
1491
stqffiere andfamigliare of Camilla
BibLOliv. 376, voLVI, c.362v
Francesco di Guglielmo Verità di Verona

1460-64
famulus familiaris, marescalchus of Alessan-

dro
Soranzo, Cronaca sconosciuta, pp.96-97
Francesco del fti Orlandino di Borgo (same as
Francesco di Borgo S. Donnino ?)
1492
connestabile for Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, voLVI, c.385
Francesco da Palude (son of Niccolô)

1479, 1480, 1490-93, 1494/95, 1497; died
before 1501
siniscalco of Costanzo; oratore of Giovanni at

Milan ( 1 490-93); maestro dicasa and maestro
delle entrate of Giovanni (1494/95, 1497)
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, c.462; Feliciangeli, Lm-
crezia, p.32 n.l; Bibl.Oliv. 376, voLVI, cc.423-
24
Galeotto Agnesi da Napoli
after 1459; died 1462
segretario and luogotenente of Alessandro
Feliciangeli, Battista , p. 1 3
Gaspare
1456
cappellano of Sveva
Oliviery, Sforza, p.L
Gaspar de Cesena
1458
servant of Battista
Gasparino Ardizij (de Mediolana)
1465, 1473
doctor of Alessandro (who marries him to his
mistress, Pacifica); then doctor of Costanzo,
and also for the town of Pesaro
Olivieri, Sforza, pp.XCV-XCVI; Bibl.Oliv.
937,vol.V, Sq.AB,c.l3v
Giacometto da Caiazzo
1497
capitano dei balestrieri e sagitarri of Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.1, cc.389-90
lacominus
1469
cameriere of Alessandro
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.X,c. 149
Giacomo (Jacomino) (same as the above ?)

1497; died 1510
cameriere. cameriere maggiore of Giovanni

Feliciangeli, Lucrezia, p.43; Bibl. Oliv. 455,
vol.n,c.l61;cinelli,p. 133
Giacomino di Ferrara
died before April 1493
curiale of Giovanni
Giacomo di Ancona
1491
curiale andfamigliare of Giovanni
Ser Jacomo delli Bagarotti da Piacenza (da
Parma)
1473, 1475, 1485
cancelliere and segretario of Costanzo; segre-
tario of Camilla and Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.V, Sq.AB, c.l3v; Ratti,
p.155; Vaccai,Le nozze, p.35; Bibl.Oliv. 455,
vol.11, c. 11
Giacomo Biancuccio
1498; died 1510
depositario del porto and tesoriere for Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.1, c.243; Bibl.Oliv. 455,
vol.11, c. 16 l;Cinelli,p.l 33
Mro Jacomo di Ser Guido da Verona
1463
scrittore, scrivano, segretario of Alessandro
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV. Sq.R, c.29v; Soranzo,
Cronaca sconosciuta, p.97
Mro Jacomo del q. Bartolomeo da Norsia
1463, 1464, 1465, 1468, 1473

ministro, fattore of Alessandro
Olivieri, Sforza, p.LXXI; Bibl.Oliv. 376,
vol. VIII, cc.226-27; Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV,
Sq.R, c.43v; Sq.T, c.42; vol.V, Sq.Z, c.8v;
Sq.AB,c.l3v
lacomo di Pero Banzo da Fossombrone
1440
castellano (with seven pages) of the Rocca of
Pesaro
Olivieri, S. Tommaso, p. 88
Giacomo da Pesaro
1430s- 1450s
humanist and notary
Saviotti; Feliciangeli, Costanza, p.l9 n.3
Jacomo Piccinino
1457
allevato of Alessandro
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p. 17
Giacomo Probo di Atria (de Probis d'Atri, son
ofAngelo?)
1481
ambassador for Costanzo in Rome
Bibl.01iv.376. vol.VI, cc.325, 325v-326
Mro Jacomo delli Scotti da Marignano
1458
barbiere of Alessandro
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.Q, c.25v
Giacomo Venuti
1505
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.11, cc.260-61
Gian Antonio da Cremona

1491
credenziere of Giovanni
Gian Francesco detto Riccio di maestro Tom-

maso (Bettini da Urbino) barbiere
1481, 1482
cameriere of Costanzo
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.11, cc.467, 469
Gian Pietro del fu Mro Tomasso calzolaio
1471
trombettiere of Alessandro
BibLOliv. 376, vol.1, c.374
Gianozzo
1478
castellano
Olivieri, Lettera, p.V
Ginevra
1515
servant of Galeazzo
ASF, Urbino, CI. Ill, Fa.38, c.209
Giorgio Attendolo da Cotignola
1500
castellano
Feliciangeli,Lettere,pAl n.l6;idem., Sull'ac-

quisto, pp.39, 45, 46, 47
Giorgio Ayberti
scalco of Giovanni
Wemarecci, L'incendio, p.791
Giovanni Andrea da Gambarano
1515
auditore of Galeazzo

Giovanni di Antonio Guglielmini di Bellinzona
1491, 1493
cameriere of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, vol. VI, cc.384, 413v
Giovanni Antonio de Bresani da Cremona

1465
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol.X, cc.l45v, 146; Bibl.Oliv.
937, V.IV, Sq.T, c.40; Olivieri, Sfona, p.LXX;
BibLOliv. 376, vol. VII, cc.81, 346-48
Giovanni Antonio del Tonso
1468
carrière of Alessandro
Olivieri, Sforza, p.Cin
Giovanni Battista dell'Antella
1457
computista of Alessandro
ASPN, Sepolcri, voLl, c.l45
Giovanni Battista de Nami
1467
Olivieri, Sforza, p.XCVII; Soranzo, Anonimo,
p2Al n.2
Giovanni Benevoli (Bonavoglia) da Mantova
1489-91
segretario of Giovanni
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p.56 n.3
Giovanni Germani
1490s, 1497
cancelliere of Giovanni; notaio of Pesaro; se-

gretario del comune (1497)
Olivieri, Gradara, p.97; Feliciangeli, LucrezM,
p.67
Giovanni di Giontarello da Pesaro

C.1451
famigliare
Olivieri, Sforza, p.XLV
Giovanni da Lacha (dal Lago)
1478
one of Costanzo's squadra
BibLOliv. 376, voLI, c.344
Giovanni Maria Dino da Castelfidardo
1496-1500
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p.53 n.2, p.57 n.l
Giovanni Ondedei
1499
capitano of Monte Baroccio
Giovanni di Padovani
1481
fattore of Costanzo; astrologer

ASPN, Sepolecri, voLlO, c.407v, Vaccai, 1909,
pp. 84-85
Mro Giovanni di Pietro alias Riccio del fii Scar-
amuccia di Torricella parmense
1493
cuoco of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, voLVI, cc.411v-12
Giovanni de Roxellis da Aretrio
1469
luogotenente of Pesaro for Alessandro
Olivieri, Sforza, p.CV
Giulio di Piersante Bosi da Samano
1457
ministro of Alessandro
Madiai, p.109
Giustiniano Castelli da Cremona
C.1463
Vaccai, 1909, p.43
Guglielmo da Pesaro
1444, c.1463
ballerino, choreographer of dances at Alessan-

dro' s wedding; dedicated dance treatise to
Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan
Rodocanachi, p. 198; Pellegrin, pp. 40-41
Guido Antonio da Sajano

borne. 1479; 1499
cameriere of Giovanni
Cinelli, p.93, and p. 161 document
Hieronyma da Pesaro
1515
domicella of Ginevra Bentivoglio Sforza, wife
of Galeazzo
Hieronymo
1515
cameriere of Galeazzo
Lanfranco de Corvis
1456-62
Olivieri, Sforza, pp.LXVI-LXVII; Bibl.Oliv.
374, vol.1, cc.56-57
Lelio dei Maddaleni Capodiferro
1495
oratore of Giovaimi at Rome
Feliciangeli, Lucrezia, pp.24, 40
Leonardo qm Giovanni Botta da Cremona

1465, 1467, 1471
cancelliere and segretario of Alessandro
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.T, c.41v; Bibl.Oliv.
376, vol.X, C.146; Olivieri, Sforza, pp.XCV,
CIX
Leonardo dal Colle
1480
copista of Costanzo
Vaccai, Le nozze, pp.28-29; Miniature, p.43

no.57
Lionino Giovanni di Bergamo
1492
armigero of Giovanni
Lorenzo de (...)
1515
cancelliere of Galeazzo
Lorenzo Lauti da Siena
1495
segretario of Giovaimi; consigliere and pro-
curatore for Lucrezia Borgia
Feliciangeli, L«crez /a, pp.30, 31 n. 3
Luciano da Laurana
1476, 1478, 1479
ingegnere of Costanzo
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.8, c.242; vol.9, c.l90;
Matteo Lepri, vol.10, c.l38v
Ludovico Bergolini da Bologna

1457
famigliare and commensale of Alessandro

Feliciangeli, Sveva, p. 18; Madiai, p.97
Ludovico de Cardanis da Torricella di Parma

1493, 1497-1500, 1510; died 1510
cancelliere and segretario of Giovanni; drew
up Giovanni's will (1510)
Gregorovius, p. 31 document 9; Feliciangeli,
Lucrezia, p.67; idem., Sull'acquisto, p.53 n.2;
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.11, cc.l61, 199v; Cinelli,
p. 133
Ludovico da Pexia
1452
castellano of the fortress of Pesaro
Olivieri, Zecca,p.2 12
Luigi di Bonabello da Sale
1500
sent by Giovanni to "ritirare certa quantité di
perle lasciate dal padre Costanzo in deposito a
Bonifacio Manerba di Brescia"
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p.41
Maddalena del q. Petrozorzo de Almerici da
Pesaro
1457-58
servant of Battista
Feliciangeli, Battista, p.9
Marco Citara
1494, 1497, 1498, 1503; died 1510

mercante who became referendario, maestro
delle entrate and maestro di casa for Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VI, c.411v; Feliciangeli,
SulVacquisto , p.5 3 n.2; ASPN, Giovanni Ger-
mani, vol. 1 6, C.224; BibLOUv. 455, voin, c. 1 6 1 ;
Cinelli, p.133
Marco de Monaldi
1458, 1459, 1465
scalco of Alessandro; councillor, soprastante
for construction on Alessandro' s palace
Feliciangeli, Battista, p. 10; Olivieri, Sforza,

p.XLVIII; BibLOliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.S, c.l4v;
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.2, c.235v
Marcone del fti Giacomo
1486, 1495
uomo d'arme of Giovanni (before 1495)
BiblOliv. 376, vol. VI, c.415v
Margarita de li Ardoino da Pesaro
1457-58
servant of Battista
Margherita da Marzano di Napoli
1479
damigella of Camilla (married Francesco, son
of Niccolô della Palude)
Feliciangeli, Lucrez /a, p.32n.l
Mariano di Tassolo alias il Perusino
1464
lived in the palace with Costanzo; occupation
not known
Bibl.Oliv. 937, vol.IV, Sq.T, c.l8
Marino Grisanti
1447-48
rappresentante andprocuratore of Alessandro,
fc»* the wedding between Alessandro and Sveva
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.9
Martino Filetico
1459
Roman humanist; teacher of Battista and
Costanzo
Matteo di Antonio de Callio

1445
cappellano of Costanza Varano Sforza
Sajanello, p.375
Matteo del fti Giovanni di Sale
1494
connestabile of Pesaro
BibLOliv. 376, vol. VI, C.41 3
Matteo da Sassoferrato dei CoUenucci
1458; died 1465
grammar instructor to Battista and Costanzo;
notaio and cancelliere
Feliciangeli, Battista, pp.6, 14
Ser Michèle ( is he identical with Ser Michèle de

Covardi, father of Vittoria, donzella of Cos-
tanza and Sveva ? See Olivieri, Appendice,
P.V)
1458
Paltroni, p. 115; Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.76
Michèle de Vittorini
1478
worked for Costanzo
Bibl.01iv.376, vol. VII, cc.98-99
Niccolô di Barignano
1467, 1473, 1474, 1475; died 1484 in Fano

famigliare of Alessandro; se^retono and^^wa-
drero of Costanzo
Soranzo, Anonimo, p.243 n.1; Ratti, p. 155;

ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.7, c.l50; Tabarrini, p.4;
Nicolô Pacediano
segretario of Galeazzo
Ratti, p.l72n.lO
Niccolô della Palude
1465, 1474
luogotenente of Alessandro and Costanzo
BibLOliv. 937, voLFV, Sq.S, c.l5; voLV, Sq.AB,
c.l4v
Niccolô Pietro da Perugia (Nicolaus Petri de

Perusio; Nicole Perusino)
1457, 1475, 1476, 1478, 1481
famigliare of Alessandro; revisore of Costanzo
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.80; Madiai, p.96; ASPN,
Sepolcri, vol.8, cc.68, 256; vol.9, cl 90; Vac-
csà,Le ville, p.265; idem., 1928, p.202
Niccolô Porcinari de Aquila
1463/64
Olivieri, Sforza, pp.LXV, LXXX
Niccolô da Saiano
1481, 1491, 1493,1500
famigliare of Costanzo; vicario délia gabella;
commissario and consultore for Giovanni;
orator et procurator acspecialis nuntius for the
marriage between Giovanni and Lucrezia Bor-
gia; oratore spéciale sent to Venice
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.II, c.320v; BibLOliv. 376,
vol. VI, cc.372v-73; Gregorovius, Appendix
p.3 1 , doc.9; Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, pp. 1 6,
43
Nicolô delli Savini da Santa Vittoria

1464, 1467, 1468, 1478
podestà of Pesaro; dottore in diritto and audi-
tore of Alessandro; luogotenente for Alessan-
dro and Costanzo
Bibl.Oliv. 455, vol.II, c.120; Soranzo, ^no/ï/-

wo,p.243 n.l; Vaccai, 1928, p.202; Bibl.Oliv.
376, vol.II, C.457
Nobilia da Parma
C.1457
donna di compagnia of Sveva
Madiai, p. 109
Ser Orlandino di Ser Bartolino dei Superchi da
Pesaro (da Tomba)
1447(48), 1458; died C.1471
cancelliere of the Malatesta and of Alessandro;
drew up the marriage contract of Alessandro
and Sveva
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.9 al; idem., Battista,
p.lO;Bibl.01iv.458
Pandolfo Collenuccio
1483
humanist; ambassador of Giovanni and Camilla
in Rome
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VI, cc.328, 329
Pasquale Maripetro ( Malipiero)
borne. 1447; 1458
companion of Costanzo (cousin of the Doge of
Venice)
Petro
1515
servant of Galeazzo
Petro de (...) (not same as above)
1515
cameriere of Galeazzo
Pier Giorgio Almerici

1440s, 1457; died c. 1468
famigliare of Elisabetta Malatesta Varano in
^ts^To; famigliare ana commensale of Ales-
sandro
Feliciangeli, £//5aZ)er/a, p.201; Bibl.OHv. 376,

vol.IX, CC.177, 182
Piergiorgio Almerici
1512
ambassador in Rome for Galeazzo
Piergiovanni di Alessandro da Camerino
1491
armigero of Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, vol. VI, c.374v
Piermatteo Giordani
1492, 1508, 1512
capitano ofNovilara; Count Palatine; ambass-

ador in Rome for Galeazzo
BibLOliv. 376, voLIX, cc.l36, 80; FeliciangeU,
Lettere, p. 10
Piero da Comazzano
1457
cameriere and scudiero of Alessandro
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p.23; Madiai, pp.94, 97
Piero Gentile di Varano (is he identical with

Pier Gentile da Camerino, born c.1461, who
carried the baldachin at the wedding of Costan-
zo and Camilla? Tabarrini, p. 13)
C.1503; died 1508
oratore of Giovanni in Venice
Vaccai, Ginevra, p.l68; Feliciangeli, L'/ft/ieA^
ario, p.34 n.2
Piero Lodovico Piemontese
died 1456
cameriere of Alessandro (first husband of his
mistress, Pacifica)
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p. 15
Pier Ludovico Saraceni da Pesaro
1499
dottore and cavalière; oratore straordinario
sent to Venice by Giovanni
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, pp.22, 23
Pier Sante di Marino Bosi da Samano
1455-58
ministro of Alessandro
Pietro Barignani da Brescia

1503
canonico; procuratore for Giovanni to borrow
money for the restitution of the Rocca Costanza
Feliciangeli, Lettere, p.41 n.20
Prospero Montani da Fermo
1491
luogotenente for Giovanni
Bibl.Oliv. 376, vol. VI, cc.360, 37 Iv
Raniero Almerici
bom 1430, 1458, 1468, 1475, 1484, 1498,

died 1499/1501
nominated cavalière aurato by Francesco

Sforza; Count Palatine (1468); served Ales-
sandro; capo di squadra for Costanzo; equitis
serving Giovanni
BibLOliv. 376, voLIX, cc.l77v-78; Feliciangeli,

Costanza, p.39 n.2; Tabarrini, p.4; Bibl.Oliv.
376, vol. VI, C.426; ASPN, Giovanni Ger-
mani, vol.16, c.224
Riccio del fu Ambrogio di Milano

1493
famigliare and curiale of Giovanni

BibLOliv. 376, vol. VI, c.409
Roberto Ondedei
1464, 1467, 1468
commisario for Alessandro; his luogotenente
and segretario, and ministro in Venice
BibLOliv. 376, voLVIII, c.220; ASF, Urbino,
CLI, Div. B, Fa. 10, c.1042; Soranzo, Ano-
nimo, p.242 n.2; Olivieri, Sforza, p.CII
Sebastiano Spandolini >
1500, 1503 I
famigliare of Giovanni '
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p.41 n.3; Olivieri, î

Diplovatazio, p.IX j
Mro Silvestro di Marco Sozzi dei Graziani da

Cotignola
1476; died c. 1491 )
castellano of the fortress of Gradara ]
BibLOliv. 376, vol.11, c.453; BibLOliv. 376, I
voLVI, C.370
Simone da Pesaro |
1462 i
depositario for Alessandro and for Pesaro |
Olivieri, Sforza, p.LXVI \
Spilimbertus Bartholomei de Crispolano \
1476 t
famigliare of Costanzo I
ASPN, Sepolcri, voL8, c.242 |
Staxio q. Staxii de Cotignola \
1473, 1476 I
suprastantibus deputatis supra fabrica of the

Rocca Costanza |
Bibl.Oliv. 937, voLV, Sq.AB, c.l3v; ASPN, j

Sepolcri, vol.8, c.242
Sveva \
1457
damigella of Sveva Montefeltro Sforza
Feliciangeli, Sveva, p. 3 5 n.2
Terenzio
died 1510
dispensiere for Giovanni
BibLOliv. 455, voLII, c.161; Cinelli, p. 133
Thomasina
1515
servant of Galeazzo
ASF, Urbino, CLIII, Fa.38, c.209
Thomasa
1499
cancelliere of Giovanni
Feliciangeli, Sull'acquisto, p.78 doc.III, p.79
doc. IV
Tommaso di Coldazzo
1496
capitano générale of the contado of Pesaro
Tommaso Diplovatazio
1489, 1492, 1506
called to Pesaro by Camilla in 1489 "per eser-
citarvi la carica di vicario delle appellazioni e
gabelle;" avvocato fiscale della Camera for
Giovanni; ambassador sent by Galeazzo to the
Marquis and Cardinal of Mantua
OXWxQÛ, Diplovatazio, pp.V, X, XI; Bibl.Oliv.
455, vol.1, C.372
Vittoria (daughter of Ser Michèle de Covardi)

died 1488
donzella of Costanza and Sveva (married to

Count Monaldino di Montevecchio)
Olivieri, Sforza, p.LlH; idem., Appendice, p.IV
Zongus q. Jacobi Lodovici de Pisauro
1483
one of the suprastantibus of the Rocca Costanza
ASPN, Sepolcri, vol.1 1, c.l46
La Description de la nouveauté dans les

récits de voyage de Cartier et de Rabelais
JEAN-PHILIPPE BEAULIEU
On estime généralement que les récits de voyage du XVI® siècle ont
participé de façon importante à la transformation de l'image du monde qui
s'est opérée progressivement chez les Européens de la Renaissance.^
Lieux de rencontre du connu et de l'inconnu, ces récits cherchaient à
transmettre à un lecteur souvent limité par ses systèmes de référence, les
impressions et les interrogations des voyageurs relativement aux objets et
aux êtres nouveaux rencontrés dans le cadre de cet élargissement du
champ "expérientiel" que constituait le voyage d'exploration.
La description de la nouveauté, composante verticale de ces relations, ^

semble être l'un des éléments les plus susceptibles d'avoir amené des
changements sur les plans langagier et épistémologique, en grande partie
parce que la pause descriptive est l'endroit du récit où sont énoncées les
données linguistiques et référentielles qui révèlent le rapport établi avec le
monde nouveau par le rédacteur - que ce dernier soit le voyageur ou son
secrétaire.' C'est au niveau de ce rapport "expérientiel" que l'on peut
identifier les éléments discursifs qui ont participé à la création d'une
nouvelle épistémè au cours des XVI^ et XVII® siècles, épistémè "analy-
tico-référentielle," pour reprendre l'appellation de Timothy Reiss, dont les
éléments de base consistent en la valorisation de la connaissance empirique
de l'univers, au moyen de modèles conceptuels capables de saisir et de
formuler les lois naturelles qui sont censées présider à l'organisation du
cosmos.'*
On peut par conséquent supposer que les récits du XVI« siècle qui se
présentent au lecteur comme des narrations de voyages effectués dans des
régions inconnues offriront des différences notables sur le plan de la
description de la nouveauté, selon que les voyages relatés sont réels ou
imaginaires. Les récits basés sur des périples historiquement vérifiables
posséderaient ainsi des caractéristiques stylistiques que l'on peut rap-
procher du discours analytico-référentiel établi définitivement au XVII*
siècle par Francis Bacon. ^ Les relations imaginaires, quant à elles, moins
influencées par les expériences nouvelles, se rattacheraient davantage aux
traditions épistémologiques médiévales, où la cosmologie et les modes de
connaissance s'inscrivent dans un discours conjonctif (ou théocentrique).^
L'influence ainsi supposée de l'expérience nouvelle sur le discours

descriptif se vérifie lors de l'examen comparatif de la composante des-
criptive de deux textes presque contemporains, qui ont souvent été rap-
prochés, dans le passé, pour des raisons de ressemblances thématiques. Il
s'sigitduBriefRécit de 1 545, attribué à Jacques Cartier, et du Quart Livre,
de François Rabelais, qui a été publié dans sa version intégrale en 1552.^
L'étude stylistique de ces deux textes révèle que les descriptions du Brief
Récit sont organisées de façon épistémologique, tandis que celles du Quart
Livre le sont de manière rhétorique, c'est-à-dire que les descriptions de
Cartier se préoccupent surtout de mettre ou valeur le signifié, c'est-à-dire
l'information, tandis que celles de Rabelais accordent une importance
particulière au signifiant, c'est-à-dire aux différents procédés de présen-
tation de l'information. On peut en effet constater que les descriptions du
Brief Récit s'articulent conmie des définitions qui tentent de cerner la
nature de l'objet décrit au moyen d'une diversification des éléments infor-
matifs, alors que les descriptions du Quart Livre esquissent une image
globale de l'objet décrit en utilisant un minimimi de renseignements qu'elles
mettent cependant en évidence par des procédés rhétoriques. Les pauses
descriptives provenant du récit de Rabelais sont par conséquent plus
proches de l'illustration que de la définition.
Les différences d'orientation, que nous venons de situer en termes de
définition et d'illustration, trouvent leur prolongement dans d'autres as-
pects des moments descriptifs et concourent ainsi à mettre en évidence ce
qu'on peut considérer comme la principale différence stylistique, soit,
d'une part, l'organisation unifiée des descriptions de Rabelais et, de l'autre,
la diversité dont font preuve les pauses descriptives provenant du Brief
Récit. Cette polarité unité/diversité caractérise les deux séries de des-
criptions tant sur le plan de l'énoncé que sur celui de renonciation.
Sur le plan de l'énoncé, les descriptions de Rabelais se centrent sur un

nombre réduit de renseignements, qu'elles exploitent cependant de façon
maximale au cours d'une démarche textuelle qui répète et amplifie les
renseignements de départ en leur adjoignant des détails synonymiques et
en leur faisant subir des métamorphoses de présentation. On peut ainsi
reconnaître, dans les descriptions du Quart Livre, une récurrence de
"l'identique" toutefois transformée par des procédés rhétoriques qui créent
une progression de l'effet. L'énumération est le principal outil stylistique
qu'utilise le narrateur afin de présenter les différentes métamorphoses de
l'information thématique qu'il a choisie de mettre en relief. Il peut s'agir
d'une répétition de sons, de mots ou de phrases syntaxiquement iden-
tiques. En conjonction avec d'autres procédés, tels l'intensification des
images, l'absence de verbes et l'abondance d'adjectifs souvent hyper-
boliques, cette succession de propositions synonymiques qu'est l'énu-
mération crée une image thématiquement unifiée, mais peu détaillée, de
l'objet ou de l'être décrit. La dynamique centralisatrice de cette esquisse

descriptive, pléonastique sur le plan de l'énoncé, est de plus renforcée par
une énonciation unifiée quant à l'effet, bien que variée en ce qui concerne
les moyens utilités pour créer cet effet. Dans l'ensemble des descriptions
du Quart Livre, le rédacteur fait effectivement appel de façon continue au
registre subjectif pour signaler au lecteur l'ampleur et la nature des réac-
tions émotives que lui et les personnages ont éprouvées devant les réalités
nouvelles rencontrées au cours du voyage. Qu'il s'agisse de crainte, dans
l'épisode du Physetere, ou d'étonnement, dans la description des habitants
de Ruach,^ l'émotion se manifeste du début à la fin de la pause descriptive,
par la présentation et l'accumulation de mots qui possèdent une conno-
tation émotive, ainsi qu'au moyen d'interpellations et de commentaires du
narrateur qui indiquent non seulement l'existence d'émotions, mais aussi
l'origine et la nature de ces dernières.
Les descriptions de Rabelais sont donc unifiées tant sur le plan de

l'énoncé que sur celui de renonciation, unité rhétorique qui ne cherche pas
à cerner l'essence de la "chose" à décrire, mais illustre certaines carac-
téristiques de cette dernière, en insistant particulièrement sur leur rapport
avec la subjectivité des voyageurs.
Comme nous venons de l'indiquer, il est possible de percevoir distincte-

ment, dans le Quart Livre, l'orientation "monothématique" et unidirec-
tionnelle qu'adopte la démarche descriptive du conteur. Il s'agit d'une
dynamique paradigmatique, où l'élan descriptif est suscité par une conti-
nuelle permutation du "semblable." Les descriptions de Cartier, par contre,
se situent sur le plan syntagmatique du langage où le "différent" succède
au "différent," tant sur le plan de l'énoncé que sur celui de renonciation,
pour offrir une image composite de l'objet décrit. Au lieu de se superposer,
comme dans le Quart Livre, pour arriver à un patron idéel de la "chose"
dont on parle, les informations fournies par le relateur se juxtaposent les
unes aux autres de façon linéaire à l'intérieur d'un mouvement du regard
descriptif qui renseigne le lecteur sur plusieurs aspects de la nouvelle
réalité rencontrée.
On peut ainsi reconnaître, dans le Brief Récit, une diversification de
l'information qui projette dans l'espace textuel une image détaillée et
plutôt complexe de l'objet décrit. Ce dernier n'est pas représenté au moyen
d'une esquisse linguistique pléonastique, mais plutôt à l'aide de divers
procédés stylistiques qui créent une image nettement différenciée de la
nouvelle réalité. Dans le moment descriptif portant sur l'adhothuys,' par
exemple, on retrouve des renseignements sur les dimensions, la couleur, le
lieu d'habitation, la répartition géographique et même le goût de cet animal
marin, présentés au moyen de comparaisons, d'évaluations perceptuelles
et de compte-rendus. Cet inventaire rapide signale bien la variété du
matériel linguistique inscrit dans un espace textuel limité.
Une telle constatation révèle l'effort que fait le "relateur" pour trans-
mettre au lecteur un ensemble varié de signifiés qui correspondrait à
l'image cognitive que les voyageurs se sont faits de la réalité nouvelle.
Quoique l'on puisse sentir ici une volonté de définir, donc de cerner
l'essence de ce qui est décrit, le texte, en multipliant les détails et les
procédés stylistiques, donne naissance, non pas à une image précise et
intégrée de l'objet, mais à une création linguistique hétérogène, qui pré-
sente une "chose" hybride dont l'essence et l'existence prennent appui, du
moins dans le texte, sur une juxtaposition de caractéristiques appartenant
à d'autres objets de l'univers. Dans la description de l'adhothuys, par
exemple, l'animal que le texte évoque semble ainsi être la résultante d'une
combinaison de traits physiques appartenant à d'autres éléments de l'uni-
vers que connaît le "relateur." Ce dernier nous présente en effet un poisson
sans nageoires, qui ressemble à un cétacé et à un chien, blanc comme neige
et qui vit entre deux eaux. La juxtaposition de ces attributs nous fait voir
l'animal plus par ses contours analogiques, c'est-à-dire par les correspon-
dances avec l'univers que l'humain croit retrouver dans la bête, que par ses
caractéristiques propres.
À cette diversité de l'énoncé correspond une diversification des registres

de renonciation qui rend compte du sentiment d'ambiguïté entourant le
statut des objets nouveaux dont parle le "relateur." Ce dernier présente
certaines informations avec objectivité, tandis que pour d'autres, le ton
qu'il utilise devient lyrique, admiratif ou méprisant. La présence d'un tel
mouvement de va-et-vient entre le registre objectif et le registre émotif
souligne la nature changeante de l'attitude du "relateur" face aux réalités
nouvelles.
La polarité unité/diversité, qui caractérise, d'une part, les descriptions

du Quart Livre et, de l'autre, celles provenant du Brief Récit, peut
s'exprimer dans les termes d'une autre opposition qui tient compte de
façon plus globale de la dynamique interne des moments descriptifs. Il
s'agit de la dualité centrifuge/centripète, modèle conceptuel binaire qui
nous semble intéressant parce qu'il indique que l'ensemble des éléments
qui forment les descriptions de Cartier possèdent une tendance à l'ex-
pansion, tandis que ceux qui composent celles de Rabelais font preuve
d'une énergie centralisatrice. Cela signifie que même si certaines carac-
téristiques des deux séries de descriptions se ressemblent, leur façon de
s'organiser les oppose selon une importante différence d'orientation.
Une telle polarité peut s'expHquer par la correspondance du choix

organisationnel des éléments styHstiques et d'un mode de connaissance de
l'univers. Dans la perspective où le texte représente un microcosme dans
lequel les deux écrivains transcrivent les composantes du macrocosme
(l'univers) au moyen d'un réseau de correspondances analogiques, ^° on
peut considérer la transcription du "grand" au "petit" comme une opéra-
tion de médiatisation qui met en évidence la vision du macrocosme que

possède le rédacteur. Il est par conséquent possible de rapprocher les
caractéristiques stylistiques d'une description - cette dernière étant la
transcription linguistique d'une "chose" appartenant au macrocosme - et
la conception que se font les deux écrivains du langage comme outil de
transposition. Une telle inscription des données descriptives dans un
discours épistémologique global permet d'expliquer les différences qui
caractérisent les deux récits, en identifiant l'épistémè à laquelle appartient
le langage de chacun des rédacteurs.^*
Comme nous l'avons déjà noté, les descriptions du Quart Livre font
preuve d'une grande force de cohésion interne qui se traduit par une
présentation pléonastique des éléments linguistiques. L'impression d'ordon-
nance et de stabilité qui résulte de cette organisation textuelle suggère que
Rabelais propose au lecteur une transcription Unguistique univoque et
fidèle du monde qu'il décrit. Ce procédé de transposition, dans lequel
l'ordonnance centripète des éléments stylistiques semble reproduire une
ordonnance similaire du macrocosme, nous indique que le rédacteur du j
Quart Livre reconnaît, d'une part, le pouvoir de représentation du langage \
par rapport à son univers imaginaire et, de l'autre, la possibilité de réduire !
la correspondance macrocosme/microcosme à un principe premier vers ■
lequel tendent toutes les composantes de ces deux systèmes analogiques. !
La place et l'importance de l'attribution de noms dans les pauses des- ^

criptives du Quart Livre indiquent en effet que, pour le rédacteur, le mot i
possède le pouvoir d'évoquer directement une réalité précise: à chaque î;
"chose" - même nouvelle sur le plan de l'imaginaire - correspond un mot |
capable d'englober la nature et la fonction de cette "chose." Rabelais I
admet donc que le langage est à même de transcrire le macrocosme en lui
imposant toutefois, au cours du processus de transcription, l'encadrement
d'une logique rhétorique plus conceptuelle "qu'expérientielle," qui est
d'ailleurs censée refléter les lois et l'organisation de l'univers, où tout
concourt à la reconnaissance de la présence première et ultime de Dieu.
Dans une telle perspective, la description de la nouveauté ne présente

aucune difficulté particulière pour le conteur. Même s'ils sont péri-
phériques par rapport à l'univers connu, les mondes nouveaux explorés par
les voyageurs du Quart Livre sont soumis aux mêmes lois universelles
d'ordre divin et, par conséquent, au même système analogique qui permet
d'assimiler linguistiquement le "différent" au "semblable" en l'inscrivant
dans une organisation hiérarchique pyramidale dont Dieu est le sonmiet et
la condition d'existence. L'économie centripète des descriptions de Rabelais
reflète donc une dynamique épistémologique conjonctive dont les éléments -
tout comme ceux du texte - tendent vers un point conmiun en reproduisant
l'organisation théocentrique de l'univers.
Comme cette conception du langage et du cosmos relève d'un principe

unificateur qui trouve son origine dans le symbolisme universel énoncé par
saint Augustin,* 2 nous pouvons donc conclure que les descriptions de
Rabelais participent de l'épistémè médiévale.
Les descriptions du Brief Récit, pour leur part, se caractérisent par la

variété des moyens stylistiques mis en oeuvre pour décrire la nouvelle
réalité. La transcription de cette dernière dans le microcosme du texte
s'avère ainsi une opération linguistique qui se distingue plus par l'ex-
pansion de ses éléments constitutifs que par leur concentration. Il s'agit
d'une stratégie textuelle qui met en évidence la difficulté qu'éprouve le
"relateur" à décrire brièvement la nouveauté au moyen de procédés stylis-
tiques univoques. Cartier reconnaît en effet le caractère approximatif de
son langage descriptif, en ne cessant d'ajouter des renseignements à son
texte, de façon parfois anarchique, afin d'appréhender une réalité qui
semble continuellement se dérober à son effort langagier.
Le Nouveau- Monde ne semble guère vouloir s'assimiler à l'Ancien sur

le plan analogique, d'où la nécessité de singulariser les choses à l'aide de
procédés épistémologiques qui constituent en fin de compte un aveu partiel
de l'impossibilité du langage à saisir directement la réalité. Bien que l'ordre
universel de similitude et de hiérarchie des choses semble ainsi rompu de
façon irrémédiable, le "relateur" réussit néanmoins à situer le "différent"
en l'incorporant à un discours descriptif dont les prémisses, qui s'inscri-
vent dans la tradition analogique médiévale, mènent à des constructions
scripturaires qui tiennent de plus en plus compte de l'individualité des
choses, saisie par l'expérience immédiate. De ce fait, Cartier fait preuve
d'une orientation intellectuelle "renaissante," car tout en étant conscient
de l'arbitraire relatif du langage, le "relateur" tente de cerner la nature des
choses avec le principal outil de communication qu'il connaît Cette attitude vis-
à-vis de la réalité du Nouveau- Monde, qui donne naissance à un discours
descriptif diversifié, se rapproche ainsi "de l'ouverture à la variété des
choses" que Jérôme Cardan identifiait comme caractérisant la révolution
intellectuelle que les Européens du XVI* siècle ont eu conscience de
vivre. ^^
À partir des informations présentées précédemment, il apparaît donc

fort probable que les contraintes " expérientielles" du voyage ont influencé
le rédacteur du Brief Récit en lui imposant la problématique de la descrip-
tion de la nouveauté, problématique que Rabelais, en décrivant son univers
imaginaire, n'a pas rencontrée, et dont la résolution textuelle se présente
chez Cartier comme une des étapes importantes menant à la formation
d'une nouvelle épistémè.
Université d'Ottawa
Notes
1 II faut insister ici sur le mot "progressivement," qui souligne l'étendue temporelle d'un processus
épistémologique dont les effets culturels ne se sont manifestés que peu à peu. À ce sujet, voir Lucien
Febvre, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVI' siècle (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1942), p. 422-423;
John H. Elliott, "Renaissance Europe and America: a Blunted Impact?" in First Images of
America, éd. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), I, p. 17.
2 Gérard Genette, "Frontières du récit," in F/^wres// (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 56.
3 La problématique de l'influence de l'expérience sur la description de la nouveauté est énoncée par

Alexandre Cioranescu, "La Découverte de l'Amérique et l'art de la description," Revue des
Sciences Humaines, 106 (1962), p. 161.
4 Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 31.
5 Pour un exposé des éléments qui constituent l'empirisme de Bacon, voir Reiss, chapitre 6, "The
Masculine Birth of Time," p. 198-224.
6 Reiss, p. 72; Peter Haidu, "Repetition: Modem Reflections on Medieval Aesthetics," Modem
Language Notes, 92 (1977), p. 878-879.
7 Bri^ Récit in The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, éd. H. P. Biggar (Ottawa: Publications of the
Public Archives of Canada, 1 924); François Rabelais, Le Quart Livre, éd. R. Marichal (Genève:
Droz, 1 947). Nous utiliserons le nom de Cartier comme un "vocable" qui désigne l'auteur du^ne/
Récit. Au sujet de la paternité de ce texte, voir André Berthiaume, La Découverte ambiguë
(Montréal: Pierre Tisseyre, 1976), p. 40.
8 Rabelais, p. 152 et 182-183.
9 Cartier, p. 117.
10 Guy Demerson, "Rabelais et Vanaio^qat," Études Rabelaisiennes, 14 (1977), p. 25.
1 1 Reiss, p. 32.
12 Johan Chydenius, "La Théorie du symbolisme universel," Poer/gwe, 23 (1975), p. 325; Alfonso
Maierù, "'Signum' dans la culture médiévale," in Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter, éd. J.
Beckman et L. Honnefelder (Beriin: De Gruyter, 1981), I, p. 57.
1 3 Cité par Michel Mercier, Le Roman féminin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976), p.34.
Daniel, Rainolde, Demosthenes, and the

Degree Speech of Shakespeare's Ulysses
CLIFFORD J. RONAN
Gayley, Muir, and the editors of the Variorum, Cambridge, and Arden
Shakespeares carefully consider the numerous influences, direct and in-
direct, upon Ulysses' magnificent oration On Degree in Troilus and
Cressida I.iii.* Hints of the underiying premise of the speech- a threat to
the universal binding power of the Cosmos - have been found in numerous
Western writers, commencing with Homer, Plato, Ovid, and the apo-
calyptic authors of Holy Scripture. Shakespeare undoubtedly encountered
the idea frequently in his reading and listening. But beyond his favourite
Ovid, there can be scarcely more than two sources to which Shakespeare
would be incontrovertibly exposed. One is Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,
which would be Shakespeare's locus classicus for the Troilus story. There,
in Boethian terminology, man is urged to live in harmony with that univer-
sal "bond of thynges" (III. 1261), Love.^ Another indisputable source of
On Degree is the official homily "Of Obedience" ( 1 547), which Shakespeare
would have heard as often as thirty times before the date of composition of
this play (entered in the Stationers' Register early in 1 603).^ "Of Obedience"
seems to be imitated and even echoed in several of Ulysses' phrases,
particularly his "Take but degree away . . . / And . . . Discord" or "Chaos"
"followes"(ll. 115-33):
Entry degree of people, in their vocacion, callyng, & office, hath appoynted to
them, their duetie and ordre . . . and euery one haue nede of other For wher
ther is no right ordre, there reigneth all abuse, camall libertie, enormitie, syn,
& babilonicall cor\fusw. Take awaye kynges, princes, rulers, magistrates,
iudges, & suche states of Gods ordre, no ma shall ride or go by the high waie
vnrobbed . . . and there must needesfolow all mischief and vtter destruccio
("Of Obedience," /rom///e5, italics supplied)
Other works that On Degree has plausibly been said to echo include
Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and, from more modem times, Elyot's
Governor (1531) and Hookef s Ecclesiastical Polity ( 1 593). It is here my
purpose to suggest at least two additional verbal sources, neither of which
seems ever to have been mentioned in connection with this play before. Both
112/ Renaissance and Reformation 5
of these likely sources are concerned with rhetoric: Samuel Daniel's \

"Musophilus" (1599), a dialogue delineating functions of literature; and ^
Richard Rainolde's Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), a collection of;
original essays designed by the author to illustrate (for teachers, students, '
and general readers) a wide variety of rhetorical strategies/ That Shakespeare |^
should be alert to the ideas and locutions of Daniel would not be a sur- \
prising discovery, as he seems to have reacted to or borrowed from Daniel's
treatment of Marcus Antonius and the War of the Roses. But if Shakespeare
can be found contemplating Rainolde about 1 600, there may be something \
more worth noticing: the interestingly tight cluster of dates (1597-1603)
when Shakespeare seems most to echo - and presumably thus to show a
renewed interest in- the rhetorical textbooks of his age.^
The chief point of significant resemblance that I am proposing between

Daniel's "Musophilus" and Ulysses' speech involves a hunting image and
the apocalyptic phrase universal prey, which both authors use to describe
the confusion and Armageddon that will occur if a great bond is missing -
Degree, for Shakespeare; Literary Excellence, for Daniel. According to
Daniel, "Presumption" and "interiangling Ignorance" produce literature
so ephemeral that poets cannot
hold out with the greatest might they may,

Against confusion, that hath all in chace.
To make of all, a vniuersall pray.
("Musophilus," 11. 243-45)
1
Shakespeare seems to have substituted the word "Chaos" for "Confu- 1
sion," and for the generalized image of a "chace," the particular image off
the self-devouring "Wolfe": J
Appetite (an vniuersall Wolfe[)]
Must make perforce an vniversall prey.

And last, eate vp himselfe.
This Chaos, when Degree is suffocate,

Followes the choaking.
{Tro. I.iii. 127-33)
So fond does Shakespeare here become of the word universal that he uses
it twice, applying it to the wolf as well as (with Daniel) to its primary
prey.
Daniel, too, seems to have contributed to impulses, experienced by

Shakespeare in many quarters, to speak of cosmic harmony (or its ?b-
sence) in musical terminology. Hooker, it is often said, is the chief source:
for Ulysses' reference to the "Discord" that follows when the "string" of*
♦
Renaissance et Réforme / 1 1 3
"Degree" is" taken[n] away" or" vn-tune[d]"(I. iii.l 15-16). And in a long
passage on the threat of disorder in the Cosmos, Hooker does indeed make
an explicit musical analogy:
See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the lawe of nature is the
stay of the whole world? Notwithstanding with nature it commeth somtimes to
passe as with arte. Lei Phidias have rude and obstinate stuffe to carve, though
his arte do that it should, his worke will lacke that bewtie which otherwise in
fitter matter it might have had. He that striketh an instrument with skill, may
cause notwithstanding a verie unpleasant sound, if the string whereon he
striketh chaunce to be uncapable of harmonic.
(Ecclesiastical Polity, I.iii.2-3)
In Hooker the "string" "uncapable of harmonie" is implicitly ill-tuned, but

only implicitly. In two interrelated passages in Daniel's "Musophilus,"
however, the author comes one step closer to speaking of a string that
sounds out of tune. In Daniel we read of jarring poetic "discords" made by
the "unhallowed string" - a term that may have helped inspire Shakes-
peare's reference to the "vn-tune[d] . . . string" of degree-less "Discord":
so many so confusedly sing.

Whose diuers discords haue the Musicke mar'd,
And in contempt that mysterie doth bring,
That he must sing alowd that will be heard:
And the receiu'd opinion of the thing,
For some unhallowed string that vildely iar'd
("Musophilus," 11.62-67; italics supplied)
The musical image of a Cosmos of poetry is repeated a hundred and fifty

Unes later in Daniel's reference to the "divers disagreeing cordes/ Of inter-
iangling Ignorance" (11 .234-36). Similarities of Daniel to Shakespeare in
no way weaken the case for the dramatist's simultaneous use of Hooker
here in Troilus (or for a use in such contemporary plays as Hamlet and
Measure for Measure).^ Instead, Hooker's influence would appear to
reinforce, rather than surmount, that of Daniel in at least the musical
imagery of these Ulyssean lines.
The opening of Hooker's First Book resembles Ulysses' speech not just
in individual phrases but also in its broad, sweeping survey of an ordered,
yet endangered, universe. Another evident resemblance between these
two is shared also with such forebearers as Elyot's Governor, Rabelais'
Gargantua, and the homily. This is only natural, because all five parti-
cipate in an international traditioa What seems to have gone unremarked
in the criticism of Troilus and Cressida, however, is that this tradition is a
Renaissance one in the strictest sense: a revivifying of an ancient custom.
When Hooker posits so eloquently a dissolution of our orderly universe —
Now if nature should intermit her course, . . . if the frame of that heavenly arch
erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve it selfe: if the . . . seasons
. . . blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, . . . what would
become of man himselfe . . .?
{Ecclesiastical Polity , I.iii.2)
- Hooker is, in fact, translating word for word (without acknowledgement)

from a patristic source, Amobius' Against the Pagans (1.2).^
A similar but more ancient and prestigious occurrence of this hallowed

trope can be found in a popular speech often ascribed in the Renaissance to
the great Demosthenes, the First Oration against Aristogiton} There,
too, we read of a hypothetical future disorder that will occur when some
protective and unifying bond is loosed. In pseudo-Demosthenes, the verb
is lu-ô ("luthentô" and "lethutai"), which means (and shares the same
Indo-European root as) loosen. The word thus corresponds to ''relaxata
autdissoluta'' in Amobius, "loosen and dissolve" inHooker, andthe"vn-
tuned" or loosened string in Shakespeare (cf. "loose" 1. 124).
[If] the laws and the obedience that all men yield to the laws were done
away with [luthentôn] and every man were given license to do as he liked, not
only does the constitution vanish, but our Ufe would not diflfer from that of the
beasts of the field For vice is . . . daring; . . . probity is . . . liable to come
off second-best. Therefore . . . juries ought to protect and strengthen the
laws If not, all is dissolved [Mutai], broken up, confounded, and the city
becomes the prey of the most profligate and shameless.
{IstAristogiton 20, 24-25)
After reading this speech about man's proclivity to political disease and
psychological brutalization, we need not agree with the Victorian editor' of
Demosthenes, who, in silently citing a parallel with Troilus, seems to
encourage a belief in Shakespeare's direct indebtedness. But this much is
clean pseudo-Demosthenes and Amobius fall within the same subdivision
of a classical tradition as do the Renaissance writers already cited.
Yet another such author, an Englishman who would have had to listen to
the homily and could also have read Elyot, is Richard Rainolde, adapter
and only Tudor translator of the most popular elementary composition text
in Renaissance Europe, Aphthonius' Progymnasmata.^^ Rainolde re-
words and retitles this originally Hellenistic book, calling it the Founda-
cion ofRhetorike (1563). In his "Oration" "against thieues," Rainolde,
unlike other adapters oftheProgymnasmata, makes a point of mentioning
and speaking highly of the pseudo-Demosthenean Aristogiton, which we
have just examined. Moreover, Rainolde quotes from it and writes varia-
tions of its section on a hypothetical chaotic future. Rainolde's antici-
pations of Shakespeare's phraseology are in many regards as striking as
Elyot's and the homilist's.
Elyot, the anonymous author(s) of the homily, and Rainolde share with
Shakespeare three speech patterns seen in no other purported source of the
motif of universal dissolution. All four writings employ the phrase take
away, place some universal bonding agent as direct object of take away,
and speak in very similar language of the dire eventuality forthcoming.
Specifically, each writer says that what "follow[s]" (homilist, Rainolde,
Shakespeare) or "ensue[s] (Elyot) is a "Chaos" (Elyot, Rainolde,
Shakespeare) or "confusion" (homilist, Rainolde). Of all these three
possible sources of the Ulysses' speech, Rainolde alone anticipates
Shakespeare in dividing the phrase takeaway into its two halves, and in his
precisely similar choice of both the words Chaos andfollow(s):
Take but Degree away, vn-tune that string.

