La pensée religieuse d'Agrippa d'Aubigné et son expression by Marie-Madeleine FragonardReview by: Bernd RennerThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 175-176Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477744 .

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Book Reviews 175

notes and her other notes for each act, as well as her exhaustive glossary. She provides indexes both of proper names and of the play's known performances. Her bibliographies are rich. Sabine Lardon's careful and scholarly critical edition of LesJutfves will remain a permanent reference for further study of sixteenth-century French theater in general and Garnier's craft, his sources, and methods in particular. The book is a fine complement to Lardon's earlier work, a critical edition of Marguerite de Navarre's Pater Noster and Petit Oeuvre de'vot, also published by Champion, in 2001.

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La pensee religieuse d'Agrippa d'Aubigne et son expression. M a r i e - M a d e l e i n e

Fragonard. Paris: Champion, 2004. 876 pp. ?l 19.00. ISBN 2-7453-1011-9.

REVIEWED BY: Bernd Renner, Brooklyn College, CUNY

This long-overdue reedition of Marie-Madeleine Fragonard's monumental 1981 doc toral dissertation finally makes an essential study of arguably the most important Protestant literary figure of the late French Renaissance available to a larger public.The text of the study has not been modified but the notes and the bibliography contain works that have appeared in the last twenty-five years. A short "postface" also aims to take into account more recent development in d'Aubigne studies.

The eleven chapters of this work are divided into four parts: (1) "La creation a l'image de Dieu"; (2) "La perte de l'image de Dieu"; (3) "La restauration de l'image de Dieu"; and, (4) "Vers l'union totale."The main text is followed by two very helpful statistical appendices (a lexicological and poetic appendix that lists the frequency of the fundamental terms from d'Aubigne's text as well as the more innovative listings of the frequency of rhymes and the number of occurrences of the most common terms in the rhyme; and a bibliographical appendix) and an extensive bibliography. The chapter titles merely hint at the philological breadth that the study encompasses as the status of language takes center stage in the discus sion of d'Aubigne's religious thinking.

The thorough investigation of the hnguistic and hermeneutical concerns that inform the writings of the author of the Tragiques (1616) and the Histoire Universelle (1618/19) actu ally end up painting a quite complete tableau of the vast implications of these issues in the literary, religious, and intellectual discussions throughout the sixteenth century; a develop

ment which naturally underlines the importance of this author. The study's scope thus far exceeds the limitations that its title seems to indicate.The main issue appears to be the mul tiple implications that the rise of polysemy had enjoyed in the early modern literary and lin guistic conscience. Fragonard shows very convincingly how the clash between secular esthetics and religious ethics reaches a climax in religious literature in general and in d'Aubign& in particular, whose work is an exemplary illustration of the paradox inherent in any such attempt. This development was obviously of particular significance in the political and religious context of d'Aubigne's time. His antidogmatic stance-his writings are meant to move and not to instruct his readers as he states in the foreword to the Tragiques-derives logically from such concerns. The disappearance of the original transparency of language after Babel simply forbids such univocity and results necessarily in the phenomenon of copia that Terence Cave has identified as one of the major illustrations of the early modern literary consciousness. The malleability of language is therefore the thread that runs through this meticulous study.As the control of language assures the control of the human soul, the forces

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176 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/1 (2006)

of good and evil will make it their priority, as becomes clear in d'Aubigne's writing (see for example chapter 5, "Le monde a l'envers," especially part 2, "L'univers du mensonge: La per version du langage," 326-52). The dilemma appears only resolvable if one were to eliminate the individual voice of the writer.This is precisely what d'Aubigne attempts in his two major texts, Fragonard argues. The "total subjectivity" of the Tragiques, the result of divine inspira tion, and the flawless "objectivity" of the Histoire Universelle, a sober description of historical facts, would achieve the elimination of any authorial narcissism and thus constitute the basis of a literary work's "religiousness" (26).

The strong reflection of various early modern literary models has been quite evident in the preceding observations, but the Pleiade has to be mentioned in particular. The group centered on Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay had developed a concept of poetic inspiration that was especially well suited for religious writing as it was fairly easy to "Chris tianize." The Pleiade's impact is manifest in the ideas of (1) poetry as a representation that incites one to search for an absolute truth that is hidden behind the veils of allegory and met aphor, (2) poetry as a laudatory genre with the hymn as a model for divine praise, and (3) literature in general as a mode of expression that defies chronological order and depends

more on the narrator's point of view, which results in a composition en abhme that also evokes Montaigne (28). This last point cannot but underline the intrinsic paradox in d'Aubigne's writing if we recall the attempt to eliminate the writer's individual voice, an epistemological paradox that reinforces the aforementioned polysemy and ambivalence in the domains of subject matter and hermeneutics, and therefore establishes the text's status as a "defense and illustration" of its concern, a very common approach in an era where theoretical and fic tional writing were frequently intermingled. Fragonard identifies yet another typical rena scent feature of d'Aubigne's writing as she insists on the creative modifications that the author imposed on his models, modifications that she identifies as baroque, situated mainly in the realms of vocabulary, rhetorical figures, and composition on the one hand, and in the relationship between author and public on the other.

On the whole, it is the inherent paradox of his condition as a Protestant outside the Protestant tradition that informs his equally paradoxical quest, a quest that Fragonard defines as follows: "construire dans et par la litterature religieuse un univers mental assez puissant, assez unificateur, pour depasser les contradictions, assez optimiste pour englober tout ce qui peut donner une reponse vivifiante aux questions terribles que suscite l'angoisse d'etre au monde" (to construct in and through religious literature a universal that is powerful enough and unifying enough to go beyond the contradictions, optimistic enough to encompass everything that can give an invigorating answer to the terrifying questions that the fear of being in this world gives rise to). It is this fundamental quest that this study elucidates admi rably, an undertaking which makes it useful not only to d'Aubigne scholars but to any stu dent of the Renaissance.

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Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559 1603. 3 vols. Ed. Steven W May and William A. Ringler Jr. London: Thoemmes Con tinuum, 2004.2337 pp. $845.00. ISBN 0-8264-7278-8

REVIEWED BY: A. E. B. Coldiron, Louisiana State University

The STC. Brown and Robbins. The Stationer's Register. The OED. Giant research tools, monuments vital to early modern scholarship: comprehensive, systematic, grounded

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