Poétique des lieux: enquête sur les mémoires féminins de l'aristocratie française...

correspondence and codified restrictions of religious behaviour by the General Assembly, Tarterreveals that religion offered English settlers in Virginia a means of coping with the harsh realities ofdaily life in the New World. Additionally, Edward L. Bond lends greater depth to these everydayarticulations of religion which not only blended European folk beliefs with Christianity but alsoconformed to the demands of a tobacco culture that dictated how and when religion was expressedin the colony. Further, Philip D. Morgan, Monica Najar and Thomas E. Buckley demonstrate how themultiplicity of religious groups and faiths that proliferated in colonial Virginia throughout theseventeenth and early eighteenth centuries forced Virginia’s ruling elite to abandon its Anglicanexclusivity, institute religious toleration and eventually promote religious freedom. While Morganfocuses primarily on the religious diversity between Anglo-Virginian, Native American and Africanpeoples, Najar and Buckley offer insightful analyses of how Dissenting and sectarian denominationssuch as the Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians and Baptists spearheaded efforts to circumventAnglican domination and the persecution of non-conforming faiths in Virginia that culminatedduring and after the American Revolution. And, in conclusion, Daniel L. Dreisbach fittingly detailshow the ‘pursuit of religious liberty in Virginia’ by a heterogeneous assortment of peoples andfaiths constructed ‘a vibrant religious culture’ for the entire American republic while providing thefederal government with a precedent for redefining the relationship between religion and politics(p.181).

Of particular note is Edward L. Bond’s attention to the daily ‘lived religion’ of the Anglo-Virginianpopulace. In contrast to the other essayists, Bond considers the Virginia colony and its religiousdynamics within the broader historical contexts of the British empire, Atlantic world and earlymodern Europe. In particular, he contemplates the existence of the colony on the periphery ofempire as well as a focal point for the Atlantic trade in tobacco and slaves, and the ramificationsthat this all had for the evolution of religious expression in colonial Virginia. If the other authorsreplicated Bond’s macro-historical awareness, this book would be exhaustively comprehensive anddefinitive. Yet, despite this shortcoming, these scholars successfully demonstrate that the diverseorigins that fostered the evolution of religious freedom in colonial Virginia proved the catalyst for‘the content, scope, and application of religious liberty’ in the United States that still ‘agitate[s] thepublic mind today’ (p.185).

Bryan RindfleischUniversity of Oklahoma

Poétique des lieux: enquête sur les mémoires féminins de l’aristocratie française (1789-1848). By Claudine Giachetti. Paris: Champion. 2009. 328 p. €65 (hb). ISBN 978-2-7453-1833-6.

The publication of Claudine Giachetti’s book on female memoirs coincided with renewed interest inforgotten women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She follows Henri Rossi andother French scholars in defining memoirs as a genre parallel to the novel, and yet impossible tocategorise because of its heterogeneous form. What Giachetti brings to the field is her geographicalapproach to memoirs produced between the Revolution and 1848. She coins the notion of ‘poétiquedes lieux’ to describe the investment of the imaginary into geographic places. She states that the‘lieu’ is a pertinent tool to explore memoirs, and one that does also include the way the text isdisplayed and written. She restricts her analysis to a selection of ten female memorialists, with somereferences to more successful authors such as Madame de Staël and George Sand.

Giachetti applies Genette’s theories on the ‘paratexte’ to memoirs: titles, sub-titles, prefaces,dedications, epigraphs and notes can unveil female strategies of authorship, which is crucial asfemale memoirs writers were often reluctant to be seen as novelists (Chapter 1). Her second chapteroutlines similarities between female memoirs of the period in their idealisation of genealogy andchildhood, due to the destruction brought by the Revolution. She lists a number of common tropesreproduced in each memoir, such as the glorification of the family and noble birth. ThereforeGiachetti rephrases what has been said on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century memoirs, since theidyllic presentation of family lineage and childhood is a traditional feature. And yet her geographi-