And hearke what Discord followes:
This Chaos, when Degree is suffocate,

Followes the choaking.
{Tro. I.iii.l 15-16, 132-33, italics supplied)
7aÂ:^lawesâwa/é, all order of states faileth [Bjothelawes and the Prince,
hane that honour and strength, that without them, a Chaos a confusion would
followe
{Foundacioriy sig. I3r; italics supplied)
Other of Rainolde's phrases, pallid though they are in comparison with

those in some alternate sources and in Shakespeare, seem also to anti-
cipate Shakespeare and probably provide reinforcement for tendencies
and devices he was already adopting under pressure of Platonic and other
influences. (Book VIII of The Republic, for instance, describes psycho-
logy, sociology, and political science in terms drawn from medicine,
music, and animal-lore, including wolf-lore.^*) Specifically, Rainolde
shares with Shakespeare the use of medical analogies in describing the
Mesocosm, a conventional device present also in Elyot and the pseudo-
Demosthenes.^^ Also, Rainolde, like Daniel, uses some musical imagery
(e.g. "harmonie," "concorde," sig. I2r) and the word prey, Rainolde,
however, is especially emphatic about the idea of beastly prédation when
the universal force is loosened. In a few consecutive pages of his long
oration, Rainolde touches upon the bestiality motif a dozen times, of which
the following is a fair sample:
Lawes . . . kepe backe, the wilfull, rashe, and beastlie life of man, ... for
. . . of ill maners came good lawes, that is to saie, the wicked and beastlie life of
man, their iniurius behauiour, sekyng to frame themselues from men to beastes
.... If the labour and industrie of the godlie, should be alwaie apraie to y
wicked, and eche mannes violence and iniurious dealyng, his owne lawe, the
beaste in his state, would bee lesse brutishe ....
{Foundacion, sigs. Ilv-2v; italics supplied)
In addition, Rainolde, unlike all the other purported sources, uses much
imagery of the cutting down or uprooting of growing things. Disorders like
earthquakes or tempests in the Mesocosm threaten, in Shakespeare, to
"crack," "rend," and "deracinate" from its "fixure" the peaceful tree of
state (11. 103-107). Such images are analogous to Rainolde's many
remarks about criminal elements as "weedes" in need of being "plucked
vp" (sig. I2r) or "cut of where they "roo[t] out" virtue (sig. K2r). And
lastly, in his use of contending abstractions, Rainolde is closer to Shakespeare
than are Daniel, Hooker and other followers of Prudentius. Shakespeare's
excitingly phrased psychomachia of "Force," "Justice," "Power,"
" Strength," "Will," and "Appetite" (I.iii. 1 20-28) seems to be anticipated
in Rainolde's pseudo-Demosthenean passages, where this device is handled
with a concentration and vibrancy approaching the dramatist's:
For, as Demosthenes the famous Orator of Athènes doeth saie. If that wicked
men cease not their violëce . . . If dailie the heddes of wicked men, cease not to
subuerte lawes, . . . oppression and violence should bee lawe, and reason,
and mlfull luste would bee in place of reason, might, force, and power,
should ende the case. Wherefore, soche as no lawe, no order, nor reason, will
driue to hue as members in a common wealthe, to seme in their ftmctio. Thei
are as Homère calleth theim, burdeins to the yearth
{Foundacion, sign. I4r; italics supplied)
In both Rainolde and Shakespeare, it seems likely, the tune of these

remarks is meant to seem Grecian or antique.
Shakespeare's resort to Rainolde may seem less credible than other of

his borrowings. But Rainolde does write on rhetoric, a subject in which
Shakespeare seems to have taken a remarkably clear professional interest
in the years inmiediate before Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602). Puttenham
is echoed, for instance, inLove J LaZ>or'5Lo5r(c. 1597); and Peacham, in
Much Ado About Nothing , (c. 1598). Another rhetorical anthology Hke
Rainolde's, Sylvain's Orator, is wsté m Merchant of Venice (c.l598).
Still, Rainolde is the most graceless and redundant of the four rhe-
toricians mentioned above, a writer whose prose is in the limping styles of a
half century before the date of Troilus, Yet if young Shakespeare really
had been, as rumored, "a Schoolmaster in the Countrey,"^^ with a less
thorough command of Latin and Greek than would be deemed appropriate,
might he not have once been interested in this little teaching guide? After
all, Rainolde comments also upon several subjects to which Shakespeare's
writing interests brought him: Venus and Adonis, Helen, Hecuba, Men-
enius, Junius Brutus, Cassibelan, Caesar, Cato, Nero, Richard III, Henry
VIII. Also Rainolde's pages resound with a salvo of Greek words and
names: "Thesis," "Rhétorique," "Eidolopoeia," "Prosolopoeia," "Prog-
inmasmata," "Democratia," and "tokos" (Greek for i/jwry); and Thebes,
Athens, Lacedaemon, Boeotia, Aphthonius, Aesop, Cadmus, Aristotie,

Plato, Isocrates, Solon, Thucydides, Diogenes, Alexander, Lysimachus,
Epaminondas. It is not inconceivable that Shakespeare would have turned,
or returned, to this school text when he was contemplating formal rhetorics
in the late 1590s. Then, remembering that Rainolde claimed to imitate
Demosthenes at some length, Shakespeare might have come back to make
specific borrowings when he needed to devise an antique speech for the
greatest of Homeric orators. Perhaps Rainolde's version of the famous
Demosthenes looked "Greek" enough to the dramatist. And if he checked
the Greek original or one of the Latin translations, ^"^ Shakespeare would
have found that Rainolde is faithful to the ancient rhetorical topos of the
threatened return of chaos - a tradition whose classical associations and
connotations were probably as well known to Shakespeare and his audi-
ence as they were to Elyot, Cranmer and associates, Hooker, and Daniel.
Southwest Texas State University
Notes
1 Shakespeare citations are to the New Variorum Troilus and Cressida , Harold N. Hillebrand and
T. W. Baldwin, edd. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953). Besides the above (pp. 51-59, 389-410),
the chief extended discussions of the sources of On Degree include Charles Mills Gayley,
Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York: Macmillan, 1 9 1 7) pp. 1 62-90,
234-59; Alice Walker, éd., Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1 969), p. 1 53; Kenneth Pahner, éd., Troilus and Cressida (London: Methuen, 1 982), pp.320-22;
and Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Yale University Press,
1 978), pp. 1 5 1-57. It should be noted that this last work, a standard authority, erroneously states
that Hooker formulates Shakespeare's phrase "Degrees in Schooles" (I.iii.l 10). Hillebrand, p.
391, on the contrary, follows Gayley and quite rightly stresses that Hooker could have provided
the "figure" of academic ranks; nowhere does the phrase degrees in schools occur in Hooker, even
though a discussion of such degrees is to be found in Hooker's Preface. The Hooker passage in
question is some 8,000 words, or 1 8 folio pages, prior to the passages on the Cosmos in Book I, the
portion of Hooker with the best claim to underlie Ulysses' speech. Below, unless otherwise
specified, Richard Hooker is cited in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. I, ed. Georges
Edelen, Folger Library Edition (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).
2 Chaucer is cited in F. N. Robinson's ed. oïThe Works, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1 957); see also
the binding "cheyne of love" in Knight's Tale (a source of MND), 11. 2988ff.
3 In 1602, Shakespeare (b. 1564) would have been a churchgoer for some 30 years. Alfi-ed Hart,
Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1934), p. 73, reminds
us that attendance was compulsory in Tudor parishes and that "Of Obedience" would be read
annually. A recent writer on this subject. Professor Ronald B. Bond of the University of Calgary,
has communicated to me privately his opinion that this crucial homily would have been read more
than once a year. Bond, too, believes that the "controlling hand" in "Of Obedience" is Cranmer's;
see Bond's "Cranmer and the Controversy Surrounding Publication of Certayne Sermons or
Homilies (1541)," Renaissance and Reformation, 12 ( 1976), 28-35, especially 30. My citation
of the Tudor "Of Obedience" is firom the readily available excerpts in the Variorum Troilus,
though I have also consulted a full text in Certaine Sermons or homilies . . . , intro., Mary Ellen
Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (1623; Gainesville: Scholars' Facsim., 1968).
4 The Daniel and Rainolde citations are from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus, ed. Raymond Himelick
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1 965 ) and Richard Rainolde, The Foundation of
Rhetorike, The English Experience, no. 91 (1563; facsim. rpt. Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1969).
5 For Shakespeare's use of formal rhetorics, see below; Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare 's Use of \
the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947) pp. 44, 1 1 3; and Kenneth i
Muir, "Shakespeare and Rhetoric," Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (Heidelberg) 90 (1954), 49-68. !
Troilus is usually assigned to 1601-02. Commenting on the likely use of rhetorical works in, |
respectively. Merchant of Venice (1596-97), Much Ado (1598-99), and Love's Labor's Lost
( 1 594-97), Muir believes that Shakespeare "seems to have read Pyott's translation ofThe Orator,
Peacham's Garden of Eloquence, and Puttenham's ^/te of English Poésie" (Muir, "Rhetoric,"
53). :
6 Gayley (pp. 187-89) argues for an especially strong influence of Hooker on Hamlet. To me, it |
seemsthatthelinesinMeasMre/orAfeaûreonglass, apes, heaven, and angels (II. ii) could involve i
Shakespeare's reading Hooker's passage on the order and degree of angels. Hooker's angels are i
internally ranked and given to searching for divine reflections in themselves and man; they are filled j
with a God-like love "unto the children of men; in the countenance of whose nature looking \
downeward they behold themselves beneath themselves, even as upwarde in God, beneath whom ;
themselves are, they see that creature which is no where but in themselves and us resembled" ,
(I.iv.1). !
7 For a convenient look at the Amobius text, see Christopher Morris' notes to his Everyman éd., !
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1907), I, 157.
8 English and Greek citations of the IstAristogiton are from the J. Vince t±, Demosthenes: Against ]
Meidias, . . . Aristogeiton, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I
1 935 ). I have, in addition, consulted various sixteenth-century Greek editions and one of the Latin ■
translations at which Shakespeare could have glanced (Philip Melanchthon, tr.. Contra '
Aristogiton . . . , Hague, 1527). 1
9 Charles Rann Kennedy, ed. The Orations of Demosthenes, Vol IV, Bohn's Classical Library 1
( 1 888; London: George Bell, 1 901 ), p. 6 1 , n. 1 , quotes Tro. I.iii. 109-30 with only the simple and \
enigmatic introductory comment "compare " ;,
10 F. R. Johnson provides a useful summary of the reputation of Rainolde and the popularity of I
Aphthonius and his Latin imitators; see Johnson's introduction to his facsimile of Foundacion of \
Rhetorike (New York: Scholars' Facsim., 1945). For the schoolroom use of Aphthonius, see T. j
W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's "Small Latine <& Lesse Greek," 2 vols. (Urbana: Illinois 1
University Press, 1944), II, 288 etpassim. Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians ]
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 3-38, makes an interesting case for {
Rainolde as an important specimen of a class of rhetoricians whom Shakespeare may almost |
everywhere be imitating. v
1 1 Cf. James Holly Hanford, "A Platonic Passage in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida," Studies j
in Philology, 13(1916),! 00-09. 3
12 Rainolde wants magistrates to rid their country of "yll humors" and "ill bloode" (sig, 12v) when ji
the land is "plagued" with "pestiferous doinges"(sig. 13r). For this imagery of the diseasedco/p«5 J
politicum there are Greek antecedents: in Plato (Relublic 564B), who speaks of a country's j
disease (nosêma); and in pseudo- Demosthenes, who terms criminals incurable (aniatos) and ]
cancerous. (See the P. Shorey éd.. The Republic, 2 vols. Loeb Library [London: Heinemann, j
1 930-35].) But since Elyot anticipates Shakespeare's use of the word "med'cinable," perhaps the j
early Tudor Englishman is as responsible as any of the other authors for Shakespeare's talk of the |
Greek enterprise as "pale" and "sicke" of "Feauer" and "Plagues." See Sir Thomas Elyot, The ^
Boke Named the Gouemour, 2 vols., ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (London: Kegan, 1883), I, 5. j
1 3 The written source is John Aubrey, quoting Christopher Beeston, son of one of Shakespeare's |
colleagues in the King's Men. Reasons for accepting Aubrey's account are well argued by, among |
others, Baldwin in his Small Latine U, 36 etpassim . \
14 Baldwin, Small Latine II, 650 and 661 states that proof is lacking for Shakespeare's use of any j
work ascribed to Demosthenes. At least until such proof may be forthcoming, Shakespeare's j
dependence on the sec(Hid-hand Athenian classicism oi Rainolde will continue to be most probable.
Book Reviews/ Comptes Rendus
Elizabeth A. Chesney. The Countervoyage of Rabelais andAriosto. A Com-

parative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics. Durham, N. C: Duke
University Press, 1982. Pp vii, 232. $20.00
This comparative study does for Ariosto and Rabelais what Giuseppe Mazzotta's
siCclsiimedDante, Poet of the Desert has recently done for the Florentine poet: it
offers many close readings, probes linguistic ambiguities, makes use of a rich
and varied critical vocabulary, displays impressive erudition, and raises issues
that every student of the texts in question must ultimately treat. Elizabeth
Chesney's work, like thatof Mazzotta, may also prove controversial because of
some of its revisionist conclusions. Nevertheless, as a whole it builds beautifully
on the Renaissance studies of such distinguished scholars as Thomas Green, A.
Bartlett Giamatti, Robert Durling, and the author's own mentor Marcel Tetel,
who directed her work in its original form as a Duke University dissertation. The
book consists of an introduction, five chapters ("The Voyage," "Myth and
Fantasy," "The Narrator," "Time and Art," "Folly"), and a conclusion, nine-
page bibliography, and ten-page index.
The Introduction contains an explanation of the purpose of the study and a
rationale for the work's organization. Chesney does not desire to focus on
Ariosto' s possible influence on Rabelais, but rather wishes to examine the
shared "difference" in the two authors. That which sets them apart from their
medieval predecessors and links them to a new age and to each other is "their
propensity for exploring the opposite of every truth and the other side of every
argument," or what Chesney calls "a countervoyage, a critical reflection upon
each conceptual pole by its other" (p. 5). She sees this dialectic as a pervasive
structure in Ariosto and Rabelais, which accounts for textual ambiguities, sets
them in the context of contemporary voyages of discovery, and relates them to
the epoch's "antirationalistic movement" (p. 6). In Hegelian terms this self-
criticism is the price a civilization must pay to evolve from one stage to the next.
Ariosto at the end of the Italian Renaissance and Rabelais at the beginning of the
French are transitional and pivotal figures, and as a result they engage in much
consciousness-raising. Structures and themes highlighted during the era and
developed in the two Renaissance mock epics become, therefore, the areas of
Chesney' s interest and form the basis of her five chapters. She justifies her
multi- thematic approach as an attempt "to unite thematic and stylistic contra-
dictions under the rubric of the countervoyage" (p. 1 5). The subsequent reading
1 20 / Renaissance and Reformation
of the Orlando furio so and the Rabelaisian opus magnum repeatedly shows
synthesis-in- antithesis, convincingly argues for structural unity where little had
previously been seen, and eloquently testifies to the value of Chesney's
approach.
The first chapter warns against seeing the voyages depicted in Ariosto and
Rabelais as a means for praising contemporary progress. Although topographi-
cal and nautical detail abounds in their descriptions of imaginary voyages, it
serves primarily "to involve the reader in a spiritual odyssey" that will soon be
spatially and temporally fragmented (p. 22). The voyage soon becomes "a
vehicle for self-analysis and the formation of judgment" (p. 40), rather than an
encomium of a Renaissance explorer. In the second chapter the uses of myth and
fantasy are similarly revealed. While Chesney agrees that the widespread in-
clusion of pagan divinities in Renaissance literature "contributes to . . . man's
own mythification" (p. 63), she argues that in the Ferrarese poet and the Gallic
monk much of the myth is a parody and an indictment of the "indiscriminate
valuing of antiquity over modernity" by their contemporaries (p. 66). The
juxtaposition of fact and fantasy "demystifies by means of remythification" (p.
96). In other words, the authors use fantasy to remind the reader that illusion is
part of being and the stuff of (re)mythification.
The next chapter, on the narrator, depends on Gérard Genette for much of its
analytical terminology. It attempts to demonstrate that in Ariosto and Rabelais
"narrative ambiguity . . . is . . . a mainspring ofthecountervoyage and, as such,
contributes to the two works' conceptual unity" (p. 98). The narrator who is
neither reliable nor consistently unreliable is designed to make the reader pause
and consider the facets of knowledge; the consciousness of such a narrator
"reflects the problems and contradictions of a transitional age" (p. 115).
Chapter 4 treats the problem of time and art. Chesney identifies temporal
vacillations in the two texts as evidence of "a temporal tension" in their
descriptions of history and futurity (p. 136). The purpose of the tension is to
demonstrate that the only constant is change; even art, which may transcend
time, is subject to changing interpretations. The final chapter discusses the
concept of folly as seen in such figures as Panurge in the Pantagrueline tales and
Astolfo in ihQ Furioso. Orlando's madness is analyzed as a "coupling of mono-
mania with schizophrenia," a fact which supposedly makes him more polemical
and didactic since he breaks with the typical literary type of fool (p. 188). The
Conclusion acknowledges the geographical and temporal differences between
Ariosto and Rabelais but concludes that these differences only serve "to render
their profound similarities all the more intriguing" (p. 213). The bibliography,
like the index, is exemplary, although Eric Auerbach's Mimesis essay on
Rabelais should probably be included.
Chesney buttresses most of the above assertions with careful readings of

multiple passages from both texts. Although she could be more careful when
speaking of allegory in Ariosto (it is of a limited scope) and more attentive to the
medieval currents in Rabelais (there are more than she credits), the book's
overall approach— with its emphasis on the "divided consciousness" of the two
authors — makes it a must for scholars of Renaissance comparative literature.
Mistakes and errata include "nouvi" for"nuovi" (pp. 4 and 22), '"Canzionere"
for ''Canzoniere'' (p. 6), "provde" for "provide" (p. 39), "condemmed" for
"condemned" (p. 45), "Ruggerio" for"Ruggiero" (p. 48), "noms" for"mons"
(p. 68, 1. 5), "lascai" for"lasciai" (p. 128, n. 39), "Aristo" for"Ariosto" (p.
165), "moveover" for "moreover" (p. 178), "scritte" for "scritto" (p. 186),
"né" for "ne" (p. 191, 1. 1) and an italicization problem on p. 34, n. 22.
Notwithstanding these minor problems, the author's prose style is lucid, and the
volume's printing is noteworthy for its clarity.
MADISON U. SOWELL, Brigham Young University
Jonathan Goldberg. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse.

Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. P.p. Xv, 177.
$17.50 US.
The title of this book is taken from Spenser's apology following the great 'river-
canto' in the fourth book of The Faerie Queene. When the magnificent procession
of water-gods and nymphs attending the marriage of the Thames and the Medway
has been described, the poet exclaims, "O What an endlesse worke have I in hand,
/ To count the seas abundant progeny . . . Then blame me not, if I have err'd in
count / Of Gods, of Nymphs, or rivers yet unred: / For though their numbers do
much more surmount, / Yet all those same were there, which erst I did recount"
Those gods he has named in his catalogue were in fact there, he reports, but there
were many more he could not describe, crowding the hall even up to the door, "Yet
were they all in order, as befell, / According their degrees disposed well" (IV. xii.
1-3). To give an exact account of "the seas abundant progeny" (IV. xii. 1) lies
beyond his powers, even though he has been assisted by the muse. The very
possibility of attempting to do so in writing invokes a dream of a complete and
accurate representation, after the pattern of those "records of antiquitie" that are
"layd up in heaven above" and to which"no wit of man may comen neare" (IV. x.
10). But the actual experience of writing calls forth a'topos of modesty' {excusatio
propter injlrmitatem) in which the poet seems uncomfortably aware of the limi-
tations of his medium. Not so, paradoxically, for the less reliable medium of
Homer whose invocation before the catalogue of ships {Iliad II. 485 ff) lays down
the claim that he has a tremendous array of detail exactly correct because of the
divine help given him by the muses. For Spenser, however, the event he has
attempted to describe constitutes in itself a full presence that cannot be adequately
represented within the confines of his art: " How can they all in this so narrow verse
/ Contayned be, and in small compasses held?" (IV. xi. 17).
To contemplate a writing that would seek to fulfill the dream of total statement,
in which no portion or feature of its object would escape representation, is to
contemplate the prospect of an 'endless work' advancing forever toward the end it
projects for itself while remaining unfinished forever there would always be one
last thing to be extricated from the folds, one last detail to work in, and the more
words we spend attempting to exhaust what is there, the further we seem to be from
a representation that can be said to be complete. When the artist himself recog-
nizes this situation he must respond by striking some attitude toward it, let us say of
melancholy or exuberance. Either he can regard the "endlesse worke" of writing

toward an unattainable goal as being exuberantly productive, like a Rabelaisian
comucopie, or he can regard it as being profoundly depressing, a hopeless rage for
order that is always being unravelled and frustrated by the maddening slippages,
complicated folds and shifting configurations of writing itself. The first, exuberant
response we find, as Terence Cave has shown (TAe Comucopian Text; 1979), in
Rabelais, the second, melancholy response, in Robert Burton with his panicky
Ramist designs and that'extemporall style' which he compares to a running sore
and a purging of infection, a writing that is always exiled from, or at best sup-
plemental to, some fantasized 'normal state' of good health where words can be
made to stand clearly and completely for things.
Which of these alternatives do we attribute to Spenser? For A. Bartlett Gia-

matti {Play of Double Senses; 1975)— at least with respect to the passage at
hand — the inability of the narrow frame of Spenser's verse to contain the immense
variety of "the seas abundant progeny" (IV. xii. 1 ) is greeted by the poet with joy
as an act of participation in the larger work of great creating nature. Mr. Goldberg,
on the other hand, takes the position that Spenser's mood, with respect to the
incompleteness that is written into the centre of his dream of artistic fulfillment, is
one of profound melancholy. In the final sentences of his book, Goldberg cites the
passage from the correspondence with Harvey in which, by 1580, Spenser is
confidently referring to a large corpus of works which are now lost, or were never
written, or (perhaps) partially incorporated into The Faerie Queene which the
poet requests Harvey to return to him so that he can get back to work: "I will in
hand forthwith with my Faery Queene, whyche I praye you hartily send me with al
expedition " "This," Goldberg concludes, "is the poet's fantasy; he has these
lost texts to himself. Giving them will empty him into the reality of loss" (p.
174)
There is ample room in Spenser, one feels certain, for both moods, and we are
most likely to find them together in that final installment which William Blissett
("Spenser^s Mutabilitie"; 1964) has aptly referred to as a "retrospective com-
mentary" on the poem as a whole, one in which a melancholy awareness of the
ruins of time is counterpoised by the goddess of Nature's "chearefuU view" (VII.
vii. 57), and by the spirit of one of Queen Elizabeth's preferred epigrams: "per
molto variare la natura bella.'^ The melancholy experience of loss that Goldberg
sees as dominating the poem proceeds, he believes, from the expectation that a
story can be made to complete itself in a definitive ending that has been foreseen by
the poet at the outset and then accomplished by writing toward it along an orderly
sequence of events. Thus the book is concerned with studying how The Faerie
Queene seems to undo its fundamental assumptions, not with respect to its claims
to allegorical meaning, but with respect to its presuppositions about the nature of
stories.
It seems to me that there are two errors here: first, it assumes that a poet
immersed in the tradition of romance would start out with such a naive assumption
about the nature of stories and the process of narration, and that definitive endings,
as opposed to elaborately devious variations, would be of primary importance to
him; secondly, it chooses to examine what might be called the 'logocentrism' of
i
The Faerie Queene in terms of its narrative rather than its claims to allegorical
meaning. To insist upon speaking of its narrative alone, independent of the claims
made for that narrative as a system for representing ideas, is to over-simplify the
issue by extricating the text from the circuit within which the reader transforms
information into a structure of meaning, feeds that structure back into his per-
ception of the text as he continues to read, and then re-configures it in response to
new stimulus. It is a continuous process driven by the assumption that the frenetic
circulation of commentary can be stabilized finally in the achievement of full
understanding. Here, if anywhere, is where a 'deconstructive' reading of The
Faerie Queene should begin.
Despite these reservations about its premises, the book presents a clear account
of what it sets out to do that promises to hold our interest even if it does not win our
consent a "reading of Spenser" is offered in which the somewhat neglected fourth
book oïThe Faerie Queene is focussed upon as typifying more fully than any other
the peculiarities of Spenserian narrative which is characterized, we are told, by
ftaistrating disruptions, retrogressions, incoherencies, subversions of narrative
logic, and so on. It is a narrative, moreover, that is shot through with a profound
sense of loss because of the incompleteness of all stories and perhaps, if I under-
stand the final sentence correctly, the futility of an art in which, as Beckett puts it,
there is nothing to say combined with the obligation to say it "The only way to tell
a story," Goldberg says, "is never to have it end" (p. 72).
The book is intended to contribute to knowledge in two ways: first, it reverses a

tendency in criticism oïThe Faerie Queene to gloss over Book IV (which does not
separate itself into a complete unit so conveniently as the others) by bringing it into
the centre of attention and grounding an interpretation of the poem as a whole upon
problems raised by it; and, secondly, it reverses the natural tendency of readers to
unify the narrative, while suppressing or explaining away any inconsistencies, by
setting forth these normally 'marginalized' snags in the fabric as being essential to
the aesthetic experience of the poem: "Most often, when criticism takes stock of
such traits of narrative, it considers them as problems that could only be elucidated
by pointing to some principle other than narration ... the frustrations of reading
are thereby neglected, and so is something vital to the nature of Spenserian
narration" (xi). Goldberg claims that this regressive and inherently frustrating
movement he finds in Spenserian narrative is what energizes the creative process
itself "The generation of the text and its production is my subject" (xii).
Allowing for a degree of exaggeration which is perhaps necessary if any unusual

approach is to catch our attention, this might suggest that an interesting book is to
follow, especially when we encounter the promising remark that Spenser's poem
"generates itself precisely out of its own instability" (xiv), for it seems right that
there should be some vital relationship between the general 'looseness' of the
narrative oïThe Faerie Queene and the mysterious creative forces that shaped and
directed Spenser's creative project Unfortunately, the book does not live up to
this promise.
The problem lies partly in its theoretical pretensions which are shored up by an
impressive list of authorities— Barthes, Derrida, Eagleton, Lucacs, Jameson,
Foucault, Kermode, Lacan, Levi- Strauss, Said and Hayden White— all laid out

for us in mini-essays that appear in the notes: "Another crucial term that Barthes
and I use is supplement ..." (p. lOn.). Although Barthes is announced to be the
most important of these because of his distinction between the 'readerly' and the
'writerly' text (the latter characterizing The Faerie Queene because the poem sets
forth the problems of writing by frustrating the reader), the above list should ;
indicate that Goldberg's theoretical approach is broadly eclectic, its purpose |
being simply to read The Faerie Queene in a new way and to express, incidentally, !
a general enthusiasm for the language of theory. The difficulty seems to arise with j
his management of theoretical ideas: "the meanings of words are determined i
inside a text as a matter of differences" (p. 24; emphasis mine). Such problems are |
magnified by the author's enthusiasm for lush overstatement, as in the following \
commentary on the epithet ofElizabeth as" dearest dred"( I. poem, iv): "this is the I
power that generates his desire, the desire to write, to be written, and to be !
destroyed in the process. Is this a consummation devoutly to be wished? The space ;
of narration is, in a word, where loss and excess meet, where orgasm would be no !
different from castration ..." (p. 24). |
In addition to this, the book is not particularly strong as scholarship on Spenser. J

The author indulges, for instance, in the kind of naive 'readerly' construction he \
condemns when referring to Una's " symbolic lamb" (p. 7). The lamb is mentioned |
only once in our first view of Una (I. i. 4. 9), because of its presence in almost all /
versions of the legend of St George; and it soon dropped out of sight because it |
served no symbolic function {Variorum I, 389-90). Elsewhere he states con-|
fidently— too confidently for anyone alive to the 'intertextuality' which makes the |
hunting of absolute origins problematic — that Chaucer's tale of Sir Thopas is an \
"undeniable source for The Faerie Queene " (p. 1 8), citing as his authority for this {
Hugh MacLean's abridged, undergraduate edition where the tale of Sir Thopas is i
much more cautiously noted as taking up the same theme as we find in Arthur's \
nocturnal vision (I. ix. 13). Apparently, Goldberg is unaware that MacLean
follows Greenlaw's discussion of the problem (excerpted in Variorum 1, 267-68),
where it is pointed out that the elements we find in the Tale of Sir Thopas are
common to "a rich body of traditional material" in Celtic folklore, and that i
Spenser must have seen it within a matrix of similar tales, none of which could be j
privileged absolutely over the others as a definitive "source" even for Arthur's |
dream, let alone the poem as a whole. It was Josephine Waters Bennet, in 1942,
who presented the most vigorous argument for the centrality of Chaucer's tale in
the scheme of The Faerie Queene as a whole, a readerly construction which
Goldberg accepts without question (or acknowledgement) but which is by no
means a settled issue.
Between an introduction and a conclusion, entitled "Pretexts" and "After-

words" respectively, there are three main chapters: "Other Voices, Other Texts,"
in which the relation of Book IV to Chaucer's Squire's Tale is discussed, "Others,
Desire, and the Self in the Structure of the Text," in which it is argued that it is
really the text, not the lovers portrayed in it, that experiences desire, and a third
chapter, better than these, entitled "The Authority of the Other," in which, in the
manner of critics such as Orgel and Greenblatt, Goldberg discusses images
surrounding Queen Elizabeth to situate Spenser's poem within a framework of
socially produced fictions that are instantialized in the text as figures of the 'Other*
(capitalized to invoke current re-readings of Freud). This chapter has pictures.
In the introductory section, Goldberg takes up "the revisionary juncture

between Books III and IV," arguing that "failed endings are part of the design of
the poem" (p. 2) even though the first books give us, as he over- hastily asserts, the
"pleasures of resolution" (p. 3). This concession is forgotten several pages later
when he claims that the "radical disturbances of narration" in Book IV "lay bare
the nature of narration throughout The Faerie Queene (p. 6). Pointing out that
Book IV has its space in the poem opened for it by "the displacement of an ending"
(the reunion of Scudamour and Amoret in the cancelled stanzas concluding the
1 590 version of Book III), an ending which never finds its way back into the poem,
Goldberg argues as follows: "the fundamental quality of narration . . . is . . . not a
progression toward a conclusion, but a deferral, leaving an ending ' to be perfected'
in 'another place'; the fundamental quality, as the narrator calls it, is 'endlesse
worke' (IV. xii. 1. 9). Such work involves seemingly endless acts of undoing,
denial and frustration. Because of it, narration is best measured in losses ..."
(p. 8). As a consequence, The Faerie Queene" is a 'writerly text' whose pro-
duction entails an " 'endlesse worke' of substitution" (p. II) in which "the
problematizaton of writing" itself becomes central to the poet's concerns (p.
13 n. 6).
The difficulty with much of this is not primarily its suspect familiarity to what is
central to our concerns: Spenser's poem does indeed raise questions about the
creative process which might well be examined in the light of current thought about
writing, difference, deferral, supplementarity, the distinction between inside and
outside, and so on. But such an analysis should take into account, at some level,
the question of intentions if only to show that, even in the case a poet who seems
preoccupied with complete patterns and polished surfaces, the forces at work in
the process of writing tend to distort, bend and re-configure those intentions in
illuminating ways. It is reasonable to assume, for instance, that Robert Burton, as
he worked on his extended treatise on melancholy, became increasingly fas-
cinated by the counterforce of prolix disorder that he discovered to be inherent in
the process of writing, and that he intentionally exploited its subverison of organ-
ized structure. His style therefore seems to proceed out of a carefully managed
dialectic between a 'readerly' dream of perfect control over rational exposition
and a' writerly' fascination with the spirited procHvity of writing to take hold of the
bit and run where it will. If we think of Burton doing this deliberately we are likely
to have a rather different conception of the significance of disorder in The
Anatomy of Melancholy than if we assume that he attempted throughout to
impose order on his material, and failed.
It is simply not possible to avoid this question of intention when thinking about
The Faerie Queene. In the 'Letter to Raleigh,' for instance, we have an almost
obsessively explicit (and notoriously problematic) description of what Spenser,
shortly after registering the first installment, seems to have thought he was doing.
Did Spenser write the Letter in the same spirit that Burton may have produced his
elaborate charts— to deliberately set up a dialectic between the chaotic disorder of
writing and an impossible fantasy of meta-discursive control? Or did Spenser
candidly intend it to be a reliable aid, allowing the reader "as in a handfull [to]
gripe al the discourse"? The reader of this book soon gives up hope that such
questions will have a fair hearing, for Goldberg never tires of rhapsode incantation
on the 'writerly text': "It plays upon the void," he exclaims, "it occupies the place
of loss — where Britomart's wound is extended to Amoret, where Amoret is
'perfect hole.' This is the space of text" (p. 11).
To substantiate the claim that The Faerie Queene is a 'writerly text,' much of
this introductory section is devoted to a reading of the proem to Book I in which a
reversal of priority occurs whereby writing takes authority over voice. These
introductory stanzas are seen as disseminating into chains of substitution all
positive terms that might have been used by a reader to stabilize the meaning of the
text and to draw boundaries between inside and outside: the authorial T and the
'Muse' are initially thought to be outside the poem, constituting its creative
'source,' while the corresponding pair of the 'Briton Prince' and 'Tanaquill' are
inside the poem and give to the narrative its beginning; but because "the pattern of
repetition and substitution has priority and undermines all beginning stories, all
stable selves" (p. 17), "both Muse and poet are inside the text and nowhere else"
(p. 16). This famihar move (which goes back to the 'new critical' refusal to
acknowledge anything but words on the page), is contradicted a moment later
when Goldberg claims that the "boundary" between inside and outside "has been
explicitly violated," a state of affairs in which it would obviously be meaningless to
speak of poet and muse being either inside or outside.
This is of more than incidental significance, for it is symptomatic of Goldberg's

procedure throughout of mystifying — one might now say 'theologizing' — the word
"text" as his critical mantra. One can only wonder, for instance, at the status of his
metaphor of the text as a sphere (which is nothing if not a figure of closure) and his
fondness for the locution "space of the text": "By the end of the first stanza of the
poem, we may already suspect that to enter the space of the Spenserian text is to
cross tlêse boundaries to the loss of our security. The questions, and the reversals,
drive us deeper into this textual sphere in which the inside is the outside" (p. 1 6). I
am not sure that anyone's security is any longer at stake when confronted by
intertextual conceptions of the literary work as a knotted vortex of codes, unless of
course they cling to such metaphors as 'textual space' and 'textual sphere.'
The first chapter takes up the matter of the relation of Chaucer* s Squire' s Tale to
Spenser's continuation of it in Book IV, arguing that Spenser's narrative "works
by entering more and more deeply into loss" and that this negative principle for
generating the text out of its own failures is observed most clearly in Book IV
which "imitates the lacuna that the Chaucerian tale defines as the space of
narration" (p. 44). Note the words 'imitate,' 'lacuna," space,' and the active verb,
'to defme.' This sentence can mean anything at all. Then we are told that "oblitera-
tion is the ending provided" (p. 44), that" loss is the principle of narration" (p. 47),
that "community is reduced" (p. 47), that in the relationship of Artegal and
Britomart" consummation is postponed because so much has been lost" (p. 47),
and that Britomart's returning to where she lost Amoret (IV. vi. 47) is meant to
figure explicitly the movement of the poem as a whole:
The poem's forward motion is explicitly amiounced as retrogression, retire-

» ment, withdrawal; and the earlier, flashback 'interruption; in which The
Squire's Tale was first ended now has become a basic structure of narration.
. . . Moving back, the text moves into itself, or refers to its own movement, for
this return reveals explicitly that the text has been finding its voice only in
reworking and unworking that ending with which it began . . . For the nar-
rative to look ahead it looks back. Going forward, the narrative confronts the
loss behind the text that generates it (p. 48)
While this passage will give some idea of the appalling repetitiveness of the
book — going nowhere, it goes nowhere — we can get an idea of the general level of
critical discussion from the following analysis of the episode at the cave of Lust
"As Amoret and AEmylia 'did discourse' (20. 1), Lust appears in 'the mouth'
(20.5 ) of the cave. He means to rape them and then to eat them. The place of desire
is characterized by the equation of discourse and sexuality. Lust's cannibalism
and rape are an extreme version of a pattern of substitution" (p. 57).
The chapter entitled " Others, Desire and the Self in the Structure of the Text" is
ostensibly concerned with the pairs of lovers who move from Books III to V.
Goldberg asserts that they are air'driven to their undoing" by " incestuous desire"
(p. 117), but it soon becomes apparent that the sex-life of the text itself is much
more exciting than theirs: " In the text, what the desire of the text does is enacted by
what desire makes the characters enact" (p. 99). This seems to put the text into a
state of anthropomorphic hyperactivity: it"quietly announces" (p. 79), if'comes
to Belphoebe by way of Lust" (p. 157), it "satisfies itself in itself (p. 117), it
"engulfs itself (p. 117), and it "arrives" at Marinell and Florimell where we
observe the "submergence of the self in the desire of the text" (p. 1 19) etc., etc.
What the text does with this desire is then explained in a note for those who have
not quite got the point "What I am urging is a freeplay within the text's own
narcissism, which also leaves the text playing with itself and the reader defeated"
(p. 116. n. 14).
The closest we come to a treatment of allegory is the following offhand remark:

although Britomart might be read as an embodiment of married love "in some
readers interpretation," to do so would replace "the actuality of the textual space
in which characters move in The Faerie Queene'' with "something supposedly
outside it" (p. 75; cf. p. 76 n.). While Goldberg forthrightly declares himself
opposed to replacing images in the text with meanings we might wish to find in it, it
is clear that he will make some exceptions: Lust, for instance, "figures the econo-
mics of exchange that affects women, objects, and words" (p. 157), and, worse
still, "male generativity" (p. 158). Would the author of the "Epithalamion"
endorse this simplistic and entirely unwarranted equation? It is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that the text is allowed to refer to some things " supposedly outside
it," and not to others.
I move forward now to Goldberg' s discussion of the central moment of Book VI,
the vision of Mt Acidale in the tenth canto, for it provides the best example of the
general competence and tone of this book. Let me begin with a brief account of the
episode itself. The mount is described, with lavish Spenserian detail, as a locus
amoenus instinct with fairies and nymphs, a sacred resort of Venus who prefers it
128 / Renaissance and Reformation v
even to Paphos. Calidore, hearing the sound of piping and the tread of dancing feet,
advances through the surrounding woods toward the "open greene" at the summit
where he sees, from "the covert of the wood" ( VI. x. 1 1 ), a vision of harmony and \
order that is at once thematically central to the book of courtesy and profoundly \
suggestive of the poet' s conception of his art One hundred naked maidens devoted i
to Venus, all "differing in honor and degree" (VI. x. 2 1 ), dance in a circle around i
the three graces who, in the configuration of their dance, are emblematic of " all the ^
complements of courtesy" (VI. x. 23). A the centre of this circular pattern, "as a i
precious gem / Amidst a ring" (VI. x. 12), is a shepherd girl who is "there !
advanced to be another Grace" (VI. x. 22). The entire vision has been called forth, \
and is sustained from within, by the piping of the shepherd- poet Colin Clout who is ;
the lover of the shepherd girl. The relation of the vision to the theme of courtesy is ;
anticipated by the mention of differences of honour and degree among the hundred
maidens, openly stated in the description of the graces, and placed within the
larger context of culture by the remarkable simile of Ariadne's crown (VI. x. 1 3)—
and image of social order emerging from the primal, 'uncultivated' energy of j
violence. It is more difficult to determine what kind of 'poetic signature' we are ;
reading, whether it is introduced for largely biographical reasons, whether |
Spenser really did consider himself to be at the end of his creative project, with |
what degree of seriousness and finality we should read it and, most difficult of all, |
how much weight we are to give to the almost unavoidable impulse to see the vision I
itself as symbolizing the great creative work of The Faerie Queene. In short, the |
passage is nuanced and layered like few others in the poem and raises questions |
that are complicated even to phrase, let alone to answer definitely. |
Goldberg does not find it complicated at all. He says that "Calidore stumbles |
into this scene of poetic reverie and loss," demanding an " explication of the text," |
and that the answer he receives from Colin, with its explanaton of the iconography j
of the graces, is "learned baggage" (p. 170). For all his mystical communion with I
the word "text," he is remarkably careless about what the thing says. Calidore j
does not "stumble" into the open green but deliberately steps forward— a signifi- j
cant difference: "Therefore resolving what it was to know, / Out of the wood he \
rose, and toward them did go" (VI. x. 17). It may be a "scene of poetic reverie" \
toward which CaUdore advances, but there is nothing in it of that "loss" which j
Goldberg is so eager to find because it is Calidore himself who causes the vision to \
disappear as soon as he comes into view. He has not seen loss but brought it with j
him— another significant difference. Finally, to dismiss the iconography of the |
graces as "baggage" may genuinely express how Goldberg feels about it per- ^
sonally, but it is an attitude that is quite out of tune with the aesthetic ambience of 1
The Faerie Queene as a whole. ,
Then we have the interpretation of the critical moment in the episode when |
Calidore steps forward and the vision instantly disappears: "When Calidore |
separates Colin from his vision he is doing what he did when he stumbled upon ]
Serena and Calepine in the bushes, interrupting coitus, making bliss bale, a \
'lucklesse breach' " (p. 1 70). The crudeness of this, as criticism, hardly needs to be |
pointed out by citing the passage (VI. iii. 20) from which Goldberg fantasizes this |
lively picture of Calepine and Serena, or the later episode in which Serena is J
deeply embarrassed by her nakedness because Calepine, who has rescued her
from the cannibals, is not yet her husband (VI. viii. 50-51).
But there is still the simile of Ariadne's crown to be discussed and on this we are
enlightened as follows: "Ariadne: won at a bloody feast, the emblem of canni-
balistic civilization in Ate' s house. Ariadne: won and lost, dismade [sic], and had
again as the pattern in the heavens. Ariadne: eternally lost and eternally there, the
jewel in nature, text and nature at once. Ariadne: the heavenly scales, weighing
words and gifts" (p. 171).
What are we to make of the existence of this tedious book? Is it an attack on the
discursive principle of reason itself or a brilliant subversion of reactionary
scholarly standards, not to mention competent prose? One feels on every page that
the author is defining this position as one extreme in a simplified relationship of
symmetrical opposition, flattening out complexity onto a single plane so that he
requires an imaginary antagonist to get himself thinking— not unlike the syner-
gistic hostility of Sans Loy and Huddibras, as Sean Kane has shown in the most
important recent contribution to our understanding of Spenser's moral allegory
("The Paradoxes of Idealism: Book II of The Faerie Queene,'' John Donne
Journal, vol. 2, no. 1). It is the old story of the sour traditionalist and the
hyperactive radical, each needing the other as an image for what he denies in
himself.
In short, this is a book that is too preoccupied with striking a pose to accomplish
much else, fantasizing for itself a critical position which will exist only in so far as it
is opposed by an imaginary other that is, as Goldberg puts it, "conservative in
nature" (xi).
G.L. TESKEY, Cornell University
Jacques Kiyntn. Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du moyen âge
(1380-1440). Étude de la littérature politique du temps. Paris: Éditions A. et J.
Picard, 1981,341 p.
Ce livre de Jacques Krynen se situe dans la foulée des ouvrages édités depuis
quelques années sur la fin du moyen âge français; on a vu, par exemple, B. Guenée
s'intéresser à l'idée de nation, F. Autrand aux gens du Parlement de Paris, R.
Gazelles, aux règnes de Jean II et Charles V pour ne nommer que ceux-là. Les
historiens constatent en effet de plus en plus que cette période est la source de
changements politiques profonds qui marqueront de façon très nette les siècles
suivants.
À partir de plusieurs auteurs tels Jean Gerson, Philippe de Mézières, Jean de
Terrevermeille, Jean de Montreuil, Christine de Pizan et des différents "Miroirs
du Prince" dont XtDe regimine principum de Gilles de Rome traduit en français
par Henri de Gauchi à la fin du XIII® siècle, Jacques Krynen examine d'une part
les conceptions médiévales de l'éducation du futur roi et les qualités morales
qu'elle vise à lui communiquer, d'autre part, comment le moyen âge concevait les
devoirs et les obligations du roi lorsque celui-ci accédait au trône. De tous les
textes utilisés par Krynen, peu nous sont inconnus et tous ou presque ont déjà fait
1 30 / Renaissance and Reformation i
l'objet d'études (philosophiques, littéraires, ou autres); la contribution de Krynen '
est de les mettre en rapport et d'examiner les idées qui s'en dégagent II nous i
permet de jeter un regard neuf sur des textes qui, de prime abord, peuvent nous ;
sembler disparates et contribue à enrichir notre connaissance de la littérature j
politique médiévale. >
L'ouvrage se divise en deux grandes parties: la première traite du "prince idéal" j

et la seconde du "pouvoir royal." Ces deux parties correspondent, l'une à l'édu- |
cation du roi et l'autre à son mode de gouvernement La première partie nous j
apprend que les éducateurs médiévaux tenaient à ce que le prince possède des ;
vertus morales hors du commun: humilité, piété, chasteté, droiture, éloquence et, |
surtout, qu'il doit adopter en toute chose une juste mesure. Comment apprend-on '
au jeune prince à acquérir toutes ces vertus? Tout d'abord, par l'exemple que l'on \
se doit de lui donner. En effet, si l'entourage du prince lui donne en tout l'exemple,
celui-ci ne sera pas tenté de tomber dans l'excès et donnera ainsi libre cours à ses
bons penchants. Les précepteurs nous apprennent ensuite que l'éducation elle-
même du prince doit faire l' objet d'une attention particulière. Il doit être entouré de i
quelques conseillers, choisis avec grand soin, qui s'emploieront à son éducation |
morale et religieuse ainsi qu'à sa formation intellectuelle. La lecture de Isl Bible, \
des Vies de Saints, de la vie des grands rois qui l'ont précédé et d'oeuvres morales, \
historiques et politiques seront pour lui des sources d'exemple et de réflexion. Il j
est frappant de constater l'extrême austérité qui se dégage du système d'éducation
proposé.
On doit aussi instruire le prince sur la meilleure façon de gouverner et sur les l
buts qu' il doit atteindre. Il lui faudra tout d' abord ne pas tenir compte de sa famille |
qui, la plupart du temps, est source de discorde et de mésentente. Il lui faudra aussi |
s'entourer des meilleurs conseillers possibles, ceux-ci devant faire preuve de |
grandes qualités morales et surtout d'mtégrité. La finalité du gouvernement est la l
justice et la paix. Le roi se doit d'exercer sa justice avec autorité et respect, d'être \
clément et libéral envers ses sujets, qu'ils soient pauvres ou riches, ce qui sera pour j
lui le meilleur moyen d'être craint par tous. La paix, tant à l'intérieur de son i
royaume qu'à l'extérieur, est le but ultime vers lequel tout souverain doit tendre. ■
On exige donc du roi qu' il possède des qualités exceptionnelles, qu' il ait une bonne |
éducation et surtout, qu'il aime son métier "Le bon prince, en effet, n'a qu'une \
seule passion, son métier de roi" (p. 136).
La seconde partie de l'ouvrage traite plus spécifiquement de l'enseignement des \
auteurs médiévaux quant aux quahtés du pouvoir royal qui se manifestent d'une j
part au niveau de la foi, le roi de France est le roi "très chrétien" et d'autre part au
niveau du sentiment national, le roi doit assurer la cohésion de son royaume. Cette
idée de roi "très chrétien," répandue en grande partie par les conseillers du roi en ■
faisant revivre, dans leurs écrits, les légendes et leurs symboles, la Sainte i
Ampoule, les fleurs de lis, l'oriflamme, permettra au roi d'utiliser ce titre à un :
niveau politique tant vis-à-vis des puissances extérieures qu'à l'intérieur même de !
son royaume. Ce titre, il l'emploiera auprès du Pape, pour lui rappeler qu'il ne lui ï
est pas soumis au niveau des choses temporelles; auprès de l'empereur, pour lui j
faire savoir qu'il ne permet pas d'ingérence dans les affaires de France; et auprès l
de l'Église de France, afin de favoriser la formation d'une église nationale dont il j
prendra la tête. '
Le sentiment national quant à lui se manifeste à la fin du moyen âge parce que le
roi se doit d' assurer l'unité et la cohésion de son royaume. Il sera fondé d'une part
sur la renommée des origines troyennes de la France et d'autre part sur la con-
tinuité dynastique de ses rois. En définitive, le conflit avec l'Angleterre servira
bien cette cause car il permettra de passer beaucoup plus rapidement du niveau
féodal au niveau national. La Guerre de Cent Ans qui avait débuté à partir d'un
conflit que l'on peut qualifier de féodal se réglera sur une base nationale.
Les théoriciens politiques français du moyen âge visent à assurer la continuité

de l'État. Ils le font en décrivant les rapports du roi avec la couronne et avec la
communauté. Ils établissent de façon plus sûre les notions de succession sur le
trône (les thèses de Jean de Terrevermeille et de Jean de Montreuil sont ici
discutées en détail par Jacques Krynen) et prônent l'inaliénabilité du domaine de
la couronne: le royaume doit donc être conservé intact Vis-à-vis de la com-
munauté, le roi "tète du corps politique," se doit de gouverner dans l'intérêt et pour
le bien de la communauté. Jacques Krynen nous rappelle alors la description du
prince idéal qui nous a été proposée dans la première partie.
Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du moyen âge nous présente
une excellente analyse de la littérature politique du moyen âge. En plus des
auteurs mentionnés plus haut, Jacques Krynen fait appel à de nombreuses autres
sources (plus de 80 sources médiévales) et chaque point de détail est analysé avec
minutie et complété de nombreuses notes (plus de 1200). La bibliographie qui
nous est présentée ici est très riche. En bref, c'est un livre à lire.
SUZANNE GAUMOND, Institut d'études médiévales, Université de Montréal

Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform^ Joseph C. McLelland editor.
Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. viii, 155pp. ISBN 0-
88920-092-0 $8.00 (hardbound)
"Renaissance and Reformation— partners or enemies?" the editor of this col-

lection of papers asks. The answer he gives, and to which the papers point, is that a
"unitive view [is] enjoying primacy today." For this reason Peter Martyr Vermigli
is an exemplary case study, for the combines "Thomism and Calvinism, human-
ism and scholasticism, Italy and the North."
The ten essays in this book have been collected from papers given at the
conference on "The Cultural Impact of Italian Reformers" held at McGill
University in Montreal ( September 1977). They have been published elegantly
and inexpensively, in a hardcover book that, in these days of exhorbitant book
prices, does the conference and the publishers great credit The first five deal with
wider topics (the book trade, the rhetorical-dialectical tradition, religious dis-
simulation, the trial of Pier Paolo Vergerio, and the concept of Italy and of Italians
abroad), thus setting the scene for the last five papers, which deal directly with
Peter Martyr Vermigli.
Paul F. Grendler's opening article on "The Circulation of Protestant Books in

Italy" traces the influx and dissemination of forbidden books in Venice, the largest
Itahan publishing centre. Professor Grendler presents us with a well- annotated
and well-documented examination of a number of questions: who were the dealers

ready and willing to engage in this illicit trade, how and why were smugglers able to
supply the lagoon city with books placed on both the Pauline and Tridentine
Index, who purchased these books, and how did all these groups respond to the
reality of the Inquisition? Original documentation from the Venetian archives
enriches this study and provides reliable support for the proposed models.
Cesare Vasoli's article on"Loc/ Communes and the Rhetorical and Dialectical
Traditions" examines the use of loci in relation to the rhetorical-dialectical
tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The short, incisive loci are seen
as an alternative, much favoured by Protestant teachers and polemicists, to the
ponderous and inadequate techniques of the later Schoolmen. After recalling
Lorenzo Valla and examining Rudolf Agricola' s Z)e inventione dialectica (which
had great influence on sixteenth- century reformers), Vasoli touches upon Juan
Luis Vives' call for "a different kind of logic" and recalls that the Spanish
humanist "imputes to the lack of systematic, logical discipline the unintelligibility
which is the dominant feature of the various branches of knowledge, among which
theology holds pride of place" (p. 23). Philipp Melanchthon'sLoc/commw/ie^
offer an answer by providing a text of indisputable teaching value, "capable of
reaching those men and social strata who, far removed from the philosophical
refinements of the Schoolmen, are unfamiliar with the sophisticated techniques of
theological disputation" (p. 25). The work of Melanchthon, in whose tradition
Vermigli's own Loci communes finds its place, provided the Reformers with a
doctrinal structure based on radical simplification and a return to Scriptural
sources. It also allowed for quick and "catchy" pronouncements which had an
immediate, and lasting, impact on the audience. Professor Vasoli's far- ranging
and illuminative article is marred only by one oversight when having it translated
from the original Italian, the editor should have asked for the lengthy passages in
Latin (such as the 7 lines on p. 24, the 5 lines on p. 25, the 1 6 lines in n. 25 of p. 26,
the 8 lines of p. 27) to be translated as well — most North- American readers do not
enjoy the thorough, European classical education that takes fluency in Latin for
granted.
Rita Belladonna's concise article "Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Religious

Dissimulation: Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini's TrattatiNove Delia Prudenza"
examines the spirit of religious reform in Siena. This amply footnoted study
provides English translations for all material from the original Trattati, thus
off'ering us a rich sub-text to the article itself. Professor Belladonna's thesis points
out the secular aspect of Carli's Nicodemism, drawing attention to the strong links
to be found between Carli's advice to the prudent man and Machiavelli's norms of
ethical relativism for a prince. In fact, Carli proposes a double standard for dealing
with religion and official religious ceremonies, particularly those of Rome. Even
though the Trattati are also deeply steeped in autobiographical mysticism, and
though they can be seen to contain elements complementary to VdXdQs' Alfabeto
Christiano, the Nicodemism they espouse is highly secular. UnHke Brunfel, CarH
is not interested in Scriptural reasons for his silence. Instead, like MachiavelH, he
is more interested in the practical reality of the present political situation. This,
Professor Belladonna suggests, should make us wary of dealing with Nicodemism
as a unified European phenomenon.
Antonio Santosuosso picks up this theme of political pragmatism and looks at

