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Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere. by Anne-Marie Beaulieu Review by: Myriam Yardeni The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 850-852 Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543724 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 03:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sixteenth Century Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.78.109.119 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:32:32 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere.by Anne-Marie Beaulieu

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Page 1: Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere.by Anne-Marie Beaulieu

Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere. by Anne-Marie BeaulieuReview by: Myriam YardeniThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 850-852Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543724 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 03:32

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

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

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

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Page 2: Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere.by Anne-Marie Beaulieu

850 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 3 (1998)

major collections in Paris, Geneva, and Zurich.The letters provide valuable internal evi- dence too of how Beza's network of correspondence would have worked.Taking up contact with a new correspondent in England, Beza provides advice as to how he should reply, through the French church or French ambassador in London, or friendly merchants in Lyon. The letters of this year are particularly interesting, also, for what they reveal of Beza's rela- tionship with the press. One of the major preoccupations of his German letters is whether to publish in Geneva or Germany a refutation of the Formula of Concord. Beza seems to take it for granted that the output of the Genevan presses could be relatively easily con- trolled: the Genevan presses had published something, he tells DUrnhoffer in March, but it might be more opportune to suppress it. So, by way of balance, it is good to have in the annexed materials at the end of the volume Beza's extremely careful and respectful submis- sion to the Genevan Council in February, asking permission to publish his own writing on the subject. For all the influence Beza exercised over Geneva's publishing industry, he clearly recognized that he, too, was subject to the city's discipline and control.The editors of the volume deserve, as ever, our admiration and gratitude.The annotations are of the customary high quality providing an exposition of the principal issues and notes on personalities men- tioned in the letters which are often small masterpieces of concise exposition. If I have one regret, it is the decision, presumably taken at the beginning of the project, not to take up in the numerical sequence letters known to have been written of which no copy survives.This would have had considerable value, particularly in a year like that covered by the present vol- ume, where a large proportion of the letters Beza wrote are no longer extant. In this partic- ular case, it would do something to restore the balance between the European and French correspondence distorted by the destruction of much of the latter. Andrew Pettegree ....... ...... St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute

Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere. Ed. Anne-Marie Beaulieu. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1997. 530 pp. n.p.

The scholarly reedition of a rare and even hard-to-find sixteenth-century text is always a feast for the historian. La Popeliniere's Les Trois Mondes is such a text. A good edition only adds to one's pleasure, and Anne-Marie Beaulieu's is a respectable one. As often happens, this is a revised version of the editor's doctoral thesis, carried out under the supervision of two of France's best known seizie'mistes, Nicole Cazauran and Frank Lestringant, whose involve- ment augurs well.

The choice of the text was a felicitous one, because it illustrates the development of two important "new" disciplines in sixteenth-century France: history and geography, deeply imbricated ever since in the French cultural and academic tradition.With the rediscovery of the man and the renaissance of La Popeliniere studies that followed in the late fifties and the early sixties, there is no longer any need to demonstrate the significance of the contributions La Popeliniere made to the study and writing of history, and especially to the newborn dis- cipline of the history of historiography. His Histoire des histoires et l'idee de l'histoire accomplie was reissued in a relatively affordable edition by Fayard and has been studied by a wide range of scholars in the last four decades. But, in spite of the excellent article published by Corrado Vivanti, "Alle origini di civilta: Le scoperte geografiche e gli scritti di Henri de La Popeliniere," Rivista Storica Italiana, 74 (1962), pp. 225-247 (not mentioned in Beaulieu's bibliography), the geographer La Popeliniere still remains to be discovered.

Unlike Mercator, La Popeliniere was not a cartographer, nor was he a traveler like many of his geographer contemporaries. He was a captain and at his times, a Protestant historian,

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Page 3: Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere.by Anne-Marie Beaulieu

Book Reviews 851

praised but also criticized for his impartiality. That we have no descriptions of voyages writ- ten by La Popeliniere himself has intrigued most specialists. Beaulieu presents the two pre- vailing views concerning this problem. Following G.W Sypher, La Popeliniere embarked for Brazil (after finishing his Trois Mondes) but interrupted his voyage because of his poor health. For E. Hassinger, La Popeliniere effectively reached Brazil and even speaks of his experiences there. Beaulieu inclines, I think wisely, towards the first hypothesis, because she qualifies La Popeliniere as "le geographe de cabinet."

But even if he himself never reached the coasts of Brazil, La Popeliniere was well read in geographical literature and even interested in practical geographical problems; for example, the variations of the littoral near the mouth of the Gironde.Thus, he was able to speculate about imbricated geographical issues such as the unknown austral continent. Nevertheless, in the Trois Mondes, La Popeliniere always remains more the "historian" than the geographer, and he seldom achieves the sensitivity and insights of the anthropologist or the ethnologist, as does Bodin.

In her introduction, Beaulieu stresses the two main qualities of La Popeliniere the histo- rian-and not the geographer: his objectivity and his modernity. In fact, her approach to preparing a new edition of a historical work is a classical one. She gives a lot of important and usefutl details and points up most of La Popeliniere's hidden and apparent weaknesses. For instance, La Popeliniere mentions only his "ancient" sources-as for the moderns, he plagiarizes, paraphrases, or copies them extensively without ever mentioning them. Among these are the works of several Protestants such as Lery, Goulart, and, ironically, Urbain Chauveton, who was one of the acting forces behind La Popeliniere's condemnation by the Synod of La Rochelle after the publication, in 1581, of his Histoire de France.

