Anne-Marie Du Boccage, <i>‘La Colombiade’ (1756)—‘Die Columbiade’ (1762)</i> . Édition bilingue, établie et présentée par Ina Schabert Du BoccageAnne-Marie, <i>‘La Colombiade’ (1756) — ‘Die Columbiade’ (1762)</i> . Édition bilingue, établie et présentée par SchabertIna. (Die Feministische Aufklärung in Europa.) Stuttgart: Metzler, 2021. x + 463 pp., ill.

Anne-Marie Du Boccage (1710–1802) is now best known, if at all, for her abridged translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published as Le Paradis terrestre in 1748. Her devotion to the epic genre led her to write one of her own concerning the adventures of Christopher Columbus on his arrival in the New World. Columbus was a popular hero for eighteenth-century epic poets, his best-known, or least obscure, incarnation being in the American Joel Barlow’s Columbiad (1807). The poem by Du Boccage has not been forgotten. There is a modern edition, La Colombiade, ou la foi portée au Nouveau Monde (Paris: Côté-femmes, 2019), in modern orthography, but, according to the present editor, it has numerous errors and omissions. Ina Schabert, however, faithfully reproduces the 1756 edition, and, on facing pages, the anonymous German prose translation published at Leipzig in 1762. The German version, which corresponds closely to the French, will be useful for readers who read German more easily than French. Schabert has also provided an Introduction, a list of variants in different eighteenth-century editions, explanatory notes, and a bibliography of editions and translations, all in both French and German. The Colombiade was also translated into Italian (1771) and Portuguese (1892), but never into English. This is a text well worth rescuing from obscurity. Du Boccage places it in the epic tradition by using the Aeneid as an approximate template for her hero’s adventures (as Voltaire did in the Henriade). She includes explicit references to Milton’s Adam (iv. 131), Torquato Tasso’s Rinaldo (iv. 92), and Homer’s Demodocus (vi. 41); Columbus’s native American lover Zama corresponds to Virgil’s Dido; the battle in Canto viii recalls the later books of the Aeneid (themselves modelled on the Iliad); the paradisal domain of the evil Queen Vascona resembles that of Tasso’s temptress Armida; the demons who assail Columbus, inspired by missionary accounts of Aztec religion, correspond to the devils in Tasso and Milton; and in Canto ix, as in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, we have a prophetic vision. While Milton confines himself to biblical history, however, the ghost of Zama informs Columbus in immense detail about the future history of Europe down to the eighteenth century. Here Du Boccage shows her Enlightenment credentials by paying homage to Voltaire (‘Un Génie immortel’, ix. 402), Émilie Du Châtelet (as ‘Uranie’, ix. 474), and a host of other philosophes. Her alexandrines are enjoyable, her narrative passages are brisk, and she excels in lyrical evocations of paradisal landscapes, soon to be devastated by the Spaniards’ greed for gold. This edition belongs in every collection of French eighteenth-century texts.

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