"Religion More Veneto and the Trial of Pier Paolo Vergerio," in order to show
that changing political and religious factors played an important part at the trials
and in the treatment of the Bishop of Capodistria by the Venetians. Concentrating
on the years 1544-49, this study is a lucid, linear exposition of the Venetian
government's expertise in blending strong religious beliefs and adherence to
political necessity into a policy of practical politics for the good of the state.
Although Vergerio is as much to blame for his demise as is the changed attitude of
the Venetian government towards him (his own venomous tongue, his personal
spiritual mid- life crisis, his bitter anticurialist stance, his irrepressible urge to
reprimand and correct others, for example, were important factors that lead to his
fall from grace), Professor Santosuosso clearly shows him to be a victim of
political circumstance as well.
Antonio D' Andrea, in his work on "Geneva 1 576-78: The Italian Community
and the Myth of Italy," looks once more at the rise of the anti-Italian sentiment
that associated all inhabitants of the peninsula with the worst excesses of
"Machiavellism." Using the incidents surrounding the publication in Geneva by
two expatriate Italian Protestants of a Latin translation of the Principe (1560),
and also those surrounding the publication oïÛiq Discours sur les moyens de bien
gouverner. . . Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin by the expatriate French
Huguenot Innocent Gentillet (1577), D'Andréa examines the sources of this
irradicable, virulent opinion of all Italians. Great emphasis is placed on the anti-
Italian sentiment already found in France as a result of both Italian influence at
court and sectarian politics at the national level; however, more discussion than
just the two passing comments ought to have been presented about "Calvin's
misgivings about the Itahans" (p. 60). Nonetheless, the article does show that the
time was favourable for an unfavourable view of Italians.
With Marvin Anderson's "Peter Martyr Vermigli: Protestant Humanist" the

book moves into its second section and begins to examine more closely the main
subject of its title. Professor Anderson takes to task John Patrick Donnelly, and
others with him, who see Vermigli as a Scholastic Reformer. To balance this view,
he points out that Vermigli only appears to be a Scholastic, while he is in fact much
more of a Humanist Although he retained the Scholastic training received at
Padua, Vermigli turned directly to classical and patristic sources to gather from
them new insights, firmly believing that the Holy Spirit "may haue us to be
scholars euen unto the ende of the worlde" (p. 84).
Rather than examining the entire period in question, Philip M. J. McNair's

article on "Peter Martyr in England" chooses instead to concentrate on the
circumstances that led to the Disputation of 1549. Particular emphasis is placed
on the religious climate in late Henrician and Edwardian England, on Christ
Church College, on Oxford's reaction to Peter Martyr and vice versa, and on the
fanatical opposition Martyr had to endure from his predecessor in the chair of
Regius Professor of Divinity, Richard Smith. The article is lively, precise and well
documented; it points the way to an examination of the other six major moments of
Peter Martyr's influence in England which, for the sake of brevity, McNair
mentions but does not examine.
134 / Renaissance and Reformation {
I
John Patrick Donnelly, remarking that Vermigli's Loci communes devotes a |
great amount of space to practical social questions and that to Peter Martyr there |
was no distinction, as there is for the modem reader, between social and ethical :
thought, offers an "exploratory essay" into "The Social and Ethical Thought of |
Peter Martyr Vermigli." In clear, incisive paragraphs, the essay touches upon ]
"Social Status, Inequality and Minorities" (women, nobility, slavery, religious j
dissenters, Jews, Moslems), "The Christian and the Economic Order" (wealth, I
poverty), "Marriage" (also polygamy, mixed marriages, divorce, virginity), to \
terminate with some "General Principles and Presuppositions" that point out ;
Vermigli's strong links with Aristotle (especially with the Mc/ïomac/ïea«£'r/ï/c5), |
his mixture of theological and secular proofs for an argument, and his use of \
Roman law. |
Robert M. Kingdon examines "The Political Thought of Peter Martyr Ver-

migli" to show that, although the structure and some of the contents are Aristo-
telian (from Vermigli's days at the University of Padua), most of Vermigli's
thoughts derive from Scriptural and Patristic sources, while some come from \
Roman law, and a few from contemporary political practice. Professor Kingdon I
then examines in detail Vermigli's definition of government (or of "the magistrate") |
and the question of political resistance by "inferior magistrates" or by citizens, i
basing his observation on the loci dealing with the ten scholia that he feels are most |
instructive in this question. |
Joseph C. McLelland brings the book to an end with his essay "Peter Martyr |
Vermigli: Scholastic or Humanist?" in which he shows that "Martyr is more|
subtle than allowed by the thesis that he is a chief contributor to the fall ofl
Calvinism into 'scholasticism'" (p. 150). The point, present in several of the|
articles preceding this one (especially VasoH's and Anderson's), is supported by ^
an examination of contemporary scholarship and the place of both Aristotelianism S
and Scholasticism in Vermigli's education. As such, it is an appropriate con-|
elusion to this fine collection of essays. I
KONRAD EISENBICHLER, Victoria University, University of Toronto \
Chartes E. Hambrick-Stowe. The Practice of Piety. Puritan Devotional Dis- \

ciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North]
Carolma Press, 1982. Pp. xvi, 298. $28.00. J
Though a number of writers have reestablished the signal importance of spiritu- \

ality to Puritanism, little attention has been paid to the themes of piety or how it^
was practiced on a daily and weekly basis, a subject for inquiry long overdue given \
recent interest in social history and popular culture. In this Jamestown Award- j
winning study Charles Hambrick-Stowe explores the "inner" history of ordinary-f
people through an examination of public worship, family and small group dis-
cussions, and private or "closet" meditations. Hambrick-Stowe succeeds ad-
mirably in providing readers with a useful description of the form, content, and|
impact of spiritual activities in seventeenth-century New England.
At its heart, Hambrick-Stowe argues, Puritanism was neither a social nor

intellectual movement, but part of a larger devotional revival that swept European
communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through a careful
examination of devotional manuals and sermons, he shows how significant con-
tinuities linked Puritan, Anglican, and even Roman Catholic devotional themes
and rituals. The theme of intensive self-examination and meditation upon one's
sins, for example, was previously assumed to be a unique activity of lay Puritans.
Yet, by exhibiting parallel texts, Hambrick-Stowe demonstrates how intro-
spection also characterized Catholic devotionals. Likewise, many other spiritual
exercises, such as meditation upon the joys of heaven and emphasis upon human
experience and divine initiative in salvation were shared by Puritans and Catho-
lics.
Having reestablished Puritanism's ties to mainstream Western Christianity,

Hambrick-Stowe builds a strong case for the popular nature of Puritan culture.
The central themes of Puritan spirituality, he argues, had long been at the heart of
popular piety and were shared by clerics and laymen alike. The point is crucial
because the description of devotional themes and practices — which comprises
most of the book — is drawn almost exclusively from manuals, sermons, almanacs,
and other documents composed by ministers. The principle metaphor running
through all these sources is that of the pilgrimage. Ministers described the indi-
vidual' s spiritual life as a journey from sin to salvation and glory. Building on the
work of others like Michael McGifFert and his mentor David Hall, Hambrick-
Stowe asserts that the conversion experience, generally a gradual rather than
violent, life- altering development, marked the beginning of the soul's pilgrimage,
not the culmination. The Puritan achieved salvation only after death, upon
redemption and union with God. Preparation for salvation, then, did not end with
the conversion experience but continued throughout life and public and private
worship, the means by which the individual proceeded along the path toward
redemption.
Several chapters are included that contain illuminating and insightful des-
criptions of public and private devotional activities. Means of public worship
included participation in the sacraments, attending sermons, church discipline,
and prayer. Private devotions involved family prayer, private prayer meetings and
conferences, and individual "secret" devotions. While all prayer centered around
some variation of the redemptive cycle of confession, petition for forgiveness,
thanksgiving, and union with God, the daily private devotions were of particular
importance to the individual Puritan. Secret exercise, Bible study, meditation and
prayer were the most powerful channels through which grace might flow, the
crucial point of contact between the believer and God. Hambrick-Stowe dis-
tinguishes between the specific functions of prayer and meditation. While the
believer actively sought God through prayer, he attempted to find ongoing
evidence of salvation and to chart his progress on his pilgrimage through
meditation.
Although this devotional synthesis survived in New England until the early
eighteenth century, the second generation faced a devotional crisis. The old
spiritual images and religious terminology no longer seemed to apply to a gener-
ation that did not share the founding experience of the fathers. Ministers con-
fronted unprecedented difficulties in attempting to motivate their flocks to seek

salvation. Clerics responded to the challenge by adapting several major themes of
Puritan devotionalism to the new circumstaixces. They venerated and celebrated
the fathers, and placed a greater emphasis upon the spiritual implications of their
pilgrimage to America. In addition, ministers created new forms of worship, such
as the covenant renewal. Renewed interest and larger printings of devotional
manuals in the late seventeenth century suggest that ministers succeeded in
rekindling the devotional zeal that characterized the first years of settlement
The Practice of Piety is a useful volume though, as with any book, the reader is
left with a few questions that may be mentioned in passing. For example, in his
discussion of popular culture Hambrick-Stowe argues that Puritanism repre-
sented an effort to reform English culture from within. The reform impulse was
neither propagated nor directed by ministers, who, partly because of their empha-
sis upon literacy, could not monopolize the Bible and thus "wielded little authority
of their own" (48). Their style of plain preaching and prayer was a response to the
demands of the movement, just as the contents of their writings reflected popular
needs. Hambrick-Stowe does well to remind readers that the ministers and the
laity interacted within a shared world of meaning. Many will resist, however, his
undocumented assertion that Puritanism's individualism coupled with its re-
jection of outward forms resulted in a popular culture characterized by inherent
anticlericalism. Hambrick-Stowe also makes a significant contribution in stress-
ing the paramount importance of private devotions in the conversion process. But
again, his subordination of the ministry in the early chapters seems anomalous and
unnecessary, especially in light of his later description of the ministerial role in
rejuvenating zeal and redefining critical devotional themes. Though the ministry is
by no means ignored, emphasis upon the individual relationship with God is so
strong in parts that the reader is surprised to see the 1 650 Connecticut law stating: f
"The pre aching of the Word. . . is the chiefe ordinary means ordained by God for 2
the converting, edifying, and saving of the soûles of the elect" (116). J
In addition, the influence of social and cultural change upon the practice of piety 'j
on the individual level remains cloudy, a problem undoubtedly rooted in a lack of ;
available sources. Hambrick-Stowe asserts that the Puritans "practiced prepar- {
ation for salvation through the means of grace," yet devotes little attention to the \
spiritual experience of the sizeable proportion of second generation believers who |
never experienced conversion (219). In general, Hambrick-Stowe' s treatment of |
the conversion experience should not be considered the final word on the subject |
His description of the gradual conversion experience, a notion central to his
lifelong pilgrimage theme, is based heavily upon evidence drawn from Thomas J
Shepard's Cambridge church. Shepard emphasized the gradual nature of con- |
version as much or more than any of his contemporaries. The sudden, life-
changing conversions experienced by many followers of John Cotton, Solomon
Stoddard, and others receive little attention here; they suggest that the variety of
spiritual experience may have been more significant than Hambrick-Stowe
implies.
The above points pertain largely to matters of detail. In general, Charles

Hambrick-Stowe' s rich description and penetrating analysis casts much needed
light into an area of Puritanism frought with obstacles to research and long overdue
for study. The Practice of Piety enriches our understanding of Puritan "inner"
history and the spiritual experience of the individual and the movement as a
whole.
JAMES F. COOPER, JR., University of Connecticut
Joyce Main Hanks. Ronsard and Biblical Tradition. Tubingen and Paris: Gunter
Narr Veriag and Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1982. Pp. 199. DM 38.
One is perhaps too often tempted to regard the poets of the Pléiade as wholly pagan
in their vision du monde, despite Lucien Febvre's having shown in the case of
Rabelais that no-one in sixteenth-century France can justifiably be called non-
Christian. This book is an important contribution to a developing interest in the
influence of the Bible and of the biblical tradition on both the content and style of
sixteenth- century French poetry, since, as Dr. Hanks says in her introduction,
"no attempt has been made to show [ Ronsard' s] overall dependence on the Bible,
conceived primarily as a literary source." When, some six years ago, she com-
pleted her doctoral thesis on which this book is based, the author was able to draw
on a recent major work in this field. Jacques Pineaux'sLa Poésie des protestants
de langue française (Psins, 1971). One can only regret that she was not able to use
Marguerite Soulié' s L'Inspiration biblique dans la poésie religieuse d' Agrippa
d'Aubigné (Paris, 1977) and Malcolm Smith's invaluable edition of Ronsard's
Discours des misères de ce temps (Geneva, 1 979), which prints earlier texts than
hitherto of the Epistre au lecteur par laquelle succintement Vautheur respond à
ses calomniateurs (Paris, 1564) and the Prière à Dieu pour la victoire (Paris,
1 569), provides more biblical references and cross-references to Ronsard's other
works than Paul Laumonier's edition of 1946 and, as Jean Baillou did in 1949,
brings together all the prose and poetry which was to form the Discours in the
collective editions from 1567 to 1587.
The close investigation by Hanks of her subject can be seen from the titles of the
five main chapters: "Biblical Imagery and Language," "Biblical Characters and
Events," "Biblical History and Classical Mythology," "Biblical Commentary
and Polemic," and "Biblical Vision: God and Man." She is always carefiil to
avoid implying that Ronsard repeatedly read biblical texts as subjects of imitation
or of free adaptation. She prefers the term "biblical tradition" to describe what the
poet draws on: his how reading of the Bible, readings at mass and in the breviary,
sermons, readings of other poets and recollections of all of these, all elements of
that cultural memory described by Du Bellay in the second preface to L'Olive.
The many biblical quotations rightly adduced in the text properly come from the
translation of the Bible by Lefèvre d'Etaples or from the Vulgate, when the latter is
closer to Ronsard's language or thought than Lefèvre' s version.
Since most of Ronsard' s themes are decidedly secular and his sources tend to be
more mythological than Judeo-Christian, it is inevitable, given the Renaissance
cast of mind, that one should find a syncretist mixture of the two traditions in some
poems, a mixture that has often disconcerted readers and critics. Ancient myth is
regarded as a préfiguration of Christian truth and the earliest poems were, in

Ronsard's own words of 1565 which are in the tradition of the Florentine
Neoplatonists, a théologie allegoricque, whose mode of expression is the only
form in which ineffable truths {secrets) may be conveyed to mankind. Mythology' s
insights, reflecting as they do important aspects of reality, are seen to be com-
plementary rather than opposed to biblical tradition, a position that is attacked by
Ronsard's Huguenot critics. This syncretism is adumbrated in the early chapters
of the book and is fully and clearly discussed in the second longest chapter.
Mythological deities are identified in theory and in practice with attributes of the
Judeo-Christian God: the many gods deepen one's understanding of the one God.
Moses is identified with Minos, Adam with Prometheus and Christ with Hercules.
The image of Hesiod's path that leads to Virtue is conflated with the description of
the narrow way found in Matthew 7:13-14. Ronsard occasionally emphasizes not
only the similarities but also the differences between Greek religion and Judeo-
Christian tradition, to the clear advantage of the latter. Hanks' concludes on this
subject that there is almost always a mythological admixture in predominantly
biblical poems, even where a quite appropriate biblical image exists. She sums up
by saying: "He consistently honors his Judeo-Christian heritage as superior to
paganism in matters oï doctrine. When it comes to imagery, however, he usually
prefers mythology" (p. 83).
The chapter on biblical imagery and language usefully analyses the way in
which Ronsard adapts his material for his own independent purposes. A closer
investigation of his language might reveal a use of hebraisms, a feature that critics
are not aware of in D'Aubigné's religious poetry, thanks to the researches of
Soulié.
Dr. Hanks discusses at length and with many interesting insights the key texts
for her subject the unprecedentledly successful series of plaquettes that make up
the Discours des misères. These works, which were in the vanguard of the
Catholic literary counter-attack and which earned for Ronsard a reputation as a
hero of the Catholic reformation, she considers to be important not least because
no French poet had previously presented theologial concepts in a lengthy polemic.
She agrees with the abbé Charbonnier* s verdict that "les idées théologiques sont
devenues accessibles au monde des lettrés; c'est déjà un progrès appréciable, et
par là cette poésie fait pendant à V Institution chrétienne de Calvin." Many of
Ronsard's attacks on the Huguenots are theological and biblical, and Dr. Hanks
pays particular attention to the sources of Ronsard's often satirical arguments.
Her analysis does, however, tend to remain at the level of subject-matter, not
delving deeper, as Henri Weber does in La Création poétique au XVI^ siècle en
France, to discuss iht Discours as poetry, as a form of discourse which generates
its own peculiar energy ( and expectations) and can have decided advantages over
prose polemic.
Two useful indexes are included: one of references in the text to Ronsard's
works, and one of biblical references. The latter graphically illustrates Dr. Hanks'
conclusion that the frequency curve of references begins at a low level in 1550,
rises rapidly to a plateau in the Hymnes of 1 5 5 5 , reaches a peak in the Discours of
1 562 and 1 563 and falls back to the level of 1 555, rising again towards the end of
Ronsard's life, especially in the posthumously published Derniers Vers.
In conclusion. Dr. Hanks' book demonstrates the value of this approach to an

important sixteenth-century French poet Can one hope that Du Ballay will also
be studied in this way?
THOMAS THOMSON, University of Dundee
The Entry of Henri II into Paris 16 June 1549, with an Introduction and Notes by
I.D. McFarlane. Vol. 7 of second volume of "Renaissance Triumphs and
Magnificences." New Series. Margaret M. McGowan, General Editor. Medieval
and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Studies, Binghamton, New York, 1982. Pp. xciv, 48. $15.00
This volume includes both the facsimile of the livret of Henri IF s Royal Entry and
of the Queen* s sacre, which was published as a companion to the main entry. In a
Foreword, I.D. McFarlane, Professor of French at Oxford University, points out
that the livret was accepted for publication some years ago and then lay in the
original publisher's drawer for a considerable time. In McFarlane' s own words it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and delay meant that the results of
recent research could be incorporated into his substantial Introduction; the
appearance of work on the social and political background of royal entries has
allowed him to take a broader view of Henri IF s Entry.
McFarlane's primary concern in the Introduction is to show that the Entry

came at a key point in the emergence of France's neo-classical aesthetic. We are
first shown how the Entry into Rheims in 1 547, two years before the Paris Entry,
had triumphal arches and classical motifs in the architectural design but that more
traditional aspects were still prominent: the tableaux vivants, the Jardin de
Plaisance and the allegorical figures, such as the Virtues, which were more
medieval than classical in inspiration. McFarlane emphasizes that the planners of
the Paris Entry were to make a conscious effort to dispense with these old world
features. We also learn about the Entry into Lyon of 1548; while this Entry had
elaborate classical elements — a double triumphant arch, anaumachia, as well as
the major presence of classical allegorical figures and neo-classical traits such as
columns and perspective — the classical gods were numerous rather than tidily
grouped round a few dominant motifs, and the classical orders were not exploited
methodically, as was to be the case with the 1549 Paris Entry. McFarlane
suggests that the Paris Entry reflected not only the Parisians' desire to outshine the
Entry into Lyon, but also perhaps Henri's desire to produce an Entry more
impressive than those recently effected by Philip II.
After briefly considering some of the difficulties and delays surrounding the
Paris Entry, McFarlane draws upon municipal records for details of the prepara-
tions by the city. Then he goes on to give an overview of events on the sixteenth of
June, drawing upon a variety of sources, which include Jean Du Tillet in his
Recueil and historians of the University, before he turns to a detained analysis of
the information contained in the livret.
McFarlane devotes a lengthy section of the Introduction to a consideration of
140 / Renaissance and Reformation \
the Entry's themes as revealed by the livret. We are shown how the sense of j
national distinction finds expression in the new neo-classical aesthetic, which i
underlies the architectural and artistic features of the Entry and which was starting \
to appear in artistic circles of the court at this time. While we cannot see this Entry '
as representing a total break with the past, it is unusual compared with other ]
pageants because greater care was taken "to plan and coordinate the various j
aspects of the ceremonies and the artistic features: this shows itself in the ;
systematic development of major themes (themselves not necessarily new) in the {
Entry and particularly in the progression of architectural structures along the i
Royal route." (28-29) The devisers of this more unified Entry included Jean
Martin, the chief planner, who was also translating Vitruvius, Serlio and Alberti at ;
this time, and Jean Goujon, one of the architects for the Entry, who also colla- \
borated in the publication of Vitruvius. Through their influence "the Entry ;
assumes some of the features associated with Roman triumphs" (39).
McFarlane points out that "the Entry shows more interest in the visual arts" i
(60), while the poetic aspects are slight; consequently, we have to study the !
illustrations of the livret closely in order to acquire a clear understanding of the |
importance of this Entry. In a number of instances the text of the livret has little to ;
say about certain features of the Entry structures and the reader is obliged to |
discover architectural innovations for himself through a perusal of the illus-
trations; for example, the First Arch of the Pont Notre-Dame has an Ionic and
Corinthian order, which Serlio considered to be exceedingly rare, but the livret
does not remark on this, showing, instead, more concern for the massive figure of '
Typhis. To take another example, the livret refers to the unusual feature of "une
salle à la mode Françoise" on the top of the Rue Saint- Antoine triple arches, while ;
leaving it to the reader to decipher the paintings on the sides of the arches as they
appear faintly in the illustration, which is in the form of a dépliant. McFarlane
provides a brief evaluation of each illustration and in some cases supplements the
information supplied by the livret with details from other sources; in the case of the
Rue Saint- Antoine arch, he draws upon Philippe Mace's accounts of the fes-
tivities, while on other occasions he uses P. Guerin's Registre, which was pub-
lished in 1 886 and which provides more technical detail than the livret, notably in |
the matter of capitals. However, even with McFarlane' s own analyses and with j
the supplementary texts he cites, the details concerning the Entry structures are
still incomplete and one should reiterate that the illustrations themselves, despite
the fact that they do not show the varied colors of the original pageant structures,
add significantly to our appreciation of the Entry. The actual illustration of the
"portique à la mode Ionique" at the Chàtelet, for instance, makes clearer to us the
way in which the innovative trompe-Voeil effect of the "perspective" was brought
about not only by the disposition and proportions of the columns, but also by the
gallery "percée à jour" which was intended to give an impression of solidity to the
whole fabric.
Having studied each of the Entry structures, McFarlane gives consideration to

the political implications of the overall neo-classical design of the Entry, to the
way in which a structure will be coherently organized around a central symbol of
royal virtue or authority: the striking figure of Hercules atop the Porte Saint-Denis
triumphal arch, for example, or the figure of Lutetia, who serves as the point of
focus for the "perspective" scene in the Châtelet "portique." As Roy Strong has
demonstrated in The Illusion o/Power (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), single-point perspective in court entries and entertainments serves as a
visual embodiment of the monarch's centralised authority. Unfortunately, within
the limited confines of an Introduction, McFarlane can only pay cursory attention
to the way in which the Entry reflects architecturally the increasing authority of
the monarch and represents an important stage in the development of the icono-
graphy of the Rot Soleil — and there is also no opportunity here to explore the
influence of an innovation like perspective on the production of other forms of
court pageantry and vice versa.
The Entry's neo-classical architectural advances are coupled with a more

sophisticated use of classical mjôlogy and with a more elaborate handling of
emblems, imprese, mottoes and inscriptions. With regard to the latter, the Entry
reveals the emerging taste for veiled truths, for the mixing of literary text and visual
arts and for a growing erudition, which, while "giving an exalted view of national
culture, helps to insert a wedge between the King and the plebs, unable to grasp all
the symbolism of such a grandiose pageant" (75). McFarlane does not allude to
royal entries in other European countries, but it is interesting to note in this context
that James I's coronation Entry into Lx)ndon over fifty years later was to display a
similar erudition that was beyond the ken of the plebs.
With respect to the literary aspects of the Entry, McFarlane finds no evidence
of any contribution by the Pléiade. However, there is a certain parallelism
between the neo-classicism of the Entry and Joachim du Bellay's Deffense et
illustration^ which was published in the same year. In addition, some of the
themes of the Entry — Hercules and la France fertile, for example — are found in
Ronsard' s work, while the idea of perspective may have been translated into his
poetry. The way in which pageantry influenced poetry demands more attention;
McFarlane does not explore the matter here, but with his knowledge of sixteenth-
century French literature he is well qualified to do so and one can only hope that
perhaps he will in the fiiture.
After a Postlude describing the journey and the naval battle, which succeeded
the Entry, the Introduction concludes with a detailed bibliography of both primary
as well as useful secondary sources. McFarlane himself acknowledges that this
Paris Entry brings up more lines of scholarly inquiry than can be pursued within
the narrow scope of an introduction; however, given the limitations of space, he
has provided us with a fine overview of recent scholarly findings relating to the
1 549 Paris Entry. In addition, the facsimile of the livret Bndsacre will prove to be a
useful source of material to scholars interested in the development of French —
and European — pageantry in the Renaissance.
NIGEL G. BROOKS, University of Pennsylvania

RV. Young, Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, Yale University
Press, 1982.
This book on Crashaw fits into the category of studies in comparative literature
that explain the phenomenon of a literary figure in one country by the phenomenon
of a literary movement in another. Here, an English Metaphysical poet is dis-
cussed according to the literary ideals of the Spanish Golden Age. RV. Young
originally drafted this book as a doctoral thesis under Lx)uis Martz' supervision at
Yale, and he contends that the Golden' s Age's mystics, Teresa of Avila and John
of the Cross, explain Crashaw' s mysticism. He affirms, moreover, that the Age's
great lyricist. Lope de Vega, is the source for the "gay tone" of Crashaws sacred
parodies, and that the Age's other critic and lyricist, Luis de Gongora, was the
inspiration for the refined and artificial beauty of Crashaw' s verse. Effectively, in
spirit if not in body, Crashaw was a Spanish Golden Age poet
Young's critical point of view is grounded on a number of avowed assumptions.

These include that a clearly identifiable, presumably homogeneous "English
devotional tradition" existed, from which Crashaw along among contemporary
English poets deviated. Another assumption is the "modem Anglo-American
culture is more disposed to accept the expression of emotion in private circum-
stances", and that Crashaw, having in the Renaissance written emotional public
verse, is therefore an English Metaphysical poetman^wé (p.8). A further assump-
tion is that Renaissance poets who wrote in Latin may be grouped into a coherent
body of a " neo-latin" writers no matter what their national origins and convictions
were; because of their "neo-latin" homogeneity, the real influence of these poets
on Crashaw may be dismissed, as nothing fundamental in him resembles them.
Another guiding principle in Young's book is that Spain was the country to hold
the "preeminent role" in the Counter- Reformation. Being a Counter- Reformation
poet, Crashaw must therefore conform to "Spanish" ideals as did the Dutchman
Reubens who. Young contends, living in Holland under Spanish rule, was perforce
one of the three Spanish painters with El Greco and Murillo to whom Mario Praz
compares Crashaw (p. 13). Yet another guiding principle behind Young's argu-
ment is that sacred parody is more " insistent" and " pervasive" in Crashaw* s verse
than in the work of any other English poet, including Alabaster's and Donne's
sonnet sequences, and Southwell's, Beaumont's, Constable's, Lok's, Brerely's,
and Barnes' religious lyrics. Crashaw was not a prophet but a stranger in his own
country in virtue of his identity with the Spanish Golden Age and his resulting
differences with English writers. Finally, the book defines mysticism as "the
intensification of Christian love for God" not differing in essence from ordinary
Christian experience (p.27), and it suggests that "the selection and disposition of
poetic elements" are the hallmarks of the baroque as a poetic style (p. 157).
As Young's identification of Crashaw with the Spanish Golden Age progresses,

a number of modem critics and scholars, who have explained Crashaw' s work in
other ways, take a beating. Joan Bennett, H. J. C. Grierson, and Douglas Bush are
noted "for similar instances of blank incomprehension erected into dogma" of
Crashaw's little degree of intelligence and display of emotion (pp. 175, 18).
Furthermore, in one place Bennett's criticism of Crashaw is described as the
factor responsible for her "distaste" of his personality, and in her hands, con-
sequently, Crashaw's poems deteriorate into "pseudo-clinical evidence*' in a case
study of "masochism" (p.24). Young's language is strong, but so far many people
would be sympathetic to his claims. They might even feel such claims over-
due.
Unfortunately, however. Young continues to attack strongly, beyond pseudo-

psychological criticism onto the trickier ground of historical appreciation. His
frontal method tends to spoil. Another modem critic, Robert Adams, in support-
ing Bennett's claims, for example, is made to conclude implicitly that Crashaw's
poetry is "a seething kettle of latent sexual perversion" (p.25). This may be going
too far. Later, Ivor Winter's rejection of the pertinence of "sexual imagery to
religious imagery" appears "untenable" to Young because he. Winters, "casually
dismisses" the old "Christian tradition" of relating them (p. 28). That such a
tradition existed has yet to be proven. For her part, Rosemund Tuve seems
"mesmerized" by the suggestions of the word "parody", and unable to cope with
Crashaw. Young dismisses her because of her inability to recognize the existence
of "sacred parody" as opposed to general parody, and her criticism degenerates
into a "crudely biographical interpretation of the concept of poetic tension" (pp
29-30). Elsewhere in Young's pages, Robert Petersson is declared"not altogether
correct" in his assertions about Crashaw's imaginative creativity at the end of the
first poem to Teresa; then, the "speculations" of so valid a critic as Ruth
Wallerstein on the musical qualities of Crashaw's poetry appear merely to
"restate the problem rather than . . . answer it;" and, what the venerable Austin
Warren has to say about Crashaw's changes in style "drives a destructive wedge
between literature and religion (or style and content)" (pp. 115, 162). Finally,
Young claims the existence of a "general misapprehension" of Crashaw's
"Epiphany" poem by modem critics because of their over-emphasis on neo-
Platonism.
The reader of Young's book is disconcerted by the isolation into which, critic-
ally speaking, he comers not himself but Crashaw. Crashaw, who never left
England and who therefore never saw the Continent until the vast majority of his
poetry was written and practically all of his life was over, is stripped of his English
origins. A Spanish Golden Age influence, identified according to principles of
intemational cultural literary penetration, is made to explain a whole man. And
yet, the prosodie parallels between Gongora and Crashaw (p. 168), stick in the
reader's memory. To read that "the similar use of long and short lines to pursue a
single idea or to unfold a single scene through a series of images — unrestricted by a
strict prosodie form— which seen to tumble forth one on top of another", is a
pleasant change from reading that Crashaw gives off too much heat Nevertheless,
Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age tempts the reader to think that
Young has followed Warren, Bush, Wallerstein, Petersson and Tuve into what he
describes as their errors.
ANTHONY RASPA, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
1 44 / Renaissance and Reformation !
ij
Jules Brody. Lectures de Montaigne. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, i

1982. Pp. 181. $13.50 .
Dans ce livre qui veut corriger les torts faits au texte de Montaigne par l'ensemble \
de la critique ancienne et actuelle, Jules Brody replace les Essais à l'intérieur |
d'une expérience fondamentale du désordre de la lecture. Ce désordre, auquel se ;
conforme Montaigne, si l'on peut dire, exige que nous abandonnions pour un ;
moment notre esprit de système et que nous faisions preuve d'une grande ouver- i
ture sur le plan méthodologique. Il faut donc attendre du lecteur une part étonnante |
de tolérance et de patience, car, au lieu de recourir au contenu systématique pour ;
expliquer la démarche àts Essais, le critique restore toute la difficulté du texte, j
l'énorme problème de sa lecture. "Montaigne n'est pas de ces penseurs qui ;
proposent des vérités; c'est plutôt un artiste qui expose, qui découvre et révèle au \
niveau du langage des nuances et des secrets le plus souvent offusqués et obscurcis <
par la pensée systématique" (p. 35). j
L'étude que nous propose Jules Brody s' inscrit donc, d'une façon méticuleuse et ;
acharnée, contre les forces qui tendent à assimiler l'oeuvre de Montaigne à son |
contenu idéologique. Elle suggère plutôt, sous divers modes, une analyse plus I
respectueuse du travail de Montaigne sur le langage et surtout du déni farouche de i
l'ordre dans cette oeuvre. Ce postulat ne veut nullement dire que le critique doit i
s'abstenir d'intervenir dans le texte à l'étude. Bien au contraire, les "lectures" de \
Montaigne par Brody sont toutes faites d'interventions qui dérangent légèrement |
le texte en y faisant surgir, ne serait-ce que par le trait de l'italique, une continuité !
secrète, une sorte de persistance à relais du désordre. Il faut expulser l'apparente '■
satisfaction du système, car elle nous empêche, en nous aveuglant, de véritable- ;
ment lire et interpréter les mouvements invisibles de l'oeuvre. i
Dans Lectures de Montaigne, Jules Brody a rassemblé plusieurs articles et j

communications, certains ayant fait l'objet de publications antérieures limitées, i
C'est d'abord dans le contexte de la réception d^sEssais au XVIP siècle que l'on ;
doit situer l'ensemble du livre. L'accueil plutôt réservé et correctif fait à l'auto- ;
portrait de Montaigne, dès les premières années du XVII®, semble avoir donné le ^
ton définitif à toute la critique subséquente, si bien que, de Jean-Pierre Camus à i
Pierre Villey, le pas méthodologique est resté fort mince. Ce premier chapitre des
Lectures de Montaigne est extrêmement intéressant par le détail et la précision j
des rapports établis. Brody est absolument exhaustif II en ressort ce que nous 1
savions déjà, à savoir que \qs Essais ont subi une censure considérable et ont fait
l'objet d'un travail de réorganisation assez unique, somme toute, dans l'histoire ]
Httéraire française. De Charron à Camus, Brody note la même volonté de re- j
classer, d'organiser, d'ordonner une oeuvre dont l'atélie est jugée insupportable. \
C'est qu'aux yeux du XVII® siècle, le désordre dQS Essais ne permet nullement de \
véhiculer un contenu idéologique clair, le texte de Montaigne "débordait les j
confins d'une éloquence scholastique prépondérante et ( . . . ) les ressources ^
expressives d'un vocabulaire critique affecté surtout à la description des formes \
fixes" (p. 1 8). Le panorama qu'effectue Brody en une vingtaine de pages sera sans j
doute définitif et devrait convaincre les plus récalcitrants d'entre nous. I
Après cette étude contextuelle. Lectures de Montaigne comporte une analyse I
détaillée de trois chapitres des Essais qui paraissent particulièrement déformés ou

"réformés" par la critique montaignienne; il s'agit donc de "De mesnager sa
volonté," "De l'expérience" et "Que philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir."
Dans les trois cas, Brody tente d'extraire les Essais de "l'obsession de la com-
position, de l'ordre et l'unité des chapitres" (p. 50). C'est ainsi qu'il formule, à
plusieurs moments dans les Lectures, une méthode d'analyse dite "philologique"
(une sorte de repérage des thèmes sousjacents à partir de 1' etymologic), qui permet
de révéler la forme essentiellement redondante ou circulaire des Essais.
Le chapitre sur "De mesnager sa volonté," magistral et mené d'une façon

brillante et singulièrement éclairante, est de loin la meilleure étude du livre. Ce
chapitre vaut à lui seul l'ensemble des "Lectures." Brody y démontre fort habile-
ment qu'il y a, dans l'essai sur la volonté, des "circuits philologiques" qu'un
repérage attentif des mots clés permettra de parcourir assez clairement II s'agit
d'une couche de mots à la fois souterraine car elle n'apparaît guère à la simple
lecture, et superficielle, car elle refuse l'émergence de tout contenu idéologique
substantiel. Ce parcours philologique, résultat d'une découverte éphémère, ne
vaut que par son statut de relais de la signification, une autre signification que celle
que nous sommes habitués à conférer d'emblée au texte de Montaigne.
L'analyse de Brody est particulièrement convaincante dans le cas de l'essai sur

la volonté, dans la mesure où elle s'adjoint une métaphore absolument insistante,
celle du désir (souterrain et superficiel, lui aussi) qui est sa source même. Le désir
est une force disjonctive: voilà pourquoi l'essai apparaît morcelé et disloqué. Mais
la dislocation que provoque la volonté, devenue désir, appelle justement la lecture
philologique proposée par Brody, celle qui nous fera voir (ou prévoir) les con-
centrations où Montaigne a "mesnagé" son texte. Le processus d'écriture des
Essais est donc fait d'une sorte de pointillisme lexical, un mot à mot qu'il faut faire
surgir: "ces atomes de signification," conclut Brody, "sont progressivement syn-
thétisés en des constructions métaphoriques quantitativement plus grandes et
qualitativement plus riches que la somme de leurs parties" (p. 53).
Dans un second temps. Lectures de Montaigne comprend l'étude de deux

autres essais fortement censurés par les siècles. Citant le célèbre extrait de l'Essai
III, 2 où Montaigne parle de ses mets favoris, Brody se demande s'il n'y a pas une
valeur textuelle à ces "fadaises" (comme on le disait au XVII« siècle). Encore ici,
il s'agit d'établir une série de liens philologiques, dont on peut citer celui de la
"saveur" et de la "sagesse," par exemple, qui permetraient de suivre le discours
des Essais au-delà du niveau anecdotique, en passant encore une fois par une
approche de la surface du texte.
Ce chapitre des Lectures, tout comme celui qui suit sur Montaigne et la mort,
paraît un peu moins convaincant, on ne sait trop pourquoi. Brody est un brillant
analyste et la minute du travail de repérage lexical est certes la même ici que dans
l'étude de l'essai sur la volonté. Mais il y a une sorte de revers à l'éclat de cette
analyse. Ce qui semble faire défaut, en fin de compte, c'est peut-être la conviction
qu'un rapport métaphorique existe bel et bien entre le tracé philologique (la
saveur) et l'appareil métaphorique (la sagesse). Et quelle est justement la nature
de ce rapport? Brody appelle à son aide le "langage effectivement symbolique" de
Ricoeur, mais l'on reste tout de même un peu perplexe. Car ces rapports philo-
logiques-métaphoriques ont-ils vraiment une valeur herméneutique, comme le

croit apparemment le critique? Il aurait peut-être été utile d'étendre le rôle con-
joncteur et disjoncteur du désir à l'ensemble des Essais de Montaigne. Dans la
lecture superficielle que nous soumet Brody, c'est effectivement le désir qui
manque.
En dépit de ces lacunes sur le plan du langage symbolique, le troisième volet des
Lectures sur "Que philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir" offre un très grand
nombre de remarques vraiment éclairantes. Brody s'attache à rétablir la lecture du
texte dans son contexte historique et remet ainsi en question l'abécédaire des
éditions successives des Essais. Pourquoi, en effet, se demande Brody, s'obstine-
t-on à toujours indiquer dans les éditions modernes du texte de Montaigne les
ajouts successifs par les lettres A. B. C? Pourquoi faut- il absolument que le livre
soit clairement démarqué dans sa diachronie? Pour Brody, cet abécédaire n'est
qu'une autre forme de l'idéologie de censure et de réorganisation qui a accueilli le
livre de Montaigne depuis sa publication.
Dans ce dernier chapitre sur le motif de la mort, le critique a le mérite de situer le

texte des Essais parmi les milliers d'ars moriendi, si populaires à la Renaissance.
Ce qui distingue Montaigne de la littérature de son époque, c'est le glissement vers
une analyse de la mort à partir de " la fonction de Nature" (p. 1 28). Ce rituel de la
nature, d'où la préparation religieuse est pratiquement exclue, transparaît dans
l'analyse encore ici philologique et étymologique que fait Brody du détail des
premières pages du texte I, 20. A ce niveau, on conviendra que les Lectures de
Montaigne ne sont pas totalement nouvelles, mais elles ont le grand mérite de
disséquer le texte dans ses plus infimes particularités.
Malgré les quelques lacunes que nous avons soulevées et malgré aussi quelques
problèmes de composition (les introductions à chacun des chapitres sont beau-
coup trop redondantes: il aurait amplement suffi de présenter la méthode une seule
fois), il n'en reste pas moins q^q Lectures de Montaigne est une des études les plus
percutantes qu'il nous a été donné de lire depuis une dizaine d'années. La méthode
conçue par Brody devrait encourager d'autres "lecteurs" et "lectrices" à relire
l'oeuvre de Montaigne avec un goût renouvelé pour le texte lui-même. Il serait bon
de vérifier si la "composition intensive," la "démarche additive et cumulative,"
les "reprises redondantes," les "prélèvements sématiques" (p. 135), tout ce code
ponctuel dont Brody fait la base de son analyse pourra maintenant s'intégrer au
projet d'autoprotrait, défini par Montaigne. Car les Essais sont avant tout une
entreprise autobiographique, comme l'ajustement dénoncé Pascal. Il faudrait voir
aussi si le rapport étonnant ébauché dans \qs Lectures, entre Erasme et Montaigne,
pourra faire l'objet d'une étude plus approfondie. Il convient d'y consacrer au
moins tout un chapitre, beaucoup plus qu'une note infrapaginale.
En fin de compte, Brody a raison de nous rappeler que la parution des Essais
avait constitué "un événement spectaculaire" (p. 9) en cette fin du XVI« siècle. A
d'autres "lectures" maintenant de relever le défi du désordre et de la quantité que
le texte de Montaigne pose sans contredit.
FRANÇOIS PARÉ, Université de Guelph
Brian Tierney. Religion, Law, and the Growth ofConstitutional Thought, 1150-
1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. xi, 114.
The reader familiar with Brian Tierney' s many years of fruitful scholarship on the
relation between Church law and constitutional thought will probably find this
little book ( as its author calls it) to be something of a disappointment Admittedly,
one can hardly object to the impulse that led Tierney to write the volume. As both a
corrective to and expansion of Figgis' classic studies collected in From Gerson to
Grotius, Tierney proposes to disclose the significance of his discovery that certain
constitutionalist "themes are common to medieval law, to fifteenth century con-
ciliarism and to seventeenth century constitutional theory. The resemblances are
too striking to be mere coincidences; but merely to call attention to resemblances
is not to explain the whole phenomenon. The recurrence of similar patterns of
thought in different historical environments is itself the problem that needs
elucidation" (p. 103). Unfortunately, "while Religion, Law, and the Growth of
Constitutional Thought clearly identifies the various aspects of "resemblance," it
never proceeds to explain such "recurrence" in historically intelligible terms.
Those who turn to Tierney' s book for insights into the constitutional doctrines
of early modem Europe will be particularly frustrated. In the first paragraph of the
first page, Tierney announces that" it is impossible really to understand the growth
of Western constitutional thought.. unless we consider the whole period from
1 1 50 to 1650 as a single era of essentially continuous development" Yet Tierney
cites ( according to a count of footnotes — there is no index) a mere ten texts dating
from the last two hundred years of his time- frame. This might be excused on the
grounds Tierney himself offers: namely, that the "material presented... display s
the characteristic limitation of the lecture form" — the contents were originally
delivered as the Wiles Lectures at Queen's University, Belfast— "extreme select-
ivity in the topics and authors considered" (p. xi). But such a rationale is not
wholly valid; for in surveying the period from 1 1 50 to 1450, Tierney manages to
cite upwards of fifty treatises. And more substantively, the only authors dating to
the era following the Council of Basle (1432) who merit extended attention are
Althusius and George Lawson — hardly representative figures in the history of
early modern constitutionalism. As a consequence, Tierney' s attribution of
medieval origins to early modem constitutionalism in general seems to be largely a
case of imputed influence.
A more unsettling charge to be levelled SLgSiinsiReligion, Law, and the Growth

ofConstitutional Thought is that Tiemey has consciously left the most important
and challenging portion of his book unwritten. After devoting in excess of one
hundred pages to "the description of the evolution of constitutionalist themes, he
admits that the more serious questions remain. Why did the medieval ideas
persist? Why did they continue to prove meaningful and useful? Even when we can
explain the process of transmission in the simplest fashion — even when we can
constmct a neat little chain of tests leading all the way from the twelfth century to
the seventeenth (and this is indeed often possible) — we shall not have answered,
we have not even addressed, the more difficult questions" (p. 105). Tiemey then
dedicates the final three pages of his conclusion to these "more serious questions."
Not surprisingly, his responses are so unsatisfactory that he is finally led to

observe: "It may seem that the whole tradition of Western constitutional thought—
both its origin and its persistence — can only be explained as the result of a random
play of contingent circumstances" (p. 108). This admission has severe conse-
quences. For the inability to explain in coherent historical terms the recurrence of
constitutionalist ideas leaves him without the consolidated intellectual tradition
he seeks. In Tiemey's account, the various medieval and early modem consti-
tutionalist doctrines are connected by a vague ' family resemblance' rather than by
some more essential historical principle.
Does this mean that there is no historical foundation at all for a constitutionalist
tradition extending from the Middle Ages into modem Europe? Assuredly not
But the identification of the basis for this tradition requires us to re-examine for a
moment our historical and historiographical premises. Tiemey staunchly disso-
ciates the origins of constitutional theory from the practice of feudal politics. In
defense of this view, he cites the fact that the most precious intellectual pre-
conditions for constitutionalism — concepts of "sovereignty," "community," and
"state" (pp. 9-10, 30) — were antithetical to feudal institutions, and moreoever
their introduction occured only through "external" sources like Roman Law and
Aristotle. In turn, Tiemey's explanation (derived from Walter UUmann) for the
reception of these "foreign" ideas into the medieval tradition is their immediate
applicability to such non-feudal political arrangements as "monasteries, cathed-
ral chapters, collegiate churches, confraternities, universities, guilds, communes" (p.
1 1 ; cf. p. 36). It was the novel problems posed by the "new corporate groups" of
this order that Tiemey believes to have been the "soil" in which the essential
constituents of constitutionalism firm took root But Tiemey's opposition of
feudal institutions to "corporative stmctures" is historically artificial. For the
actual emergence of these corporate communities, so far from conflicting with
and/or undermining the arrangement of feudal society, saw their rapid integration
into the general pattem of medieval life. As much as Tiemey wishes to see
"communal experience" and feudalism as in principle antithetical, they were in
matter of fact practically compatible. And the reason is that feudalism, understood
as the narrow and personalized relationship of lordship and vassalage (fodalit),
was but a single and limited aspect of a more general social system (fodalisme)
characterized by the decentralized and fragmented distribution of political author-
ity in essentially private hands. Hence, while various communal organizations,
when viewed in isolation, seem incompatible with the personal bonds of the feudal
contract, both political forms constitute prime instances of the widespread and
uncoordinated dispersion of sovereign power upon which feudal society was
constmcted. Concommitantly, it was the process, intemal to feudalism itself, by
which this power was progressively reconcentrated — first in principalities, later in
kingdoms — that provided the most cmcial recurring political issues in medieval
and early modem Europe.
When conceived in these terms, it then becomes possible to treat the con-
stitutionalist tradition as a response to the increasingly pressing problem endemic
to feudalism of the accommodation of public power (generally represented by
monarchy) to the privatized distribution of jurisdictions and liberties. Of course.
1
constitutionalism was not the only sort of response to this historical reality, for as
Tieraey rightly remarks, "one couldjust as easily write a history of absolutism as a
history of constitutionalism" covering the same era (p. xi). Where absolutist
authors sought to integrate the power of private franchises into the state office
structure by appeals to royal supremacy/ sovereignty, however, constitutionalist
theorists beginning in the Middle Ages proposed that at least some right and
powers were so thoroughly imbedded in private hands that they could never be
claimed ( or reclaimed) by any superior authority. The constitutionalist view might
take the form of an unabashed defense of local individualized and/or corporate
rights; or it might adopt the more sophisticated strategy of the "mixed consti-
tution" theory. But always it involved a denial oïplenitudo potestatis on the part
of an ultimate or " sovereign" ruler ( regardless of composition). A recurrent aspect
of the constitutionalist tradition throughout its medieval and early modem history
was the principle that no ruler could be afforded a regularized set of arbitrary or
discretionary powers which might be used to interrupt the particularized juris-
dictions of the dominus and the universitas.
Tiemey's insensitivity to the crucial historical dimension of medieval and early

modem political thought does not, however, invalidate his claim that the con-
stitutive features of constitutionalism first arose within the context of Christian
ecclesiology. Conciliar theories of the church constitution — such as those ad-
vocated by Gerson and d' Ailley, whose influence was later felt in secular circles —
were in fact founded on canonistic doctrines dating to the twelfth and thirteenth
centures. But this ecclesio-canonical impact upon secular constitutionalism can
itself be explained historically. After all, the Western Church, as the most
"advanced" system of feudal politics during the High Middle Ages, suffered at an
early date from serious conflicts between local jurisdiction (bishops, communities,
"national" churches) and the centralized administration of the papacy. It was
these sorts of conflicts that were eventually to be transferred to the realm of secular
politics. Despite the special circumstances implied by ecclesiastical government,
the temporal organization and consequent jurisdictional disputes of the Church
typify the feudal polity as accurately as do the conditions of the French or English
kingdoms. The problems implied by feudal political organization were felt by
clerical and lay lords, communities and mlers without substantial differentiation,
and were addressed by authors concerned with the governance of ecclesiastical
and secular affairs alike. Such facts are hardly incompatible with the basic insights
0Ï Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought. But Tiemey's
failure to inspect adequately the historical foundations of the constitutionalist
tradition means that the more compelling issue of accounting for recurrent intel-
lectual "resemblances" is, at least by inference, pushed entirely aside.
CARY J. NEDERMAN, Glendon College, York University
150 / Renaissance and Reformation i
i
Pierre- Victor Palma-Cayet. L'Histoire Prodigieuse du Docteur Fauste, publié ;
avec introduction et notes par Yves Cazaux. Genève: Librairie Droz, 1982. Pp. !
220. Fr.S. 40.
From the original edition of the Faustbuch [published (anonymously) by John i

Spies in Frankfurt, 1 587] to modem times, the story of Dr. Faustus has played an I
important role in Western literature. This little book is rooted in historical reality,
for there is some biographical basis for the story of Dr. Faustus' life, and it shows a j
specific ideological orientation, for it is generally considered to be a Lutheran :
pamphlet. It gave rise to one of the most influential of all literary myths. The story •
has fascinated writers because of its concern with such religious and philosophical i
problems as the desire for unlimited knowledge, the human relationship with the :
forces of good and evil, the human revolt against the limitations of life, the |
relationship between ethical principles and the pleasure principle. •
Tht Faustbuch is the first known literary version of the legend, and the theme is j
itself most interesting. It is the Reformation's attempt to use the Faust story as an )
example of the horrible death that awaits skeptics and sinners. It is a didactic work \
directed against those who are tempted to hubris, who try to go beyond their |
human condition. Although it presents a few facts about Faust's life, it is largely i
fantastic. Faust is a scholar gone wrong, a proud intellectual who makes a pact |
with the devil and must pay for his earthly pleasures with his eternal damnation. \
He conjures up the devil Mephostophiles, who purchases his soul in return for j
twenty-four years of forbidden knowledge, devilish powers, and material rewards, i
Faust engages in discussion with the devil who reveals the truth about heaven and I
hell and gives a geocentric description of the cosmos. Various fantastic adventures !
of Faust are presented, including tricks reminiscent of Till Eulenspiegel, together j
with his remorseful lamantations, and his final horrifying death at the hands of the \
devil. j
Spies' book was quickly translated into a number of languages including j

French. Yves Cazaux has given us a scholarly edition of the first French trans- \
lation of the Faustbuch ( 1598). It was done by Pierre- Victor Cayet, "sieur de \?l].
Palme," often called Palma-Cayet, an interesting figure in his own right. Best|
known as historiographer of Henri IV, Palma-Cayet was converted to Protestant- '\
ism in his youth and studied in Geneva and Germany. He entered the service of;
Jeanne d'Albret as tutor to her son, Henri de Havarre and served as a Protestant '■
preacher in several French towns, but his return to the court in 1 5 93-94 under the ;
auspices of Catherine de Bourbon, sister to Henri, led to his reconversion to the <
Caùiolic faith in 1595. However, these dates are controversial. He was named -
historiographer to the king, appointed professor of oriental languages, and given a j
pension by the clergy. He was the object of violent attack by his former co- j
religionists and accused of debauchery and black magic. He was certainly inter- j
ested in alchemy and fantastic stories, and this led him to translate iht Faustbuch, \
which brought accusations of occultism. I
M. Cazaus mentions a possible earlier edition of Palam-Cayet's translation!

which a German scholar, Carl Kiesewetter (Faust in der Geschichte undl
Tradition, 1893. Reprinted: Hildesheim: Georg 01ms Verlagsbuchhandlung,!
1963, p. 71) had posited, but Cazaux claims that this edition remains lost. This
first edition would have been prepared while Cazaux was still a Protestant so that
its Lutheran message could easily have been seconded by Cayet at that time. In
1 598 the situation is more confused. The text follows the original Faustbuch fairly
closely and so the Lutheran message remains. However, the Preface, addressed to
the Count of Schomberg, must have been new, for it shows Palma-Cayet attacking
the Protestant spirit or "libra-examen," exemplified by Faust, and ends with his
pious hope that the German nation will return to the bosom of "nostre mere saincte
Eglise Romaine, pour délaisser tant d'opinions monstreuses, qui y ont pullulé
depuis cete miserable defection ..." (p. 53). Thus Cayet attempts to turn the
Faustbuch with its Lutheran message into an anti-Protestant work in which Faust
himself represents the Protestant ideology, and in which it, like he, is condemned
to eternal damnation. Small wonder that Cayet was so vehemently attacked!
This edition contains an introduction that includes remarks on the historical