What is particularly valuable in the introduction is the "actualization" of the Trois Mondes. The work is firmly placed in the historical realities of the Wars of Religion as well as in the private and public life of La Popeliniere himself. Beaulieu mentions La Popeliniere's indig- nation against the unjust papal bull of Alexander Borgia VI depriving France of her part in the NewWorld. She is particularly sharp and sensitive when in La Popeliniere's geographic interests she stresses the confessional and the national ingredients. As for Coligny, so too for La Popeliniere, geographic discovery and colonization represent perhaps the best, if not the only solution to the religious strife between Catholics and Protestants. Founding new French colonies in Brazil, Florida, or elsewhere offered a possibility to reconcile religious toleration with obedience to the king while preserving the characteristics of true French- ness. After the failures in Brazil and Florida, La Popeliniere's only hope remained the as yet unknown world of the Antarctide, the Australian continent.

The three worlds of La Popeliniere are that of the past, the world known by antiquity; that of his own days, the New World discovered and explored in the last 150 years; and that of the future, to be discovered, explored, and colonized by France. And in this imbricated geographical and historical sequence, it is no accident that in the third book of the Trois MMndes, after analyzing the French failure in Florida (1562-1568), La Popeliniere discusses the Brazilian colonizers' experience (1555-1560). In spite of the strong ideological currents underlining the Trois Mondes, the work, as Beaulieu puts it, remains a remarkable synthesis of the history of the world and of 150 years of discoveries.

Beaulieu's edition is based on the texts of the quarto edition of Paris, Pierre L'Huillier (1582), and the octavo edition published in the same year by this editor.The scholarly pre- sentation of the work is exemplary. The notes are comprehensive if not exhaustive: 98 for the Avant Discours, 617 for the first book, 824 for the second, and 583 for the third, the shortest of them.

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Page 4: Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere.by Anne-Marie Beaulieu

852 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 3 (1998)

There are three annexes that follow the text.The first gives the detailed plan of the work and helps clarify many obscure issues. The second is a helpful and important table of the themes discussed in the Histoire de France and the Trois Mondes. The annexes are followed by an excellent glossary, a bibliography, and an index for the Trois Mondes (excluding the intro- duction).

What is visibly lacking in the bibliography is the modern anthropological research related to travels and discoveries, such as the works of Anthony Pagden. But this is perhaps because of La Popeliniere's failures in this field and not those of the editor. MyriamYardeni ............................................... University of Haifa

Antoine Verard, Parisian Publisher, 1485-1512. Mary Beth Winn. Geneva: Librai- rie Droz, 1997, 555 pp. n.p.

This impressive book represents a work the scope of which few researchers these days are willing or able to undertake.Winn has examined virtually all the extant presentation copies of books published byVe'rard, and a very large proportion of the others. Her study amply testifies to the value of the difficult job of effecting a detailed comparison between these widely scattered copies.

Verard was a large-scale publisher, that is to say, in the early days of printing when the new commerce was establishing, indeed creating itself, he commissioned editions from many different printers and then arranged for their sale or presentation. Still penetrated with the norms of manuscript production while fully appreciating the capacities of the new tech- nology,Verard simultaneously exploited the older and the newer, not just the two different technologies of script and print, but also the two different profit systems of patronage and commerce.The printed editions he commissioned frequently comprised both paper and vellum copies, and the latter were then customized either for presentation to a chosen patron or for other potential patrons as the openings arose.The most numerous and most handsome volumes went to King CharlesVIII of France. Presentation copies were illuminated by hand, usually with miniatures completely covering the woodcut which illustrated the copies intended for ordinary sale.Verard commissioned these frequently exquisite miniatures from a variety of artists, including some of the best of the day like the Master of Jacques de Besancon. But it is not only the illustration and ornamentation which is peculiar to presen- tation copies; they also frequently have prefatory material, usually printed, which is unique to them or to a very small proportion of surviving copies. Winn's study reminds us repeat- edly of how very far a printed edition is from being a homogeneous entity.

The bulk of the study focuses on these presentation copies and onVerard's projection of himself as a "producer" of the volume presented.The first three chapters give an account of Verard's career, status, and relations with writers. Archival documents cited here are subse- quently reproduced in one of several valuable appendices which complete the study. Chapter 4 reviews the royal and noble patrons who received presentation copies.Winn is able in each case to review the totality of surviving evidence for relations with each donor. In all, eleven recipients are identified, including HenryVII of England for whom copies were rather sum- marily customized when the opportunity presented itself. Winn demonstrates first the supreme importance of Charles VIII as object ofVerard's attentions in the early part of his career.The flow of volumes dedicated to the king faltered, however, when Charles set off for his Italian wars, and was only beginning to reestablish itself when the king died unex- pectedly in 1498. After unsuccessfully soliciting the support of the new king, Louis XII, Verard looked increasingly to the rising star of the Angouleme family. During the reign of

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