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cal approach allows her to detect a shift in the depiction of the childhood home during the Revo-lution, as it becomes a symbol of instability and the premonition of future misery. Giachetti sets outto demonstrate in a third chapter how ambiguous interior spaces are for female memoir writers,since access to the outside was restricted after the Revolution. She speaks of an ‘écriture de lafrontière’ because there isn’t a detailed description of intimate spaces such as the bedroom, memo-rialists preferring to voice their vision of the outside world. She also highlights the immateriality ofsalons for those women: salon culture is thus described as a hermetic space where freedom of speechis anachronistically perpetuated and embodies the essence of the place itself. In the chapter called‘Paysage des formes brèves’ she details the role played by short texts in the memoirs such asportraits, anecdotes and maxims in relation to history and imagination. She observes that historyis rendered more intimate in women’s memoirs, while legends and anecdotes are given the status oftruthful facts. This is what makes female memoirs stand out from history chronicles and novels. Thefifth chapter, on exteriors, focuses on exile, the variety of experiences of it and the impact it had onnoblewomen writers. Giachetti’s strength is always to link space with felt experience, which bringsto light the frustration felt by noblewomen returning to a transformed France after their emigration.Similarly, she successfully renders the subtlety of women’s relationship with other outside spaces,such as the city or the streets and political spaces of the July monarchy. While outside space canprompt introspection, as in Romanticism, it is also a space to be repossessed by writing. The lastchapter returns to interior spaces, but understood as the feminine body and intimacy. Giachettidevelops the usual argument about the limitations of the female body and how it is modestlydisplayed in the memoirs. Her most pertinent conclusion is on the ageing of the female body andhow writing was the way both to resist time and to acknowledge its fatal course for all memorialists.

Laure PhilipUniversity of Warwick

Marriage, Gender and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy. By Edward T. Potter.Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2012. 198 p. £50 (hb). ISBN 1-57113-529-4.

Departing from the common consensus that German comedy of the early Enlightenment washeavily involved in promoting the concept of sentimental marriage, Potter sets out instead tounearth ‘alternative modes’ within such plays, ‘highlighting comedy’s resistance to the emergingdiscourse of the sentimental marriage’ (p.1). To this end, he re-examines five comedies of the time,most of which have been the subject of considerable previous critical attention: Johann GottfriedGottsched’s Atalanta, oder die bezwungene Sprödigkeit (1741), Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Diezärtlichen Schwestern (1747), Johann Elias Schlegel’s Der Triumph der guten Frauen (1748), GottholdEphraim Lessing’s Der Misogyne (1748/1767) and Theodor Johann Quistorp’s Der Hypochondrist(1745), covering in the process the satirical Saxon comedy, the sentimental comedy and the pastoralplay.

Potter focuses on the ‘ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy’s stance on marriage’ (p.2) asemerging underneath a seemingly straightforward plot that proves the superiority of sentimentalmarriages over socially and economically motivated ones. To start with, Potter observes that allmarriages forged in these plays are still on a sound financial footing, and thus contain ‘a certainamount of ambiguity’ towards their own pedagogical aim. But this ambiguity expresses itself evenfurther in the performance of female resistance to marriage of any shape or form (Gottsched andGellert), female cross-dressing (Schlegel and Lessing) and hypochondria as a disguise for malesame-sex desire (Quistorp). All these forms of resistance to (sentimental) marriage are ridiculed inthe plays at the end, but – and Potter stresses this ‘but’ – they are nevertheless there, are performedand maintain some attractiveness throughout. Moreover, Potter demonstrates that all these plays‘contain moments of self-referentiality in which early Enlightenment comedy performs its ownreception, and [...] the texts self-reflectively depict the inability of each particular comedy to educateits audience, thereby raising more general questions about the efficacy of the early Enlightenment’suse of comedy as a means to pedagogical ends’ (p.176-7).

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