Faust and the creation of his legend, the original Faustbuch and its sources, the
translater, Palma-Cayet and the edition he used, the facts of publication of his
translation, the characteristics of the translation and its afterlife. Three Annexes
follow, presenting documentary material concerning Faust (an anecdote by Jean
Wier), Palma-Cayet (extracts ofthe Journal of Pierre de L'Estoile), and a listing
of the editions of the Palma-Cayefs translation taken from the Faust-Biblio-
graphie. The text itself contains a dedication by Pahna-Cayet to the Count of
Schomberg and the history of Jean Fauste divided into three parts, which are
themselves divided into chapters, although the chapters are not numbered. Regret-
tably, there is no bibliography, glossary or listing of the chapter headings.
M. Cazaux fails to tell us what modifications he has made to the text so that we
are at a loss as to whether to attribute the considerable number of typographical
errors to the original French text or to the editor of this modem version. A
comparison between the modem French translation by Joël Lefebvre (Lyon: Les
Belles Letters, 1 970) and Pahna-Cayet's version shows that Palma-Cayet did not
know German very well and did not consider it necessary to be faithful to the text.
Thus, there are many errors of sense, and Palma-Cayet's text is sometimes
incomprehensible. M, Cazaux often uses Lefebvre's modem version to explain
garbled or unintelligible passages in Cayet's text, but he should have done more of
this, since incomprehensible passages remain. He also should have gone back to
the original German text to verify the translation.
Despite the many errors, this version was for a long time the only French
translation, and nineteen editions of it were published between 1598 and 1798
according to the Faust-Bibliographie. It is curious, then, that Cazaux does not
find any influence of this translation on French literature, and, indeed, dismisses
any possible influence of Palma-Cayet's translation. The question of such in-
fluence demands deeper study.
Such as it is, this text is an interesting stage in the development and propagation
of the Faust legend throughout Europe. Because of its value as a Reformation and
Renaissance document, and because of its rarity (the text has not been reprinted in
its entirety since 1712), we must thank M. Cazaux for his contribution to Faust
studies. Even the lacunae in M. Cazaux's book rouse the curiosity of the reader
and lead one to search for fiirther enlightenment.
ELLEN S. GINSBERG, The Catholic University of America
Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney's Arcadia, Toronto: Univ. of Toronto;

1982. Pp. 224. $30.00.
Although not lengthy. The Structures of Sidney's Arcadia deals with many of the
salient concerns of recent scholarship on the Arcadia , as, for example, the rhetori-
cal underpinnings of Sidney's prose style and method of composition, the didactic
motives of the romance, its generic affinities, and the nature of the relationship be-
tween the episodic material and the pastoral 'core' the New Arcadia retains from
the Old Arcadia . No all-embracing Ûieories or schemes of interpretation are to be
found here, but instead a series of enlightening and often provocative deliberations
concentrating on the text of 1590. Regarding the multiple texts. Professor Lind-
heim counsels the student to attempt to keep all three versions in mind, especially
when working with the problematic conclusion of 1593, and to do so without
thoughtlessly conflating them. The over-all impression of the Arcadia conveyed
here is of a deeply serious "re-vision," or refashioning of what had been (indeed,
what is) a comedy in tone and structure into something more akin to epic or heroic
poem, owing its general conception of the hero and heroic purpose to the Aeneid
and its more specific didactic aims to the ideals of Tudor humanism.
The structures under investigation are three: rhetorical, tonal, and narrative,
each of which is shown to contribute to the Arcadia 's sense of 'multiple unity' and
to the expression of a coherent thematic pattern. With respect to Sidney's
*rhetoricism,' or the Arcadia's "essentially rhetorical perception of experience,"
preliminary references are made to some recent work on Renaissance histories in
relation to what is termed the Sophistic strain in the rhetorical tradition, that is, an
inherent bias in classical rhetoric to deal with the things of this world and to leave
the transcendent to philosophy. Sophistic epistemology affects rhetorical stra-
tegies inasmuch as it calls for antilogy, the presentation of opposing arguments,
"to give pluralistic illuminations to 'truths' and motivation; in style it makes use of
antithesis to highlight contradiction and of irony to achieve detachment and
awareness of discrepancies between the intention and effect of action." Such an
approach to reality, it is claimed, well suits the Arcadia's overwhelming concern
with ethical behaviour and its depiction of a world in which moral choice becomes
increasingly difficult and the confusion of good and evil ever more subtle.
From this theoretical overview the book proceeds to examine Sidney's rhetori-
cal habits of composition, in particular his use of antithetical topoi, the importance
of which to the organization of his ideas has been long recognized. Perhaps most
original in this section is the analysis of the recurring figures antimetabole and
correctio. By means of such figures Sidney is able to set up oppositions or dis-
tinctions and then to overturn or blur them; two things initially antithetical end by
sharing the same identity. The ubiquity of these figures of reciprocity and rever-
sible balance, together with his reliance on the antithetical topoi, seems to be
"related to a tension between Sidney's analytical habit of mind and his tempera-
mental need for synthesis." Of the two antithetical topoi under consideration,
'Reason and Lxjve,' the first, is studied in the light of the Hercules/Omphale motif,
which attaches chiefly to Pyrocles disguised as Zelmane, the Amazon. Unlike
Ariosto or Spenser, Sidney draws on the positive implications of a tradition
originating with Prodicus, that is, on the 'Not only/But also' development where-
by Hercules becomes a symbol of reconciliation. It is argued quite reasonably that
Sidney's choice here would seem to indicate that he intended a final reconciliation
of the seemingly opposed chivalric and pastoral values of the romance.
The discussion of the second topos, 'Knowledge and Virtue,' focusses on Sid-
ney's treatment of character. By contrast with the other major characters in the
work, Gynecia, Philoclea, and Cecropia do not demonstrate that direct, positive
relationship between virtue and knowledge that is a central principle of humanist
paedeias and so of the Arcadia. It is typical of Professor Lindheim's approach
throughout that where, as in this case, she cannot find a reasonable, ready solution
to a problem, she does not try to enforce one; her exploration of the problem, how-
ever, is always full of insight. Looking at characterization in general, she observes
that whereas the conception of virtue is dynamic in the Arcadia, the conception of
character is static. It is suggested that Sidney's use of the conventional topics of
praise and blame for the delineation of character gives rise to problems in differen-
tiation, especially between similar types such as Pyrocles and Musidorus. Again,
the two heros seem almost too perfect in their chivalric roles and too lucky in their
pastoral roles; according to Professor Lindheim, the result is that the unfortunate
and even tragic Amphialus becomes a more complex and interesting character.
Some readers, however, will contest this opinion by regarding the witty and inven-
tive Pyrocles as the most attractive and well-rounded personage even in the
uncompleted romance.
Tonal structure is apparent where the very sequence of narrative events seems
to direct the reader's attitude to the material. The three personal combats that take
place during the siege in Book III seem best to illustrate a three-part tonal scheme
of positive, negative, and humorous representations of a theme; the three-part
sequences pointed out in Book I would not appear to fit quite so neatly into this pat-
tern. Another agent of tone, the impersonal narrative voice, is viewed as a techni-
cal advance of the intrusive and sometimes limiting narrator of the Old Arcadia.
On the other hand, it could be objected that a character such as Gynecia is
diminished in the course of this improvement.
Narrative structure is examined first through an analysis of the 'retrospective'

narrative material. The princes' adventures in Asia Minor are said to illustrate the
testing of virtues acquired in an idealistic setting against the morally confused
situations of the real world. While Musidorus' more straightforward account suits
the application of theory to situations of clear-cut injustice, Pyrocles' 'interwoven'
narrative treats events of a more complicated and morally ambiguous sort. Sidney
would appear to follow Aristotle in maintaining that the essence of moral virtue
resides in choice. Professor Lindheim is not accepting of the thesis that the princes'
pastoral experience represents a further stage in their education. Investigating the
Arcadia's affinities with chivalric, pastoral, and epic materials— including all the
familiar sources— she points out that the chivalric ethic fails in its pre-occupation
with self, while pastoral deals with social issues in too small and particular a
fashion. Maintaining the priority that society and public virtues, especially justice,
assume in the revised ^rca^zVz, she concludes that is most powerful model is the
Aeneid, not only for its peculiar mixture of heroic and pastoral, but more espe-
cially for theAeneid's stress on public virtues and its depiction of love and the softer
life rejected in favour of the heroic quest. It is suggested, too, that because the
Renaissance defined epic in terms of genre, Sidney quite conceivably thought that
when he wrote the New Arcadia he was recasting the Old Arcadia as an epic.
The Structures of Sidney's Arcadia is a book that presents the major critical
issues in a thoughtful and learned way. It has the great virtue of persuading the
reader to think of the various issues as having a degree of complexity not often
amenable to single approaches. Occasionally its views seem corrective. Not
everyone will agree that there is virtually no Neoplatonism in the Arcadia. Again,
the reader may feel that love and the sentimental aspects of the romance have been
treated rather harshly, and that the pastoral experience in general has been skimped.
Secular love in this romance featuring young protagonists must surely bear some
resemblance, however faint, to that Divine Love which, as Pamela explains,
brings into harmony all the warring elements of the cosmos. One of Professor
Lindheim's valuable contributions is to be found in her analysis of the chief
rhetorical figures and of the purpose of the "vanishing distinction." Similarly help-
ftil will be her clear, incisive evaluation of the influences of the various modes and
sources, whether or not one agrees that the Aeneid provides the determinative
influence, or that Sidney thought of his romance as an epic. One may regret the
complete omission of the poetry on the grounds that it does not simply re-state the
themes of the prose in simpler, more schematic form, as Professor Lindheim
implies, but that it is an integral part of a design that, encompassing tournaments
and descriptions of beautiftil ladies and chivalric ftimiture, is meant to be hand-
some and gay as well as sober and wholesome. The Structures of Sidney's
Arcadia ends with the intriguing idea that the trial scene of the Old Arcadia gave
rise to a conceptual framework too weighty and fertile for the action it purports to
sum up, and that therein were sown the seeds of the revision that was to become the
broader, more serious, and more intricate New Arcadia.
MARGARET SMART, Toronto
The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon

Donaldson, edited by Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw. Edinburgh: Scottish
Academic Press, 1983. Pp. x, 261. $20.00
This Festschrift for the dean of Scottish historians has the signal merit of exploring
many overlooked areas of sixteenth-century Scotland. It has the perhaps unavoid-
able signal demerit of disunity and very uneven quality of pieces. All are aimed at a
scholarly audience, but only some make convincing cases. The editors apparently
tried to guide their contributors and nearly all the pieces follow lines of investiga-
tion opened by Professor Donaldson. The contributions cover administrative and
political, social and intellectual history, with a dash of diplomacy thrown in.
Under the first rubric, two essays on ecclesiastical patronage by Ian Cowan and
James Kirk are extremely valuable, documenting the shift of patronage from pre-
Reformation churchmen to the crown by the later sixteenth-century. The three-
corner game between pope, king and patron underwent a "silent revolution" that
almost accidentally led the way to increased lay patronage in the next century.
Athol Murray's "Financing the Royal Household" focuses on the career of James
Colville as comptroller presiding over the disaster of James V's financial policy,
which led to the assault on church revenues and helped to weaken it just as the
Reformation hit. In a more political vein is Thorkild Christensen's "The Earl of
Rothes in Denmark," but his essay does little to demonstrate why this episode
should be rescued from the "near oblivion" in which it has reposed for four
centuries,
John Durkan's "The Early Scottish Notary" bridges the gap between adminis-
trative and social history, though it focuses mainly on medieval notaries. John
Bannerman's valuable "Literacy in the Highlands" does a persuasive job of
reconstructing a tri-lingual culture and explaining the social dynamics of literacy.
His piece also contains a short but illuminating discussion of the bard's role.
Margaret Sanderson's is one of the most useful articles. She details "The Edin-
burgh Merchants in Society, 1570-1603" chiefly on the evidence of their wills. A
very intriguing picture emerges of the mercantile enterprise that made Scots such
formidable competitors in later centuries. T.M.Y. Manson's sketch of Norse
"Shetland in the Sixteenth Century" fills out the social history category.
Another hybrid contribution leads to two other primarily intellectual pieces.

Edward Cowan's "The Darker Vision of the Scottish Renaissance" is a rather
confused effort to portray Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell as a minor magus.
This he may well have been, but Cowan's attempt to hang that thesis on the North
Berwick witchcraft episode fails to lend coherence to his case. Deny s Hay,
undoubtedly the most distinguished historian represented in this volume, wrote a
short piece on "Scotland and the ItaHan Renaissance," a somewhat tenuous con-
nection, as it turns out. Much of the piece concentrates on Hay's latter-day interest
in historiography.
Two remaining pieces grapple with Scottish religion, one in a primarily intellec-
tual way, the other in a predominantly political fashion. The second editor, Dun-
can Shaw, produced the longest essay on Adam Bothwell's library. It is, as the
author admits, only the "scaffolding" for his subject, and is marred by too may
assumptions about what sort of beliefs Bothwell should have held. Maurice Lee's
treatment of Alexander Seton, "King James's Popish Chancellor," by contrast, is
a subtly eirenic appreciation of the possibilities for a permanent religious peace
inherent in Seton's career and James's policy. In so far as such categories still have
value, the Renaissance is better served than the Reformation. Only Lee's and
Cowan's pieces, together with Kirk's deal directly with the Reformation, though
many others touch on it.
All in all a suitably eclectic tribute to a many-sided historian. Two introductory

essays recount Donaldson's life-long love of history and documents. A five-page
bibliography of his publications testifies to the strength of his twin passions.
THOMAS F. MAYER, Southwest Missouri State University
News / Nouvelles
RSA Annual Meeting
The Renaissance Society of America annual meeting will be hosted by the Mid-
Atlantic Renaissance Seminar, March 20-22, 1 986, at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. Enquiries should be directed to Georgianna Ziegler, Special Collections,
Van Pelt Library/CH, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104.
RSA South-Central Conference
The South-Central Renaissance Conference has announced April 3-5 as the dates
of its 1 986 meeting, to be held at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos,
Texas. Stephen Orgel of The Johns Hopkins University will be the featured
speaker. Inquiries from those wishing to read papers should be sent to the program
chair, Gary A. Stringer, Department of English, University of Southern Mis-
sissippi, Box 5037 Southern Station, Hattiesburg, MS 39406. The deadline for
submission is December 31, 1985.
Query re Shakespearean Statuary
Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of plaster statuettes on Shakespearean

themes (i.e. The Closet Scene from Hamlet, The Cave Scene from Macbeth) by
the Anglo-Canadian sculptor Hamilton Plantagenet MacCarthy (1846-1939)
please contact Dr. Robert J. Lamb, Dept. of Art & Design, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2C9?
Un colloque sur Du Bartas
Le Groupe de Recherches sur l'Ancienne langue française et sur la Renaissance

de la Faculté des Lettres de Pau organisera un Colloque International les 7, 8 et 9
Mars 1 986 qui se tiendra à la Faculté des Lettres, et a retenu le sujet suivant: Du
Bartas: Poésie et encyclopédisme.
Il serait souhaitable que pour la rentrée (au plus tard le 15 novembre) les pro-
positions de communications soient accompagnées d'un bref résumé. Les collègues
désireux de présenter une communication et ou d'assister à ce colloque sont
invités à prendre contact avec: James Dauphiné— 223 avenue de Fabron Les
Oliviers 06200 NICE; ou Faculté des Lettres de Pau Avenue du Doyen Pop-
lawski 64000 PAU.
"i'%.
I-.'îrt,
Renaissance
and
Reformation
Renaissance
et
Réforme^
■o
New Series, Vol. IX, No. 3 Nouvelle Série, Vol. IX, No. 3
^^ August 1985 août
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme is published quarterly (February, May, i

August, and November); paraît quatre fois l'an (février, mai, août, et novembre). ■
(CSRS / SCER) 1
North Central Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (NCC) j
Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference (PNWRC) '
Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) ;
Victoria University Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS). 1985. ^
Editor j
Kenneth Bartlett l
Directeur Adjoint |
Claude Sutto (Université de Montréal) 'î
Associate Editor |
Glenn Loney |
Book Review Editor |
Thomas Martone |
Responsable de la rubrique des livres %
Pierre-Louis Vaillancourt (Université de Montréal) |
Business Manager |
K. Eisenbichler |
Editorial Board/Comité de rédaction ^
Rosemarie Bergmann (McGill) A. Kent Hieatt (Western Ontario) '
André Berthiaume (Laval) R. Gerald Hobbs (Vancouver School of Theology) i\
Peter G. Bietenholz (Saskatchewan) F.D. Hoeniger (Toronto) i
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Renaissance
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Renaissance
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1985

Contents / Sommaire
ARTICLES
157
Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia:
The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes
by Winfried Schleiner
177
Henry Peachman, BAp&'sIconologia, and Vasari's Lives
by A.R. Young
189
François de la Noue (1531-1591) au service du libéralisme du XIXe siècle
par William H. Huseman
209
The Essay as a Moral Exercise: Montaigne

by John O'Neill
219
F. Edward Cranz,^ Bibliography of Aristotle Editions, 1501
reviewed by Paul F. Grendler
220
Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ:
New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance

reviewed by Daniel Bomstein
223
Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric-
Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship,
and Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence:
Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance
reviewed by Paul Ramsey
1600
226
James Dauphiné, Le Cosmos de Dante,

compte rendu par Simone Maser
227
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470 - 1625
reviewed by Bernard C. Weber
228
Hallet Smith, The Tension of the Lyre: Poetry in Shakespeare's Sonnets
reviewed by Andrew M. McLean
229
Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community
in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500 -1789
compte rendu par Robert Toupin, SJ.
231
Paul SeWin, John Donne and 'Calvinist' Views of Grace
reviewed by Terry G. Sherwood
233
NEWS / NOUVELLES
Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia:

The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes'
WINFRIED SCHLEINER
It is a commonplace that literature and life intersect in many places. Even

without adopting philosophic concepts (the Kantian categories, say, or
Cassirer's symbolic forms) as tools for probing facts in various realms of
experience, a literary scholar may point to the derivation of many narrative
or dramatic episodes and plots from actual cases: moral, judicial, and
medical. But derivation certainly does not imply primacy of importance of
the source, i.e., if we study the interplay of disciplines in actual casus,
reciprocal fertilization between disciplines is more apparent than mere
debt. Indeed, if we pursue the Renaissance thinking about one kind of
medical case, namely what we would now call schizophrenia, and par-
ticularly the delusions associated with it, Francis Bacon seems to have
been right for that period when he said pointedly that "Medicine is a
Science, which hath been . . . more professed, than laboured, and yet more
laboured, than advanced."^ While some cases of psychoses and some
minimal classification of them have their firm place in disquisitions on
"melancholy" from the earliest medical authors onwards, it seems that
such cases needed sympathetic penetration by thinkers outside the medi-
cal academy for the full extent of suffering in them to be reaUzed - perhaps
an analogue to recent impulses the treatment of psychotics has received
fi-om a movement sometimes called "anti-psychiatry."^
In our period the troubled mind will derive not only insight but sus-
tenance from the sympathetic account of schizophrenia in a book like R. D.
Laing's The Divided Self. Describing the exaggerated desire for privacy
and the acute sense of vulnerability in these patients, Laing points out that
their sense of being exposed and vulnerable is carried to such an extreme
that one of them "may say that he is made of glass, of such transparency
and fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and penetrates
straight through him,"^ or that a man who says he is dead "means that he is
♦ The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfen-
buttel, Germany. Ruth El Saffar, Alan S. Trueblood, and Michael A. Hirsch, M.D. read earlier ver-
sions of it and made valuable suggestions.
'really' and quite 'literally' dead, not merely symbolically or 'in a sense' or
'as it were'."^ According to one of Laing's patients, the fear of being hurt
can be pitched to such a degree that the person "really wants to be dead and
hidden in a place where nothing can touch him and drag him back"
(p. 180).
While there is a strong ancient and Renaissance tradition linking mad-

ness and genius in the notion of genial or heroic melancholy (powerfully
presented by Ficino, Agrippa of Nettesheym, and Melanchthon), medical
writers of the period rarely show any sympathy for such delusive con-
ditions as those described by R. D. Laing. Although cases like that of
someone believing himself dead or thinking himself a clay vase or a glass
jug or a helpless bird are often mentioned as special cases of melancholy
(some go back to Hippocrates and Galen), one must look to theologians
and writers of fiction to find sympathetic treatments of the condition. It is
not in Marcello Donati, Hercules of Sassonia, Andre du Laurens, Juan
Huarte, and perhaps not even in the highly courageous and innovative
Johann Wierus (Weyer) or the perceptive Thomas Fienus (Fey ens),
whose De viribus imaginationis elicited Robert Burton's highest praise,
but in the ostensible anti-melancholies Luther and Cervantes that the con-
dition of such psychotics and the ambiguity of their cure are most clearly
presented.
The Laughable Psychotic
As I noted above, cases of persons thinking themselves other than they

were (a clay jar, a cock with flapping wings) are included in ancient dis-
cussions of melancholy such as Galen'sZ)^ affectis (Bk. 3),^ but there is no
question that Renaissance doctors deUghted in them, expanded them by
introducing local detail, and added new ones for their comic interest, often
dated and localized, to the popular case books. Thus Renaissance hand-
books of medical and related knowledge are filled with cases of deluded
people who fi*equently try to impose their vision upon their neighbors.
Often the authors or compilers do not even try to conceal their amusement:
"Quite ridiculous is also the case of the person who went to Murano to
throw himself into a furnace wanting to have himself turned into a salad
bowl."«
Without belabouring this point with a variety of cases from the curiosity
shop of Renaissance medicine, let me add only one of a voluntary retentive
that ahnost invariably elicited amusement. The French physician André
du Laurens writes
The pleasantest dotage that ever I read, was of one Sienois a Gentleman, who
had resolved with himselfe not to pisse, but to dye rather, and that because he
imagined, that when he first pissed, all his towne would be drowned. The
Phisitions shewing him, that all his bodie, and ten thousand more such as his,
were not able to containe so much as might drowne the least house in the
towne, could not change his minde from this foolish imagination. In the end
they seeing his obstinacie, and in what danger he put his life, found out a plea-
sant invention. They caused the next house to be set on fire, & all the bells in
the town to ring, they perswaded diverse servants to crie, to the fire, to the fire,
and therewithal! send of those of the best account in the town, to crave helpe,
and shew the Gentleman that there is but one way to save the towne, and that it
was, that he should pisse quickelie and quench the fire. Then this sillie
melancholike man which abstained from pissing for feare of loosing his towne,
taking it for graunted, that it was now in great hazard, pissed and emptied his
bladder of all that was in it, and was himselfe by that means preserved.'
The earliest instance I have seen of this story is in Marcello Donati, but it
may well have already been part of the bedrock of medical commonplace
before him. While Burton tells only half of the case, the Englishman
Thomas Walkington presents this melancholic as "of all conceited famous
fooles . . . most worthy to be canoniz'd in the chronicles of our memory,"
and almost a century later the compiler Laurentius Beyerlinck identifies
this case as the "most ridiculous" of all stories of melancholies.*. It is quite
possible that Swift was thinking of the man of Siena when he had Gulliver
so effectively extinguish the fire in the Queen's apartments.
The "humour" in the last case does not derive merely from its violating
some sexual or scatological taboo (though certainly breach of decorum is a
vehicle of Swift's satire); this element is not present in the other cases that
are called by Renaissance authors "ridiculous". Not breach of decorum
but psychotic delusion is common to them all. Speaking of "melancholike
persons, and mad men [who] imagine many things which in verie deed are
not," Ludwig Lavater says "Those which dwell with suche kinde of men,
when they here them tell such absurd tales, such strange things, and such
marvellous visions, albeit they pittie their unfortunate estate, yet can they
not many times containe themselves from laughing."' Although Lavater
refers to the pity of the patients' keepers, this reference actually ampUfies
the ridicule evoked by the psychotic delusions: the sense of the ridiculous
overcomes pity. Of course the pain and inhumanity resulting from unsym-
pathetic attitudes towards psychotics have mostly gone unrecorded. A
striking exception is the case of a person whose death is reported as an
instance of medical misjudgment (or we might say 'malpractice') or in
answer to the question whether the imagination is so strong that it can kill.
A man believes his body is no huge that he cannot pass through a door and
therefore refuses to leave his room. When at the request of the physician
several helpers carry the screaming patient through the doorway by force,
he feels his body to have been shattered inside and falls so ill that he dies
shortly afterwards.^®
The Erasmian Praise of Mental Distraction and

the (Pseudo-) Aristotelian Praise of Melancholy
A related but significantly different Renaissance attitude towards psy-

chotic delusion is what for want of a better term I will call the "Erasmian,"
an attitude perhaps more humanistic than humane, drawing some support
from the ancients. InPraise of Folly, Erasmus' ambiguous speaker (Folly)
describes a "pleasant mental distraction [that] relieves the heart from its
anxieties"** and distinguishes it from destructive madness. While destruc-
tive madness is sent up from the underworld by the avenging Furies, this
madness takes its origin from Folly, the imagined speaker, and according
to her is "most desirable": "It occurs whenever a certain pleasant mental
distraction relieves the heart from its anxieties and cares and at the same
time soothes it with the balm of manifold pleasures."*^ Folly refers to one
of Cicero's letters to Atticus (3.13) claiming that "Cicero wishes for this
mental distraction as a great gift from the gods, because it would have dep-
rived him of all awareness of the great evils around him," but two recent
editors of Praise of Folly have corrently pointed out that Cicero does not
say what Folly here attributes to him. *^ Although Cicero may be the wrong
informant. Folly effectively illustrates her view of this mental condition by
reference to a case reported by Horace (Epist. 2.2.128-40):
Nor was there anything wrong with the judgment of the Greek who was so mad
that he sat alone in the theatre for whole days on end, laughing, applauding,
enjoying himself, because he thought that wonderful tragedies were being
acted there, whereas nothing at all was being performed. But in the other duties
of life he conducted himself very well: he was cheerful with his friends, agree-
able with his wife; he could overlook the faults of his servants and not fly into a
mad rage when he found a winejar had been secredy tapped. Through the
efforts of his friends he took some medicine which cured him of his disease, but
when he was completely himself again, he took issue with his friends in this
fashion: "Damn it all!" he said, "you have killed me, my friends, not cured me,
by thus wresting my enjoyment from me and forcibly depriving me of a most
pleasant delusion."'*
Erasmus is clearly not interested in the kind of medicine (which Horace

reports to be hellebore). In the first version of the case I have seen, the
medication is not even mentioned; Aristotle's exemplum makes the same
general point (that the melancholic was happier in his delusion), but
without the elaborate details Folly borrowed from Horace: "It is said that
at Abydus a man who was mad went into the theatre and watched for many
days, as if there were people acting, and showed his approval; and when he
recovered from his madness, he said that he had enjoyed the best time of his
life."*^ In the Renaissance the case of this "melanchoHc" was well know.
Ludwig Lavater recounts it in his work just mentioned together with an
equally famous case of a melancholic called Thrasyllos; from Athenaeus
to Burton, Thrasyllos is cited to show that a person can be happier in his

melancholic delusion than after his cure:
Atheneus [sic] lib. 12 writeth of one Tresilaus [in Athenaeus: Thrasyllos],

whose braines were so distempered, that he verily supposed all the ships
whiche aryved at Porte Piraeus, to be his owne: he would numbre them, he
commaunded the Mariners to launch from shore, and when they returned after
their voyage home againe, he as much rejoyced as if he had ben owner of all
wherewith they were laden. The same man affirmed, that in al the time of his
madness he lived a verie pleasant life, untill the Phisitian hadde cured him of
his disease. ^^
As in Athenaeus, the cure is just a given, necessary to make the point of the
story, but we do not learn how it was effected. ^^ In fact Lavater tells us even
less about the patient's background, about whom Athenaeus relates that he
was afflicted by madness "resulting from luxurious living."
Lavater' s point in stringing these cases together is to illustrate a sense of

amusement (resulting from the disturbed perception of reality) and to show
the patient's preference for the deluded state. In Erasmus' Praise of Folly,
the speaker takes the argument one step further, claiming that such states
are generally desirable. To realize that Erasmus' speaker is Folly does not
entirely discredit the view propounded; since the reader finds many of
Folly's arguments (particularly in satiric passages) eminently reasonable,
this realization merely helps to suspend the praise of deluded folly in a tan-
talizing and very Erasmian ambiguity.
Occasionally the view that a mentally deluded state is preferable to nor-

malcy is supported by the (pseudo-) Aristotelian notion already men-
tioned, that melancholy is the precondition of all genius: "Why is it,"
Problem XXX, section 1 opens, "that all men who have become outstand-
ing in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and
some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from
black bile, as the story of Heracles among the heroes tells?"** Melancholies
may philosophize in their illness - and only in their illness - or, although
unlettered, may speak in perfect verses for days on end: the characteristic
response elicited by such cases is not sympathy but wonder. Shakespeare
accurately catches this mood when he has the Duke in As You Like It ask
his men to lead him to the scene of melancholy Jaques's ravings: "Show me
the place," the Duke says. "I love to cope [i.e., converse with] him in these
sullen fits, / For then he's full of matter" (AYLI II, i,66-68 [Riverside
ed.]). The Duke's motive is not charity, but enjoyment of spectacle, i.e. an
excitement he gets from Jaques' unusual association of ideas, perhaps
satisfying his urge to catch a glimpse of the transcendent world.
We may study the blend of Erasmian and Aristotelian ideas in a case re-
ported by the sixteenth-century doctor Juan Huarte de San Juan, a case
162 / Renaissance and Refonnation
that will later serve us as a basis for describing important transformations

wrought by one of the greatest literary artists of the Renaissance. Huarte
tells of the "notable speeches, uttered by a Page of one of the great ones of
this realme, whilst he was made, who in his health was reported a youth of
slender capacity."*' Thus the pattern is similar to the Athenaean or Eras-
mian one, except that intellectual capacity attends illness and is con-
sidered more important than the patient's health. Huarte continues:
Falling into this infirmitie, he delivered such rare conceits, resemblances, and
answers, to such as asked him, and devised so excellent manners of governing
a kingdome (of which he imagined himselfe to be the soveraigne) that for great
wonder people flocked to see him and heare him, and his very maister scarcely
ever departed from his beds head, praying God that he might never be cured.
Which afterwards plainly appeared, for being recovered, his Phisitian (who
had healed him) came to take leave of his lord, with a mind to receive some
good reward, if of nothing else, yet at least in good words; but he encountered
this greeting: "I promise you maister doctor, that I was never more aggreeved
at any ill successe, than to see this my page recovered, for it was not behooflull
that he should change so [sic] wise folly, for an understanding so simple as is
this, which in his health he enjoieth. Me-thinks that of one, who to fore was
wise and well advised, you have made him a foole againe, which is the greatest
miserie that may light upon any man." (Huarte, Examination of Mens Wits,
p. 43)
Of course this is the sense of wonder a "melanchoUc's" stunning abilities

usually evoke in Renaissance beholders, abilities that Huarte on the next
page explains in terms of Problem XXX, as resulting from an unusual
humoral mixtiwe. First, however, he reports in Athenaean/Erasmian
fashion the patient's own reaction to his cure. After politely thanking his
doctor, the page says to him
I assure you on my faith, that in some sort, it displeaseth me to have bene

cured. For whilest I rested in my folly, I led my life in the deepest discourses of
the world, and imagined my selfe so great a lord, as there raigned no king on the
earth, who was not my vassal, and were it a jeast or a lie, what imported that,
whilest I conceived thereof so great a contentment, as if it had bene true? I rest
now in far woorse case, finding my selfe in troth to be but a poore page, and to
morrow I must begin againe to serve one, who whilst I was in mine infirmitie, I
would have disdayned for my footman, (pp. 43-44)
Rather curiously this passage has the marginal comment "This page was not
yet perfectly cured" representing accurately the annotation of the first edition
(1575): "Este page aun no habiasanado del todo."^** The comment seems
to indicate that its author, Huarte or his editor, was not entirely aware that
the case of the page harking back to his pleasant delusions stood in the
Athaenean/Erasmian tradition. As so often in cases deriving from this
tradition, the medication or therapy that cured the page remains unmentioned.
Luther: Cure by Charity and Company (societas)
If, then, a certain kind of psychotic case tended to attract medical ridicule
and if the Erasmian notion of pleasurable delusion likewise did not lead to
serious consideration of therapy, we may have to look elsewhere in the
Renaissance for a glimpse of what has become so strikingly obvious in our
times: that a knowledge of the patients' histories, empathy with their condi-
tion, and endeavors to understand their particular thought processes are
important in the treatment of psychotics, whose suffering and pain are
beginning to be fully recognized. A measure of the important of such
thought now is the participation of psychiatrists and psychologists of the
most diverse persuasions in community programs bringing together
"primary consumers" and their friends and families.
Perhaps it is significant that I have found the most striking Renaissance

intimation of such matters in a theologian and in a poet, who transmuted
the medical commonplaces through their specific fears and predilections,
and above all through an encompassing sympathy for the psychotic. While
medical authors often had been content to map out diverse psychotic cases
comparing the patient's psychotic to his sane state without suggesting any
therapy or cure, the cases recounted in Luther's Tischreden (or Colloquia)
are informed by a sense of caring for the patient and include the nature of
the patient's cure. Indeed, it can be said that this sense of caring becomes a
vehicle of therapy.
The first case is of a melancholic who refuses to eat and drink and hides
in a cellar. He rebuffs any charitable helpers with the words "Don't you see
that I am a corpse and have died? How can I eat?" Michel Foucault points
out that a seventeenth-century medical author refers to a similar exem-
plum to show that the insane are capable of logical rigor, to such an extent
in fact that they will starve to death for a syllogism. ^^ Although in Luther's
story the patient is not brought to revise his minor premise, which would
mean sanity, at least he is induced to life-preserving illogic: after several
days, when his life is in danger, his friends decide to set a table in the cellar;
they bring in the most delicious dishes, select a monk for his embonpoint ,
and have him eat and drink loudly and demonstratively. By the feasting
monk's example and company the melanchoUc is impelled to eat and drink:
"I must drink with you and cannot help it, though I be dead a hundred
times."22
The second case (in some versions of the Colloquia not attributed to
Luther but to his physician Lindemann) is of a melanchohc who thought
that he was a cock, with a red comb on his head, a long beak, and a crowing
voice - surely since Galen one of the most hallowed medical topoi. But
while Galen does not suggest a cure, this melancholicus is joined by an
inventive person who simulates the gait and voice of a cock. After living
with the patient in this manner for several days, he says "I am not a cock
any more, but a human being; and you have returned to being human, too."
And the speaker concludes with something like a moral, which would have
been a fitting close for the previous case as well: "And by that company he
cured him" (Et ilia societate ilium persuasit)}^
The third case told by Luther is perhaps even more interesting because it
resonates with echoes of the major theological divisions of the Reforma-
tion. It concerns a iustitiarius, or as the German text says more express-
ively, a Werkheiliger. Since the case of this voluntary retentive is at the
same time a minor anecdotal or even novelistic masterpiece - incidentally
illustrating the overlap of a medical case with short fiction - 1 have trans-
lated it in toto.
Then Dr. Martin Luther said "that there was a devout man, a Werkheiliger ^
who heard a monk preach about a saint who had stood for three years in one
place on a step [of a ladder or stair]. Then he had stood another three years on
another and higher step, without in that period eating or drinking anything. As
a result maggots had come out of his feet. But as soon as these worms had fallen
to the ground, they had turned to pearls and precious stones. And the monk
concluded his sermon saying: 'You also must let everything become bloody
sour for you if you want to win heaven!' ['Also musst ihrs euch auch lassen
blutsaur werden, so ihr wollet sehg werden!']
"When the melancholic heard this, he resolved (to put it decorously) not to
let water. No one could persuade him to urinate; and he continued like that for
several days. Then someone came to him saying that he was doing right in cas-
tigating his body and that he should certainly stay with his resolve (to serve
God and to make himself suffer), for one entered into heaven through many
crosses and tribulations. The same person also pretended that he too had taken
a vow not to urinate, but that since he had prided himself on this pledge and had
thought to gain heaven by it, he had sinned more than if he had urinated;
indeed, he had almost become a murderer of his own body. 'Thus all the world
will say similarly of you, that you do so out of pride. Therefore give up your
resolve and let nature have its course.' In this way he persuaded the melan-
cholic to urinate. ^^
This case, or we may more appropriately call it an exemplum, illustrates

some concerns central to Luther's thought about justification, spiritual
temptation (Anfechtung), and melancholy (which he usually calls, using a
medieval adage, "the Devil's bath," balneum diaboli), a nexus deserving
more thorough exploration than it can receive in the present context.
Luther's presentation of the story is different in two ways from the ver-
sion that entered the collections of medical commonplaces. Perhaps
because of the authority of Galen, who merely listed instances of melan-
cholic behavior, such as claiming to have a body of fragile material, playing
the cock, or claiming to support the world on one's shoulders, medieval and
Renaissance compendia usually give no history of such patients. Huarte's
case of a noble lord's page who fell into the delusion that he was a sovereign
lord himself is rather unusual, for presumably his kind of madness is

related to his station in life." The connection between the delusion and the
patient's kind of life and habits (genus vitae et consuetudo) is not expressed
systematically until the early seventeenth century in a Wittenberg disser-
tation on melancholy, and then the idea is somewhat simplistic: "The
theologian claims to speak with angels and to be Christ; ... the chemist
disclaims on the making of gold; the miser, however rich, weeps about lack-
ing everything; the astronomer says he is a prophet, the courtier a king."^^
While in the usual version of the voluntary retentive's case his previous
history is not explained, Luther gives an etiology: he describes the man as a
"iustitiarius" before the onset of his disease, i.e. someone attempting to
justify himself by works rather than by faith. For Luther it is appropriate
that such a iustitiarius should fall into melancholy (a version of the
medieval monks' disease acedia) upon hearing a monk praising a man for
castigating himself. The terms in which Luther has the monk urge the con-
gregation to works of penitence are loaded: "Also musst ihrs euch auch
lassen blutsaur werden ..." (Thus you must let everything become
bloody sour for you too). "Sour" is often Luther's derogatory epithet for
the looks or life style of the iustitiarii, whether of Romish or Enthusiast
(i.e. Anabaptist) persuasion.
The second way in which Luther's exemplum differs from the versions
typically found in medical handbooks of the period is in the kind of cure
proposed. We saw that the abnormal behavior in the second case, of the
man imitating a cock, was remedied by ingenious persuasion through
human contact or company, and that the final sentence Et ilia societate
ilium persuasit could just as well have applied to the first patient (who
thought himself dead). In Renaissance terms, this man was not suffering
simply fi-om acedia, since his refusal to eat was not a means of mortifying
himself:" he thought he was already dead. Thus Luther's version belongs
to the cases usually taken to exemplify laesa imaginatio, an injured or
harmed imagination, although some medical writers record "cures" signi-
ficantly more ingenious than Luther's: in Sennert's chapter "De viribus
imaginationis," the starving melancholic is joined by someone pretending
to be dead yet hungry and by that example is persuaded that corpses also
should eat.^* As we have seen, in Luther the appeal is more physical and
social, to the infectious pleasure commonly experienced by human beings
in eating: someone simply wines and dines in the patient's view thus
stimulating his fellow creature's appetite. While in these brief stories the
evidence for such judgements is scanty, it may be said that in modem terms
Luther's "melancholic" comes closer to being cured.
Clearly human company is the essential element in the cure of the

melancholic iustitiarius also. Indeed, although the German version trans-
lated above omits any "moral," the Latin text draws it in such a way that it
functions like a refrain: "Et ita ilium persuasit societate" (And thus he per-
suaded him by company). Just as in the cure of the birdman "company"
meant that friend imitated the patient's behavior, so in the case of the reten-
tive iustitiarius it means claiming to have had an experience similar to his.
Thus at the outset of therapy, there is an attempt to overcome the psy-
chotic's isolation by demonstratively negating the border between "nor-
malcy" and "insanity".
Cervantes: In the Interaction of Three Traditions
The most powerful fictional elaboration of the tensions between ridicule,

compassionate reintegration (which I see best exemplified in Luther), and
the Erasmian stance towards psychotic delusion is Cervantes' Z)o« Quixote ^
a novel that broadens the issue from a question of the patient's characteris-
tically Erasmian ways of evaluating abnormal states of mind and even sug-
gesting their benefit for society. Uncertainty about the value of the
ingenious psychotic's state of mind - is his perception comparable, even
preferable to that of the many? - casts a shadow of ambiguity over the
intended cure of the ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote. It is impossible to
review here the specific arguments about Don Quixote's humoral condi-
tion and cure that have been brought forth since Iriarte's concerted attempt
to bring medical history to bear on the novel.^^ In any case, the dis-
agreements about Don Quixote's condition in terms of humoral physi-
ology (whether he is best explained as an ingenious melancholic [H.
Weinrich] or as a colérico with enthusiasm turning melancholic [O. H.
Green]) are relatively unimportant in the present context, for ultimately,
according to general Renaissance physiological theory, even cholera
adusta produces what is also considered a version of melancholy.
Much of the plot is motivated by notions of curing, and the motives of the
curers (priest and barber in part I and Sanson Carrasco in part II) are pure
at least at the beginning: selected representatives of La Manchan society
set out in order to find their fellow villager and to bring him home . Although
Cervantes' irony, as complex and subtle as Erasmus's, invariably tempers
the moral significance of action, the fundamental strain of compassion and
human sympathy evident in these motives of cure comes to the surface in
other places in the novel: in Maritomes's offering Sancho a glass of wine
after he has been tossed in a blanket (1,17); in Don Quixote's counsel to
Sancho, about to set out to govern his island, to err in favor of mercy, not
rigor (11,42); in scattered remarks in various places criticizing those laugh-
ing at Don Quixote (without necessarily defending Don Quixote - as e.g.
Cide Hamete's comments on the Duke and the Duchess in 11,70). To be
sure, some of the action (like the comportment of the Duke and Duchess)
only shows people's interest in and enjoyment of the madman's genius -
and thus is equivalent to the noble lord's dubious enjoyment of his schizo-
phrenic page's wisdom in Huarte's exemplum or the Duke's interest in

conversing with Jaques in his fits (in^^- You Like It). But most of the time it
is the ostensible motive of curing Don Quixote that turns much of the novel
into a series of masquerades in which the would-be curers enter into the fic-
tion of the patient. Before Sanson Carrasco as the Knight of the White
Moon takes on Don Quixote in the final and humiliating bout, he has him
agree to return to La Mancha for a year if he should lose. When Don
Antonio Moreno after the fight accuses him of having foolishly robbed the
world of the benefit of Don Quixote's eccentricities, Sanson Carrasco
defends himself, saying "I myself felt particular sympathy for his sad case,
and as I believed his recovery to depend upon his remaining quietly at
home, I earnestly endeavored to accomplish that end."^^
As we have seen with several cases already, a certain kind of therapy
was indicated for patients with fixed delusions, and this therapy was based
on a few theoretical assumptions shared by most medical writers. In his
section "Of the Force of the Imagination" (pt. 1, sec. 2, memb. 3, subs. 2)
and throughout his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton accurately
records a Renaissance trend to assign the causes of melancholy to the
imagination. He agrees with Nicholas Piso and other medical authorities
in saying that the fountain of distempers is laesa imagination^ (wounded or
injured imagination) and draws upon Thomas Feyens (Fienus), who in an
eminently interesting book called De viribus imaginationis held that
melancholic humors result from prava imaginatio (distorted imagina-
tion). Hence, said Feyens, they cannot be expelled from the body except
by inducing other and contrary images in the imagination. In the resulting
therapy, the healers become stage managers and actors who act within the
fiction of the patient, even expanding it. Thus one finds scores of reports
like those of people who believed they contained frogs or snakes and were
cured by a physician who pretended to extract the animals from their
innards, or of patients who thought that antlers were growing on their heads
and were healed by a clever physician's simulated operation. ^^
Surely no one familiar with Renaissance medical notions about curing

laesa imaginatio will miss the attempts at manipulating Don Quixote in
the interest of a presumed cure, but the fictions resorted to are so elaborate
that Cervantes may have been satirizing exactly this medical theory. The
would-be therapists devote themselves to their masquerade with so much
enthusiasm that in their fascination for the means they lose sight of the end;
as a result they seem at times as deluded as Don Quixote himself. Thus
Sanson Carrasco engages Don Quixote in the final bout ostensibly in order
to get him home for a year, but Oscar Mandel, who has sifted through the
novel's characters to determine which come closest to being reliable and
reasonable agents and spokesmen for the author, is undoubtedly correct
when he calls Sanson a "doubtful referent."" Not only is he too bungling in
his attempts to get Don Quixote home, but even Sanson's motives are
questionable: while after the final joust Sanson claims that he has had Don
Quixote's interests and specifically his cure in mind (II ch. 65), the reader
remembers that Sanson Carrasco had at one point affirmed the opposite.
After being defeated by Don Quixote, he had said to his own "squire" "It is
not my wish to make him recover his wits that will drive me to hunt him
now, but my lust for revenge" (II, ch. 15). That many a reader has agreed
with Don Antonio's reprimand of Sanson Carrasco is an index of how
deeply the Erasmian spirit pervades the novel:
May God forgive you for the wrong you have done in robbing the world of the
most diverting madman who was ever seen. Is it not plain, sir, that his cure can
never benefit mankind half as much as the pleasure he affords by his eccen-
tricities? But I feel sure, sir, that all your art will not cure such deep-rooted
madness; were it not uncharitable, I would express the hope that he may never
recover, for by his cure we would lose not only the knight's company, but also
the drollery of his squire, Sancho Panza, which is enough to transform
melancholy itself into mirth. (II, ch. 65; Starkie trans., p. 995)
Though we know that Sanson Carrasco succeeds in getting Don Quixote

back to his village, at the entrance to which Don Quixote experiences what
psychiatrists now call "ideas of reference" (he interprets a hare fleeing
toward him as a malum signum), and that Don Quixote finally regains
sanity on his deathbed, Cervantes does not give anyone unambiguous
credit for the "cure" - neither Sanson Carrasco nor any other would-be
therapist from La Mancha, including the doctor. It may well be that he
wishes to reserve for God the distinction of being the ultimate physician.
While Don Antonio's view is not the last word on the ingenious psy-
chotic, in its moral ambiguity (the opposition of charity versus delight as
incapsulated in the expression "diverting madness") it highlights Eras-
mian tenets and enriches them with the aesthetic pleasures of watching a
character so obsessed with books that he takes his imagined world for real.
While this genetic view of Cervantes' thought may perhaps simplify his
tantalizing creation inordinately (obscuring for instance the point that Don
Quixote never hallucinates), it should be noted that some of the seeds of his
accomplishment are contained in the kind of topical medical cases we have
been considering. The Greek madman who sat in a theater alone for days
on end "saw" an imaginative creation, evaluating it emotionally or aes-
thetically. And just as this Athenian psychotic singled out by Erasmus
represents a hyper-cultural phenomenon, so unquestionably "bookish"
patients suffering mental illness are quite common in medical discussions
in the Renaissance. Renaissance doctors are not averse to drawing upon
literary characters and episodes, doing so eclectically of course, without
the Freudian and Jungian underpinnings that motivate most modem
attempts at bridging the gap between life and literature. Thus Lavater
reports that the slighted Ajax became so "madde through griefe" that he
drew his sword and "set upon herds of swine supposing that he fought with
the whole army of the Grecians ..."''*- an episode that will strike one as
potentially Quixotic.
There is no question that Don Antonio's reaction is plotted in the tension

field between delight and charity, for he says so ("were it not uncharit-
able," etc.). The same tension animates what may be the most moving
episode of this kind in the novel - Sancho's pleading words to Don Quixote,
who is on his deathbed and resigned to die: "Up with you this instant, out of
your bed, and let us put on shepherd's clothing and off with us to the fields
as we were resolved a while back. Who knows but we may find Lady
Dulcinea behind a hedge, disenchanted and as fresh as a daisy" (II, 74;
Starkie trans, p. 1047). If we assume that Sancho at this point in the novel
cannot hope any more to find the world of romance (pastoral or other) in his
own world, his suggestion is comparable to the Lutheran healer's com-
passionate act: he will keep Don Quixote company to prolong his Hfe. But
the categories I have been distinguishing are only the roughest guides in a
complex situation like this one, veiled in subtle irony: for Sancho's pro-
pose, though charitable, also affirms his pleasure in their unusual com-
panionship. Therefore it is more to the point to say that Cervantes here
manages to transform the (Erasmian) pleasure taken in Don Quixote's
madness into sympathy and brotherhood. In Sancho's spontaneous and
feeling reaction, Cervantes transcends the categories' separateness.
The two elements which I find in nuce in Luther's thinking about cases of
"melancholies," namely the consideration of the psychotic's past and the
role of societas in re-integrating such a person into the community, are
highlighted with an almost uncanny perspicuity (and without the irony
veiling the compassion m Don Quixote) in a novella by Cervantes that has
long been considered the most puzzling but also fascinating of his short
works. ^^ Working from the kind of topical medical exempla we have
reviewed in this paper and of course thinking in the context of the humoral
physiology reigning in his period, Cervantes' imaginative genius highlights
problems of communal integration not only in therapy but also after some
"cure" has been accomplished, thus going far beyond the theoretical
interests of medical academicians of his time.
"El Licenciado Vidriera," one of Cervantes' Aô veto ejemplares, tells

the story of a young man with a good memory (good memory in humoral
physiology distinguishes the melancholic) who sees the world, returns to
Salamanca to take his law degree, but because of a supposed love potion
secretly administered to him falls grievously ill. He recovers physically but
becomes "mad" or "melancholic," or as we would say, psychotic:
The poor wretch imagined that he was all made of glass, and under this delu-
sion, when someone came up to him, he would scream out in the most frighten-
ing manner, and using the most convincing arguments would beg them not to
come near him, or they would break him.'*
Along with his delusion the licenciado acquires stunning wisdom: he baffles
the professors of medicine and philosophy by answering the most difficult
questions put to him, and Cervantes spends the larger part of the novella
giving examples of his ingenious perceptions and sayings. The story thus
presents a version of the melancholic of genius in the tradition of pseudo-
Aristotle's problem XXX, 1 , a tradition that has been described by Saxl,
Panofsky, and others."
Modem scholars are undoubtedly correct if they see the story as a con-
flation of a psychiatric case in the tradition of Galen (of a man beHeving he
is made of some brittle substance) with Huarte's case (mentioned above)
of the page with the delusion of being sovereign of a realm. ^* But Huarte's
story here reveals an affiliation that Cervantes' "Licenciado Vidriera"
does not have: the page enjoys being treated like a lord (he is somewhat like
Shakespeare's Sly in the induction scene to The Taming of the Shrew), As
we have seen, the cure, which is not explained, returns the page to a disap-
pointing reality: "For while I rested in my folly, I led my Hfe in the deepest
discourses of the world, and imagined my self so great a lord as there
raigned no king on the earth, who was not my vassal, and were this iest or
lie, what imported that, whilest I conceived thereof so great a contentment,
as if it had bene true?" (p. 44). Thus Huarte's case is ultimately a version of
Athenaeus' case of Thrasyllos, the imagined owner of all the ships in the
harbor of Piraeus, who later lamented his cure. The case of Cervantes'
licenciado is not of the Athaenean/Erasmian type. Although this wise
madman's pronouncements may be said to appeal to an interest similar to
that of a string of Erasmian apothegmata,^^ the licenciado does not enjoy
his ability to coin pithy sayings, many of which are righteous, caustic, some
even uncharitable. Nor does he derive any pleasure from his conviction
that his body is made of glass.
As Harald Weinrich says, the motif of the man of glass presupposes the
traditional conception of flie body as vessel of the soul.^* Indeed, some of
the gifts traditionally attributed to melancholies in the pseudo- Aristotelian
and Ficinean tradition, for instance the gift of divination, were commonly
explained as the result of the higher penetrability of their bodies to the
subtlest spiritus and astral influences. But this learned reading by no means
precludes the psychiatric (or perhaps in this case we should say Laingian)
interpretation, in which the schizophrenic's particular delusion is seen as
the result of a trauma and of fear of more wounds. Not only has Cervantes'
licenciado been hurt by a person who wanted to be very close to him (i.e.
wanted him), but the novelist makes it clear that the man of glass is
especially vulnerable to human contact. He tells us of attempts to cure him
that are as well-intentioned as the ones recorded in Luther's exempla but
lack the fuller understanding of the psychotic person that characterized
those:
In order to relieve him of his strange delusion, many people, taking no notice of
his shouts and pleas, went up to him and embraced him, telling him to look and
he would see that in fact he was not getting broken. But all that happened as a
result of this was that the poor wretch would throw himself on the ground
shouting for all he was worth, and would then fall into a faint, from which he did
not recover for several hours; and when he did come to he would start begging
people not to come near him again/^
Thus unlike Athenaeus' Thrasyllos and Huarte's page, this ''paranoid

schizophrenic" as he has been called,*^ suffers pain in his psychotic condi-
tion in spite of his stupendous gifts, in fact so much pain that most readers,
past and present, expect a cure to turn the novella into a "success story."
The cure, in contrast to that of Huarte's exemplum , is brought about not by
a physician "with a mind to receive some good reward" (p. 43), i.e., for
financial gain, but by a monk of the Hieronymite order "out of charity" (p.
145).
Since Cervantes gets the licenciado *s cure over with in a couple of sen-
tences, it might be thought that he was not interested in the subject, but
nothing could be more incorrect. His introduction of the healer's charity is
in some way equivalent to Luther's emphasis on notions oï Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft (societas), which are animated by it, and may (as
Gwynne Edwards suggested) have had special significance for Cervantes,
who was delivered from North African Moslem slavery by the patient and
charitable efforts of certain mendicant monks; even more so it may rever-
berate with Cervantes' own charity, the impulsiveness of which defied
worldly prudence so much that he was once clapped into jail for aiding a
mortally wounded victim of a street fight. *^
Of course Cervantes' story of the man of glass does not end happily with
this cure. After the patient has returned to sanity, Cervantes adds another
reversal to the plot: in spite of the licenciado's pleas, the townspeople of
Salamanca do not allow him to return to normalcy and practice law. They
are unwilling or unable to accept his cure. The stigma of his past condition
is so strong that he has to leave town, profession, and country.
In source studies one should not emphasize similarity but grant it, and
then interpret the differences. From my perspective it is not so important to
agree or disagree with Satumino Rivera Manescau's contention that at
Valladolid Cervantes heard from the physician Antonio Ponce Santacruz
the case of a Parisian "man of glass" not reported in print until 1622; to
accept the possibility or even likelihood that Cervantes knew the case
would not, as Walter Starkie supposes, "diminish his genius,""*^ for the
therapy Santacruz reports is too different: the doctor has the patient lie on a
bed of straw (Cervantes' licenciado also likes to protect his seemingly
fragile body with straw) and, setting a fire, leaves:
This done, he decamped rapidly, shutting the door and leaving the madman to
his own devices. The latter, finding himself encircled by flames, jumped up in
terror and beat upon the door with all his strength, but without breaking or
injuring himself, crying out that he no longer beUeved he was made of glass.
Thus the terror of being consumed by fire was so great that it caused his mania
to disappear.'*'*
This therapy is harsh, and we may wonder how the licenciado might have
reacted to it: he might have fallen into a faint (as Cervantes reports him to
have reacted to the equally harsh though perhaps less ingenious treatment
of the Salamancans) and might have incurred tihe same fate as the patient
who against his will was carried through a door he thought was too narrow
for his body.
Conclusion
As we saw, Luther shows none of the dehumanizing amusement that often

animates even learned physicians when they report certain kinds of cases.
In his exempla the imagination is used, at most, to gain a patient's con-
fidence, but the 'cure' is brought about not by trickery but by friendly per-
suasion, by appeal to common humanity, by company. There is taimting
amusement in Cervantes' "El Licenciado Vidriera," but he puts this
amusement in perspective by demonstrating that it is destructive. Cer-
tainly the riffraff among the Salamancans prefers an insane to a sane licen-
ciate - perhaps this is Cervantes' later comment on Erasmian views of
madness. The entire story is informed by a strong sense of sympathy for a
patient who becomes stigmatized by society.
While we know that the glass graduate's cure was motivated by charity,
we cannot be sure about motivation m Don Quixote. The simplicity and
efficiency of the Hieronymite monk contrasts with the elaborate and bung-
ling attempts of somelike like Sanson Carrasco. The charity of the former
(affirmed by the author) contrasts with the motives of the latter, which are
often tainted or at least questionable. If there is no unambiguous sign of a
therapy in La Mancha, this may be because there is no Hieronymite monk
movido de caridad and no friend unambiguously curing in the spirit of
Luther's Gemeinschaft . Sancho's desperate attempt to prolong Don
Quixote's life is spontaneous and moving, but it is part of Cervantes' irony
to present Sancho as ill-equipped for the therapeutic task. Another element
of irony is that at the time of Sancho's compassionate proposal Don Quixote
has just come to his senses through the help of no physician except perhaps,
as the narrator veiledly hints, the Divine.
It would seem that Luther and Cervantes represent the best of a long psy-
chiatric tradition. So does Samuel Johnson in a later century when he has
Rasselas and his sister meet an astronomer who believes that he regulates
the seasons, another case that goes back to Donati, and through him to
Avicenna.'*^ The recluse gets relief from his terrifying spectres and is
gradually weaned away from his imagined absorbing task through freely
proffered male and female friendship.
Is WilUam Wharton's best-SQlling Birdy (to mention only one modem

example of a psychiatric novel) evidence that in our times the give and take
between imaginative fiction and psychiatry has been reversed? This engag-
ing work shows how the inmate of a psychiatric ward, whom we meet at the
outset perched in bird fashion on his toilet seat, is very slowly wakened
from his catatonic state by his former playmate's gently recalling child-
hood feats in which they shared: Lutheran societas and Cervantesque
consideration of the patient's past, both of course now informed by a post-
Freudian understanding of childhood experience. But to name Freud, a
man steeped in the imaginative literature of the past (and from his youth a
reader of Cervantes'**), suffices to prevent an easy answer to my question.
Further, while much of the focus in Birdy is indeed psychiatric, the pro-
fessional army psychiatrist in the novel is perceived as the patient's
antagonist and thus remains unable to help him. An element of the novel's
imaginative core aligns it with the movement somewhat unfortunately
called "anti-psychiatry," a movement broader than a fad, with eminently
respectable antecedents as we have seen. One may hope that the anta-
gonistic stance is only a passing phase - certainly antagonism to medicine
(or psychiatry) has not motivated the best writers old or new. The kind of
cases we have considered, so instructive because they are in a sense
extreme and represent the cas limite of human consciousness, call upon an
interpretive ability that is decidedly similar in psychiatrist and imaginative
artist, for R. D. Laing is no doubt correct in saying that the kernel of the
schizophrenic's experience of himself remains incomprehensible (p. 39).
University of California-Davis
Notes
1 Advancement of Human Learning, Bk. 2, in Bacon, Works, ed. James Speeding e/ al. (Lx)ndon:
Longmans, 1 859), III, 373. In a strict sense "schizophrenia" was of course not defined until early
in this century (by Eugen Bleuler), see Silvano Aneû, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, 2nd. ed.
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), ch. 2. In the Renaissance all such psychoses as intended in my
title were included under melancholia , an extensive term which has only recently been narrowed to
a particular psychotic condition.
2 See Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health, ed. David Ingleby (New York: Random
House, 1980), p. 8 and passim.
3 The Divided Self {Umdon: Travistock, 1960), p. 38.
4 The Divided Self, P- 39.
5 De locis qffectis, bk. 3, ch. 10 in Galen, Opera ed. C. G. Kûhn (Leipzig, 1821-33), VIII, 190:
"... siquidem alius testaceum se factum putavit, atque idcirco occurrantibus cedebat, ne con-
firingeretur; alter gallos cantare conspiciens, ut hi alarum ante cantum, sic ille brachiorum plausu
latera quatiens, animantium sonum imitatus est."
6 TommasoGaizom,L'hospidale de'pazzi incumbili (Wemce, 1601), p. 101:"£'assairidiculoso

ancora quello de collui, che, parendoli esser devenuto un vetro, andô a Murano, per gettarsi dentro
un fomace e farsi fare in foggia d'un inghistara."
7 André du Laurens,^ Discourse of the Preservation of Sight: OfMelancholike Diseases , trans. R.

Surphlet (London, 1599), p. 103. The French ed. is of Paris, 1597.
8 Dona.û,De medica historia mirabili (Mantua, 1586) y fol. 34/î; ^wrion. Anatomy, pt. 1, sec. 3,
mem. 1 , subs. 3 (Shilleto ed., vol. 1, 460), Walkington, The Opticke Glasse of Humours (London,
1607), fol. 72; Beyerlinck, Affl^n«m theatrum vitae humanae (Lyons, 1678), V. 398C.
9 Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night, trans. R. H. (London 1572),
p. 10.
10 Marcello Donati,J?eme<//ca historia mirabili,fo\. 34;Ercole S2iSsoma,De melancholia (Venice,

1 620), p. 3 1 ; Thomas Feyens [Fienus],De viribus imaginationis, 3rd ed. (London, 1 657), p. 1 60
and pp. 167-68.
1 1 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1979), p. 58.
12 Praise of Folly, trans. C. H. Miller, p. 58.
1 3 Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: 1 94 1 ), p. 1 49 andPraise of Folly, trans. C. H.

Miller, p. 58, note 5. Miller suggests that Erasmus may have intended to show Folly deliberately
twisting Cicero's words.
14 Praise of Folly, trans. C. H. Miller, pp. 58-59.

1 5 Aristoteles,Z>e mirabilibus auscultationibus 832 b 1 7, in Amt.,Minor Works, trans. W. S. Hett
(Loeb Classical Library, 1936), p. 251.
16 Lavater, op. cit. , p. 11.
17 Athenaeus, Dipnosophistae, trans. Charles B. Gulick (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Loeb
Classical Library, 1933), V, 521.
18 Aristotle, Problems, trans. W. S. Hett (Loeb Classical Library, 1937), p. 155.
19 The Examination of Mens Wits [Examen de ingeniosj, trans. R. C. (London, 1594), p. 43.
20 Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios, ed. Rodrigo Sanz (Madrid: La Rafa, 1930),
p. 129.
21 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Random House, 1 965 ), p. 95 . The reference is to Paul Zachias, Quaestiones medico-
legales (Avignon, 1660-61).
22 Luther, Tischreden (Weimar: Bôhlau, 1912-19), III, 52: "Ich mus mit dir trincken und kans nicht
lassen, wan ich hundert mal todt were."
23 Luther, Tischreden, vol. Ill, 52.
24 Luther, Tischreden, vol. Ill, pp. 52-53:
Damach sagete D. Martin Luther, "dass ein gut fromm Mensch ware gewesen, ein
Werkheiliger; der hatte von einem Monch hôren predigen, dass ein Heiliger gewesen
ware, der hâtte auf einer Stufen an einer Statte drei Jahr uber gestanden. Damach auf
einer andem und hôhem Stufen ware er noch einmal drei Jahre gestanden, und hâtte
diese Zeit uber gar nichts gessen noch getrunken. Drum waren aus seinen Fiissen
Maden gewachsen. Aber alsbalde solche Maden auf die Erde gefallen, so waren daraus
lauter Perlen und kôstliche edele Gesteine worden. Und hatte der Monch die Predigt mit
diesem Exempel beschlossen und gesagt: 'Also musst ihrs euch auch lassen blutsaur
werden, so ihr woUet selig werden!'
Da dieses ein Melancholicus gehôrt, hatte er ihm furgesetzet, er wollte sein Wasser
(mit Ziichten zu reden) nicht von sich lassen. Es hatte ihn auch kein Mensch darzu
bereden kônnen, dass er hatte wollen pinkeln. Und solches hatte er etzliche Tage gethan.
Damach kômmt einer zu ihm und uberredet ihn, 'dass er daran recht thàte, dass er seinen
Leib casteiete, und sollte ja bei diesem Fùrsatz und Gelùbden (Gott zu dienen, und ihme
seiber wehe zu thun, und den alten Adam zu tôdten und zu creuzigen), verharren und
bleiben, denn man mùsste durch viel Creuz und Trubsal eingehen ins Himmek-eich.
Item derselbige hatte sich gestellet, dass er auch ein solch Gelùbde hatte gethan und ihm
furgenommen, nicht zu pinkeln, aber da er auf diesem Gelùbde stolziret hâtte und ver-
meinet, dardurch den Hinmiel zu verdienen, hatte er mehr gesiindiget, deim wenn er
hatte gepinkelt. Auch ware er schier ein Môrder an seinem eigenen Leibe worden.
Dariim so wird aile Welt dergleichen von dir sagen, dass du es aus Hoffart thust; so stehe
nun von deinem Fùrsatz ab und lass der Natur ihren Gang.' Also hatte er den Melan-
choUcum uberredet, dass er wieder gepinkelt hatte."
25 Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenious, éd. R. Sanz (Madrid: La Rafa, 1930),
pp. 119-20.
26 Tobias Tandler (Praeses),De melancholia eiusque speciebus (Wittenberg, [ 1 608], no. LXI: "Sic
et vitae genus et consuetudo phantasmata variât. Theologus enim se cum angelis loqui, se Chris-
tum profitetur: Juris studiosus acta fori déclamât; Chymicus auri confectionem; avarus etsi opulen-
tissimus, omnium rerum inopiam deflet: Astronomus, se prophetam; aulicus se regem
vendicat."
27 On acedia, see Mark D. Altschule, "Acedia: Its Evolution from Deadly Sin to Psychiatric Syn-
drome," British Journal of Psychiatry , 111 (1965), 117-19; Noel L. Brann, "Is Acedia
Melancholy? A Re-examination of this Question in the Light of Fra Battista da Crema's Delia
cognitioneet vittoria di se stesso (1531)," Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Scien-
ces, 34 (1979), 80-99; and Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and
Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1 967). Cf. also Susan Snyder,
"The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition," Studies in the
Renaissance, 12 (1965), 18-59.
28 Daniel Sennert, De chymicorum cum Galenicis consensu ac dissensu liber I, ch. 1 4 (Wittenberg,
1 6 1 9 ), p. 403 : "Alius quoque qui se mortuum esse imaginabatur, et cibum propterea aspemabatur,
socii comitate, qui cum eo se in sepultero mortuimi esse asserebat, et quod ipse mortuus cibum
caperet, ad cibum capiendum persuasus fuit; ut refert Holer, lib. 1 . de morb. inter, cap. 15." The
reference is to the French doctor lacobus Hollerius, De morbis intemis, bk. I, ch. 16 (Lyons,
1588), p. 63, where the story is told as Sennert reports it.
29 M. de Iriarte, S. J., El doctor Huarte de San Juan y su Examen de ingenios (Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1948 [first éd. Munster, 1938]; Harald Weinrich, Das
Ingenium Don Quijotes (Munster: Aschendorf, 1956); Otis H. Green, "Ellngenioso Hidalgo,"
Hispanic Review, 25 (1957), 175-193.
30 Don Quijote, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: Signet), p. 994. This is pt. 2, ch. 65, ed. Martin de
Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1958), p. 1014: "... y entre los que mas se la han tenido
he sido yo; y creyendo que esta su salud en su reposo, y en que esté en su tierra y en su casa, di traza
para hacerle estar en ella."
31 Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 2, memb. 3, subs. 1 (Shilleto éd., vol. 1, 290).
32 For these and other topical cures, see Marcello Donati, De medica historia mirabili (Mantua,
1586),fol. 34 and ErcoleSassonia, De me/a/ïcAo/Za (Venice, 1620), p. 31, who spells out the prin-
ciple of deception.
33 Oscar Mandel, "The Function of the Norm in Don Quijote, MP, 55 (1957-58), 160.
34 Lavater, OfGhostes and Spirites, p. 13.
35 See Gwynne Edwards, "Cervantes's "El Licenciado Vidriera': Meaning and Structure," MLi?,
68 (1973), 589. Also Dana B. Drake, Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares: A Selective. Annotated
Bibliography (2nd ed. ; New York & London: Gariand, 1 98 1 ), pp. 1 35-54. The most penetrating
analysis of the Licenciado as a paradoxical cynic philosopher censured by Erasmian /ruma/i/ra^ is
by Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels
(Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 260-316.
36 Exemplary Novels, trans. C. A. Jones (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p. 128.
37 The pioneering studies of Saxl and Panofsky are summarized and expanded in Raymond Klibansky,
Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1 964). See also
Rudolf Wittkower, 5orn under Saturn (London: Weidenfels and Nicolson, 1963), ch. 5: Genius,
Madness, and Melancholy"; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing: Michigan
State College Press, 1951); and Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices ofMelancholy (London: Routledge
&Kegan Paul, 1971).
38 In the Renaissance this case is a locus communis , and (as Weinrich points out) Cervantes could
have found it in Jason Pratensis, De cerebri morbis (Basel, 1 549), ch. 18, p. 270 or in Ludovicus
Caelius Rhodiginus (=Ludovico Ricchieri), Lect. ant. 17,2; p. 625. See Harald Weinrich, Das
Ingenium Don Quijotes (Forschungen zur Romanischen Philologie, Heft 1), Mùnster:Aschen-
dorf, 1956, pp. 5 1-52; also Otis H. Green, ''El Licenciado vidriera: Its Relation to the Viaje del
Pamaso and the Examen de ingenios of Huarte" in The Literary Mind of Medieval and
Renaissance Spain, ed. John E. Keller (The University Press of Kentucky, 1 970), pp. 1 90-92. In
addition to the works cited by Weinrich, the following ones also contain the case of a person
imagining to have a brittle body: Bernard Gordonius, Opus lilium medicinae: De morborum
curatione, bk. 2, ch. 19 (Lyons, 1574), p. 21 1 says: "Alii videntur, quod sint vasa vitrea vel
argillosa, et timent quod si tangerentur, frangerentur"; Marcello Donati, De medica historia
mirabili (Mantua, 1586), fol. 35 and 36/?, mentions people with bodies of clay and legs of
glass.
39 Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. R. C. (London, 1594), p. 43.
40 The authoritative study of Erasmian influence on Spain in general and Cervantes in particular is
Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y Espana: estudios sobre la historia espiritual del sigh xvi (2nd éd.,
Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econômica, 1966). But "influence" rarely means wholesale accep-
tance of a paradigm. In spite of the narrowness of my focus, my spotlight may still help clarify the
larger issue of Cervantes' relationship to Erasmian thought.
41 Weinrich, Das Ingenium Don Quijotes, p. 5 1 .
A2 Exemplary Novels, trans. C. A. Jones (Penguin éd.), pp. 128-29.
43 A. Vallejo Najera, Literatura y psiquiatria (Barcelona: Edit. Barcelona, 1950), pp. 43-44,
49.
44 Most biographies of Cervantes mention the role of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the
Redemption of Captives (OSST) in freeing Cervantes from bondage, see e.g. William Byron, Cer-
vantes: A Biography (Garden City: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 242-46. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
mentions both biographical events {Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Reseha documentada de su
vida [Buenos Aires: Editorial Bajel, 1944], chs. iv and ix); Edwards relates them to Vidriera,
MLiî, 68 (1973), 566.
45 See Starkie's otherwise informative Foreword (p. xx) to his transi. Cervantes, The Deceitful
Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels (New York: Signet, 1963). G. Hainsworth also is con-
cerned only with similarity; see "La source du 'Licenciado Vidriera'," Bulletin Hispanique, 32
( 1 930), 70-72. For S. Rivera Maneséau's argument, see his "El Modelo del Licenciado Vidriera"
in Fiesta del Libra: IV Centenario de Miguel de Cervantes (Universidad de Valladolid, 1 947), 1 -
11.
46 Walter Starkie's paraphrase in his Foreword to Cervantes, The Deceitful Marriage and Other
Exemplary Novels, p. xx.
47 Donati, JDé medicina historia mirabili, fol. 36/: "Avic. itaque 4. Naturalium 6. tantum imagina-
tioni tribuit, et pluvias, et tonitrua, terremotusque ad libitum excitare, et aegritudines inducere, ac
sanare poterit, ait Montanus in com. in 2 fen. 1 Avic. se hominem quendam vidisse, qui ex sola forti
imaginatione quoties volebat, in facto circulo plusquam centum serpentes convocabat."
48 See S. B. Vranich, "Sigmund Freud and 'The Case History of Berganza': Freud's Psychoanalytic
Be^nmng»," Psychoanalytic Review, 63 (1976), 73-82.
Henry Peacham, Ripa' s Iconologia,

and Vasari's Lives
A.R. YOUNG
The first illustrated edition of Cesare Ripa' s Iconologia (Rome, 1603)

had an early influence in England upon triumphal pageants and masques.
Ripa's extremely popular alphabetized handbook was designed to assist
poets, painters, sculptors and others who wished to portray personifications
of virtues and vices, and human sentiments and passions, and, as has been
recognized for some time, Ben Jonson made early use of it in The King's
Entertainment in Passing to His Coronation (15 March 1603-04), and,
in collaboration with Inigo Jones, he used it in Hymenaei (1606), in The
Masque of Beauty ( 1 608), in The Masque of Queens ( 1 609) and in subse-
quent works of the kind.* Also well-known is the fact that another English
poet and artist, Henry Peacham, consulted the Iconologia while compil-
ing his emblem collection M/w^rva Britanna (1612),^ and, as Rosemary
Freeman pointed out in her English Emblem Books, as many as fifteen
emblems in Minerva Britanna are adaptations of sections of Ripa's book.
In his emblem book Peacham only acknowledges his debt to Ripa in three
of the fifteen instances,^ but in his treatise The Gentleman's Exercise,
which was published later in the same year,'* Peacham seems to have gone
out of his way to remain silent concerning his far more considerable debt to
the Italian iconologist. It is the nature and hnportance of this debt that I
should now like to consider.
Peacham's The Gentleman 's Exercise was a much-expanded and revised

version of his earlier handbook for would-be gentleman artists. The Art of
Drawing (1606). Virtually the entire 1606 version is contained in Book
One of the new pubHcation, and to this Peacham adds two further parts:
"The Second Booke of Drawing and Limning," and a "Discourse tending
to the Blazon of Armes." It is Book Two oïThe Gentleman *s Exercise that
is of concern here, since, as I shall show, it consists of a thirty-two page
iconology largely compiled from selected passages, translated and re-
arranged, from Ripa's Iconologia, ^ and is hence the first English version of
that popular and influential Italian work.** The Gentleman 's Exercise was
one of Peacham's most widely-read works. Further editions of it appeared
in 1634, when it was published both separately and as an appendage to a

new and expanded edition of TJie Compleat Gentleman , and in 1 66 1 when
it was again published as an appendage to a new edition of The Compleat
Gentleman, William London included The Gentleman s Exercise in his
Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (1657), and during the
seventeenth century sections of it were considered sufficiently important
to be copied out by hand.^ Peacham's role in acquainting English readers
with Ripa's Iconologia may thus have been considerable, and future
scholarship will have to consider the degree to which Ripa became known
in England to artists and writers from Peacham's selected and abridged
edition rather than from the Iconologia itself.
Peacham appears to have become acquainted with Ripa's work shortly

after he completed a manuscript emblem book that he presented to Prince
Henry in 1 6 10.® The manuscript contains no evidence that Peacham was
famiUar with Ripa, whereas, as already pointed out, by 1612 he clearly
knew ûiQ Iconologia well. From his use of Ripa's illustrations m Minerva
Britanna it is clear that Peacham's copy was an illustrated edition, either
that of 1603 (Rome) or that of 16 1 1 (Padua), the only illustrated editions
of Ripa at that time, and a close comparison of Peacham's illustrations
with both of these editions reveals that he probably used a 1603 edition,
since on four occasions details of his woodcuts match those of the 1603
rather than the 1611 edition.' Peacham's iconology abandons Ripa's
alphabetical system and replaces it with a series of seven chapters dealing
successively with various personifications "as they haue beene by Anti-
quitie described either in Comes, Statues, or other the like Publike
Monuments" (Chapter One), floods and rivers (Chapter Two), Nymphs
(Chapter Three), the Ocean, Thetis, Galatea, Iris and Aurora (Chapter
Four), the Nine Muses (Chapter Five), Pan and the Satyres, and the Four
Winds (Chapter Six), and the Twelve Months (Chapter Seven). Peacham's
version therefore only represents a small portion of Ripa's compendium,
and furthermore Peacham does not attempt to translate entirely those
entries from Ripa that he does pick out, nor does he stick to their original
sequence. As can be seen from the comparative listing given in Appendix
A at the end of this paper, Peacham's arrangement is encyclopedic in
character. In the main the rationale behind his new groupings of personi-
fications is clear. Only in his first chapter does he appear to have selected
almost at random to produce a somewhat arbitrary grouping in which
individual entries have little connection with each other.
Peacham's method of creating an entry is worth examining. His entry

under Providence may be taken as typical since it is drawn from three
separate entries under that heading in Ripa which are now rendered in a new
sequence. Only parts of Ripa's sentences are translated, but enough for us to
recognize that Peacham in his own way can be very close to his source:

l.Peacham:
Providence
A Lady lifting vp both her hands to Heauen with this worde Prouidentia
Deorum . In the Meddals oïProbus a Lady in a Robe in her right hand a Scep-
ter, in her left a Cornucopia, a Globe at her feete.
OÏ Maximinus carrying a bundle of Come, with a speare in one hand.
(sig. Qlr)
2. Ripa (In original sequence):
PROVIDENZA
Nella Medaglia di Probo.

Si vede per la prouidenza nella Medaglia di Probo, vna Donna stolata, che
neila destra mano tiene vn Scettro, & nella sinistra vn Cornucopia, con vn
globo a'piedi, & si mostra la prouidenza particolarmente appartenere à
Magistrati.
PROVIDENZA
Nella Medaglia di Massimino.

Donna, che nella destra tiene vn mazzo di spighe di grano, & nella sinistra
vn'hasta, che con diuerse cose mostra il medesimo, che si è detto dell'altra.
******
Prouidenza.
Vna Donna, che alza ambe le braccia verso il cielo, & si riuolge qua si con le
mani giunte verso vna Stella, con lettere, Prouidentia Deorum; la quale è di
Elio Pertinace, come raccontra I'Erizzo.
(p. 415)
Many of Peacham's entries are highly selective paraphrases of this kind.

The main details are retained but much complementary detail is dropped.
On occasion details are also compressed. In Peacham's version of

Ripa's Time, Time's four children (fanciuUi), two of whom look in a mirror
while two others write in a book, are reduced by Peacham to two, and the
reference to the mirror is dropped (sig. QF).^° In his next entry. Concord,
Peacham selects from four of Ripa's entries under that heading and re-
arranges their sequence, and for his fifth and final sections he compresses
the detail "Donna, che tiene in mano vn fascio di verghe strettamente
legato" from one entry and "vno scettro che in cima habbia fiori" from
another into "In another place she is shewed with a Scepter, hauing flowers
bound to the toppe of the same, and in her arme a bundle of greene rods"
(sig. Ql^). Similarly Peacham's Aurora combines two entries from Ripa,
Aurora (p. 34) and Crepvscvlo della Mattina (p. 95). Ripa's "Una fan-
ciulla alato di color incamato con vn manto giallo in dosso" and the des-
cription of her riding on Pegasus are both retained from the Aurora entry,
but Peacham adds to this from Ripa's Crepvscvlo della Mattina the
attributes "in cima del capo vna grande, & rilucente Stella, & che con la
sinistra mano tenghi vn'vma riuolta all'ingiu versando con essa minu-
tissime gocciole d'acqua" (this last to represent the morning dew). Where
Ripa in his entry for Aurora had described her as bearing her lantern in
her hand, Peacham says "some give her a light in her hand, but in stead of
that I rather allow her a Viol of deaw, which with sundry flowers she scat-
tereth about the earth" (sig. RS^). This last detail of the flowers, purpor-
tedly an especially personal choice, is, however, taken directly from Ripa's
second Aurora enUy ("& con la destra [mano] sparge fiori" p. 34).**
As already noted, even while omitting and compressing the materials of

his source, Peacham on occasion makes additions. For the most part, as in
the example just referred to in Note 1 1 , these are of a minor nature. In his
discussion of the Ocean, for example, Peacham adds the attribute of seal
skin drapery for Ocean's loins, together with an explanation of the Greek
origin of Ocean's name: "wicus," which is swift, and suddenly violent"
(sig. R2^). A number of Peacham's additions are similarly etymological in
nature. Presumably Peacham the schoolmaster felt quite confident in con-
tributing learned etymologies for Hercules' name (sig. P4^), and for the
Greek words for Nymph (sig. Rl^), Dryad (sig. R20 and Diana (sig. R20.
In much the same vein Peacham on occasion adds further information from
various learned sources. In his entry for Piety, for example, he adds infor-
mation about the elephant from Plutarch, Aelian, Pliny and Oppian not in
Ripa (sig. P4'^), and in his discussion of the Nile he adds that the crocodile is
so named "from the feare he hath of Saffron, which hee cannot endure,
wherefore those in Aegypt that keepe Bees set great store of Saffron about
the hiues, which when hee seeth, hee presently departeth without doing any
harme" (sig. Q4r). In his entry for the River Indus, Peacham similarly
expands Ripa's reference to the camel at Indus' side and the Italian's
explanation for its presence ("Gli si mette à canto il camelo, come animale
molto proprio del paese, oue è questo flume" p. 1 62) and states "the beast
hath his name from Xafiai,, that is, on the ground he is represented
pleasantly graue, because the East Indians are held to bee the most politi-
que people of the world, as our countrymen haue had good experience
among those of China, laua, Bantam, and in other places in those Eas-
teme parts" (sig. Rl^.
This last example with its reference to "our countrymen" is indicative of

another form of change that Peacham makes in his translation. On a num-
ber of occasions he anglicizes his original in some way. In his entry for Dis-
simulation (Simvlatione in Ripa) Peacham adds that "the Poet Spencer
described her looking through a lattice" (sig. Q2^). In his entry for the
Napeae or Nymphs of the Mountains Peacham alters Ripa's "varie sorti di
fiori con loro mischiati, & varij colori" (p. 353), which adorn the
heads of the Nymphs, in order to name specific and familiar English plants
"vpon their heads garlands of hunnisuckles, woodbine, wild roses, sweet
Marioram and the like" (sigs. Rl^— R20. Similarly in the entry for the
Naides or Nymphs of Floods, Peacham anglicizes Ripa's reference to a
garland of the leaves of reeds ("vna ghirlanda di foglie di canna" p. 354) to
"garlands of water-cresses, and their red leaues" (sig. R20.
This technique of deliberate anglicization, no doubt quite justifiable in

an iconography designed with English artists in mind,^^ is chiefly in evi-
dence in the concluding section of Peacham's book where he deals with the
twelves months. Peacham specifies, for example, hawthorn buds and
primroses for April (sig. 83"^) and "bents, king-cups, and maidenshaire" for
June (sig. S3^), and he gives August pears, plums, apples, gooseberries and
"at his belt (as out Spencer describeth him) a sickle" (sig. S4r).*3 Peacham's
December entry is particularly striking and quite different fiôm that of
Ripa:
December must bee expressed with a horrid and fearefuU aspect, as also
January following, cladde in Irish rugge, or course freeze, gyrt vnto him, vpon
his head no Garland but three or foure nightcaps, and ouer them a Turkish Tur-
bant, his nose redde, his mouth and beard clogd with Iseckles, at his backe a
bundle of holly luy or Misletoe, holding in furd mittens the signe Capri-
comus.
(sig. S4V)
Peacham's entries for the Months then conclude with two admonitions.
First he urges his reader to "giue every moneth his instruments of hus-
bandrie, which because they do differ, according to the custome (with the
time also) in sundrie countires, I haue willingly omitted, what ours are
heere in England Tusser will tell you" (sig. Tl^. Ripa does give such a list
when he discusses the sequence of months in terms of agriculture, but
Peacham evidentiy felt that what was proper to the Italian clime was not
always appropriate to England's. Peacham then warns his reader "to giue
euery month his proper and naturall Landtskip, not making (as a Painter of
my acquaintance did in seuerall tables of the monthes for a Noble man of
this land) blossomes vpon the trees in December, and Schooleboyes, play-
ing at nine pinnes vpon the yce in luly" (sig. T 1^). This would appear to be a
genuinely personal comment. Certainly there is no equivalent for it in
Ripa.
Apart from such anglicizations, Peacham adds references to his own

work that seem designed to disguise the fact that what he is offering is a
translation of foreign material. At the conclusion of his first chapter, for
example, he inserts a reference to his Minerva Britanna: "for further
variety of these and the like deuises, I referre you to my Emblèmes
Dedicated to Prince Henry'' (sig. Q2^), and in his entry of Zephyrus he
refers to a Petrarch sonnet "which with Gironimo Conuersi and many mo

excellent Musitians I haue lastly chosen for a ditty in my songs of 4. and 5 .
parts" (sig. SI""). Even more deceptive are statements that appear to be
direct personal observations which nonetheless are taken from Ripa. Thus,
when describing Time, Peacham says "I haue scene time drawne by a
painter standing vpon an old mine, winged, and with Iron teeth" (sig. QIO-
Yet this is clearly a condensation of Ripa's "Hvomo vecchio alato, il quale
tiene vn cerchio in mano, & stà in mezzo d'vna ruina, hà la bocca aperta,
mostrando i denti, U quali sieno del colore del ferro" (p. 483). Similarly in
his entry for the River Danube, Peacham remarks "whereupon as I
remember^ W5on/w5 saith, Danubius perijt caput occultatus in ore'' (sig.
Q4v), but the original of this is in Ripa (p. 160). Less clear, however, is
what Peacham does with his entry for the River Ganges. Ripa's entry states
''Fiume comme dipinto nelVesequie di MicheVAngelo Buonaroti in
Firenze. Vn vecchio inghirlandato di gemme, comme I'altri fiumi, con
I'vma, & à canto I'vcel grifone" (p. 1 62). Peacham expands and alters this
to give a seemingly more accurate first-hand detailed description: "I have
scene this riuer with wonderfull art cut out in white Marble, bearing the
shape of a rude and barbarous sauage, with bended browes of a fierce and
cruel countenance, crowned with Palme, hauing (as other flouds) his
pitcher, and by his sides 2i Rhinoceros'' (sig. Q4^). Ripa's description is
taken from Vasari's Le vite de' piu excellenti pittori, scultori, e Archi-
tettori (1568 edition) and refers to a painting by Bernardo Timante
Buontalenti displayed during the funeral ceremonies for Michelangelo in
Florence.^'* One wonders what marble sculpture had so impressed Peacham
that he should decide to diverge from his source.
These then are the principal kinds of changes that Peacham makes when
translating Ripa's Iconologia. Listed in this way, they may seem numer-
ous enough for one to conclude that Peacham's work is sufficiently differ-
ent to be considered independent of its source. However, such an inference
would be false. For the most part Peacham follows Ripa very closely
(albeit selectively) and the second book of The Gentleman 's Exercise
should therefore be considered as the first translation into EngUsh of
selections from one of the most influential and popular of Italian Renaissance
works.
With this notable "first" to his credit, Peacham ten years later, in his
chapter "On Drawing, Limning, and Painting" with the Hues of the
famous Italian Painters" in The Compleat Gentlemen (1622), provided
English readers with another translation of selected passages from an
important Italian author - Giorgia Vasari. This time he acknowledged his
sources,** but in general modem scholars have not noticed Peacham's
debt,*** and it is still generally believed that William Aglionby in 1 685 was
the first English translator of Vasari. As he himself acknowledged (see
above, Note 15), Peacham was unable to obtain a copy in Italian of Vasari
and was instead forced to work from the Dutch translation by Carel van
Mander ( 1 548- 1 606). Van Mander had used a 1 568 edition of Vasari and
editions of his translation into Dutch had appeared in 1603-04 and 1618,
but it is not clear which of the Dutch editions Peacham used.
Van Mander's translation of Vasari forms only part of his massive

Het Schilderboeck, the section dealing with Italian artists being entitled
Het Leven der Moderne/oft dees-tytsche doorluchtighe Italiaensche
Schilders. *^ Van Mander selects under half of Vasari's 161 lives, and in
those lives he does select he tends to cut much of Vasari's original text. In
his turn Peacham selects only eighteen of the lives in van Mander, twelve of
these deriving from Part One of Vasari (dealing with the Trecento), five
from Part Two (Quattrocento), and one only from Part Three (Cinque-
cento). Furthermore, he tends to cut from each passage he does take from
van Mander, keeping, on occasion, only the barest biographical facts. Not
surprisingly the end product is sometimes barely recognizable as an
abridged translation of Vasari, since, due either to van Mander's or to
Peacham's cuts, detailed descriptions of individual works of art, quoted
poems and epitaphs, philosophical conmients, digressions, and a great
many incidental biographical details tend to be lost. Van Mander's trans-
lation of the life of Simon of Siena, for example, retains the opening
paragraph from Vasari. This comments on the good fortune of artists
whose names are immortalized by poets, as happened in the case of Simon,
who painted a portrait of Petrarch's Laura and was rewarded by being
celebrated in some verses by the grateful poet. There follows a brief com-
ment on Simon's inventive powers, and van Mander's version ends with
the date of Simon's death, his age at death, and the epitaph carved on his
tomb. Omitted are the relevant quotations from Petrarch and detailed des-
criptions, several pages m length, of Simon's works at Rome, Siena and
Florence. Peacham's version of van Mander is, however, even less
detailed, for it omits the philosophical opening, the epitaph, and even the
date of death.
Simon of Siena was a rare Artist, and liued in the time of the famous and
Laureate Poet Francis Petrarch , in whose verses he liueth eternally, for his
rare art & judgement showne, in drawing his Laura to the life. For invention
and variety he was accounted the best of his time.
(p. 130)
This is an extreme example of compression on Peacham's part, but else-

where there are many passages that survive intact (via van Mander) from
Vasari. One example will suffice. In his life of Andrea di Clone Orcagna,
Vasari describes in some detail a painting of the Last Judgement that
Orcagna did in the Campo Santo in Pisa. The complete description and
van Mander's and Peacham's respective versions of it are too long to quote
in full, but the following extract demonstrates how whole sections of the
Italian original are preserved in Peacham:
Vasari:
Dall'altra parte nella medesima storia, figure sopra vn'alto Monte la vita di
coloro, che tirati dal pentimento, de'peccati, e dal disiderio d'esser salui, sono
fuggiti dal mondo à quel Monte, tutto pieno di Santi Romiti, che seniono al
Signore, diuerse cose operando con viuacissimi affetti. Alcuni leggendo, &
orando si mostrano tutti intenti alia contemplatiua, e altri lauorando per
guadagnare il viuere, nell'actiua variamente si essercitano.
(sig. Z40
Van Mander:
Op d'ander syde der Historien / maechte hy op harde rootse al Volck / dat de

Weerelt ontvloden / daer in penitentie / Eremyten wesende / Godt dient /
verscheyden actien doende / met levendige affecten: d'een leest met grooten
vlydt / oft bidt met grooter innicheyt en aendacht / oft arbeyt om den cost
te winnen.
(fol. 35r)^«
Peacham:
On the other side of the table, he made an hard Rocke, ftiU of people, that had
left the world, as being Eremites, seruing of God, and doing diuers actions of
pietie, with exceeding life; as here one prayeth, there another readeth, some
other are at worke to get their liuing. . . .
(p. 131)
As can be seen in Appendix B at the end of this paper, Peacham provided

his readers with biographical material on eighteen artists. Where in his use
of Ripa he had radically altered the sequence of his source, in this instance
his selection retains the original sequence he found in van Mander. Though
only offering a selected sampling of Vasari, Peacham's translation had an
even wider circulation than his version of Ripa, since editions of The Corn-
pleat Gentleman appeared in 1 622, 1 627, 1 634, and 1 66 1 . Like The Gen-
tleman 's Exercise, it was included in William London's Catalogue of the
Most Vendible Books in England (1657), and in 1663 in a court case
involving the notorious Sir Charles Sedley , it was cited by the judge in such
a way as to imply that educated men would be familiar with it. *' Peacham's
translations of Ripa and Vasari precede the hitherto assumed first English
translations of these writers by ninety-seven and sixty-three years res-
pectively. Though in the case of his version of Ripa Peacham evidently
wanted to pass off selections from the Iconologia as his own, and thou^
his purpose in The Compleat Gentleman is quite different since he con-
cludes his translation of Vasari by recommending his reader to go back to
the original, in each instance Peacham deserves to be given credit for being
the first to acquaint English readers both with the most influential of all
iconologies and with what art historians continue to acknowledge as

perhaps the most important art history ever published.
Acadia University
Notes
1 See Paul Reyher, Les Masques Anglais (Paris: Hachette, 1 909), pp. 394, 399; Ben Jonson , ed.
C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), X, 388-91; Allan H.
Gilhert, Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1948), pp. 4-5, 23; D.J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination , ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, Lx)ndon: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 146-53, 161, 174, 285.
2 Reyher, Masques A nglais, p. 40 1 ; AUardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage
(London: Harrap, 1937), p. 190; Gilbert, Symbolic Persons, p. 271; Rosemary Freeman,
English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), pp. 79-81.
3 Minerva Britanna, pp. 23, 149, 206. For further discussion ofPeacham's debt to Ripa inMmerva
Britanna, see Alan R. Young, Henry Peacham (Boston: Twayne, 1979), pp. 52-54, 147n42,
4 Another issue appeared in the same year with the title Graphice. That The Gentleman 's Exercise
appeared after Minerva Britanna is evident from the manner in which Peacham refers to his
emblem book in The Gentleman 's Exercise (sigs. E3r, Q2v). For a brief discussion of Peacham's
debt to Ripa in The Gentleman 's Exercise and for an analysis of his use of Ripa's eternity, see
Young, Henry Peacham, pp. 65-68.
5 Freeman noted that some parts ofTTie Gentleman 's Exercise derived from Ripa (English Emblem
Books, p. 80), but she appears not to have been aware of the fiiU extent of Peacham's borrowings. I
am indebted to Professor Allan H. Gilbert for the suggestion he once made to me privately that
Peacham did more than borrow the occasional detail from Ripa.
6 The first English translations oî the Iconologia have hitherto been assumed to be those of 1709,
1771-79 and 1785.
7 Bodleian Library: MS RawlinsonB32, fols. 2-5, 1 7-38; British Library: Add. MS 341 20, fols. 34-
41, and MS Harleian 1279, fol. 12^. F.J. Levy's "Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing" dis-
cussed the importance of the work but missed the debt to Ripa {JWCI, Vol. 37 [1974],
174-90).
8 BA2 1 A I K( )N AÎ2P0N(British Library: MS Royal 1 2A LXVI). The manuscript is undated but

in addressing Prince Henry in Minerva Britanna (1612) Peacham refers to his previous gift of the
manuscript "two yeares since."
9 CompsiTe Minerva Britanna, pp. 26, 41, 128, 132 with the 1603 edition of Ripa, pp. 117,229,75,
306 respectively. The relevant illustrations in the 161 1 edition are pp. 128, 248, 84, 327.
10 It should be noted, however, that Peacham adds (probably from his own direct observation) the
following description: "Hee is commonly drawne vpon tombes in Gardens, and other places an
olde man bald, winged with a Sith and an hower glasse" (sig. Ql^). Here only the attribute of Time's
wings is in Ripa.
11 In his entry Peacham adds the Homeric epithet po8oôaKTv\o% (rosy-fingered) as explanation
for the pink-coloured wings with which both he and Ripa provide their respective personifi-
cations.
1 2 Peacham's consciousness of his English readership is nowhere more evident than at the end of his
chapter on rivers where he remarks, "Thus haue I broken the Ice to inuention, for the apt descrip-
tion and liuely representation of flouds and riuers necessary for our Painters and Poets in their pic-
tures, poems, comedies, maskes, and the like publike shewes, which many times are expressed for
want of iudgement very grosly and rudely" (sig. Rl"""^).
1 3 Spenser is not the only English author Peacham refers to in this section. A fiirther "English"
flavour is added by his allusion to Sidney in his entry for September (sig. S4r).
14 Wasah,Le vite, sig. 5D4''.
15 At the conclusion of his chapter in The Compleat Gentleman Peacham says, "If you would reade
the Hues at large of the most excellent Painters, as well Ancient as Modem, I refer you vnto the two
volumes of Vasari, well written in Italian (which I haue not seene, as being hard to come by; yet in
the Libraries of two my especiall and worthy friends, M. Doctor Mountford, late Prebend of Pauls,
and M. Ingo lones, Surueyer of his Maiesties workes for building) and Caluin Mander in high
Dutch ; vnto whom I am beholden, for the greater part of what I haue heere written, of some of their
hues" (p. 137).
16 But see F.J. Levy, "Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing," yW^C/, 37 (1974), 188; Luigi
Salerno, "Seventeenth Century English Literature on Painting," JWCI, 14 (1951), 237; and
Young, Henry Peacham, pp. 81, 151n41 and 42.
17 References here will be to the 1618 edition of Van Mander.
18 "On the other side of the picture he devised a hard rock full of people, who, having escaped the
world and being hermits doing penance, serve God in diverse ways with lively feeUngs. One reads
with great diligence, another prays with great devotion and concentration, and another labours to
earn his living."
19 Andrew Clark, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 1891), I, 477; H, 335.
Appendix A
Peacham, The Second Booke of Drawing

and Limning from The Gentleman's
Exercise (1612)
Chapt. I Etemitie (sig. P2^^)

Hope (sigs. P2v-P3r)
Victory (sig. P3r-v)
Piety (sigs. P3v-P4r)
Peace (sig. P4r-v)
Vertue (sigs. P4v-Qir)
Prouidence (sig. QK)
Time (sig. QKv)
Concord (sig. QP)
Fame (sig. Q2'")
Captiue Fame (sig. Q2'')
Salus pubUca, or
common safety (sig. Q2'')

Clemencie (sig. Q^"")
Fate (sig. Q2r)
Felicity (sig. Q2y)
Fecundity (sig. Ql")
Security (sig. Q2v)
Money (sig.Q2v)
Dissimulation (sig.Q2.v)
Equality (sig. Q2v)
Matrimony (sig. Q2y)
Chap. II Of Flouds and Fiuers (sig. Q3r)

The Riuer Tiber (sig. Q3r-v)
The Riuer Amus (sig. Q3v)
The Riuer Po, or Padus (sig. Q3v)
The Riuer Nilus (sigs. Q3v-Q4r)
The Riuer Tigris (sig. Q4«"-v)
The Riuer Danubius, or the Donow
(Sig. Q4V)
The Riuer Achelous (sig. Q4v)
The Riuer Ganges (sig. Q4v-Rir)
The Riuer Indus (sig. RV)
The Riuer Niger (sig. KV)
RSpsi, Iconologia (Rome, 1603)
Eternité (pp. 140-41)

Speranza (pp. 469-72)
Vittoria (pp. 515-18)
Pietà (pp. 401-03)
Pace (pp. 375-78)
Virtu (pp. 506-12)
Providenza (pp. 414-16)
Tempo (pp. 482-83)
Concordia (pp. 80-82)
Fama(pp. 142-45)
Cattiva Fama (p. 143)
Salute (pp. 438-40)
Clemenza (pp. 68-70)
Fato(p. 146)
Félicita (pp. 154-56)
Fécondité (p. 148)
Sicvrezza, et Tranqvillità (pp. 452-53)
Pecunia (p. 384)
Simulatione (p. 455)
Equalità(p. 130)
Matrimonio (pp. 305-07)
Fivmi (p. 1 56)

Tevere(pp. 156-58)
Amo(p. 158)
Po(pp. 158-59)
Nilo(p. 160)
Tigre (p. 160)
Danvbio(p. 160)
Acheolo (p. 161)
Gange (p. 162)
Indo(p. 162)
Niger (p. 162)
Chap. Ill The Nymphes in generall (sig. Rl^)
Napaeae or Nymphes of the mountains
(sigs. Rlv-Rlr)
Dryads and Hamadryades, Nymphes
ofthe woods (sig. R2'")

Naides or the Nymphes of flouds
(sig. R2'--v)
Chap. IV The Ocean (sig. R2v)

Thetis (sig. R2v)
Galatea (sig. R3>")
Iris or the Rainebow (sig. RS"")
Aurora or the Morning (sig. RS^-^)
Chap. V The Nine Muses (sig. R3v)

Clio (sig. R3V)
Euterpe (sig. R4r)
ThaHa (sig. R4r)
Melpomene (sig. R4r)
Polymnia (sig. R4v)
Erato (sig. R4v)
Terpsichore (sig. R4v)
Vrania(sig. SK)
Calliope (sig. SI >■)
Chap. VI Pan and the Satires (sigs. Siv-S2«")
Thr 4, Winds Eurus or the East wind
(sig. S2r)
Zephorus or the West wind (sig. Sl^-v)
Boreas, or the North winde (sig. 82^)
Auster or the South wind (sig. 82^)
Chap. VII The twelue moneths of the yeare

(sig. S30
March (sig. S3»")
Aprill (sig. S30
May (sig. S3r-v)
lune (sig. 83^)
luly (sig. S3V)
August (sigs. S3v-S4r)
September (sig. S4'')
October (sig. 84^-^)
Nouember (sig. 84^)
December (sig. 84^)
lanuary (sigs. 84v-TK)
Februarie (sig. TK)
Ninfe in commvne (p. 352)

Ninnedi, & Napee (p. 353)
Driadi, & Hamadriadi (p. 353)
Naiadi. Ninfe de fiumi (p. 354)
Mare (p. 354)
Thethi (pp. 354-55)
Galatea (p. 355)
Iride (Ninfe de l'aria) (pp. 355-56)
Aurora (p. 34) and Crepvscvlo della
Mattina (pp. 95-96)
Mvse (p. 346)

Clio (p. 346)
Evterpe (pp. 346-47)
Talia (p. 347)
Melpomene (p. 347)
Polinnia (pp. 347-48)
Erato (p. 348)
Terpsicore (pp. 348-49)
Vrania (p. 349)
Calliope (p. 349)
Mondo (pp. 330-32)
Evro (pp. 496- 97)

Favonio, o Zephiro (p. 497)
Borea, overo Aquilone (pp. 497-98)
Avstro (p. 498)
Mesi(p. 315)
Marzo (pp. 315-16)
Aprile(p. 316)
Maggio (p. 316-17)
Givgno (p. 317)
Ivglio (pp. 317-18)
Agosto(p. 318)
Settembre (pp. 318-19)
Ottobre(p. 319)
Novembre (p. 319)
Décembre (p. 320)
Geimaro (p. 320)
Febraro (p. 320)
Appendix B
Peacham, "On Drawing, Limning,

and Painting: with the Hues of the
famous Italian Painters" in The
Compleat Gentleman (1622)
Cimabue(p. 117-18)
Tasi(p. 118-19)
Gaddi(p. 119)
Margaritone (p. 119)
Giotto (pp. 119-23)
Stefano(p. 123-24)
Pietro Lauratio (p. 124)
BuflFalmacco (pp. 124-30)*
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (p. 1 30)
Pietro Cavallini (p. 130)
Simon of Siena (p. 1 30)
Andrea Orcagna (pp. 131-32)
Masaccio (p. 1 32)
Alberti (pp. 132-33)
Filippo Lippi (pp. 133-35)
Antonello of Messina (p. 135)
Ghirlandaio (pp. 135-36)
Raphael (pp. 136-37)
Vasari, Le Vite de' piu
van Mander, Het
excellenti pittori, scultori.
Schilderboeck il6lS)
e Architettori il S6S)
Vol. I
Liv-L4r
fol. 29''-v
02r-04v
fols. 29v-30r
04r-Plv
fol. 30r
P2r.p3v
fol. 30r
P4r-Q3r
fols. 30V-31V
S2v-S4r
fol. 32r
S4v-T2r
fol. 32V
Vl'--X2r
fols. 32V-33V
X2V-X3V
fols. 33v-34r
X4r-Yir
fol. 34r
Y1V-Y3V
fol. 34r
Z3'--2A2v
fol. 35r
202r-204v
fol. 36r-v
2Z1V-2Z3V
fols. 35v-37r
3B2r-3C2r
fols. 37r-38r
3A2r-3A3v
fol. 38r-v
3Ll'--3Mlv
fol. 39r-v
Vol.II,h4v-mlr
fols.49v-53v
* There is a hiatus in the pagination of The Compleat Gentleman between pages 124 and 129.
François de la Noue (1531-1591) au service du

libéralisme du XIXe siècle
WILLIAM H. HUSEMAN
L ne semble guère nécessaire de présenter le maréchal François de La

Noue aux lecteurs de cette revue. Si La Noue est demeuré un personnage
moins célèbre que Coligny, Monluc, Condé, et d'Aubigné, l'on aurait tort
de sous-estimer le rôle qu'a joué le "Bras de Fer" dans les guerres de
religion et dans 1' "institution" de la Réforme en France.^ La parution en
1967 d'une édition moderne de ses Discours politiques et militaires^ a
contribué à l'accroissement de sa réputation en rendant accessible à la
communauté des seizièmistes une oeuvre riche mais relativement peu con-
nue. Depuis cette date, de nombreux chercheurs ont recouru à son témoig-
nage à cause de la lucidité de ses analyses et de la qualité indéniable de sa
prose. ^ Le lecteur des Discours découvre avec plaisir non pas les réminis-
cences décousues d'un vieux guerrier hargneux mais un témoignage équit-
able qui impressionne par sa franchise et sa bonne foi, qualités rarissimes à
l'époque des guerres de religion. L'on comprend facilement pourquoi
Montaigne a pu s'émerveiller de "la constante bonté, douceur de meurs et
facilité conscientieuse de monsieur de la Noue, en une telle injustice de
parts armées, vraie eschole de trahison, d'inhumanité et de brigandage, où
tousjours il s'est nourry, grand honmie de guerre et très-experimenté."*
Serait-il superflu de rappeler ici que la plupart des historiens se sont rangés
du côté de ce Gascon qui n'avait pas l'habitude de couvrir d'éloges des
guerriers huguenots?
La biographie de la Noue
Etant conscient des limites d'une étude consacrée à un seul homme, nous
proposons un réexamen de la carrière et du caractère de François de La
Noue, un homme qui, selon le père Lelong, "a joué un si grand rôle dans les
premiers troubles de la Religion que sa Vie en est comme l'Histoire."^
Son nom apparaît dans presque tous les récits des historiens, des chroni-
queurs et des mémorialistes du 1 6e et du début du 1 7e siècle. Si l'on repé-
rait et rassemblait toutes les sources qui contiennent des références à la
Noue, il serait possible de le suivre de jour en jour - et parfois même
d'heure en heure - pendant quarante ans. Mais il est évident qu'une telle
étude dépasserait de loin le cadre de cette revue, et l'on est en droit de se
demander si cette énorme entreprise aiderait à mieux saisir l'intérêt essen-
tiel de la vie de cet homme et de son oeuvre. Ainsi plutôt que d'analyser en
détail chaque escarmouche, chaque bataille, chaque entretien avec un
adversaire, etc., nous porterons un jugement global sur la totalité de sa
vie.
Ecrivant en 1 892, Henri Hauser a reconnu que, "nous sonmies loin . . .

d'avoir pu explorer tous les dépôts qui peuvent ou même qui doivent con-
tenir des pièces relatives à La Noue; et si cette vie présente peut-être quel-
ques énigmes insolubles, il est aussi des lacunes que d'autres, plus heureux
que nous, pourront sans doute combler."^ Hauser a suggéré, par exemple,
qu'il était "peu croyable que les archives des petites villes flamandes ne
conservent pas encore des lettres de La Noue."^ Etant ainsi conscient des
lacunes qui restaient à combler, il a pourtant conclu qu'"en présence des
documents que nous avons consultés, nous ne pensons pas que des trou-
vailles nouvelles puissent sensiblement modifier notre récit ou altérer nos
conclusions."* Voilà donc les deux défis que Hauser a implicitement
lancés à la postérité: parviendra-t-on à mettre en doute soit son récit de la
vie de La Noue soit ses conclusions sur le comportement de cet homme et
sur la valeur de sa vie?
De telles questions se sont posées lors de la conception de la présente

étude: les années qui se sont écoulées ont-elles confirmé le bien-fondé de la
position de Hauser? Pour rendre justice à La Noue, fallait-il se lancer à la
recherche d'éventuelles sources inédites cachées dans des bibliothèques
isolées? Après avoir examiné et les sources du seizième siècle et les ouv
rages qui ont été publiés depuis la parution de la thèse de Hauser, il nous a
semblé qu'il n'y avait pas lieu de "sensiblement modifier" son récit. Si
Hauser n'a pas fourni de réponses à toutes les énigmes posées par la vie de
ce capitaine, il a eu le mérite d'avoir posé les bonnes questions et d'avoir
établi les points de repère principaux. Quant à son analyse du personnage,
on peut légitimement poser d'autres questions et proposer d'autres inter-
prétations.
Il s'agira donc de rouvrir le dossier en utilisant le fil qu'a tissé Hauser et

en tenant compte des contributions de l'historiographie du vingtième
siècle. Nous nous sommes efforcé de ne pas commettre "l'erreur d'enfer-
mer les événements dans un cercle trop mesquin, de tout ramener à la
portée d'un individu, de grossir par artifice les 'questions de personnes' et
de mettre les catégories générales dans la dépendance de simples
incidents."^
Le portrait de Hausen **confîante et indulgente bonhomie*'
Chaque époque est marquée par ses préoccupations idéologiques, voire

par de véritables idées fixes. Celle de Hauser avait les siennes, nous avons
certainement les nôtres. Le portrait de La Noue que l'on trouve chez
Hauser reflète deux obsessions du dix-neuvième siècle: le nationalisme et
le laïcisme. Hauser, d'origine Israélite, aurait voulu que La Noue fut un
bon citoyen patriote d'une république laïque, et il semblait éprouver un
besoin intense de montrer que les protestants (et, avec eux, d'autres
minorités) étaient des Français à part entière. En essayant de montrer que
le plus grand héros de la Réforme naissante était "un bon Français," ne
cherchait-il pas aussi à prouver que tous les protestants (et peut-être aussi
les Juifs) étaient à leur tour "de bons Français"?
Non que ses concitoyens du dernier quart du dix-neuvième siècle aient

eu besoin de recevoir des leçons de patriotisme; au contraire, la com-
munauté protestante cherchait à se protéger du chauvinisme exclusiviste
qui s'est manifesté lors de l'Affaire Dreyfus. Conmie les Juifs, les témoins
protestants de la fin du siècle font état d'une "campagne d'accusations, de
calomnies de toutes sortes, qui se poursuit depuis quelque temps contre
nous et que cherchent à perpétuer certains journaux, certains livres. . . .
On fait beaucoup de bruit aujourd'hui autour de cette grande formule: La
France aux Français, et l'on s'en sert contre nous."^° Il s'agit évidemment
des répercussions de la montée de l'Allemagne et de l'humiliation de 1 870:
"Les débuts de la guerre franco-prussienne de 1 870 donnèrent lieu à une
recherche de coupables dont les protestants français eurent à souffrir. Une
campagne de presse les accusa de souhaiter la victoire de l'ennemi, voire
parfois de l'aider activement." ^^
Hauser et les protestants cherchaient à repousser deux accusations. Il y

avait, d'une part, celle qui dépeignait le protestantisme, enfant bâtard du
"renégat saxon" Luther, comme un phénomène essentiellement étranger:
"Du fait que Calvin s'était réfugié à Genève, . . . que les grandes puissan-
ces, Angleterre, Allemagne, souvent ennemies de la France, étaient à
majorité protestante, une suspicion s'attachait à la minorité réformée
française."*^ D'autre part, ils luttaient contre l'idée qu'ils devaient forcé-
ment être soupçonnés de "coUaborationisme" avec les ennemis. Bien
qu'ils aient fait semblant de ne pas prendre au sérieux de telles accusations
- "A qui fera-t-on croire qu'il y a un péril protestant, un complot protes-

tant, que nous voulons livrer la France à l'Angleterre ou à l'Allemagne?""
- ils se sont crus obligés d'y répondre. L'on peut être tenté d'en sourire,
mais le parallèle ne paraissait que trop évident à ceux qui rêvaient d'une
France "toute catholique" et qui s'en prenaient aux "ennemis de l'âme
française":*'* de même que les huguenots avaient cherché l'appui d'Elisa-
beth et des princes allemands contre les rois Très-Chrétiens, leurs descen-
dants étaient capables de "vendre la patrie" aux ennemis contemporains.
Si les Rochelois avaient invité les Anglais à s'établir chez eux, si Condé
avait fait venir des reîtres, si l'Etat protestant avait ébranlé le trône des
Valois, que pouvait-on espérer de leurs petits-fils? Tel était le climat à
l'époque où Hauser rédigeait sa thèse.
Les protestants se sentaient particulièrement exaspérés par ceux qui
prétendaient qu'il y avait "une sorte d'incompatibilité entre l'esprit protes-
tant et l'esprit français . . . que le protestantisme est contraire à notre carac-
tère national."*^ Ils insistaient donc sur les origines purement françaises de
la Réforme, sur "le caractère profondément national du protestantisme
français,"^^ mais ce faisant ils reconnaissaient la priorité accordée aux
intérêts de l'Etat-nation: "Notre Eglise est une Eglise essentiellement
nationale. Et savez-nous pourquoi? parce qu'elle est protestante."^^ Le
"bon" protestantisme égalait donc le nationadisme. Ils étaient fiers d'avoir
contribué à la formation des institutions démocratiques grâce à "la par-
ticipation des laïcs à l'administration ecclésiastique."^* Le protestantisme
qu'ils envisageaient était ainsi un protestantisme respectueux de la règle du
jeu de la Troisième République: un régime laïc, démocratique, bourgeois,
tolérant, exigeant toutefois la subordination de l'Eglise à l'Etat.
Hauser aurait voulu que La Noue fut conforme à cet idéal laïc et
nationaliste. N'a-t-il pas fini par écrire "une étude historique où le passé
pouvait soutenir l'opinion libérale dans le présent"?^' Mais force lui était
de constater que son héros s'est écarté de cet idéal à de nombreuses rep-
rises: il a participé activement à des soulèvements armés contre l'autorité
légitime de son pays; il avait des contacts avec des agents de puissances
étrangères; il a fait introduire sur le territoire français des soldats étrangers;
il a cherché à embrouiller des sujets français dans les affaires des Pays-
Bas, sachant bien que cette intervention aurait pu mener à une guerre avec
l'Espagne; il a collaboré avec la machine administrative de l'Etat protes-
tant, etc. Conunent la communauté protestante aurait-elle osé proposer
comme héros un homme qui, au dix-neuvième siècle, aurait pu être con-
sidéré comme un traître?: "L'on ne voulait à aucun prix, dans certains
milieux protestants français - surtout à Paris, centre du nationalisme, et
chez les Réformés - prêter le moindrement le flanc aux accusations selon
lesquelles le protestantisme était en France un élément étranger. ''^^
(Evidemment, il est inutile d'insister sur le fait que le comportement des
rois de France et des extrémistes catholiques mérite l'étiquette de "traître,"
mais il s'agit ici de François de La Noue.)
Hauser se voyait donc obligé d'expliquer certains aspects "gênants" du

comportement de son héros. Il s'efforce de démontrer que la politique de
La Noue était dominée par un sentiment national, d'où une litanie d'affir-
mations de son patriotisme. Comparé à certains huguenots, La Noue était
"trop bon Français et trop peu fanatique à leur gré" (xiv), et "trop bon
Français pour servir d'instrument docile" (xvii) aux desseins des Anglais.
Il était "toujours prêt à aider la grande reine protestante, s'il pouvait le faire
sans manquer à ses devoirs de Français" (p. 1 29; cf. pp. 282, 234, 76, 90).
Comparé à Du Guesclin, La Noue "se décida, non comme un chef de
bande du XlVe siècle, mais comme un bon Français du XVIe"— ne faut-il
pas lire, "du XIXe siècle" (p. 268)? Hauser s'efforce de concilier religion
et nationalisme: "En même temps que chrétien, il est resté Français" (p.
260) et "faisait passer l'intérêt national avant celui de sa secte" (p. 76),
sauf après 1573, lorsque "le politique parut l'emporter sur le chrétien, le
sectaire sur le Français" (xviii). Hauser essaie d'attribuer à La Noue une
espèce de "nationalisme" qui, en réalité, n'était concevable qu'après la
Révolution de 1789: à La Rochelle, La Noue refuse de commettre "un
crime de lèse-nation. ... Il possède, à un très haut degré pour un homme de
son temps, et presque en dehors du sentiment loyaliste, un véritable senti-
ment national. ... La Noue y répond comme un moderne, qui a le senti-
ment très vif de la nationalité française" (pp. 288, 164, 223). Hauser
insiste sur son sentiment de "fraternité nationale" (p. 245), de "solidarité
nationale" (p. 286), de "devoir national" (p. 267). La Noue aurait pro-
fessé les doctrines d'"une école nationale" (p. 288). Bref, à en croire
Hauser, "il croit même, et c'est chose nouvelle, qu'en dehors et au-dessus
de ces devoirs envers son roi, il en a, et de plus sacrés encore, envers cet
être moral qui s'appelle la patrie" (p. 288). S'il est indéniable que La Noue
faisait preuve d'un sentiment "nationaliste" qui mérite, à certains égards,
l'étiquette de "moderne," ce genre d'expUcation va amener Hauser à
une impasse.
S'il est embarrassé par la question de la "trahison," on sent qu'il est

également gêné par la foi de La Noue. De même qu'il cherchait un patriote
modèle, il aurait voulu trouver chez La Noue un protestantisme de bon ton
qui ne risquât pas de choquer la sensibihté bourgeoise, un protestantisme
mesuré, "raisonnable", "philosophique" qui incarnât les plus nobles
aspirations de la Révolution. Et lorsque La Noue ne s'y conforme pas il
faut, encore une fois, trouver une explication pour le protéger contre les
accusations de fanatisme.
Si le guerrier intrépide ne s'est pas adonné au culte des Anciens, "il s'est
moins bien défendu contre une autre cause d'erreur, il a cru aveuglément à
la lettre de la Bible. On le voudrait un peu moins servilement attaché au
texte de saint Paul, on lui souhaiterait un peu plus de cette noble indépen-
dance d'esprit, de cette largeur de pensée qu'on rencontre chez les grands
païens de l'époque, chez ces épicuriens qu'il a condamnés au nom de la foi,
les Rabelais et les Montaigne" (pp. 280-81). (Notons en passant que la
critique bourgeoise a essayé ainsi de récupérer Rabelais et Montaigne.)
Mais si on élimine cet attachement à la lettre de la Bible, qui découle
évidemment du principe de Sola Scriptura, et la doctrine fondamentale de
saint Paul, la justification par la foi et par la grâce, on peut se demander ce
qui reste non seulement de la foi de La Noue mais aussi de la Réforme. On

sent que Hauser est également gêné par la foi et par le comportement des
premiers huguenots: "Ce rude soldat avait en lui je ne sais quoi de bon-
homme et de bon enfant; cela lui donne un visage à part, et plein d'attrait,
au milieu de l'austère et un peu ennuyeuse compagnie des calvinistes"
(p. 1 97). Il trouve que son style, "si vif et si leste à l'ordinaire, devient par-
fois grave et terne au point de faire déjà pressentir ce qu'on appellera plus
tard le 'style réfugié'" (p. 281). Les pasteurs sont présentés comme des
fanatiques aveugles (Chapitre II). Mais il faut demander si Hauser cherche
des gens qu'il aurait aimé rencontrer dans un salon parisien ou des gens
prêts à tout sacrifier pour pouvoir vivre selon la pureté de l'Evangile. Est-
ce qu'il ne finit pas par renforcer le stéréotype du protestant froid, ren-
frogné, sévère, etc.? L'on comprend que, vivant dans un milieu intellectuel
dominé par les idées d'un Renan ou d'un Comte, Hauser ait pu se sentir
gêné par cette foi trop primitive, trop naïve, trop "crue," mais cette attitude
influe sur son analyse du caractère et du comportement de La Noue.
De même qu'il a insisté sur la "modernité" du seizième siècle, Hauser

aurait voulu voir en La Noue un homme moderne: "Il possède, à un très
haut degré pour un homme de son temps ... un véritable sentiment
national La Noue y répond comme un moderne Il se décida, non
comme un chef de bande du XlVe siècle, mais comme un bon Français du
XVIe On se prend, malgré soi, à songer à ces philosophes du X Ville
siècle qui devaient travailler au triomphe de la tolérance et de l'humanité"

(pp. 164, 223, 268, 280). Mais le fait est que La Noue n'aurait pas pu se
conformer à un tel idéal philosophique, laïc et nationaliste, même s'il avait
pu le concevoir. Et lorsque Hauser le constate, il en est déçu. Il est
indéniable que La Noue aimait profondément une entité appelée "France",
que ses Discours constituent un programme pour la restaurer, et qu'il ter-
mine S2i Déclaration en affirmant "le suis un bon François" (p. 20). Il est
"moderne" à certains égards, témoin ses tendances absolutistes, cen-
tralisatrices et "tolérantistes."
Mais Hauser ne tient pas assez compte des différences sémantiques sur-
venues au cours de trois siècles d'histoire, attribuables notamment à une
Révolution qui a bouleversé les structures de l'Ancien Régime. Les mots
"patrie," "nation" et "France" n'évoquaient plus pour un citoyen de la
République au dix-neuvième siècle ce qu'ils évoquaient pour un sujet du
Royaume au seizième siècle. La Noue utilise aussi l'expression "bon
citoyen" (Observations, p. 786), mais qui oserait prétendre qu'elle avait
en 1585 les mêmes résonances qu'elle aura dans la bouche d'un Robes-
pierre, d'un Danton, d'un Saint Just? C'est toute la différence entre un
"ancien" et un "nouveau" régime. Il faut surtout faire attention à des mots
comme "nation" et "national" qui, après 1789, avaient pris des con-
notations que La Noue n'aurait même pas pu concevoir. Hauser voudrait
que le "patriotisme" de La Noue soit le "nationalisme" post-révolution-

naire et post-napoléonien, que son protestantisme soit un protestantisme
post-renanien. Mais ne finit-il pas par tomber dans le piège des anti-
protestants dont r "interprétation de l'actualité fut souvent une projection
de leur vision du passé sur le présent, comme si les rapports entre religion et
politique ou la conception du patriotisme, par exemple, avaient été les
mêmes au XVIe siècle et au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècles"?" Il
n'accepte pas qu'un honmie du seizième siècle ait pu légitimement être
tiraillé entre plusieurs devoirs contradictoires, ceux de la religion, de la
féodalité, du "patriotisme" régional ou national, de l'amitié, etc. Un
homme du dix-neuvième siècle ne pouvait plus l'être parce que l'évolution
historique avait fait de la loyauté à l'Etat-nation la valeur suprême, et tout
devait être subordonné aux intérêts de la nation (même si on prétendait ne
voir aucun conflict entre les intérêts de la religion et ceux de l'Etat). Dans
l'Europe d'états-nations du siècle dernier, le comportement des huguenots
et de La Noue aurait pu être considéré comme un comportement de "traît-
res." Mais c'est précisément parce qu'ils ne vivaient pas au dix-neuvième
siècle qu'on ne peut pas les juger d'après les critères de ce siècle; il ne faut
pas non plus essayer de justifier le comportement de La Noue en utilisant des
critères d'un siècle qui n'était pas le sien. Cet homme qui a vécu au
seizième siècle se considérait comme un "bon citoyen," mais il a commis
des actes qui auraient scandalisé un "bon citoyen" du dix-neuvième siècle.
Si ce genre de comportement n'était guère apprécié par les monarques du
seizième siècle, La Noue n'a pas été traité avec la même rigueur que
l'auraient été des ennemis de l'Etat moderne: ce rebelle a été reçu à la cour
et nommé ambassadeur à La Rochelle! (Et rappelons encore une fois que le
comportement des rois et des extrémistes catholiques n'était guère un
modèle de probité, de bonne foi, de patriotisme.)
L'on voit le dilemme auquel a dû faire face Hauser, embarrassé par ce

qu'il appelle "de véritables défaillances morales" (pp. 62, 286) de cet
homme qui semble bel et bien avoir mis les intérêts de sa foi avant ceux de
sa patrie, mais qui semble avoir, à d'autres moments, mal servi ses
coreligionnaires et ses "bienfaiteurs," prêtant ainsi le flanc aux accusa-
tions d'un Denis d'Aussy.^^ La seule explication que propose Hauser, c'est
la naïveté, aussi invraisemblable que cela puisse paraître: "Il eut ses
faiblesses. Son esprit, ferme et sage en beaucoup de choses, n'était pour-
tant pas sans travers; le moindre était la naïveté" (p. 280). Ces termes
reviennent à travers toute l'étude de Hauser: "Dans sa naïve confiance, il
ne voulait croire au péril. ... sa sensibilité un peu naïve. ... on le savait
naïf, scrupuleux à l'excès Il n'échappe pas à une certaine naïveté," etc.
(pp. 85,35, 225 ,177). Il va encore plus loin: "Ce rude soldat avait en lui je
ne sais quoi de bonhomme et de bon enfant" (p. 197) et "une candeur qui
... est bien près de toucher au ridicule" (p. 285). A en croire Hauser, La
Noue aurait même oublié un des fondements de la doctrine calviniste (pour

ne pas dire, chrétienne): "Sa confiante et indulgente bonhomie ne pouvait
croire longtemps à la méchanceté, surtout à la méchanceté persévérante.
... Il est trop désintéressé Il ne croit vraiment pas assez à la méchan-
ceté des hommes Il ne sait pas haïr" (pp. 35, 1 77). Hauser affirme que
"La Noue, c'est son honneur et son ridicule, ne croit pas à la méchanceté
humaine. Au fond, cette impossibilité de croire au mal, cette confiance
exagérée dans les retours de bonté dont les pires sont parfois capables,
c'est la grande, l'irrémédiable infirmité de La Noue, le seul défaut de cette
intelligence si nette et si pratique, de ce ferme caractère" (pp. 283-84).
C'est à cause de ces traits que La Noue ne pouvait pas se débarrasser de "la
manie de la conciliation universelle" (p. 284), de "cette chimère d'univer-
selle réconciUation" (p. 285).
Le témoignage des contemporains: d'un 'Jugement solide & posé*'

aux **surprinses & meschancetez^'
L'on voit que Hauser se permet d'utiliser des termes conmie "ridicule",
"exagéré", "infirmité", "manie", etc. pour justifier le comportement de
La Noue lorsque celui-ci ne se conforme pas à l'idéal républicain et pa-
triotique. Mais Hauser n'est pas hostile à son héros; au contraire, il admire
La Noue et maintient qu'il mérite le surnom de "Bayard Huguenot." Il
tente le "coup d'escrime désespéré" parce qu'il est sûr que les énormes
qualités du Bras de Fer l'emporteront facilement sur ses défauts. Mais,
confronté à ces "défaillances", il a recours à une explication qui, à notre
avis, déforme les véritables traits de La Noue. Il n'était pas nécessaire de
forcer le lecteur à prononcer La Noue coupable soit de "trahison" soit de
"naïveté": il n'était pas naïf lorsqu'il négociait avec les rois, de même qu'il
n'était pas traître lorsqu'il s'opposait à la politique de ceux-ci. Sans vouloir
paraître désinvolte, l'on peut se demander si Hauser ne finit pas par
évoquer plutôt l'image d'un pépère quelque peu gâteux en train de som-
noler devant la cheminée — et qu'on réveille de temps en temps pour lui
demander si on peut se fier à la parole du roi de France, s'il faut livrer La
Rochelle aux Anglais ou pousser le royaume à la guerre en envahissant les
Pays-Bas, si Henri de Navarre devrait se convertir au catholicisme, etc.!
Le contraste entre le portrait qu'en fait Hauser et le rôle que La Noue ajoué
en réalité semble démesuré. N'a-t-il pas décrit un Candide huguenot? Et
pourtant, ce "bonhomme enfantin" a survécu à tous ses maîtres à travers
quarante années de luttes sanglantes, acquérant une réputation qui "est
sortie bien loin hors de la France, & s'est estenduë iusques en Espagne,
Italie, Allemagne & Angleterre"!"
Où est l'honmie qui, selon ses ennemis acharnés, avait "servy de vraye
phare & guide en l'armée des hérétiques, en laquelle il a tant apprins &
pratiqué de surprinses & meschancetez, qu'il se peut ay sèment vanter estre
le plus redouté de ceux qui tiennent pour le iourd'huy leur party"?^*

Auraient-ils craint à ce point un "bonhomme crédule"? Les Ligueurs qui le
détestaient n'hésitaient pas pourtant à lui attribuer "une des meilleures
têtes qu'il y ait" en l'armée de Henri IV. ^^ Son ennemi Brisson insiste sur sa
maîtrise de la ruse: "La Noue pratiquoit soubz main & s'asseuroit de ceux
desquelz il se vouloit servir pour exécuter l'entreprise."^^ Brisson en fait le
portrait suivant: "Il est doue d'un esprit assez vif, d'une grace douce, qui à
sa contenance monstre qu'il pense plus qu'il ne dit Toutesfois ceux qui
le fréquentent l'ont en reputation d'estre homme d'entreprise & d'exécu-

tion, de sçavoir conduire & mener les hommes à la guerre, d'estre brave &
adroit gentil-homme, versé es affaires d'estat. Ceux encore qui le suivent,
louent en luy un iugement solide & posé."^^ L'on recherche en vain le grand
benêt décrit par Hauser.
Aurait-on confié la lieutenance de la Guyenne à Candide? Aurait-on

envoyé un tel député à la cour "pour recevoir les plaintes & remonstrances
de leurs confederez; afin de les faire conoistre au Roy qui leur prometoit y
pourvoir selon le besoing"?^^ Bentivoglio l'appelle un "personnage de
grande valeur & des plus estimez aux affaires de guerre qu'il y eust alors en
France parmy la faction des Huguenots."^' Son ami La Popelinière le con-
sidérait comme "un des plus accomplis Gentils-hommes de toute la
France" et "l'un des plus avisez & résolus guerriers de France. ... Il n'y
avoit en France Gentilhonune de la Religion plus signalé que lui pour le
maniment des armes & affaires de consequence."^® Est-ce que les Flamands
auraient confié le commandement de leur armée, et donc leur propre des-
tin, à un naïf? J.B. de Blaes écrit que les Etats l'ont invité parce qu' "on l'es-
timoit le plus habile & plus expérimenté Capitaine en l'art militaire, qui fut
en son temps. "^^ Les ambassadeurs anglais rapportent que les ennemis
refusaient parfois de se battre, fuyaient en terreur et abandonnaient des
places à l'annonce de l'approche de La Noue.^^ L'on peut se demander
comment la capture d'un bonhomme enfantin aurait pu inspirer le déses-
poir chez les uns, le déchaînment de joie chez les autres, y compris le roi
d'Espagne. Après la prise de Bruges, le prince de Parme s'est vu obliger de
reconnaître que "La Noue ... a enfin si bien joué son personnaige, qu'il l'a
surprins par intelligence de quelques sectaires."" (Une tentative de s'em-
parer de Bruxelles et du prince de Parme a échoué.) Rappelons que sa pre-
mière action d'éclat avait été la prise d'Orléans "moins par la force . . . que
par la ruse & l'artifice; ce qu'il exécuta avec autant d'habileté que de
bonheur."^* En 1574 il est entré à La Rochelle grâce à un coup d'état, et
vers la fin de sa vie il utilisait les mêmes méthodes: "Toutes les trouppes de
ces hérétiques, Givry et la Noue, furent pour surprendre la ville de Meaux,
avec l'intelligence de certains politiques de dedans, lesquels par force
ouvrirent une des portes de la ville. "^^ De Thou fournit le témoignage sui-
vant: les ennemis ayant fait circuler de faux bruits afin d'attirer les
huguenots dans une embuscade, "La Noue, qui étoit l'homme du monde le
moins crédule, n'ajouta ps beaucoup de foi à ce bruit. Les bonnes nou-
velles, dit-il, qui nous viennent par la voye des ennemis, doivent toujours
nous être suspectes, & il est bon d'être en garde contre les pièges qu'ils
pourroient nous tendre. "^'^ C'est sa prudence qui l'amenait souvent à pren-
dre des risques "imprudents": il "retourna à la porte Saint-Michel, &
s'étant approché seul pour examiner avec plus d'attention l'endroit qu'il
vouloit attaquer, il reçut au bras gauche un coup qui lui cassa l'os"" (cf. p.
706). Il a été tué par une balle tirée dans des circonstances pareilles. Henri
de Navarre s'est moqué de lui à cause de sa prudence "excessive," mais
L'Estoile raconte que La Noue, "un des plus vieux & expérimentés
Capitaines de la France ... lui prédisoit ce qui en advint."^* Même les
réformés extrémistes retenaient leur jugement: "Quant à moy en telle divi-
sion & partialité d'opinions . . . ie suspend!, comme ie tiens encore sus-
pendu, mon jugement de son affaire: ne voulant rien témérairement
prononcer d'un gentilhonmie si bien qualifié que cestuy-là.""
Les affirmations de Hauser et des contemporains de La Noue divergent
à tel point que l'on peut être tenté de demander s'il s'agit du même person-
nage! Seuls les réformés les plus extrémistes s'en prenaient à sa crédulité,
et bon nombre d'entre eux le regrettaient après son départ de La Rochelle.
A notre avis, ce sont les contemporains qui avaient raison, et nous essaierons
de montrer que la naïveté est un mobile insuffisant pour expliquer le carac-
tère et le comportement de La Noue. Bien au contraire, il y a d'excellentes
raisons de conclure que sa poHtique n'était ni celle d'un naïf ni celle d'un
trmtre, mais plutôt celle d'un homme d'état réaliste et accompli à qui on
pourrait approprier l'éloge qu'il a lui-même fait de CoHgny: "C'estoit un
personnage digne de restituer un Estât affoibli & corrompu" (p. 780).
Selon nous, on diminue la grandeur et l'humanité d'un tel homme en faisant
de lui un tjê de naïf simplet. S'il s'est trompé à certains moments, ce n'est
pas par naïveté ou par faute de lucidité; c'est plutôt parce qu'aucun homme
dans une situation pareille n'aurait pu rassembler suffîsemment de ren-
seignements pour y voir clair. Il fallait donc peser les risques et en accepter
les conséquences, et La Noue était le premier à reconnaître que "les plus
fins, & qui ouvrent bien les yeux, ne laissent quelquefois d'y estre attrap-
pez" (p. 707).
Contrairement à ce qu'en dit Hauser, La Noue comprenait bien le

monde de la guerre et de la Realpolitik; il connaissait bien les mobiles du
caractère humain, notamment ceux des "Grands"; il était conscient du
caractère instable et "ondoyant" des affaires humaines; et il reconnaissait
la possibilité de l'échec. Mais à notre avis le secret de sa grandeur ^t dans
le fait qu'il n'en désespérait pas, s'étant efforcé d'accepter avec équanimité
les vicissitudes de l'existence. (La sienne en a certainement eu!) Face à des
obstacles qui paraissaient insurmontables, il croyait à la dignité de la lutte,
à la possibilité de surmonter "ce qui espouvante tant de gens, & principale-

ment les délicats" (p. 779). Tenant compte de la "branloire perenne," il
croyait à la nécessité de confronter des choix pénibles, déjuger, de choisir
et, une fois le choix fait, de s'y lancer corps et âme, sachant bien qu'il
pourrait rencontrer l'échec, mais n'oubliant jamais qu'il pourrait se relever
le lendemain pour reprendre la lutte. C'est cette "resilience" exception-
nelle, cette réaffirmation continuelle de l'esprit humain qui caractérise son
attitude et explique son comportement - et qui risque de dérouter l'his-
torien! C'est ce que Hauser prend pour de la naïveté. Mais faut-il toujours
assimiler espoir, optimisme, équanimité et confiance à naïveté, crédulité et
niaiserie? Le fait que La Noue s'efforçait de ne pas être méchant ne veut
pas dire, comme Hauser l'affirme, qu'il était incapable de soupçonner les
autres d'être méchants. Le fait que La Noue n'était pas un traître ne le ren-
dait pas incapable de se méfier des intentions d'un Charles IX ou d'une
Catherine de Médicis. L'on peut croire à la méchanceté sans être soi-
même méchant; l'on peut reconnaiître l'existence du mal sans pour autant
s'y abandonner. La Noue a passé toute sa vie dans ce que Montaigne
appelle une "vraie eschole de trahison, d'inhumanité et de brigandage"
sans pour autant devenir traître, inhumain et brigand. Il y a survécu sans
perdre sa "constante bonté, douceur de meurs et facilité conscientieuse."
Ces qualités ne l'ont pas pourtant empêché d'être un "grand homme de
guerre et très-experimenté."*^ C'était un homme exceptionnel parce qu'il
réfléchissait à ce qu'il faisait et fondait son comportement là-dessus - mais
de tels hommes existent. Ne réduisons pas sa grandeur en expliquant son
comportement par des "manies" ou des "chimères."
La vision idéologique de La Noue: ^'naïveté'' ou ^* modernité''?
Nous espérons que cette analyse des Discours de La Noue contribuera à

mettre en relief un aspect peu connu de son caractère. La Noue était dans
un sens un "loyal serviteur," un "Bayard huguenot," mais il servait loyale-
ment des principes auxquels il avait bien réfléchi, sans se laisser aveugler,
sans abandonner la raison. Il réfléchissait avant d'agir en s'effbrçant de
conformer sa vie à des modèles idéologiques cohérents. La comparaison
avec Bayard risque de le réduire à un type quelque peu béat et dépourvu de
subtilité. Nous espérons avoir montré que c'était un homme intelligent,
sensé, prudent et même malin. Sans ces qualités, il n'aurait pas pu survivre
dans l'univers guerrier, cette "eschole de trahsion, d'inhumanité et de
brigandage."
Serions-nous "naïf à notre tour de voir dans cet homme un mélange

unique, l'incarnation de l'idéal noble et de l'idéal calviniste? De sa forma-
tion nobiliaire, il tire le modèle idéologique d'une vie fondée sur la pour-
suite de la vertu, de la justice, de l'honneur, aussi bien que le sens de
mission: la défense des opprimés et du royaume de France.'*^ Il reconnaît
pourtant des limites et s'efforce de maîtriser les penchants à la violence

gratuite. Du calvinisme il tire sa confiance, surtout la conviction qu'il
existe un plan divin et que l'homme a un rôle actif à jouer. S'il reconnaît la
possibiHté de l'échec, il se lance dans la bataille comme si la victoire était
inévitable. S'il ne cherche pas activement la défaite, les douleurs ou la
mort, il ne les craint plus: "Quand elles lui adviendront, il ne fera pas l'acci-
dent plus grand qu'il est, ains taschera, avec la vigueur de l'esprit, de le ren-
dre encores plus petit Ils ne se contristent point outre mesure de quitter
une vie caduque & transitoire pour une parfaictement accomplie de tous
bien étemels," etc. (pp. 571,5 80). La Noue s'efforce donc de vivre à la fois
l'idéal évangélique et l'idéal guerrier.
Nous n'hésiterons pas à affirmer que c'était un homme exceptionnel qui

a assuré la survie de la Réforme et qui en honore l'histoire. N'exagérons
pas en faisant de lui un saint, car son idéologie comporte des éléments qui
choqueront (espérons-le) le lecteur "éclairé" du vingtième siècle. Mais s'il
est indéniable qu'il accepte le principe d'une société fondée sur le privilège,
il insiste quand même sur la nécessité de mériter ces privilèges et se montre
tout à fait insensible à l'égard de ceux qui trahissent leur vocation
"naturelle" de cadres dirigeants. S'il consent à peine à reconnaître
l'humanité du "peuple champestre" qui semble incapable des "exercices
supérieures de l'ame" ("Mais la charité nous doit faire juger que Dieu ne
fait rien en vain," p. 606), il n'hésite jamais à risquer sa vie pour le défendre
contre les atrocités perpétrées par ses pairs de la noblesse, ces "harpyes
militaires." S'il est également indéniable qu'il recourt à la force et à la
violence pour défendre une foi fondée sur "miséricorde," "charité" et
"douceur" (p. 398), il fait tout pour en éviter l'emploi et s'efforce toujours
d'en minimiser les dégâts, car "l'homme doit principalement tendre à paix
& tranquillité, à fin de mener une vie plus juste" (p. 210. Ajoutons en pas-
sant que les idéologies "progressistes" et "scientifiques" qui ont succédé
aux doctrines "réactionnaires" de l'Ancien Régime se sont avérées beau-
coup plus sanguinaires et répressives.) A notre avis, le mot "grandeur"
n'est pas déplacé, une grandeur qui provient moins de ses exploits mili-
taires que de son caractère et de sa capacité de réflexion. Il se montre tou-
jours plus exigeant à l'égard de sa propre conduite qu'à celle de ses
contemporains et se croit d'autant plus autorisé à fustiger ceux-ci qu'il s'ef-
force consciemment de réaliser une synthèse entre l'idéal nobiliaire et
l'idéal évangélique. Il s'en est approché.
Quelle est alors la valeur du témoignage vécu et écrit que nous a laissé
La Noue? Comme il serait téméraire et déplacé de vouloir empiéter sur le
domaine de la foi personnelle des Réformés du vingtième siècle en leur pro-
posant une réponse à cette question, nos conclusions s'organiseront plutôt
autour de deux concepts qui risquent de prêter à des malentendus: la
"modernité" et la "naïveté." Non que ces concepts entrent forcément en
contradiction Tun avec l'autre; mais comme Henri Hauser s'en sert, non
seulement dans son étude sur La Noue, mais aussi dans La modernité du
seizième siècle, nous les reprenons ici pour tenter de répondre aux ques-
tions suivantes: les analyses de La Noue ont-elles anticipé sur l'avenir? Si
oui, nous pourrons employer l'étiquette "moderne." D'un autre côté, La
Noue ne conçoit-il pas les rapports entre les êtres humains et la nature de
l'Etat sous un angle "naïf," c'est-à-dire sans tenir compte de ce que
Machiavel appelle la realtà effetuale délie cose? Si nous hésitons à utiliser
le terme "précurseur" de peur de tomber dans les pièges de l'anachronisme
ou d'une vision linéaire de l'histoire, il faut tout de même reconnaître que
La Noue devance à certains égards la majorité de ses contemporains. Sa
conception de l'Etat et sa vision de l'avenir de la noblesse illustreront
cette thèse.
Prenons d'abord sa conception de l'Etat en en analysant trois aspects

complémentaires: le nationalisme, le monarchisme et la tolérance. Comme il
vit à une époque de crise, La Noue propose souvent des solutions pro-
visoires dictées par l'actualité et destinées à rétablir l'ordre le plus vite pos-
sible; mais ces remèdes "ponctuels" découlent en réalité de principes
abstraits que La Noue s'est formés, soit à partir de ses lectures soit pendant
sa carrière militaire. Loin de voir des contradictions entre le théorique et
l'universel, d'une part, le pratique et le vécu, de l'autre, La Noue insiste sur
leur complémentarité. Son sentiment national en fournit un exemple. Une
des sources de son patriotisme est le danger immédiat représenté par
l'Espagne. Il est d'autant plus "nationaliste" qu'il craint la domination
étrangère, et la peur de voir triompher les forces du roi très-catholique joue
un rôle décisif dans ses appels à l'unité nationale. (Il n'hésite pas toutefois à
exprimer son admiration pour certaines qualités espagnoles: discours
XIV-XVII). Mais à ce sentiment négatif fondé sur la crainte s'ajoute un
réel sentiment de fierté à l'égard de la France. Il s'agit d'une attitude
"moderne" en ce sens que La Noue dépasse le sentiment tribal primitif, la
crainte primordiale de l'Autre en se déclarant prêt à reconnaître conmie
compatriotes tous ceux qui se réclament de la France: "Aux termes où est
maintenant nostre Estât, un Italien francizé est bien autant à priser qu'un
François espagnolizé" (p. 107). Peu de ses coreligionnaires se montrent
aussi accueillants envers les compatriotes de la Reine-mère. (L'on verra
qu'il s'agit naturellement d'un Etat multi-confessionnel.) Si Hauser a tort
de chercher chez La Noue une espèce de nationalisme post-révolution-
naire, il a raison d'insister sur sa conscience nationale "moderne."
Ce sentiment est inséparable chez lui d'un sentiment monarchiste que

l'on pourrait qualifier de "pré-" ou de "proto-" absolutiste, car La Noue
tient à ce que ses compatriotes restent "affectionnez à se maintenir unis
souz l'authorité de ceste couronne" (p. 41 5). De nouveau, théorie et prati-
que se réjoignent. Un roi fort lui paraît être le remède immédiat aux
désordres causés par les guerres de religion, et ce roi aurait pu en même

temps protéger les Réformés. A ces soucis immédiats s'ajoutent les exhor-
tations bibliques qui exigent la soumission aux "magistrats" (discours X),
et La Noue est conscient des dangers que comporte tout "changement de
police." Qu'il ait cherché des solutions dans la science pohtique gréco-
romaine, dans l'enseignement paulinien ou dans la réalité concrète qui
l'entoure, il a trouvé la même réponse: la fidélité à un roi fort qui, seul,
exerce la souveraineté à la tête d'un Etat-nation unifié. Lorsqu'il se voyait
obligé de s'opposer à la politique des fils de Henri II, son but n'était ni la
destruction de la monarchie ni la mort des monarques: il cherchait plutôt à
les ramener à la raison, à les obliger à négocier, à accorder la Hberté de con-
science - d'où sa modération, sa mansuétude, ses efforts d'empêcher des
atrocités qui n'auraient fait que provoquer des représailles de la part des
catholiques plus nombreux. Il ne voulait pas ravager le pays qui devait un
jour servir à tous, réformés et catholiques. Il se comportait donc comme un
homme d'état qui voyait loin, qui savait pourquoi il se battait et qui
n'oubliait jamais que la fin ne justifie pas les moyens.
La politique de tolérance préconisée par La Noue relève, elle aussi, de

facteurs concrets et de principes abstraits. Il est évident qu'une telle politi-
que aurait assuré la sécurité des Réformés, permis le retour des exilés et
autorisé le prosélytisme, grossissant ainsi les rangs du parti. Il n'y a donc
pas lieu de s'étonner de l'attitude de La Noue. Mais il ne s'agit pas simple-
ment de la politique intéressée d'un sectaire, car La Noue respecte la
dignité inhérente de l'individu et reconnaît la suprématie de la conscience
en matière de foi (bien qu'il méprise l'Islam et qu'il maintienne que "le feu
est pour les Sodomites," p. 1 24), pourvu que le "faux zelle" ne pousse pas
le croyant à répandre le sang d'autrui. L'Etat monarchiste devrait s'en por-
ter garant, "& si la paix règne quelque temps on verra qu'en la Chrestienté
ne se trouvera de meilleurs catholiques et évangeliques qu'en France" (p.
409). La coexistence de deux ou de plusieurs confessions se présente ainsi
comme un moyen de contribuer à la gloire du royaume de France, d'ajouter
une pierre précieuse à la couronne du roi. Hauser a donc des raisons
solides de défendre l'authenticité de la "Lettre sur la conversion du

Roy."*2
Bien que les acquis de l'Edit de Nantes aient été progressivement rognés
par les successeurs de Henri IV, les trois principes qui viennent d'être
analysés constitueront la base de l'Etat français du XVIIe et du XVIIIe
siècles. Dans la perspective de La Noue, l'unité nationale paraît incon-
cevable sans la présence d'un roi fort qui, appuyé par une noblesse
régénérée, fut capable de veiller sur les droits de tous ses sujets, quelle que
soit leur confession. Un tel pays pourrait alors tenir tête à d'éventuelles
menaces venues de l'étranger: "Mal-aisément nous pourroient-ils ruiner
en quelque estât que nous soyons, moyennant que nous demourrons en
l'obéissance de la couronne" (p. 435). L'analyste moderne y verra sans

doute la soumission de la religion aux intérêts de l'Etat, mais La Noue n'y
voit aucun conflit, ayant toujours trouvé une parfaite correspondance entre
sa foi et son patriotisme. La conception de l'Etat qui se dégage des Dis-
cours préfigure ainsi certains principes fondamentaux de l'Etat absolutiste
du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles, et de l'Etat "libéral" fondé sur la coexis-
tence de plusieurs confessions et de plusieurs courants d'opinion. Est-ce
que La Noue a aussi bien prévu le rôle que jouerait dans cet Etat le
Second Ordre?
La Noue comprend bien que la France est en danger parce que ses
défenseurs sont incompétents, irresponsables et "indignes de porter ces
deux beaux titres de chrestien & de gentil-homme" (p. 697). En tant que
noble, il cherche à agir dans un domaine qui relève de sa compétence,
ayant conclu que le salut du royaume passerait par le salut de la noblesse.
Si de nombreux contemporains éprouvent un besoin urgent de réformes
profondes au sein du Second Ordre, c'est La Noue qui, dans ses Discours,
fournit des analyses parmi les plus perspicaces, proposant des solutions
concrètes et réalisables: "Ce ne sont point icy des Idées de Platon (c'est à
dire des choses imaginées)" (p. 313).
Comme ses idées sur la nature de l'Etat, ses idées sur l'éducation relè-
vent et du théorique et du pratique. Le spectacle effroyable des guerres de
religion l'a convaincu des résultats catastrophiques de l'ignorance: ceux
qui troublent "l'ordre public" et qui "s'émancipent à telles choses, le font
par défaut de bonne nourriture" (p. 157). L'éducation dans des académies
"écuméniques" aurait donc servi à mettre fin aux désordres et à arrêter la
destruction de la noblesse."*^
Mais en même temps "l'institution à pieté & vertu" (p. 142) lui paraît
nécessaire si le noble doit réaliser pleinement toutes ses virtualités. Cette
insistance sur l'épanouissement moral, spirituel et intellectuel de l'homme
laïc - impliquant même la contemplation et la méditation - est à mettre en
rapport avec le principe réformé du sacerdoce universel: le père, "prêtre"
chez lui, doit être capable de lire l'Ecriture, de l'enseigner à ses enfants,
d'en tirer des leçons et d'agir en conséquence. L'union avec la Divinité est
non pas un droit, mais un devoir fondamental de tout être humain, notam-
ment du noble, né avec "des inclinations plus vives & ployables que les
autres. ... à quoy leur condition noble les doit aussi exhorter" (pp. 595-
96). L'on voit donc comment religion et conscience de classe se renforcent.
La Noue préconise ainsi la formation de cadres laïcs dignes de diriger
le royaume.
L'on comprend facilement la nécessité de bien former la faculté du juge-

ment. La vie de La Noue confirme que le noble est confronté à des choix
épineux: la nature de l'engagement du sujet dans la vie de la république; la
définition d'une guerre "juste"; les limites acceptables de la force et de la
violence; le devoir de refuser d'obéir à des ordres injustes; les alliances

politiques "impures," etc. La religion de La Noue n'exige pas la démission
intellectuelle ou la croyance aveugle des pasteurs de La Rochelle. Ses Dis-
cours et ses Observations veulent aider le noble à aiguiser ses facultés de
discernement: "Cela est apprendre à estre capitaine. ... à fin que ceux qui
veulent s'instruire aux armes en tirent ce fruict. . . . Quand quelque fait est
descrit à la vérité, & avec ses circonstances, encore qu'il ne soit parvenu
qu'à my chemin, si peut-on tousjours en tirer du fruict" (pp. 66 1 , 724,
736), etc. Son oeuvre et sa vie constituent un modèle vivant de cette
pédagogie nouvelle visant à assurer la survie et l'épanouissement de la
noblesse d'épée: "La jeunesse ayant esté ainsi instituée, il ne faudroit point
craindre de l'envoyer après par tout où l'on voudroit, par ce qu'elle seroit à
l'espreuve, & au lieu de se gaster, elle iroit choisissant ce qui est de meilleur
ailleurs, pour y profiter" (p. 158). Que peut-on dire de ses projets, de sa
vision de l'avenir de la noblesse?
Si La Noue a bien compris la nécessité de réformes profondes au sein du

Second Ordre, il ne pouvait pas concevoir la domestication de l'aristo-
cratie accomplie au cours du XVIIe siècle. Tandis que son désir de fournir
à la noblesse d'épée un nouveau type de formation intellectuelle représente
une percée vers la modernité, son espoir de voir se renforcer l'harmonie
entre une noblesse plus "reconnaissante" et la monarchie paraît naïf. Mais
qui aurait pu prévoir que les processus de "raffinement" impliquerait aussi
l'apprivoisement intellectuel, moral et même financier du Second Ordre?
Sa conception patemaUste de la monarchie ("Le prince ... est père

conmiun de ses sujets," p. 152) l'empêche de concevoir qu'un père puisse
chercher à restreindre l'épanouissement de ses "fils." Il faut dire en même
temps que La Noue a sous-estimé la rôle qu'allait jouer le Tiers Etat dans
cette nouvelle société. Son progranmie préconise la reprise en main des
fonctions clés de l'Etat par ceux dont les ancêtres, "estans parvenus à
grandeur & honneur, par les voyes de vertu tant intellectuelle que morale,
. . . leur ont laissé des petites semences d'icelles . . . aptes à les renouveller
en eux" (p. 595), etc. Mais l'évolution historique n'a pas exaucé ses voeux:
il se serait certainement réjoui de voir l'aristocratie raffinée du XVIIe
siècle; il se serait sans doute étonné de constater jusqu'à quel point elle
s'était soumise à la monarchie et s'était adonnée au "libertinisme"
dénoncé dans le discours XXIV.
Terminons donc en souHgnant encore la richesse et la diversité de

l'oeuvre de La Noue. On a vu que l'histoire littéraire a relégué notre auteur
au rang des "chroniqueurs" ou des "mémoriaUstes," destin qui n'est pas
dépourvu d'honneur mais qui ne rend pas justice au Bras de Fer. S'il est
indéniable que le contenu des "Observations" explique ce jugment de la
critique, La Noue dépasse de loin les Montluc, les Castelnau, les Bamaud,
etc. Ce sont tous des témoins qui, en tant que tels, ont joué un rôle indis-
pensable dans la compréhension de l'histoire du seizième siècle. Mais ces

témoins s'avèrent souvent bornés et intéressés, cherchant à se vanter ou à
justifier leurs méfaits. Sans vouloir nier que La Noue cherche à se justifier
- "Il estoit tres-necessaire alors ... de lever les mauvaises impressions qui
se pouvoyent prendre par ceux qui ignoroyent les intentions des entrepre-
neurs. . . . Qui ne rembarre les calomnies . . . sans doute il se verroit sou-
vent supprimé," p. 622 - nous soutenons que ce n'est pas là l'essentiel.
Tout en étant un témoin objectif et digne de foi, La Noue est avant tout
un penseur, un moraliste qui cherche à renvoyer ses lecteurs à des valeurs
atemporelles: le vécu et l'immédiat doivent toujours être transcendés et
déboucher sur l'abstrait, l'universel et l'étemel. Que ce soit dans ses
"mémoires" ou dans ses "opuscules," l'auteur s'efforce de dépasser
l'éphémère en avertissant le lecteur de l'existence d'autre chose, d'une
leçon générale à en tirer. Tout fait concret débouchant ainsi sur l'universel,
le lecteur se voit doublement récompensé de ses efforts. C'est cet aspect de
son oeuvre qui l'élève au-dessus aussi bien des mémorialistes que des
polémistes déchaînés dont l'oeuvre était destinée à la "consommation"
immédiate. Ainsi les véritables confrères de La Noue se nomment-ils
Machiavel, Plutarque, Guichardin, Montaigne, Charron, Pascal.
Cette constatation nous mène à poser une question paradoxale: faut-il

regretter que La Noue n'ait pas eu le temps de se consacrer à la réflexion et à
l'écriture? D'une part, il peut paraître regrettable que ses campagnes mili-
taires incessantes ne lui aient pas laissé le loisir de s'adonner aux activités
intellectuelles. La suite des "Observations," par exemple, serait sans
aucim doute un document des plus précieux. Ses années de captivité ont été
"utiles" dans la mesure où elles lui ont offert une période de temps "libre"
pendant laquelle son âme était "desliee des ceps & liens mondains" (p. 598).
C'est précisément ce mélange d'action et de réflexion chez La Noue qui fait
le caractère unique du personnage etde l'oeuvre, c'est son engagement per-
sonnel qui justifie son oeuvre. Ses idées ne sont pas seulement abstraites mais
sont en prise sur le réel et l'action. Il se compare lui-même à Saint Augus-
tin, qui "a approuvé du tout ceste bien ordonnée composition" de vie active
et de vie contemplative, aussi bien qu'à saint Paul, qui "avec ses hautes &
profondes speculations n'a point laissé d'estre en action perpétuelle pour
l'édification de l'Eglise" (ibid.). C'est dans ce désir maintes fois exprimé
de réaliser une synthèse entre le spirituel et le matériel, le divin et l'humain
que réside la "noblesse" de La Noue. Il a cru pouvoir aider la classe
dirigeante du royaume de France à atteindre cet idéal à travers son exemple
personnel, par son engagement actif et par ses écrits. Il a contribué de la
sorte au progrès intellectuel de la noblesse française, ainsi qu'à la "défense
et illustration" de l'Eglise Réformée, et ce avec la plume d'un authentique
écrivain dont la prose à enrichi la langue française du XVIe siècle.
University of Oklahoma
Notes
1 Le lecteur trouvera des renseignements sur la vie de La Noue dans Brantôme, Œu vres, éd. Ludovic
Lalanne (Paris: J. Renouard, 1873), VII: 203-65; dans Moïse Amyraut, La vie de François,
seigneur de la Noue, dit Bras-de-Fer (Leyde: Jean Elsevier, 1661); et dans Henri Hauser,
François de La Noue (Paris: Hachette, 1 892). Ce sont des témoignages de valeur inégale: si Bran-
tôme laisse échapper son sentiment de jalousie à l'égard de La Noue, Amyraut ne résiste pas à la
tentation hagiographique. C'est donc l'étude de Hauser qui s'avérera la plus utile.
2 François de La Noue, Discours politiques et militaires, éd. Frank E. Sutcliffe (Genève: Droz,
1967). Toutes les citations seront tirées de cette édition et apparaîtront dans notre texte. Comme le
professeur Sutcliffe n'a pas précisé les principes dont il s'est servi pour établir son texte, nous avons
comparé l'édition de 1967 àcellede 1587 ([Bale ou Genève]: François Forest, 15 87; Bibliothèque
Nationale R. 6332). Lorsqu'il ne s'agit que de variantes d'orthographe qui ne mettent pas en cause
le sens du texte, nous ne nous sommes pas cru obUgé de les signaler au lecteur, afin de ne pas
encombrer inutilement notre étude.
3 Parmi les travaux récents consacrés à La Noue, on peut citer: William H. Huseman, "François de
La Noue, la dignité de l'homme et l'institution des enfant nobles: contribution à l'étude de
l'humanisme protestant". Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 42 (1980), 7-25; lan
Morrison, "The Dignity of Man and the Followers of Epicurus: The View of the Huguenot
François de La Noue," BHR 37 (1975), 421-29; Paul Rousset, "Un huguenot propose une
croisade: le projet de François de La Noue, 1 5 80- 1585," Revue d 'Histoire Ecclésiastique Suisse
72 (1978), 333-44; "L'idéologie de croisade dans les guerres de religion au XVIe sïécXt," Revue
Suisse d'Histoire 31(1981),! 74-84; James Supple, "François de La Noue's Plan for a Campaign
Against the Turks,"5i/i? 41(1 979), 273-9 1 ; "The Role of François de La Noue in the Siege of La
Rochelle and the Protestant Alliance with ihQ Mécontents, "BHR 43 (1981), 107-22; et "Fran-
çois de La Noue and the Education of the French Noblesse d'épée, "French Studies 36 (1982),
270-81.
Parmi les chercheurs qui citent longuement La Noue, on peut mentionner André Devyver, Le
sang épuré. Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l'Ancien Régime (Bruxelles:
Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1 973); Ariette Jouanna, L 'idée de race en France au XVIe
et au début du XVHe siècle (1498-1614), (Paris: Champion, 1976); Miriam Yardeni, La con-
science nationale en Francependant les guerres de religion (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1971); Roger
Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compère, et Dominique JvAisi, L'éducation en France du XVIe au
XVIIIe siècle (Pans: SEDES, l916),etRenéBady,L'hommeetson "institution" de Montaigne
à Bérulle, 1580-1625 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964).
4 Montaigne, Essais, éd. Pierre Villey (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922), II: 448 ("De la présomp-
tion." II, 17).
5 Jacques Lelong, Bibliothèque historique de la France (Paris: Jean-Thomas Hérissant), II: 339.
Lelong cite le père Gabriel Daniel, Histoire de France depuis l'establissement de la monarchie
françoise dans les Gaules (Paris: J.-B. Delespine, 1713), III: 1531.
6 Hauser, p. 274.
7 Ibid., xvii.
8 Ibid., xvii-xviii.
9 Lucien Romier, Le royaume de Catherine de Médicis. La France à la veille des guerres de

religion (Paris: Perrin, 1925), I: x.
10 H.-J. Messines, Protestants et Français (Paris: s. éd., [ 1 899]), pp. 3, 8. Cet ouvrage sans valeur
"scientifique" s'avère néanmoins extrêmement utile dans la mesure où il exprime l'inquiétude pro-
fonde de la communauté protestante.
1 1 Jean Bauberot. "La vision de la Réforme chez les publicistes antiprotestants (fin XIXe-début
XXe)," inHistoriographie de la Réforme, éd. Ph. Joutard, Actes du colloque du 22-24 septembre
1972 (Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1977), p. 216. La revue Histoire a consacré un
numéro aux protestants fi-ançais: janvier-mars 1981, n*» 7.
12 Ibid., "Avant-propos" de P. Guiral, p. 5; cf. Messines, p. 5.
13 Messines, p. 3.
14 F. Brunetière, Lej ennemis de l'âme française (Paris: J. Hetzel, s.d.), pp. 55-74; Ch. BueU Les
mensonges de l'histoire (Lille: J. Lefoit, 1885-1889), I, 53-195; II, 143-86; 209-75; Edouard
Drumont, La France juive (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1886); Ch. Merki, L'Amiral de
Coligny, la maison de Chàtillon et la révolte protestante, 1519-1572 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit,
1 909); E. KenanXd, Le péril protestant (Paris: Tolra, 1 899); et Georges 'UÀéhsAxé^Le parti protes-
tant (Paris: A. Savine, 1895).
15 Messines, p. 4.
16 Ibid., p. 13.
17 Ibid., p. 23.
18 Ibid., pp. 25-32.
19 Daniel Robert, "Patriotisme et image de la Réforme chez les historiens protestants français après
1870," in Joutard, p. 207. Voir aussi un article typique de N. Weiss, "La prétendue trahison de
Coligny," BSHPF 49 ( 1 900), 31-41, ou les Actes du colloque Les protestants dans les débuts de
la Troisième République (1871-1855), éd. André Encrevé et Michel Richard (Paris: Société de
l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 1 979).
20 Robert, p. 215.
21 Bauberot, p. 222.
22 Denis D' Aussy, "Un Bayard calviniste: François de La Noue et ses dernières campagnes,"/{evue
des Questions Historiques 42 (octobre 1 887), 397-440. L'on peut consulter aussi ses articles dans
laRevue de la Saintonge et de l'Aunis, 8 (juillet 1 888), 280-83 et 8 (septembre 1 888), 331-33; et
1 3 Ganvier 1 893), 22-34. N. Weiss lui a répondu dans le 55//PF 36 ( 1 887), 667-78 et 37 ( 1 888),
335-36, 388-89. Hauser a défendu l'auûienticité des Discours dans la Revue Historique 53
(septembre-octobre 1893), 301-11.
23 Pierre de Dampmartin, La Fortune de la Cour (Paris: Nicolas de Sercy, 1644), p. 173.
24 La coppie d'une lettre envoyée par un gentilhomme, de l'armée de Monseigneur le Duc de

Mayenne, aux Bourgeois & habitans de la Ville & Faubourgs de Paris (Paris: Pour Anthoine du
Brueil, 1589),pp.4-5.
25 "Discours bref et véritable des choses plus notables arrivées au siège mémorable de la renommée
ville de Paris & défense d'icelle," in Mémoires de la Ligue (Amsterdam: Arkstée & Merkus,
1758), IV: 282.
26 Pierre Brisson, Histoire et vray discours des guerres civilles es pays de Poictou, Aulnis, autrement
dit Rochelois. Xainctonge, & Angoumois depuis l'année mil cinq cens soixante & quatorze
(Paris: lacques du Puy, 1578), f. Avi verso.
27 Ibid., f. Cvii recto.
28 La Popelinière, Henri Voisin, sieur de. Histoire de France (La Rochelle: Abraham H., 1581),
tome second, livre 24, f. 5 recto.
29 Bentivoglio, Guido, Cardinal. Histoire générale des guerres de Flandres, trad. Antoine Oudin
(Paris: François Promé, 1699), tome I, livre vi, p. 323.
30 La Popelinière, tome second, livre 32, f. 118 verso.
31 Emanuel van Meteren, L'histoire des Pays-Bas, trad. Jean de La Haye (La Haye: Hillebrant
Jacobs, 1618), f. 156d (14 juillet 1578).
32 Calendars, avril 1579, n° 668, p. 501; 10 mai 1579, n° 675, p. 507; 5 octobre 1579, n» 59, p. 68;
22 novembre 1579, n° 96, p. 98.
33 Alexandre Famèse, prince de Parme, Correspondance. . . dans les années 1578, 1579, 1580 et
1581, éd. M. Gachard (Bruxelles: C. Muquardt, 1853), p. 112.
34 De Thou, Histoire universelle (La Haye: Scheurleer, 1740), tome quatre, Uvre 42, p. 18.
35 La résistance des habitans de la ville de Meaux, contre les trouppes de Givry, & la Noué, & leurs
associez politiques (Paris: Hubert Velu, 1 5 89), p. 7. Palma-Cayet rapporte le conseil suivant qu'a
donné La Noue à Henri IV: "Nous y perdrions temps et moyens, mais peu à peu, usant des ouver-
tures que je feray , vous verrez que ce grand party se dissipera en soy-mesmes, et nous donnera beau
jeu sans beaucoup travailler; mais il faut de la patience et de la finesse" (Chronologie novenaire,
éd. Petitot (Paris: Foucault, 1824), XXXIX: 329. C'est nous qui soulignons.)
36 De Thou, tome quatre, livre 47, p. 316.
37 Ibid., p. 321.
38 Pierre de UEstoileyJoumal pour le règne de Henri IV, 1589-1600, éd. Louis-Raymond Lefèvre
(Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 72 (août 1590).
39 Nicolas Bamaud, Le réveille-matin des François, et de leurs voisins. Composé par Eusèbe
Philadelphe Cosmopolite, en forme de dialogues. (Edimbourg: laques lames, 1574), II: 132.
40 Montaigne, II: 448.
41 Cf. La Noue, Déclaration, p. 3: "Le devoir d'un gentilhonmie faisant profession de vertu, gist en
premier lieu, à si bien preparer & digérer ses actions, qu'il en reçoive contentement en soy mesme.
Il doit après les faire reluire & les iustifier en sorte, que les bons soient satisfaits, & les mauvais
n'ayent suiect de les condenmer."
Palma-Cayet (XL: 292) raconte que, vers la fin de sa vie, La Noue a coupé "deux petites
branches de laurier," et "ayant amenuisé l'une de ces branches, il la mit à son armet au lieu de pan-
nache." En voyant entrer le sieur de Montmartin, "il luy monstra son armet entouré de lauriers, et
luy dit: "Tenez, mon cousin, voylà toute la recompense que vous et moy espérons, suivans le mes-
tier que nous faisons."
42 Voir son article "François de La Noue et la conversion du roy," Revue Historique 36 (mars-avril
1888), 311-23.
43 Voir les études de Huseman, de Morrison, de Supple, de Jouanna, et de Bady citées dans la note 3
ci-dessus.
The Essay as a Moral Exercise: Montaigne'

JOHN O'NEILL
In the Essays^ Montaigne achieved a unique conformity between the

literary exercises of reading and writing and an order of interiority that
enabled him to lend himself to the world and to others without loss, but also
without either moral idealism or scepticism.^ The literary unity of the
Essays, although not as apparent as the integrity of the moral maxims that
first figurate them, emerges gradually in the self-portrait of the reader/
writer doubly reflected in Montaigne's own practices and their embodied
demands upon the reader's response to the Essays:
La gentille inscription dequoy les Athéniens honorèrent la venue de Pompeius

en leur ville, se conforme à mon sens:
D'autant es tu Dieu comme
Tu te recognois homme.
C'est une absolue perfection, et comme divine, de sçavoyr jouyr loiallement de
son estre. Nous cherchons d'autres conditions, pour n'entendre l'usage des
nostres, et sortons hors de nous, pour sçavoir quel il y fait. Si, avons nous beau
monter sur des eschasses, car sur des eschasses encores faut-il marcher de nos
jambes. Et au plus eslevé throne du monde, si ne sommes assis que sus
nostre cul.
(IILxiii, 1096)
If we propose to speak of the Essays as a moral exercise, we do so only in

order to follow Montaigne's deconstruction of the ethical portrait, the
moral or maxim forced to stand frozen in time like Cato, attracting an
admiration deprived of self- inquiry.
What Montaigne exercises in the Essays is himself as a writer, that is to

say, he explores his strengths and weaknesses as an essayist rather than as
an abstractly moral figure. This exploration begins in the very early and -
as he himself remarks - rather dependent essays that trade upon the moral
maxims and exempla of antiquity. The exemplum condenses a moral
deed, posture or maxim into a moment that lays a claim upon universal
attention. The exemplum furnishes the mind with places where it may
* Paper presented at the Colloquium on literature and Moral Philosophy, Centre for Comparative
Literature. University of Toronto, Victoria College, April 14-17, 1983.
contemplate man's capacity for moral strength or weakness, probity or

turpitude. Thus the exemplum punctuates its surrounding text, creating a
monumental place that gathers to itself moral reflection with the aim of
sending away a more resolute moral agent. As a rhetorical device its
danger is that it may lure us into a merely echoing morality that will not
stand up in the time and altered circumstances of our own trial.
Montaigne seems to have sensed from the very beginning that the
Essays could not be built upon the footings of the exemplum . Indeed, to the
extent that they appear only to be a collection of such maxims, the Essays
have been pillaged, like the Parthenon, to service those anthologies, gar-
lands and museums of the mind, that display an easy spirituality. If the
Essays lacked any stronger principle of composition, then, of course, they
would not have withstood the ravages of time, and they would even have
been lucky to survive as fragments in our cultural museum. But then we
should also have lost the author ofthe Essays . Or rather, Montaigne would
have lost himself through his inabiUty to improvise that form of ethical
inquiry that underwrites the Essays as a text that cannot be gathered into a
garland of moral maxims, nor into an anthology without an author who will
claim it as his own body.
The things that stand the test of time, morally speaking, do so by yielding
to time rather than by declaring themselves as eternal archetypes. Such
archetypes are indeed nothing but the dead stones of history, always ruined
by time, surviving fortuitously or by a bricolage indifferent to their original
status. The solidity of the exemplum collapses in virtue of its pretended
extra-textuality, its inability to withstand the essayist's amplification of
history elsewhere and otherwise brought to similar ends. Montaigne's pro-
liferation of exempla destabilizes them, turning certainty into uncertainty,
decisiveness into undecidability. The result is that the textual closure
aimed at by the moral maxim or paradigm is subverted in the continuous
disclosure ofthe essayist's triumph over the book of received opinion. A
weak intertextuality, trading upon the voices ofthe past, is replaced by the
strong intertextuality of the essay form as an exercise in moral inquiry,
judgment and self-appreciation.
Montaigne's method of counterposing to an exemplary moral claim

everything that can be said to challenge it rescues ethical argument from
both idealism and empiricism. In the course of Montaigne's reading and
writing, the space of ethical inquiry is displaced into the essay's explora-
tion of ethicaJ ideals and customary moral behaviour. Between them the
writer and the reader articulate the essay in a mode of self-inquiry that pro-
gresses through the essayist's ability to so suspend the moral alternatives
upon which a given essay turns that none rules the text as a foregone
conclusion.
In "Of Cannibals," for example, Montaigne proceeds very gradually to
subvert the cultural boundary between civilization and barbarism. The

revolving distinctions of the essay drive the reader to redistribute his own
critical sense of boundaries as a rude practice that only writing/reading the
essay can redeem. By combining civilized reportage with the testimony of
his own experience, including that of certain plain savages without any
motive to embellish their stories, Montaigne reappropriates the boundary
between civilization and barbarism as a textual locus. ^ Thus the essay
itself becomes the proper moral space within which the reader can confront
the other as himself and himself as other, relativising the very grounds of
morality (reason, information, fidelity) to the essayist's ethic. Through the
detour of the naked and the familiar, the essayist Hke a noble savage
delivers the unadorned truth of the spoken body, undivided and faithful.
The open form of Montaigne's Essays is the result not of his irresolute
nature nor of his failure to embrace logic and closure. It is a shaping instru-
ment of the writer's determination to dwell within the rhythms of his
embodied experience. Thus particular essays drift and vary like Mon-
taigne's own moods, occupying him for a longer or shorter period, and
often returning upon him, as we see from the triple levels of the text and its
innumerable internal revisions. Montaigne's usage of temporal markers
and disjunctive adverbs is an especially significant artifact m the essayist's
successful subversion of the exemplary text into 2i self-text. And the places
where he succeeds in intertwining his own lived experience with an insti-
tutionalized history of morals are similarly marked by subtle shifts from
first to third person usage. Thus, having recalled the advice of Epicurus,
"Conceal your life," Montaigne himself remarks:
Ces discours là sont infiniment vrais, à mon avis, et raisonnables. Mais nous
sommes, je ne sçay comment, doubles en nous mesmes, qui faict que ce que
nous croyons, nous ne le croyons pas, et ne nous pouvons deffaire de ce que
nous condamnons.
(II:xvi, 603)
The cumulative effect of these distinctive devices is to breed a conversa-

tion between Montaigne and his reader in which the text is indifferent to
any tendency to mastery or slavery. Rather, the essay solicits a ftiend, one
equal in judgment and abiHty, less likely to be dominated by words, myths
and received opinion for having embraced the essayist.
In the essay form Montaigne discovered a field in which the embodied

self conXd test itself against its written self as in conversation or in love.*
The particular mode in which he devised this contrastive play of selves is to
be seen in his typically disjunctive departures from the mould of received
sayings, opinions and customs - forcing the text to speak in Montaigne's
voice:
Je propose les fantaisies humaines et miennes, simplement comme humaines

fantaisies, et séparément considérées, non comme arrestees et réglées par l'or-
donnance celeste, incapables de doubte et d'altercation; matière d'opinion,
non matière de foy; ce que je discours selon moy , non ce que je croy selon Dieu,
comme les enfans proposent leurs essais; instruisables, non instruisants; d'une
manière laïque, non cléricale, mais très- religieuse tousjours.
(I:lvi, 308-309)
Such a passage can be repeated time and again. What happens in them is
that, in weighing himself against himself, the essayist pits the reader
against himself in a game of doubles, as it were. Like a tennis player, the
capable reader whom Montaigne required of himself in order to become a
writer is simultaneously doubled in any lecteur suffisant of the Essays.
Any particular essay, therefore, can be shown to put the reader/writer rela-
tion into play over its sense, its language, or its very title. But these are not
exercises in any general scepticism. They are rather valorisations of read-
ing and writing, weighed in the scale of a nonchalant and learned ignorance
that subverts the anxieties of intertextuality with the consubstantiality of
the self-text.
The composition of the self-text involves the steady re-assimilation of

the self-absorbing or impersonal voice of the essayist who starts by subor-
dinating himself to a narrative seemingly ruled by received opinion. But
each exemplary text soon becomes a pretext whose received authority,
once placed in the balance of the essay and weighed in the essayist's own
judgment of it, is re-assessed in the opinion of the universal subject -
Michel de Montaigne:
Les autheurs se communiquent au peuple par quelque marque particulière et

estrangere; moy, le premier, par estre universel, comme Michel de Montaigne,
non comme grammairien, ou poëte, ou jurisconsulte. Si le monde se plaint de
quoy je parle trop de moy, je me plains de quoy il ne pense seulement pas
àsoy.
(III:ii, 782-783)
Internai to the composition of the essay, we frequently find that Montaigne

succeeds in subverting received opinion by shifting the epistemological
question of truth or falsity into the moral question of freedom versus
slavery.^ Thus the question, "is death something or no-thing (to be
feared)?," is transposed into the question, "How are we to free ourselves
from the fear of death, how are we to make of it an understanding that
is our own?":
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non
sperabitur hora.
Il est incertain où la mort nous attende, attendons la partout. La premeditation

de la mort est premeditation de la liberté. Qui a appris à mourir, il a desapris à
servir. La sçavoir mourir nous afranchit de toute subjection et contrainte.
(Lxx, 85)
The effect of this substitution is to reject the tyranny of death and to make of
it a friend encountered daily in a premeditated liberty, yet not morbidly.
It is especially in "Du Repentir" that the essay reveals its peculiar ftill-
ness as a moral exercise. We ordinarily consider it the task of ethics to
define the ideal criteria of a good man whose premeditated form is and
ought to be imposed upon the tendency of his senses to scatter and seduce
him. Yet Montaigne forswears any such practice of forming man. He
argues that, on the contrary, it is in this way that we are mal- and mis-
informed. Those who submit to such formation, so far from being self-
directed, though less likely to be moved from the outside, remain without
internal control, as they know if they at all dare to inspect themselves. By
contrast, those like Montaigne, who are apt to lend themselves to the out-
side, do so without betraying their interior freedom. This reversal of the
forms of passage and movement, of stability and being, achieved in so
many of the essays, realizes Montaigne's unrepentant claim upon the
universal condition of man through his own individual and incorrigible
experience of himself:
Je propose une vie basse et sans lustre, c'est tout un. On attache aussi bien
toute la philosophie moral à une vie populaire et privée que à une vie de plus
riche estoffe; chaque homme porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition.
(III:ii,782)
Thronôutthe Essays Montaigne is engaged against the scholastic pre-

sumption of linguistic mastery of truth and being given in a fixed code of
rubrics and set definitions. He opposes vehemently the humanist conceit of
a transcendental language imposing its rationalist classifications upon a
degraded order of experience, despite the fact that this is the level upon
which most of us live out the history and geography of our lives:
Nous sommes nés pour agir:
Cum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.
Je veux qu'on agisse, et qu'on allonge les offices de la vie tant qu'on peut, et
que la mort me treuve plantant mes chous, mais nonchalant d'elle, et encore
plus de mon jardin imparfait.
(I:xx, 87)
As he says, Montaigne needed a language in which lived experience

could find expression without being subordinated or reduced to levels of
abstraction and/or formalized usage that bleed the life from it, separating
the writer's body from his soul in the name of a fancied transcendance of
philosophy and literature. For this reason, Montaigne side-steps the
rhetorical arts of memory in favour of the paper paths of the Essays,
forever side-tracked into tiiose places where the writer finds himself, pro-
vided he leaves the royal road of scholastic and set rhetorical reasoning.
Once off the high road of the exemplum and free from the weight of the
literary tradition, the poor essayist becomes his own rich resource.
Simultaneously, however, he restores his wandering, weak-memoried self
with the abundant improvisation of the Essays, thereby revealing the
poverty of the literary tradition that might have prevented them. The
essayist is then free to shape his formless self, which would otherwise
forever escape him in philosophical and literary generalities more decep-
tive than the phantasies with which he was beseiged before he resolved to
become a writer. In other words, so far from losing himself to the world as
an essayist, Montaigne discovers in the field of writing the one place where
his self can come into the world. But the Essays do not give us Montaigne
simply because he wrote about himself in them in all honesty and sincerity
and as modestly as he conducted his life outside of them. This would ignore
the surplus effect of writing, the pleasure of the text, towards which the
writer must also assume a posture whether of modesty or presumption.
Thus we find Montaigne re-embedding his literary self in the spoken body,
in that bottom nature each of us discovers who listens to his body,
especially where the body opens onto language - as in love and poetry. The
wild ways of the Essays are not merely diversions and digressions from the
via regiae of the book or scholastic treatise. We know that Montaigne
prided himself upon a certain poetic dispossession, a fortunate find opened
up in the wake of writing to which the essayist trusted himself and his
thoughts - not without vanity. It is in this sense that we must regard Mon-
taigne's practice of decentering his text, marginalizing its monumental
beginnings, floating everything in search of that supervenient grace
achieved through abandoning the fixed architecture of the book for the free
form of the essay. Thus the Essays are consciously an element of universal
folly, inseparable from the political madness of their day and at once an
element of moral stability, enduring the ravages of time like Rome, like the
Chateau de Montaigne, and like themselves - through a nonchalant neglect
that adds more to their survival than any plan.
If Montaigne concentrates upon himself, it is with a steady attachment

to his friend La Boétie, to his family and to his city, and to the voices from
the past with whom he conversed in his library. He considered himself a
small note in the collective and largely anonymous history of mankind, of
which literature and art yield us only a fractured sounding. What is ethical
in Montaigne is not his scepticism or his relativism. It is rather his ability to
hold life's attachments at a distance in order to consider how it is we are
nevertheless beholden to everything and everyone around us. Montaigne is

not an idle subjectivist, sunk in fantasy or carried away by endless imagin-
ary projects. He knew himself to be among the most variable of spirits,
most changeable in his moods, irresolute and without method in the dis-
charge of his affairs. For all this, the Essays are not a series of vile con-
fessions, even though they insist upon self-observation and inquiry.
Rather, they 'rebound' from everything that oppresses the mind and the
body, whether through the negation of positivity or an affirmation in place
of negativity, always ruled, of course, by Montaigne's experience with
things and himself. The Essays, then, are Montaigne's happy credo - into
which he could pour himself, while simultaneously standing at a Sunday
distance from them. They accumulate from a working pleasure in reading
and writing and from the prospective joy of finding a reader capable of
exercising his own literary competence with the Essays as a continuous
bodily inscription. Such pleasure lies outside any literary organization.
Hence Montaigne's topics and titles in the Essays serve only as strategies
of pleasure, in taking a page from a book or a poem in order to go on writing
yet another book or a poem and to continue reading still more books and
poems.^ And so the Essays find readers who find other readers like friends
seeking one another. By word of mouth.
Montaigne employed paradox and a visceral style that awakens the

reader's instincts, or his bodily ties to language and community. The effect
is that the author and reader enjoy a mutual incarnation pleasured by the
text. The Essays shift from the impersonal to the personal voice, from the
past to the present, from obiter dicta to the testimony of Montaigne's own
eyes, ears and body, and by means of these shifts he heightens the literary
company between himself and his reader. By requiring of him his own
literary competence, the Essays exercise the reader, and do not simply
subordinate him before an exaltation of literary language. Montaigne's
style is therefore essential to the liberty of discourse and friendship that
excludes tyranny. It requires, too, the solitude represented by his library
tower. There he fostered the silence that permits men to choose their
words. By contrast, the tyrant - at times played by the literary critic - mon-
opolizes talk, fearing the liberty of discussion, or else he subordinates the
arts to his pleasure, denying them any more serious revelation. Hence
Montaigne's conceits, paradoxes, humour and self-parody. Hence, also,
his insistence upon the publication of his private thoughts, since thoughts
without hope of a public cannot be free. For the same reasons, the Essays
take their time, walk when they want to, and run when they like, always free
to turn to any side that attracts their author, yet never losing themselves for
want of their own direction.
Together, Montaigne's love of textuality, i.e., the institution of reading

and writing, and his concept of the classical institution of the friendship in
which the Essays were composed, require that we reject any argument that
they are the work of a dependent imagination without any other life, depth
or movement than the reflecting mirror or La Boétie and the hterary past
that surrounded Montaigne.^
I am, of course, invoking the moral sense of friendship that is the result of
Montaigne's very essay of that notion, as well as how he lived his love for
La Boétie. Montaigne's concept of friendship places it above all other
moral relationships. It is not an addition to Montaigne's life, nor does it
subtract from what he might have owed himself. In friendship, as in essay
writing, Montaigne doubled himself. Friendship opened him to himself as
the^^â;^^ opened him to Michel de Montaigne. In both he gathered him-
self as the bee gathers its life from the flowers that otherwise give no honey.
In reading and writing on his beloved historians and poets he enlarged and
gave back to the world the book of himself. For he knew full well that the
mirror of Narcissus can only be avoided through the mediation of other
minds, in the amplification of discourse and intertextuality . Like Petrarch,
Montaigne was faithful to his ancient authors in order rightfully to add him-
self to them, in a graft of humanity more enduring than the water image
of Narcissus.
Thus friendship is a figure of the reader's freedom which the writer

knows cannot be constrained by logic, any more than a lover's discourse
can constrain the meaning of the love declared through him.* Rather,
reader and writer are floated upon one another, like friends and lovers
whose talk amplifies their sensory lives, intertwining them with threads
they weave about themselves. In such reverberation there can be no false
note, though there may be suffering. A false note is struck once only in the
music of friendship and love: when mastery or servitude is heard. Then the
doubled unity of love and friendship separates or succumbs to tyranny.'
The Essays pursue to the very end their own disequilibrium, upsetting
the maxims and monuments of morality upon which we are tempted to fix-
ate our lives. Thus by subverting the great lists of history , Montaigne could
introduce the history of ordinary everyday living in the great innovation of
ihe Essays as an Ethics. To make this eUiical departure, Montaigne had
simultaneously to subvert the plenitudes of classical morahty in the play of
writing and, specifically, in the essayist's quest for freedom from form. Yet
the Essays do not simply catch the wind of writmg's vanity. On the con-
trary, there supervenes upon the essayist's practice a discovering aware-
ness of the moral composition of textuality and selfhood m the acquisition
of that spoken body which is Montaigne's self-portrait.
The Essays never betray the carnal ambiguity of man's relation to him-
self, to his reason, his senses, his body and his language. In each case, man
must avoid the wilful pursuit of absolute distinctions, of complete certainty
and clarity, since these beUe his own mixed composition. In exchange for
foregoing such transcendental excesses, there opened up to the essayist

that mundane presence of the literary body to the embodied self which is
the one place where the otherwise wholly metaphorical exercise of self-
study can be practised.
Thus we must locate Montaigne's bodily troubles in writing and reading,

upon which he so often remarks, as natural effects of the romance of books.
Whereas other critics have seen faults in Montaigne's methods of reading
and composition, with the purpose of displaying their own higher morality
in these matters, I am arguing that it is precisely in the way that the essayist
works that Montaigne gradually established himself as the most serious of
all writers, the one most concerned with the bodily regimen of literature
and its lively practice. Montaigne never tires of revealing his own in-
capacities, quirks, and mannerisms of thought and speech. Yet writing was
as essential to him as it was to Petrarch or to Rabelais; it was a daily under-
taking that he could no more go without than any other bodily function.
Montaigne lived the Essays, and waited upon them like the very days of his
life for the trail of meaning that life acquires only over its course, and in no
other way than at its own expense: in this respect Montaigne may finally be
compared with that incomparable artist of the self-portrait, Rembrandt.
Convinced of the impossibility of any definitive revelation, the artist and
essayist have nevertheless to avoid the traps of narcissism and relativism,
of wilful contradiction and ultimate self-defeat. Thus we see in the self-
portraits of Rembrandt and in the Essays of Montaigne the gradual
dominance of the author's look, mocking, suspicious, candid, proud,
humble and caught in the farce. But, with all the strength of natural
inquisitiveness and self-scrutiny, these portraits throw back the pain of liv-
ing, of aging and dying. In both cases, there is a gradual deepening of the
expressive potentials of the baroque, away from theatrical dispersion,
towards the inner concentration of the soul's body. In a portrait of 1648,
Rembrandt Drawing Himself by the Window,*^ we have, as in Mon-
taigne's comments upon his own activity as a writer, a subversion of the
myth of representation by means of a reflection endlessly reflected upon,
unless gathered religiously in each of us. In these two men we are face to
face with the mystery of creative work, and with its virtuosity of moving us
long after its author has left his hand upon it:
je peins principalement mes cogitations, subject informe, qui ne peut tomber

en production ouvragere. A tout peine le puis je coucher en ce corps aërée
de la voix.
(II:vi, 359)
York University
Notes
1 Oeuvres Complètes de Montaigne. Textes établis par Albert Thibaudet et Maurice Rat (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1962), See Appendix for translation of passages cited.
2Maurce Merleau-Ponty, "Reading Montaigne," pp. 198-210 in his Signs, trans. Richard C.
McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
3 Michel de Certeau, "Le lieu de l'autre Montaigne: 'Des Cannabals,' " pp. 1 87-200 inLe racisme:
mythes et sciences, sous la direction de Maurice Olender (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1981).
4 ioïaiO''iê\\\, Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Read-
ing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
5 Lawrence D. Kritzman, Destruction/Découverte: Le fonctionnement de la rhétorique dans les

Essais de Montaigne (Lexington: French Forum, Publishers, 1980).
6 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1975).
7 John O'Neill, "L'essayiste n'est pas un 'malade imaginaire,' " pp. 237-246 in Montaigne et les
Essais 1580-1980, actes de Congrès de Bordeaux (Juin 1980), Présentés par Pierre Michel
(Paris-Genève: Champion-Slatkine, 1983).
8 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1978).
9 John O'Neill, "Power and the Splitting (Spaltung) of Language," New Literary History, 14
(1983), 695-710.
10 Jean Paris, Tel qu'en lui-même il se voit, 'Rembrandt' (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1965),
p. 122.
Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus
F. Edward Cranz./l Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501-1600. Second Edi-

tion with addenda and revisions by Charles B. Schmitt Bibliotheca Bibliographica
Aureliana, XXXVIII*. Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koemer, 1984. Pp. xxiv,
247.
Compiling bibliographies of printed books in the post-incunabular era (i.e., after

1 500) is a formidable task whose difficulties can be fully appreciated only by those
who do it. While the cataloguing of incunables is well in hand, less has been done
for sixteenth-century printing because so many more books were printed in so
many different places. Moreover, sixteenth-century books are usually considered
less beautiful and less interesting historically. But one can argue that the bibli-
ography of sixteenth-century printing deserves more scholarly attention than that
of incunables because books then truly spread to all who could read. Sixteenth-
century bibliography is especially important for documenting the Renaissance in
northern Europe.
Possibly Aristotle was the most influential and often-printed ancient author in
the Renaissance; only the Roman Cicero might rival him. Aristotie continued to
be studied and interpreted, albeit sometimes in different ways than during the Mid-
dle Ages. In 1 97 1 , F. Edward Cranz published a comprehensive listing of all the
Aristotle editions appearing between 1 501 and 1 600, based on the findings of the
Index Aureliensis, about a thousand in all. It was a significant and useful book. But
the coverage of the Index Aureliensis was far from complete, because it tended to
limit itself to major northern European libraries; Italian libraries were particularly
under-represented.
Now Charles B. Schmitt, a noted scholar of Renaissance Aristotelianism, has

published a revised edition of Cranz's bibliography. This second edition reprints
Cranz's listings in the same format, but makes a number of corrections, and adds
significantly to the total. Based on visits to about 1 00 libraries in western, eastern,
and southern Europe plus the United States, Schmitt has added 430 more print-
ings of Aristotle. It is an important achievement. Although Schmitt warns in the
introduction that other editions will turn up, he speculates that 90 to 95% of the
total have now been located. This revised edition includes, as did the original, use-
ful indexes, bibliography, and adds a table of places of publication for the sixteenth
century. Paris, Lyon, and Venice printed over 60% of the total.
In his brief introduction, Schmitt makes some points worth repeating. Probably
no individual library contains more than a third of the total. The British Library of
London and the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris combined shelve about one-half
of the total. This underlines the importance of bibliographic research in numerous
libraries. One sometimes finds notable printings in obscure libraries very far from
the places of publication. Another conclusion, with which this reviewer fully con-
curs, is that, while the cataloguing of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is
important and difficult work - and is appreciated as such - producing a com-
prehensive bibliography of sixteenth-century printings on an author or subject can
be equally important and difficult - but is less recognized and appreciated. The
Cranz-Schmitt volume is a very useful one that should facilitate and encourage
further study of Renaissance AristoteHanism.
PAUL F. GRENDLER, University of Toronto
Jerry H. Bentley. Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the
Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 Pp. xiii, 245.
Ever since the time of Burckhardt, it has been an historiographical conmionplace

that Renaissance humanists displayed a radically new attitude towards the ancient
world. They venerated that world, and passionately sought to recover it as fully as
possible: they collected classical cameos and statues, studied architectural remains,
copied inscriptions, and reclaimed and circulated previously neglected texts. At
the same time, they were acutely aware of the gulf that separated them from that
world. In order to bridge that gulf and recover their beloved antiquity, both pagan
and Christian, they developed tools of philological analysis and historical
criticism - and so created modem scholarship.
Jerry Bentley illustrates this commonplace with a detailed appreciation of New

Testament scholarship in the Renaissance. Renaissance humanism, according to
Bentley, broke with the medieval tradition of biblical studies, a tradition domi-
nated by allegorical and spiritual exegesis and framed in the Aristotelian terms of
scholastic theology. "The Renaissance humanists," he says, "were determined to
set aside the medieval tradition of New Testament study and replace it with a
brand of scholarship that aimed to recover or reconstruct the assumptions, values,
and doctrines not of the Middle Ages, but of the earliest Christians" (p. 3 1 ). The
pioneer in this undertaking was Lorenzo Valla, "the first westerner since the pat-
ristic age to enjoy a thorough knowledge of Greek and to apply it extensively in his
study of the New Testament" (pp. 32-33). Valla used his knowledge of Greek and
mastery of philology to criticize and emend the Vulgate, to propose better Latin
translations of certain passages, and to attempt a sounder explanation of the literal
sense of scripture.
The second step in the progress of humanist New Testament scholarship was
taken in Spain, by a team of scholars at the university of Alcalà. This university
had been founded by the noted reformer. Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros,
and it was Ximénez who gave the impluse to the Complutensian Polyglot Bible.
He assembled a group of experts in the three biblical languages and charged them
with preparing a scholarly edition of the scriptures. The editors of the Complu-
tensian Polyglot Bible improved on Valla's methods in some ways. They recog-
nized, as he did not, that the Greek text, like the Latin, was subject to corruption,
and so it was not enough to correct the Latin to accord with the Greek. But they
employed no editorial principle consistently, following now one, then another.
Since they were generally guided by a desire to reaffirm the text of the Vulgate,
they often chose from among variant Greek readings the one that agreed with the
Vulgate. But they did not always attempt to resolve textual problems: when the six
volumes of their edition were printed between 1514 and 1517, the parallel
columns of text (Greek and Hebrew flanking the Latin in the Old Testament, Latin
and Greek side by side in the New) often preserved unreconciled differences be-
tween the two.
The culminating achievement of Renaissance New Testament scholarship was

that of Erasmus. It was Erasmus who arranged for the publication of Valla's
Adnotationes on the New Testament ( 1 505), who published the first edition of the
Greek New Testament, with a revised version of the Vulgate in parallel columns
(1516), who prepared a fresh translation of the New Testament ( 1 505- 1 506) and
printed it in place of the Vulgate in the second edition of his New Testament
(1519), and who justified his editorial decisions with an ever-growing body of
philological annotations, which by the fifth edition in 1535 filled a 783-page folio
volume. He consulted a wider range of manuscripts, both Latin and Greek, than
either Valla or the Complutensian scholars, and he treated those manuscripts with
model philological sophistication: "in several thousand notes he evaluated a vast
body of Greek and Latin textual data, considered from all angles the best Latin
representation of the Greek text, and offered explanations of the Greek text sensi-
tive to literary, historical, and philological realities" (p. 217). The result of his
efforts was a text of the Greek New Testament that remained the standard until the
nineteenth century.
As he tells this story, Bentley displays impressive erudition and an admirable

mastery of the many languages, ancient and modem, needed to study New Testa-
ment scholarship in Renaissance Italy, Spain, France, England, and the Nether-
lands. What his work lacks, unfortunately, is a breadth of historical vision
conmiensurate with its subject.
Bentley 's view of history is resolutely teleological and positivistic: his aim is to
recount the steady liberation of New Testament scholarship from its medieval
theological concerns and its irreversible progress towards the modem acme of dis-
interested scientific philology, represented here by the work of Bmce Metzger.
Bentley, accordingly, is not interested in how humanists in general approached
holy writ, but only in the efforts of those few humanists who contributed signi-
ficantly to the development of modem philology: the rest can be dismissed as
voices of "stubborn conservatism'* (p. 207; see also pp. 45, 1 10). He says little of
Giannozzo Manetti's Latin translation of the New Testament ( 1 45 5- 1 45 7 ), other
than that he "fell victim to inadequate manuscript resources" (p. 46). He dis-
misses Marsilio Ficino's conmientary on the Epistle to the Romans and John
Colet's exegesis of the Pauline epistles as being more concemed with theology
than philology (p. 9). He acknowledges that Guillaume Budé was a worthy
philologist, but judges his observations on the New Testament too sketchy to be
evaluated. He recognizes that the many works of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples cer-
tainly demonstrate the seriousness of his interest in the New Testament, but disap-
proves of Lefèvre's approach: "In one issue, one controversy, one problem after
another, he allowed his deep piety, his commitment to tradition, or his mystical
theology to override philological considerations" (p. 11).
Bentley does not seem to appreciate why it was that Lefèvre followed the dic-
tates of piety, tradition, and theology, rather than philology. He assumes that the
New Testament is a text like any other, subject to textual corruption and philologi-
cal emendation. This assumption is a perfectly reasonable one for a modem,
secular philologist - but it is totally inappropriate to expect it to be shared by a
Renaissance humanist. Again and again, even Bentley's heroes leave him feeling
puzzled or betrayed. "In his notes to the New Testament, strange to say. Valla's
attempts at the higher criticism lack the rigor and insightfulness of his efforts else-
where" (p. 47). The Complutensian editors "declined to employ their talents
except in the service of traditional Latin orthodoxy. As a result, they did not
advance understanding of the scriptures as much as they might have, had they less
timidly applied sound philological methods" (p. 97). Even Erasmus modified his
text and reconsidered his arguments in response to the criticisms of Edward Lee,
Frans Tittlemans, and Stunica - even though their criticisms "were motivated by
considerations of theology" and were not "properly philological" (pp. 202, 203).
The fact of the matter was that Valla and Erasmus, Lee and Stunica, Colet and
Lefevre all recognized that the New Testament was not a text like any other text.
They lived in an age of increasingly bitter theological controversy - controversy
that in essential ways turned on how the New Testament was to be read and
understood - and they all engaged in the theological and scriptural arguments of
their age. By ignoring this, Bentley closes himself off from the possibility of
recovering or reconstructing the assumptions, values, and doctrines of a period
whenô/a scriptura became an ideological battle cry. He turns a large and impor-
tant topic into a minor and peripheral one by sidestepping the theological issues
and working instead towards the uninspiring conclusion that his contribution to
"scholarly methods . . . was perhaps the most enduring ofall the legacies Erasmus
bequeathed to his cultural heirs" (p. 1 93). This focus on method rather than matter
extends even to the index, which lists references to biblical manuscripts but not
biblical passages. And so it is that the bold promise of the title, announcing a book
that will explore the varied ways in which devout and troubled humanists grappled
with holy writ, fades to the diminished compass of the subtitle, a monograph on
New Testament scholarship in the Renaissance.
DANIEL BORNSTEIN, University of Michigan
L
Jonathan V. Crewe. Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of

Authorship. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
1 35 pages.
Richard A. Lanham. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the

Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976. Paper.
252 pages.
Rhetoric and truth are totally and hopelessly irréconciliable systems; the problem
is solutionless. Language is always rhetoric and can never reach reality and truth,
so everything anyone ever says automatically deconstructs, and all that one can,
post-Derrida-enly, do, is to toss about some somewhat-paradoxes somewhat
denied or re-and-dis-manufactured, with some fleetingnesses of jargon (which
terms may not touch truth, by non-definition, for then they would be antkhetorical
and antidestructive and hence disloyal, not to mention self-inconsistent): such
jargon as "radical dislocation" "antiworld" "violent negativity" "power" "theat-
ricality" "radically alienated" "truly sophisticated" "demonic" etc. That range
of notions (more-or-less [and-more-or-less-elusively] desiderated) is opposed -
quite firmly and polemically and absolutely opposed, without deconstructive or
ironic reserve - to "Puritan rationalism" or "rationalistic rigor"; and opposed to
"good order"; and (mostly) opposed to "decorum."
Am I parodying Jonathan Crewe's book (and not a few others)? No. I am

paraphrasing Crewe's book, especially pages 89-90 and 1 1 , then here and there,
and drawing a few inferences. The quotations are all quotations from Crewes.
Am I irritated and bored with such doings? Well, yes, in truth, and my style
shows it. Are the irritation and boredom relevant? Well, yes, in the sense that they
are decorous, that is, proper, that is appropriate and just. But since my impressions
and responses are not infallible, assertion is insufficient. Some argument is in
order.
Crewe writes of Shakespeare, "(To what extent is the work of Shakespeare

critically accountable in terms of its responsible 'themes?' If Shakespeare is not
fully accountable in such terms, what is the nature of the unreduced excess in his
work?)" Everything not truth/theme as such is "unreduced excess." The sim-
plification of that dichotomizing is total, and any book about Shakespeare in-
stantly refutes it. There is more to talk of in Shakespeare than that. Theme
(paraphrased or simplified or deeply complicated in style and subject) connects
with other things. An elegy - which has grief for one theme - may be sad in tone.
Thus tone and theme are related, because relatable. Some excess is reducible;
some is not even excessive.
The chief principle of connection between theme and rhetoric is decorum.

Crewe dismisses decorum with rapid contempt (he needs to, to maintain his
dichotomy and deconstructing), attacking Rosemond Tuve's "rigid prescrip-
tions," but then goes on to praise, as against Tuve, the richer and more flexible
decorum in The Arte of English Poésie. Which is a fatal admission for Crewe's
case. If decorum is a rich and complex concept (as it beautifully is in the criticism
of Rosemond Tuve and in the English Renaissance), then Crewe's basic and
irréconciliable opposition between rhetoric and truth breaks down. The connec-
tions are real, complex (often in tensions); and therefore valid criticism is ( 1 ) dif-
ficult, (2) possible. Nor does decorum subsume all of the relations of instruction
and aesthetic delight. There are many connections good critics can use to see
through, with, and by.
It is not just that Crewe wrote an unfortunate parenthesizing, easily refutable.
The spirit of the paragraph is permeating. Nor is it that there are not real problems
involving the opposition of plain and figured style, or between rhetorical skill and
moral truth, or in the relation of language and reality and truth, or m the place of
metaphor(s) in discourse. Such problems exist, richly discussable and illumin-
able. (Aristotle and Wittgenstein and Max Black and quite a few others have valu-
able things to say thereon.) It is that the radical scepticism implicit in much
discourse since Nietzche's epistemological blundering, is neither necessary nor
finally defensible. Such scepticism should not be simply assumed as evident-to-
the-sophisticated.
Or reached by crude disjunction. Crewe tells us that certain critics and the
English Renaissance writers themselves, "especially Puritan ones," have sought
"a language of final order and ultimate significance." (The "Puritan" is a typical
enough move of his polemics: seeking truth is Puritan, and thus Bad and Repress-
ive), and goes on to say, "The author is always situated in a language already mis-
appropriated, duplicitous, and subject to rhetorical exploitation," adding shortly
thereafter "the mere cultural presence of rhetoric . . . 'postpones' and renders
infinitely problematical the desired outcome." Either perfection or chaos. Not
perfection; therefore chaos. So goes the implicit disjunctive argument, which is
valid, but whose first premise is false. For better and worse writing, greater and
lesser understanding, are possible, and happen. Therefore Crewe's premise fails.
There is a middle ground we often inhabit. Were it really true that language is
always and wholly "duplicitous," language would not be "duplicitous," but
"infinitous" and no sentence could ever get said, much less be understood or
misunderstood.
Crewe, in moving the only-too-familiar counters around, adds little to the real
debate and dialectic. Nor very much to the understanding and appreciation of
Nashe. He tells us, up front,' "I am using' Nashe ... to make a point." But how
can he? How can anyone not delight in Nashe? Or not be frustrated by his brilliantly
silly excesses? Nashe wrote of Gabriel Harvey, "his inuention is ouer-weapond."
Which is surely and accumulatively true of Nashe also, Nashe is great fun to read,
for a while. And has much of subtlety and pungency to say in and through his
genius and over-genius of style. Where's the puzzle? How most of all - here's the
real mystery - can anyone write of Nashe without praising highly and gladly the
few but very great lyrics for which we owe permanent love and gratitude?
One owes Richard A. Lanham scholarly gratitude for his earlier study, the lucid
Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, which, by examining specifically and generically
and cross-classifying and sorting out, is a great help to the student of rhetoric and in
the good bargain a valuable and revealing analysis of the structures and limits and
confusions in Renaissance rhetoric. His book The Motives of Eloquence could
use some of that complexity of analysis itself. Lively and wide-sweeping, it bases
ail on a simple division between "serious" man and "rhetorical" man, which bears
a near analogue to the division between truth and rhetoric of Crewe's scepticiz-
ings.
Crewe mosdy sides with the rhetorical antitruth convolutings: he tells us on

page 8 that "rhetoric as an opposing and putatively supenor principle to logic . . .
cannot seriously be defended"; on page viii that he will take "a principle of
. . . rhetoric (opposed to logic) . . . as the inalienable basis ofmy discussion." The
contradiction is even plainer in context.
Lanham sees the serious and the rhetorical, not in balance or in resolution,
because that would undo the distinction, but as vacillating randomishly through-
out and thus constituting Western intellectual history. But the distinctions are far
too simple to carry such a huge burden. Classes overlap; these 'classes', if they can
be kindly granted that name, wantonly and intricately and confusin^y overlap,
such overlap undercrumbling the scheme Lanham would market, and explain
all by.
Serious man, we are told early, has a "central self, an irreducible identity" in
relation to others and to a reahty which can be known. Clarity and sincerity are
consequently the central rhetorical goods. Rhetorical man, however, concentrates
on the word, on memory, on the skillfully garnered and maximed, on proverbial
wisdom's "decorous fit into situation." The opposition between the serious and
rhetorical is irremediable and the shifting to and fro among the twain provides
"sophisticated" history. But suppose some maxims can be true? or even false? Or
suppose some of the decorous fitting yîr^ and suppose some does not? The
philosophy instantly deconstructs and we are back among the actual and intermix-
ing complexities of rhetoric and truth, morality and self-serving (overlapping
categories themselves), pleasure and duty - which help to form real human and
rhetorical and philosophical history, as once Lanham well understood.
It is bothersome that Lanham, who as a student of rhetoric was one of the best at
showing the complexities of rhetorical interclassification, overclassification, and
misclassification, should offer such a dividing into vaguened twoness.
In practice Lanham often finds the classes mixed, using that truth as a club to
club Plato's Ideas (any stick will do to beat Them these days) or in praise of
Shakespeare. But, since any sentence is not a sentence unless it is ( 1 ) referential -
referring outside of itself, not part of an entirely enclosed system (2) in words syn-
tactically structured, the commingling is universally present in all discourse, and
cannot therefore serve as a critical standard to judge better and worse discourse.
Sentences, in words syntacted, can be true or false; and some are better written
than others. Language has reference and rhetoric; not all rhetoric is playful,
divisive, or insidious; not all reference is solemn. Lanham's distinctions do not
hold.
Lanham knows much and has responded much to a range of literature. Hence
the book is often interesting, awarely reflective, witty, and such, and one can learn
and enjoy from such moments. (Learning and enjoyment are not mutually
exclusive). The actual rhetorical analysis in the book- the analysis of how rhetori-
cal figures work in a given rhetorical and literary situation - is always valuable.
One wishes there were more of such analysis in the book.
Yet, among the virtues of thought and livelinesses of style, one also finds some
curious judgments, often intimately inveigled with the theory and trends at work.
Thus Lanham writes, "high seriousness . . . requires a conception of human
character as single, solid, substantial, and important" It does? What of the open-
ing of the Divine Comedy? or the dark sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Lanham's strange sentence is not a casual error or misjudgment; it is central to
his dichotomizing.
Here, as too often elsewhere, the twin hand puppets take center stage, and block
the view.
PAUL RAMSEY, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Le Cosmos de Dante par James Dauphiné dans les Classiques de l'humanisme.

Les Belles Lettres: Paris, 1984. P. 213.
Voici une nouvelle étude sur l'Homère du Trecento. Son auteur, James Dauphiné,
s'est fixé pour objectif d'expliquer au sens littéral du mot la vision cosmologique
de Dante telle qu'elle se révèle dans la Divine Comédie. En effet plus qu'une
exposition philosophique du système dantesque, James Dauphiné veut montrer
au lecteur la dimension poétique da la vision du poète florentin; c'est pourquoi tout
en se référant ici et là aux autres ouvrages de Dante comme le Banquet et la Vie
nouvelle, il a placé au centre de sasphère d'étude V éblouissante Divine Comédie.
Les termes que nous soulignons caractérisent la thématique même qui soutient la
vision cosmologique de Dante.
La livre de James Dauphiné est constitué de quatre parties inégales: Les sour-
ces (pp. 1 1-26), la hiérarchie (pp. 27-44), le voyage (pp. 45-93) et enfin la plus
ambitieuse et de loin la plus importànie^poétique et imagination (pp. 95- 1 5 3 ). En
outre l'auteur a cru bon d'ajouter en appendice quatre études. Les deux premières
sont consacrées à des précurseurs de Dante, Restoro d'Arezzo et Bonvesin de la
Riva qui tous les deux ont cherché à atteindre Dieu. Les autres appendices traitent
de Dante: Dante et la signature des étoiles et Dante et l'Odyssée: forme et
signification.
Il n'y a pas de mentor plus éclairé que James Dauphiné pour nous mener sur les
pas de Dante dans se quête de l'Infini. En fait ce livre est une partie de sa thèse de
doctorat d'état. Les visions poétiques du cosmos de Dante à l'aube du XVIIème
siècle (1981). Nous savons aussi que James Dauphiné s'intéresse tout par-
ticulièrement à la symbolique. C'est dire que nous avons à faire à un auteur
sérieux, bien documenté au fait de toutes les doctrines philosophiques et théologi-
ques qui avaient cours à cette époque.
Dans les trois premières parties, l'auteur donne au lecteur tous les outils
nécessaires pour comprendre la quête de Dante et le processus de son ascension. Il
expose d'abord d'une façon exhaustive les sources utilisées par Dante puis expli-
que le système dantesque de la hiérarchie en le comparant à celui de Denys, de
Grégoire ou même à celui duBanquet, oeuvre précédente de Dante. C'est grâce à
cette hiérarchie que Dante peut s'élever de cercle en cercle des profondeurs
ténébreuses de l'enfer jusqu'à l'Empyrée le plus radieux puisqu'il n'y a pas de
cloisons étanches dans l'univers. James Dauphiné démontre comment les struc-
tures temporelles du voyage correspondent aux structures spatiales, comment la
"science, poésie et mythologie se confortent, se répondent." Dante est astrologue,
théologien, mystique mais surtout poète, poète-voyant. C'est ainsi qu'on le sur-
prend à sacrifier l'exactitude scientifique au souci d'équilibre poétique.
La quatrième partie est la plus ambitieuse, la plus personnelle. Il s'agit de mon-

trer Dante aux prises avec l'écriture: la Divine Comédie n'est pas une oeuvre
didactique. En plus d'être une oeuvre mystique, c'est une oeuvre d'art. James
Dauphiné parle d'aventure stylistique: Dante doit révéler l'extraordinaire, l'in-
connaissable. Dieu, au moyen des mots. Cet extraordinaire, Dante l'a vu tant avec
son oeil physique que son oeil spirituel et il est ébloui au sens fort du mot. James
Dauphiné, après Pézard (Dante sous la pluie de feu), Tuzet (l'imagination
stellaire de Dante et le Cosmos et l'imagination), fait de la divine Comédie une
épopée de la lumière. Sous la protection de différents guides, dont évidemment
Béatrice, Dante passe de l'absence de lumière à l'éblouissement total au paradis
où la lumière est intensifiée, magnifiée grâce à des jeux de miroirs. L'auteur veut
traiter de *'la nature lumineuse de l'univers et les aspects de ce dernier en relation
avec la thématique du nombre, du cercle et de la musique" en s'attachant par-
ticulièrement aux images, métaphores, symboles et allégories. Il expose claire-
ment, avec autorité, le système poétique de Dante. On peut toutefois regretter des
longueurs, des répétitions. Surtout il aurait fallu que James Dauphiné fût poète lui-
même pour pouvoir faire ressortir la poésie de la divine Comédie. En effet, à
l'issue de cette étude et malgré les protestations de l'auteur, on est amené à voir le
poème davantage comme un oeuvre initiatique que comme une oeuvre lyrique.
Malgré ces quelques réserves, le livre de James Dauphiné, le Cosmos de Dante

est un compagnon indispensable à tout étudiant non seulement de Dante mais de
toute poésie cosmologique occidentale.
SIMONE MASER, Unviersité d'Ottawa
Jenny Wormald. Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland 1470-1625. Univer-

sity of Toronto Press: Toronto and Buffalo, 1981. Pp. viii, 216.
This recent work on the history of early modem Scotland covers the period from
the reign of James III through that of James VI. Quite naturally a focal point of this
book is the age of the Scottish reformation, a topic covered in four well-organized
chapters. This central section dealing with a time of religious uncertainty is pre-
sented between two surveys of Renaissance Scotland.
The author provides a well-balanced account of early modem Scotland, and her
analysis makes effective use of recent scholarly studies that give new insights into
the complexities of intemal developments in the country during an especially criti-
cal period of its history. Of the Scottish rulers of that time high praise is accorded to
James VI. He is commended for his intelligence, his forceful foreign poHcy, and
his resolute refusal to be brow-beaten by Elizabeth I. As the author points out, he
did much to enhance the prestige of personal monarchy.
Scotland's history during the age of the Renaissance and Reformation is charac-
terized by the vitality and variety of its political, religious, and cultural experience.
These diverse aspects are clearly delineated by the author. The book's value is
further enhanced by seven and a half pages devoted to suggestions for further read-
ing, and by a chronological table of five pages. There is also a serviceable idex.
This study is an important and valuable one which provides a thoughtful basis for a
reconsideration of Scottish history during one of the more colourful periods of its
long history.
BERNARD C. WEBER, The University of Alabama
Hallet Smith. The Tension of the Lyre: Poetry in Shakespeare's Sonnets. San
Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981. Pp. xii, 172 pp.
Hallet Smith* sElizabethan Poetry ( 1 952) is a readable and economical study still
worth recommending as a judicious introduction to Tudor poetry for students just
beginning their studies. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, oîThe Tension of
the Lyre which is intended "to make the sonnets more accessible to various kincU
of readers" (p. ix). While this latest study is readable, brief, and full of interesting
observations on various aspects of the sonnets, it does not offer its "various kinds
of readers" much that is new or vitally interesting.
The first of six chapters begins with a discussion of T.S. Eliot's "Three Voices
of Poetry" (1953): the first is the voice of the poet "talking to himself— or to
nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience The third
is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in
verse. " Smith claims to be interested in only the first two voices, although in Chap-
ter 4 we are told that "the sonnets are in some sense dramatic" and in Chapter 2,
entitled "Personae," the "I" of the sonnets is called "apersowa with identifiable
traits" (p. 23) while the poems speak, "most of the time, to apersona But they
are poems of the second voice, poems addressed to an audience of one or more,
poems to be heard and mentally responded to" (p. 41). And it seems that the
dramatic rather than the lyric poet is recalled in Smith's observation that "any-
thing important, to be fiiUy realized must be viewed both tragically and comically"
(p. 109).
Chapter 3 discusses "The Poet & the World," which is largely a courtly world,
and Chapter 5 on "Order and Punctuation" rehearses and conmients on the
"rearrangers" of the sonnets such as J.D. Wilson (1968), T. Brooke (1936), and
J.W. Lever ( 1 956), as well as the dating of the sonnets by L. Hotson ( 1 949) and
the numerological studies by A. Fowler (1970). For Smith the theories of Laura
Riding and Robert Graves (1927) are absurd, and Stephen Booth, who devotes
five pages to summarizing their argument in his edition of the sonnets ( 1 977) com-
pletely overlooks the fundamental fallacy of the Riding-Graves essay: "the punc-
tuation of the sonnet in the quarto of 1 609 is not the work of the poet, but of one of
the two compositors in the workshop of Eld, the printer" (p. 125). Smith earlier
admits a debt to Booth's commentary, yet seems to reject it because Booth
"accepts completely William Empson's dictum that all suggested glosses for a
passage are right" (p. x, and p. 11 n. 18). Smith admits a preference for LA.
Richards and, as a formalist critic, Smith seems to be aware of the limitations of his
method.
Smith does remind us of the value of the literary context to explicate a poem.
The celebrated love of sonnet 115, for example, "exists in an environment ... a
worid outside the relationship" (p. 43) which sonnet 124 seems to identify as a
worid of public affairs compared to the private worid of the lovers, and sonnet 66
offers a catalogue of what is wrong with the world. Smith claims that we shall bet-
ter understand the Dark Lady sonnets "if we bring to their readmg the appropriate
passages in the plays" (p. 47), which he attempts to do in broader strokes in Chap-
ter 4, "Dramatic Poem and Poetic Plays," observing different links between the
plays and the sonnets. For example, he contrasts the swearing and being forsworn
inLove Labour's Lost (Act 4.2) with sonnet 152, and the exploitation of language
(Act 5 .2) with sonnet 82; in the Merchant of Venice the theme of misleading first
appearance is compared with the Dark Lady of sonnet 141.
The concluding discussion, "Some Readers of the Sonnets," might be the best
chapter in the book; it surveys the work of Leonard Digges, John Suckling, the
publisher John Benson ("as a reader of the sonnets"), George Steevens, Malone,
George Wyndham, Edith Sitwell and Santayana. Yet most of these names would
be unknown to the student approaching the sonnets for the first time, and one won-
ders, then, just what audience Smith has in mind for this brief study. While he
relieves many of the sonnets of the burden of others' more cumbersome glosses.
Smith spends too much time discussing untenable theories of dating and reorder-
ing while seemingly suggesting some reordering of the sonnets himself. He calls
sonnets 40-42 "misplaced" arguing (speciously) that they belong to the Dark
Lady sonnets because they deal with the theme of sexual infidelity.
Hallet Smith has written several graceful essays that have been stretched into a
book. He often illuminates our understanding of the sonnets and their relationship
to Shakespeare's plays or to his times, but in the long run there is little new here.
Smith enjoys reading the sonnets, but the book does not serve its intended purpose
as an introduction to the sonnets for new readers, and it offers the more seasoned
scholar little new to think about.
ANDREW M. McLEAN, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Philip T. Hoffman. Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1 789.
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984, 239 p.
L'analyse de la tradition chrétienne, celle de la Réforme et de la Contre-Réforme—

qu'une fois pour toute on devrait rebaptiser la Réforme catholique— attire de plus
en plus l'attention des chercheurs intéressés à l'Ancien Régime. Le choix du
diocèse de Lyon répond au besoin de fixer nettement le portrait d'une importante
communauté ecclésiale.
L'étude bien documentée du Prof. Hoffman aborde particulièrement le pro-

blème de la Réforme sur le plan social: rôle du clergé et d'une élite laïque urbaine,
sollicités, après le concile de Trente, par le dynamisme d'agents multiples, con-
vaincus de la nécessité d'une forte discipline pour maintenir un haut niveau de
piété et de participation.
Principales sources de l'enquête: les testaments, les archives municipales et

communales, les dossiers des cours de justice, les archives diocésaines ou
paroissiales. Documentation qui révèle le rôle prépondérant du clergé paroissial,
intermédiaire culturel puissant, médiateur toujours au poste sur le plan de Tinstitu-
tionalisation de la Réforme, tant dans les villes que dans les villages. Ce que l'en-
quête met ici en lumière est le rôle déterminant des laïcs, tant sur le plan de la
résistance à certaines formes d'expression de la culture populaire que sur celui des
efforts amorcés pour imposer la nouvelle discipline tridentine.
Au cours du XVIe siècle s'est consolidée la collaboration entre le clergé

paroissial et l'élite urbaine de Lyon, ville de grand commerce, dominée par ses
classes marchandes. Peu à peu se sont multipliées les associations de toutes sortes:
guildes, fraternités, et groups divers, dont le rôle a été très significatif dans la vie
sociale et religieuse de la cité. Au niveau des petits marchands et des artisans
toutefois, ce clergé, même au temps de son dynamisme le plus grand (au XVIIe
siècle), demeurait exclus du territoire de la culture populaire. Bien que Lyon fût un
des grands centres du protestantisme français, le zèle du clergé local gardait sa
vigueur, et les ordres réguliers — missionnaires capucins, jésuites, etc. — venaient
répondre, à l'occasion, à la sollicitation des laïcs.
Dans les paroisses situées en dehors de la ville de Lyon, le milieu paysan avait
de plus étroites relations avec le clergé paroissial. Clergé souvent issu de la
localité, sans éducation ou formation théologique, mais en contact plus étroit avec
le village. Dispensateur des sacrements, dans un monde plus facilement captivé
par le geste et le rituel, le pouvoir étonnant d'une seule voix pouvait facilement
s'enfler au gré du charisme individuel, dans un vaste espace d'ignorance, que sac-
ralisait subtilement le tintement redoutable et bienfaisant des cloches. Aux jours
de fête, très nombreuses, il est vrai, sons et couleurs répondaient au sentiment
communautaire exprimé dans la fete, surtout au temps des processions.
A partir de 1 560, la Réforme catholique prend son essor et bientôt manifestera

son étonnante vigueur, en particulier en ce qui concerne la discipline instaurée par
les décrets du concile de Trente. Hommes et femmes de grande sainteté de vie —
saint Vincent de Paul et les Filles de la Charité par exemple— donnèrent l'exemple
par le travail et le prière. L'intention des réformateurs était de remodeler la culture
populaire. Fondations, sermons, catéchismes, visites pastorales, nouvelles asso-
ciations et nouveaux séminaires, encouragés par les élites laïques, donnèrent
l'élan.
Une association particulièrement vigoureuse, le Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement,

patronnée par les plus hautes classes de la société, mit tout en oeuvre pour renfor-
cer la discipline, enfluencer les législateurs, entraver l'expression de la culture
populaire, appuyant le clergé dans son opposition aux festivals, danses, chari-
varis, occasions de débauches.
En fait, l'Eglise du diocèse, comme ailleurs, en Italie en particulier, cherchait,
par la multiplicité des règlements, à maintenir une étroite séparation entre le sacré
et le profane. D'où ces prescriptions concernant la surveillance du clergé, la musi-
que d'église et la moralité sexuelle. On retrouve ici ce puritanisme impitoyable
dont on a hérité en Nouvelle-France. Notons toutefois que l'auteur n'aborde pas le
domaine de la casuistique héritée des moralistes espagnols. Il suffît de retenir que

même les autorités civiles exerçaient — à côté du clergé — un sévère contrôle
social: surveillance accrue des moeurs, répression de la prostitution, du con-
cubinage, des bains publics, de la nudité et même des festivals populaires, con-
sidérés comme sources de désordres, sinon de sédition. Promoteur de l'ordre
public, la monarchie se trouvait pleinement d'accord avec ce que proposait la
spiritualité tridentine.
Au cours du XVIIIe siècle, grâce en particulier à l'influence des curés, se mul-

tiplièrent les associations pieuses, comme celles du Rosaire, du Saint-Sacrement,
des Pénitents, du Scapulaire, de la Doctrine Chrétienne. La nouvelle spiritualité
catholique inspira d'importantes fondations, telles que les écoles primaires, pro-
mises à un grand avenir. Ajoutons que, dans les associations nouvelles — charités,
confraternités, etc.— les femmes prenaient une part de plus en plus active, surtout
dans les campagnes.
Quelques questions à approfondir: v.g. quel est le rôle de l'Eglise officielle du

temps: la cour de Rome, le clergé de France (assemblées du clergé, mandements
des évêques), les grands séminaires (St-Sulpice à Paris, Charles Borromée à
Milan, etc.) dans la définition de la spiritualité française et dans l'aménagement de
la praxis pastorale au niveau d'un grand diocèse, sans doute modèle de plusieurs
autres?
ROBERT TOUPOIN, S.J., Université Laurentienne, Sudbury
Paul R. Sellin. John Donne and 'Calvinist' Views of Grace. Amsterdam: VU

Boekhandel/Uitgeverij, 1983. Pp. 61.
Paul R. Sellin's short monograph sheds useful light on the vexing questions about
Donne's notions of predestination and free will. Sellin has a specific target in his
sights: an imprecise notion of "Calvinist" in Donne scholarship, which has
blurred Donne's position on these crucial issues. The central clain is that Donne
publically concurred with the orthodox Calvinist position of the Synod of Dort,
which had met in 1 6 1 8- 1 9 to counter the Arminian challenge. Sellin claims further
that the favourable response to Donne's reHgious prose by Lowland Calvinists
suggests the same theological kinship.
Sellin focuses on two semons delivered by Donne at The Hague in 1 6 1 9. Con-

tending that Donne scholarship inclines to paint all Calvinists in the same dark
colour, Sellin argues that Donne specifically follows an infra-lapsarian, not the
more radical supra-lapsarian line. *'In infra-lapsarianism, election and reproba-
tion are subsequent to the creation and fall, and they are acts of mercy and justice.
In supra-lapsarianism, election and Teprobauonprecede the creation and fall, and
they are acts manifesting divine sovereignty" (p. 13). Sellin's point is that Donne's
sermon deliberately brings him in line with the orthodox infra-lapsarian position
pronounced at Dort.
Sellin concludes broadly that "the idea is questionable that Donne was hostile
to the basic institutions and tenets of Calvinist orthodoxy as expressed in the for-
mulations of the Synod of Dort" (p. 49). But at this point many readers will feel
that Sellin pulls up short, without addressing more specifically the nagging nature
vs. Grace questions inherent in the matter. Sellin himself cites Barbara Lewalski's
rendition of the Synod's five points: "total depravity, unmerited election, limited
atonement (for the elect only), irresistible grace (admitting no element of human
cooperation or free response), final perseverance of the saints" (Protestant
Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, p. 20). So much in Donne's
sermons seems to run against the essential grain here. For example, Donne's
instinct is to extend generously, not limit the numbers of the Elect. On one occa-
sion he stresses that God would have all men saved: "... Yes; God does meane,
simply All" {Sermons, V, 53). Similarly, the notion of total depravity must be
stretched uncomfortably to accommodate Donne's claim that some ancient philo-
sophers using only natural reason "were sav'd without the knowledge of Christ"
(Sermons, \y,n9).
By not addressing such problems in greater detail, Sellin leaves the field to those
who would argue that the subtleties of Donne's infra-lapsarian position — and
Sellin makes a convincing case — might not, in fact, please the orthodox Reformers
at Dort. Nonetheless, SelHn's special knowledge of English-Lowland ties relating
to Donne brings in invaluable perspective to crucial elements in Donne's theology.
TERRY G. SHERWOOD, University of Victoria
News / Nouvelles
Newberry Summer Institute
The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce its
1986 Summer Institute in the Early Printed Book, which will be directed by
Professor Henri-Jean Martin, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, from June 23 to
August 1, 1986.
Beginning in the late Middle Ages with the transition from the manuscript to the
printed book, the institute will analyze the changing relationship between the book
as a material object and its socio-cultural context through the eighteenth century.
Topics will include: identities of and interactions between printers, publishers,
and readers; the impact of the Government and the Church on the history of the
book; methods of production; the relationship between text and image; and the his-
tory of libraries. The course will be taught in French and will focus on France, but
comparative materials from other western European countries will be introduced.
There are two sources of support available for participants in the institute: (1)
stipends of up to $2,250 funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and limited to full-time faculty, including university librarians with instructional
responsibilities, employed in American institutions of higher learning, and (2) a
number of additional stipends limited to faculty, research scholars and advanced
graduate students at institutions affiliated with either the Newberry library Center
for Renaissance Studies or the Folger Institute of Renaissance and Eighteenth-
Century Studies.
Faculty, qualified graduate students, and unaffiUated scholars not eligible for
funding are welcome to apply. The application deadline is March 1, 1986. For
more information and application forms, please contact the Newberry Library
Center for Renaissance Studies, 60 W. Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610,
(312)943-9090.
Call for Papers
The Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, S.U.N.Y. at Bingham-
ton will hold its twentieth annual conference October 17-18,1 986. The topic will
be "The Classics in the Middle Ages." The conference, which will mark the 20th
anniversary of the founding of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, will examine the influences exerted by the classi-
cal heritage on medieval life and culture from the earliest centuries to about 1400,
including a variety of fields extending from literature and the arts to the sciences,
social sciences, philosophy, education, theology /mysticism/spirituality, and
philology.
For the variously topically organized sessions the Center for Medieval and
Early Renaissance Studies cordially invites scholars to submit short papers (20-30
minutes) for consideration. The Center welcomes submissions from the various
fields of medieval culture noted above. Although abstracts will be considered,
completed papers will be given priority over them. Submissions must arrive by
May 19, 1986. The final program for the conference will appear in September,
1986. Please submit all inquiries, papers, abstracts, and suggestions to the Con-
ference Coordinators: Professors Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin, 1986 Con-
ference Coordinators, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State
University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, 1 3901 ,

(607) 798-2730 or 798-2130.
Italianist Conference
The American Association for Italian Studies will be holding its Sixth
Annual Conference at the University of Toronto on April 1 1-13, 1986.
The following sessions on topics of interest to Renaissance specialists

will be offered: Italian influence on Medieval and Renaissance English
Hterature; Sex and sexuality from the Middle Ages to the Baroque; Icono-
graphy and Typology in Medieval and Renaissance Art; Machiavelli;
Teatro e critica testuale nel Cinquecento; Letteratura cavalleresca dal
Medioevo al Rinascmiento; Petrarchism and antipetrarchism in the Re-
naissance; Travellers to Italy and Italian travellers of the Renaissance;
The Donna/Poeta of the Italian Renaissance: From Courtesan to Saint;
Bandello and the short story tradition in Italy.
For further information contact the conference organizers. Prof. Giuliana

Katz and Domenico Pietropaolo, AAIS 1986, Italian Studies, U of
Toronto, Toronto, Ont, M5S lAl.
Renaissance
and
Reformation
Renaissance
et
Réforme
New Series, Vol. IX, No. 4 | AaA Nouvelle Série, Vol. IX, No. 4
Old Series, Vol. XXI, No. 4 ^ ^ VM^--' Ancienne Série, Vol. XXI, No. 4
November 1985 novembre
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme is published quarterly (February, May, \

August, and November); paraît quatre fois l'an (février, mai, août, et novembre). ■
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North Central Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (NCC) '
Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference (PNWRC) \
Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) \
Victoria University Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS). 1985. \
Editor I
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Renaissance
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Renaissance
et
Réforme


1985 Ancienne Série, Vol. XXI, No. 4
Contents / Sommaire
ARTICLES
235
"Men that are Safe, And Sure":

Jonson's "Tribe of Ben" Epistle in its Patronage Context
by Robert C. Evans
255
L'écriture de l'échange économique dans les Regrets de du Bellay
par François Paré
263
The Rhetoric of Deviation in Lorenzo Valla's The Profession of the Religious
by Olga Z. Pugliese
275
Alexander Brome, Poems, ed. Roman R. Dubinski
reviewed by Raymond A. Anselment
278
I David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature:

Versions of the Source
reviewed by Philip R Berk
281
Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism
reviewed by John D'Amico
283
Umanesimo a Roma ne Quattrocento, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Maristella Lorch
reviewed by Kenneth R. Bartlett
284 '
William F. Hansen, Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet: \
A Translation, History, and Commentary '
reviewed by John Reibetanz \
286 I
Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut \

compte rendu par John Hare
289 I
Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther's Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531-46 |
reviewed by James M. Estes I
291 1
Franco Catalano, Francesco Sforza
reviewed by Paula Clarke !
294 I
John F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome:
Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation \
reviewed by Thomas Deutscher À
296 i
Terry G. Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne's Thought i
reviewed by Jeanne Shami
299
Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 1642 - 1646 |
reviewed by Michael G. Finnlayson !
302
Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton 's Puritan Masque,
and William B. Hunter, Jr., Milton's Comus: Family Piece
reviewed by Paul Stevens ;
305 ;
Diana Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert,
and Richard Strier, Love Known:
Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry
reviewed by Daniel W. Doerksen i
308 i
William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain \
reviewed by James P. Carley ^
310
NEWS / NOUVELLES
313
INDEX / TABLE DE MATIÈRE, Volume XXI, 1985
"Men That Are Safe, And Sure"

Jonson's 'Tribe of Ben" Epistle
in its Patronage Context
ROBERT C. EVANS
Nearly every poet of the English Renaissance, it might be argued, was a
patronage poet in some sense, because every poet was touched in some
way by the system of patronage relationships so central to the social struc-
ture, literary culture, and general psychology of that period. Literary pa-
tronage was far more than a system of economic benefits or of conventional
social deference; it reflected in one sphere of life the patterns of thinking,
expectation, and behavior that helped define Tudor- Stuart culture as a
whole. Even poets who never sought monetary reward for their writing
were nonetheless caught up in the patronage system - a system that trans-
lated into practical terms (however imperfectly) the larger hierarchical
assumptions of the time. Every poet had his place in the social hierarchy;
every writer knew that his most important audience consisted not of the
"public at large," but of those social superiors, influential equals, and wary
competitors whose actions and attitudes would determine both the recep-
tion of his works and his own social standing. Whether he sought literary
renown or a secure place and sense of participation in social reality or both,
every author knew that his writings constituted one very important aspect
of his total self-presentation. Every poem was in some sense an implicit
advertisement for or statement about the writer who created it, and every
poem would be scrutinized and evaluated at least partly in those terms by
readers who could in some way affect one's rank or reputation. The
"micro-political" pressures inherent in this literary system almost in-
evitably contributed to the artistic complexity of the poems the system
helped generate.^
The works and careers of few other poets better illustrate the complex
literary impact of patronage than do Ben Jonson's. Although not a pa-
tronage poet in the same ways that Sidney, Spenser, Donne, or Shake-
speare were, Jonson can in many respects be seen as the quintessential
patronage poet of his time. Certainly he was one of the most successful. No
other poet defined himself so explicitly as a poet and won such widespread
acceptance and support on those terms from patrons as Jonson did. Sidney's
social influence was chiefly inherited; Spenser's promotions were due as
much to political service as to literary achievement; Donne won patronage
less as a poet than as a divine; and Shakespeare, although a patronage poet
in ways that have not yet been fully charted, wrote neither as obviously nor
perhaps as self-consciously for patrons as Jonson did. Jonson' s patronage
success did not come immediately or easily, and one of the dangers of
emphasizing his success is that it is much easier for us than it ever was for
him to take that success for granted. The inevitable, inherent uncertainty
and insecurity of his relations with his patrons, combined with the fact and
the prospect of continuous competition for patronage support, made Jon-
son a far less secure and self-confident poet than he wanted to be and to
seem. The lofty certitude that so often characterizes his tone is at least in
part strategic: it provides a means of coping with anxieties central to his
experience as a writer dependent on patronage. In one way or another,
every period of his life and every poem he wrote seems to have been
touched by these kinds of uncertainty and apprehension.
In one of his most famous poems, written near the height of his career,
Jonson betrays the anxiety and apprehension that patronage dependency
and competition bred within him. "An Epistle Answering to One that
Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben" not only lashes out at Jonson's
antagonists and competitors for status, but expresses deep misgivings
about the good will and reliability of those superiors on whom his con-
tinued status depended. Depicting God and even Jonson himself as exem-
plary patrons, it thereby implicitly rebukes the superiors who he felt had
failed him, while also offering them models to emulate in their own conduct
towards him. It is a poem full of fury and claims to self-sufficiency, but one
that also exposes in an especially memorable way the fundamental in-
security of his position.
The "Tribe of Ben" epistle comes near the end of a period of seemingly
unparalleled success for the poet. Even before the folio publication of his
Workes in 1 6 1 6, Jonson had achieved a kind of prominence he could only
have dreamed of in his younger days. His decision to bring out an elaborate
edition of his poems, plays, and masques - the first of its kind in England-
was in one sense the daring act it is often pictured as being. No poet before,
particularly no dramatic poet, had ever presented himself in print quite so
audaciously. Yet it is unlikely that the Folio would ever have been
published had not Jonson - and, more to the point, his printer - been suf-
ficiently confident that it would find a market among those who could
afford to pay for it. The Folio is only the most palpable sign that by the
second decade of James's reign Jonson had won a literally enviable status
in the Jacobean social and literary hierarchy.
In the same year the Folio was published Jonson was granted an annuity
of 1 00 marks by the King, and in the following year was one of a number of
figures listed as possible members of a proposed royal academy. In 1618
he attempted to use his influence at court on behalf of his friend John
Selden, whose book on The Historié ofTythes had provoked the anger of
powerful clerics. During his famous walking tour of Scotland, Jonson was
banqueted and honored by the "noblemen and gentlemen" of the north,
and not long after his return to England was made honorary Master of Arts
by Oxford University. Throughout this whole period Jonson produced a
steady stream of masques for the court, and his income from these, com-
bined with his annuity and incidental patronage, freed him from any
necessity to write for the stage. Between 1616 and 1 626 no new play of his
was performed. However, one of his masques - The Gypsies Meta-
morphosed - proved so popular with the King that it was presented three
times during the late summer and early autumn of 1621. One contem-
porary report suggested that Jonson' s annual pension had been increased
from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds. Another claimed that James
had intended to bestow a knighthood on the poet, concluding ambiguously
that "his majesty would have done it, had there not been means made (him-
self not unwilling) to avoid it." In the fall of 1621 Jonson was granted the
reversion to the office of Master of Revels, an honour that brought with it
little immediate financial advantage but that was certainly a sign of the
monarch's favour. Thus it may seem surprising to find him, probably less
than two years later, writing a poem as full of insecurity, bitterness, and
grim foreboding about his standing at court as "The Tribe of Ben"
epistle.^
In part the mood and tone of the work reflect a very specific and recent
disappointment. Early in 1623 Prince Charles and George Villiers, Mar-
quess of Buckingham (the dashing royal favourite) slipped secretly out of
London, disguised with false beards and traveling under the improbable
names of Jack and Tom Smith. They journeyed only as far as Canterbury
before being stopped by officials suspicious of their appearance and be-
haviour; revealing their true identities, they were allowed to continue to
Dover, and from there set sail for the Continent. Charles had concocted the
journey to expedite stalled negotiations for his marriage to the Spanish
Infanta. By visiting Madrid himself he hoped to conclude an agreement
quickly and, within a few months, bring his bride back to England with him.
The plan was full of risks, and at first James had been reluctant to approve
it. The marriage negotiations involved delicate questions of domestic
politics and international diplomacy. The Infanta's Catholicism meant
that a Papal dispensation permitting the marriage would be required, and
both Rome and Madrid seized upon the opportunity to haggle about the
rights of English CathoHcs. To complicate matters further, Spain in 1620

had invaded the Palatinate, ruled by the Protestant Elector Frederick V.
As a fellow Protestant prince, James was under some pressure to come to
Frederick's assistance; as Frederick's father-in-law his obligation seemed
to many even more obvious. Yet James hesitated, partly because he held
Frederick somewhat responsible for his own predicament, partly because
he hoped to play a central role in negotiating a settlement. The Spaniards,
meanwhile, had done everything possible to prolong the marriage talks,
thereby neutralizing James's ability to act on Frederick's behalf. Frustra-
tion with the King's inertia had been building among the English Protes-
tants, and popular opposition to the proposed match with the Infanta had
been growing. Into this quagmire, at some risk to his own reputation and
personal safety, stepped Charles.^
At first, surprisingly, all seemed to go well. Charles and Buckingham

were received enthusiastically in Madrid, and the prospects for an early
agreement brightened. The Papal dispensation, so long delayed, was now
rumored to be imminent, and by early summer James began making offi-
cial preparations for a joyous arrival of Charles and his Infanta in England.
On 14 June John Chamberlain wrote to his correspondent Dudley Car-
leton that
On Whitsun Monday the duke of Richmond, Lord Treasurer, Marques

Hamilton, Lord Chamberlain, Lord Marshall, Lord of Carlile, Lord Belfast,
and Master Treasurer tooke their joumy towards Southampton to take order
for the reception of the Infanta when she shall arrive, for lodging her and her
traine, for mending the high wayes and for shewes and pageants, to which pur-
pose Innigo Jones and Allen the old player went along with them, who alone
(with two or three herbingers and such like officers) might have performed all
this as well as so many prime counsaillors, but that we must show how diligent
and obsequious we are in any thing that concerns her . . .*
Jonson's old rival Jones had already been very much involved in prepar-
ing for the Infanta's arrival. In his capacity as Surveyor he had been com-
missioned to design and supervise the construction of two new chapels for
her use, and while in Southampton he received the added honour of being
elected a burgess of that town. Jonson, on the other hand - whether inad-
vertently or deliberately - seems to have been completely forgotten. Stung
by this neglect, outraged and threatened by his rival's conspicuous suc-
cess, Jonson responded passionately in the "Epistle." In the firsthalfof the
poem his satire on Jones is indirect and allusive, but no less scathing
for that:
AN EPISTLE ANSWERING TO ONE THAT ASKED

TO BE SEALED OF THE TRIBE OF BEN
Men that are safe, and sure, in all they doe.
Care not what trials they are put unto;

They meet the fire, the Test, as Martyrs would;
And though Opinion stampe them not, are gold.

I could say more of such, but that I flie 5
To speake my selfe out too ambitiously.
And shewing so weake an Act to vulgar eyes.
Put conscience and my right to compromise.

Let those that meerely talke, and never thinke,
That live in the wild Anarchie of Drinke, 10
Subject to quarrell only; or else such
As make it their proficiencie, how much

They'[h]ave glutted in, and letcher'd out that weeke,
That never yet did friend, or friendship seeke

But for a Sealing: let these men protest. 15
Or th'other on their borders, that will jeast

On all Soûles that are absent; even the dead;
Like flies, or wormes, which mans corrupt parts fed:

That to speake well, thinke it above all sinne.
Of any Companie but that they are in, 20
Call every night to Supper in these fitts.
And are received for the Covey of Witts;

That censure all the Towne, and all th'affaires.
And know whose ignorance is more than theirs;

Let these men have their wayes, and take their times 25
To vent their Libels, and to issue rimes,

I have no portion in them, nor their deale
Of newes they get, to strew out the long meale,

I studie other friendships, and more one.
Then these can ever be; or else wish none. ' 30
The effect of the poem's title and of its very opening lines is difficult to
describe; in them, Jonson concocts an almost unassailable blend of self-
assertion and humility, a kind of modest pride. In one sense the title's bibli-
cal allusion is seriously meant: Jonson does present himself and his
followers as righteous men uncontaminated by the corruption around
them. Just as members of the tribe of Benjamin are preserved from the
wrath of God in the Book of Revelation, so Jonson suggests that the virtues
he and his "sons" adhere to will be ultimately, if not immediately, rewar-
ded. The allusion has the effect not only of enhancing Jonson' s moral posi-
tion, but of intimidating his antagonists, indirectly reminding them of one
fate that may await them if they continue their vicious practices. Yet this
biblical reference, and the ensuing imagery of martyrdom, might seem
overweening, overblown, perhaps even blasphemous, if it were not qual-
ified by a hint of self-conscious and humorous irony. In this poem as in

others by Jonson, irony is more than simply an aesthetic effect; it is a
micro-political tactic rooted in the poem's status as self-conscious social
performance. Jonson likens the rejection he has suffered to a "trial" that
tests his mettle, and yet he also knew that this poem - his response to that
rejection - was itself a kind of trial, a public testing and carefully scru-
tinized public display of his resiliency and strength under pressure. The
"Epistle" is an "answer" in a larger sense than its title implies.
The mere fact that Jonson refers to himself as "Ben" helps undercut any
sense of pretension or unlimited pride. Again and again in his later poetry
he used the "Ben" persona in this self-mocking fashion - neutralizing
potential criticism, turning his foibles and shortcomings to his own advan-
tage, presenting himself as a lovable figure distanced from competitive
ambition.^ Indeed, the "Ben" persona is fundamentally paradoxical. On
one level it reflects Jonson's sense of himself as a prominent public figure,
as a personality interesting in his own right and not simply because of his
writing. In this sense the persona suggests Jonson's recognized social stature
and his confident acceptance of it. But in another sense the "Ben" persona
reflects the inevitable insecurity of his position; its function is partly defen-
sive. It deflects potential attack, and the good humour it implies and evokes
is one tactic for coping with the essential anxiety of Jonson's condition as a
courtly poet. The very image of naive ingenuousness the persona conjures
up must to some extent have been self-consciously cultivated; in any event,
Jonson knew when and how to employ it effectively. In this poem its use,
combined with the somewhat self-mocking assertion that he disdains to
"speake [himself] out too ambitiously" ( 1 . 6), renders his position nearly
impregnable to criticism. Charged with sacrilege, he could reply that his
assailant had taken the bibUcal allusion much more seriously than it had
been meant; accused of pride, he could respond that he had himself openly
poked fun at this very tendency. The humour of the opening lines is one of
the most effective means by which he simultaneously implies, creates,
asserts, and defends his social power.
Although Jonson claims to disdain speaking ambitiously because to do

so would violate his conscience and compromise his sense of right, he also
indicates that to do so would be an act of weakness - one, presumably, that
could easily be exploited by his enemies. His modesty here may be adopted
not only or even necessarily because he finds it congenial, but also because
to assert himself too vigorously might ultimately be ineffective, allowing
his antagonists to take advantage of his rhetoric and use it against him.
Indeed, throughout his career Jonson exhibits an obsessive concern with
controlling his words, with authorizing them and imposing on them a
signification that cannot be misconstrued. The dedications, prologues, and
inductions to his plays, the marginalia to his masques, the self-conscious
voice so common in his poems - all these suggest a need to control and con-
tain the meaning of his words. For all his belief in the power of right
language to reform society and move men to virtue (one of his chief jus-
tifications for practising poetry), Jonson also feared words. Or rather, he
feared the very ambiguity of language that is often at the heart of his best
poetry and that he exploited so effectively to enhance his own social status.
The ambiguity of language was both a source of his power and the potential
cause of its loss. For Jonson, language was not an abstract issue: losing
control of one's words meant losing social security. And in fact, it is not so
much language that he fears as it is the ignorance or malignity of his inter-
preters. Language itself is neutral, but its meanings can be appropriated,
stolen, re-assigned, or misinterpreted by others intent on promoting them-
selves. More than a tool for communication, language becomes a weapon
in the struggle for power.
Jonson's expressed need not to seem to speak "too ambitiously" sug-

gests just one of the ways in which his dependent status encouraged linguis-
tic subtlety and indirection: self-promotion that was too obvious might also
be ineffective and vulnerable. Blatant ambition could prove self-defeating.
Seeming to seek too desperately the approval of others would make their
approval less likely; it would reveal weakness, and weakness would breed
weakness by making one less attractive as a friend, dependent, or mentor.
Obvious or excessive ambition would make one appear too self-centered to
be a reliable ally or trustworthy client. To realize his ambitions, Jonson
had partly to disclaim them; to secure his power, he had partly to distance
himself from the obvious desire for it. His references to "conscience" and
"right" (1.8) themselves function tactically; by making him appear com-
mitted to values higher than the merely political, they advance his political
interests. By suggesting his self-respect and self-confidence, they solicit
the respect he craved from others. His appeal to internal standards of
motive and conduct helps strengthen his external standing. His public
avowal that he acts not to promote his social self-interests but in accord-
ance with his conscience functions, paradoxically, to ensure that those
same interests are advanced.
Indeed, the distinction the poem attempts to draw between individual

values and social ambition is for all practical purposes exceedingly dif-
ficult to sustain. However much Jonson may speak of safety and surety as
character traits or personal attributes, their value for him derives precisely
from the fact that his social safety and surety have been threatened. And
yet Jonson knew that his safeness and sureness could not be defined purely
internally, as a reflection of his own personality, but that they inevitably
depended to a large extent on the reactions of others. The "Epistle" seeks
to shape and guide those reactions - but it does so, ironically, partly by
claiming indifference to them. The very pose of independence Jonson
adopts in the opening lines is itself part of his strategy for winning accep-
tance, although it functions also as a pre-emptive tactic for dealing with the
possibility of continued rejection. His contempt for "Opinion" (1.4) can-
not disguise his fear of it, and although he opens the poem by claiming his
indifference to political insecurity, the "Epistle" is in fact an attempt to
respond to and cope with his unease. Proclaiming his allegiance to safety
and surety as personal values is thus in one sense a private consolation for
social disappointment; at the same time, though, it serves publicly to assert
Jonson's sense of his own social worth. As he implicitly concedes, the
question can only be one of appearing to speak too ambitiously, not of free-
ing oneself from ambition completely. Although he claims that he will not
compromise his conscience, the whole poem is an attempt to find a suitable
compromise between adherence to a personal standard of individual integ-
rity and the need to make and defend a place for oneself in the world.
Jonson's professed modesty and concern with conscience, his ostensible

submission to a higher ideal of right, are meant to stand in clear contrast to
the ensuing description of the behaviour of those he attacks. In refusing to
speak himself out too ambitiously, he had used silence as a means of
intimating a worth it would have been boastful to proclaim in detail. His
satire aims to point up part of the difference between himself and his
unspecified targets precisely by emphasizing their egotistic, self-promotional
uses of language. He argues implicitly for the quality of his own words -
and word - by accusing his antagonists of vacuous talk, empty protests,
hypocritical praise, and self- serving satire. By mocking those "that meerely
talke, and never thinke" (1.9), Jonson implies that his own use of words is
closely wedded to reasonable thought, but the phrase also reminds us of
other senses in which his language is "thoughtful" - the senses in which it is
self-conscious, guarded, and politic. Earlier in the same year this poem
was written, Jonson had provoked displeasure precisely by being insuf-
ficiently cautious in his use of language: he had exploited the public genre
of the court masque for personal satire on the poet George Wither.^ Many
of those who first read Jonson's epistle may therefore have glimpsed unin-
tended irony in his attack on others for presuming to "censure all the
Towne, and all th' affaires, / And know whose ignorance is more than
theirs" (11. 23-24), while anyone who recognized the subtly specific
attack on Inigo Jones buried beneath the ostensibly generalized satire of
this section may have smiled at Jonson's reference to those who "vent their
Libels, and . . . issue rimes" (1. 26). Perhaps he felt that the best way to
distance himself from such imputations was to allege them openly against
others.*
Clearly, what bothers Jonson about those he attacks is not only their
moral failings considered in the abstract, but their success - the fact that,
despite shortcomings he regards as painfully obvious, they remain menac-
ing competitors for social prestige and advancement. At first it might seem
that his targets are beneath the need to be attacked; he describes them as
apparently inconsequential drunkards and philanderers (11. 9-15). Far
more threatening, however, are those "received for the Covey of Witts" ( 1 .
22). Indeed, the threat they pose is the direct result of their reception, their
social acceptance and recognition. Their power is no more independent of
society than his, and in fact the real purpose of his satire seems less to
denigrate them than to influence the perceptions of those who grant them
status. Despite all his disdain for "Opinion," his poem functions on one
level precisely as an attempt to shape and direct it. Although reading Jon-
son's "Epistle" in this way may seem to locate its roots in the poet's
"selfishness," from another perspective such a reading helps illustrate how
utterly and inescapably social his concerns necessarily were.
The "Covey of Witts" Jonson attacks stands in direct opposition to the

"Tribe of Ben" that the poem both celebrates and seeks to augment. In this
sense the "Epistle" seems to have grown out of a kind of factionalism quite
common in the political and social world of Jonson's day. Like the leader of
a political faction, he knew that his appeal to others inevitably depended
partly on his real social power. This is why his failure to be included in the
commission to greet the Infanta must have seemed variously threatening.
Because it could be interpreted as a possible sign of his loss of stature and
influence, it would not only make him more vulnerable to sniping and back-
biting from the sort of "Witts" he attacks here, but it would also make him
less attractive as the central figure of an alternative group. Excluded from
the commission, rejecting and rejected by the rival "Covey," he seems also
have worried about the potential danger of more general rejection. Indeed,
in an important passage to be considered later, he describes this fear almost
as if he imagined a chain- reaction of renunciation ( 11 . 51-55).^
Perhaps this is one reason why the request from the unnamed person
"that asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben" may have seemed so signifi-
cant, so deserving of an extended and weighty answer. It allowed Jonson to
advertise the attraction he still held for some, to call attention to the fact
that he was still drawing allies in spite of his recent disappointment, and
thus to improve his chances of drawing others into the fold. In the face of his
exclusion from the welcoming commission, friendships of the sort he
celebrates here must have seemed all the more important to him, not only
because of the private consolation they offered, not only because they
helped shore up his sense of his own social dignity and self-respect, but
because they increased his chances of regaining whatever power seemed
jeopardized or lost. Although he attacks the "Covey" for issuing "rimes"
and for exploiting poetry tactically, his own "Epistle" perfectly exem-
plifies the tactical use of verse. Generalizing the threat that the "Covey"
poses (they "censure all the Towne and all th' affaires" [ 1 . 23]), he plays on
the insecurity of his audience to enhance his own sense of safety. He wants
his readers to feel threatened by the same fear of exclusion and enmity, in
order that they might join him in excluding the "Covey." However much
he may have rejected the "Covey" personally, he realized that personal
rejection was insufficient: only by influencing others could he exert any
real effect.
In the second half of the poem, where Jonson presents more explicitly
the differences between himself and his satiric targets, the sense of per-
sonal threat, as well as its connections with patronage concerns, becomes
more pronounced:
What is't to me whether the French Désigne
Be, or be not, to get the Val-tellinel

Or the States Ships sent forth belike to meet
Some hopes oîSpaine in their West Indian Fleet?

Whether the Dispensation yet be sent, 35
Or that the Match from Spaine was ever meant?

I wish all well, and pray high heaven conspire
My Princes safetie, and my Kings desire.

But if, for honour, we must draw the Sword,
And force back that, which will not be restor'd, 40
I have a body, yet, that spirit drawes
To live, or fall a Carkasse in the cause.

So farre without inquirie what the States,
Brunsfield, and Mansfield doe this yeare, my fates

Shall carry me at Call; and I'le be well, 45
Though I doe neither heare these newes, nor tell

OîSpaine or France', or were not prick'd downe one
Of the late Mysterie of reception.

Although my Fame, to his, not under-heares.
That guides the Motions, and directs the beares. 50
But that's a blow, by which in time I may
Lose all my credit with my Christmas Clay,

And animated Po re 7a«e of the Court,
I, and for this neglect, the courser sort

Of earthen Jarres, there may molest me too: 55
Well, with mine owne fraile Pitcher, what to doe

I have decreed; keepe it from waves, and presse.
Lest it be justled, crack'd, made nought, or lesse:

Live to that point I will, for which I am man.
And dwell as in my Center, as I can, 60
Still looking to, and ever loving heaven;
With reverence using all the gifts then[ce] given.

'Mongst which, if I have any friendships sent.
Such as are square, wel-tagde, and permanent,

Not built with Canvasse, paper, and false lights, 65
As are the Glorious Scenes, at the great sights;

And that there be no fev'ry heats, nor colds,
Oylie Expansions, or shrunke durtie folds.

But all so cleare, and led by reasons flame.
As but to stumble in her sight were shame; 70
These I will honour, love, embrace, and serve:
And free it from all question to preserve.

So short you read my

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Renaissance and Reformation

February 1985 février

Renaissance and R^ormation / Renaissance et R^orme is published quarterly (February, May,

© Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies / Société Canadienne d'Etudes de la Renaissance

North Central Conférence of the Renaissance Society of America (NCC)

Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference (PNWRC)

Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC)

R,W. Van Fossen

Claude Sutto (Université de Montréal)

Book Review Editor

Responsable de la rubrique des livres

Editorial Board/Comité de rédaction

André Berthiaume (Laval) A. Kent Hieatt (Western Ontario)

Peter G. Bietenholz (Saskatchewan) R. Gerald Hobbs (Vancouver School of Theology)

Paul Chavy (Dalhousie) F.D. Hoeniger (Toronto)

Jean Delumeau (Collège de France) Robert Omstein (Case Western Reserve)

S.K. Heninger (North Carolina) Charles Trinkaus (Michigan)

Renaissance and R^ormation / Renaissance et Réforme

Second class mail registration number 5448 ISSN 0034-429X

New Series, Vol. IX, No. 1

Nouvelle Série, Vol. IX, No. 1

Past/Present: Leonardo Brum's History of Florence*

Littérature politique et exégèse biblique

(de 1570 à 1625)

par Pierre-Louis Vaillancourt

The Way of Caution:

Elenchus in Bacon's Essays

BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Cobum Freer, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama,

reviewed by A.R. BraunmuUer

Attack and Response, reviewed by David Bevington

Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 6, The Correspondence of

Erasmus: Letters 842 to 992 (1518 to 1519),

reviewed by John F. McDiarmid

George M. Logan, The Meaning ofMore's "Utopia, "

reviewed by Elizabeth McCutcheon

Past/Present: Leonardo Bruni' s

The importance of historical consciousness in thejRenaissance is a fact

This heightened sense of the past is itself one of the manifestations of a

To meet the demand created by this progressive differentiation of social

2 / Renaissance and Reformation

is a quantifiable one, according to the daily, monthly or yearly human

The following pages on Leonardo Brum's History of Florence are

While chroniclers seem to be content with recording in the vernacular the

Indeed the annalistic framework of Bruni' s History is traditional, as is

4 / Renaissance and Reformation

If we consider now the rôle of classical models in Bruni's History, we

And all these events seem to me particularly worthy of being preserved in

This entire story deserves indeed to be recorded, both as a lesson to citizens,

The presence of classical models in Bruni's History is at times less con-

Such a mercantile cast of mind, operative on the socio-political level, sur-

Almost one hundred years later, in 1 376, Florentine orators Alessandro

In conclusion. Brum's background is broad and composite. He was

particularly prominent in Brum's History, and that he holds to be peculiar

The historiographie criterion of truth/ impartiality adopted by Bruni in

It is also necessary to emphasize the narrowly political and mundane

8 / Renaissance and Reformation

Further discussion of some aspects of Bruni' s work will show to what

years became clearer and clearer, offering him a better understanding of

In the process of drawing up his History of Florence, Bruni continued to