<i>Textual Spaces: French Renaissance Writings on the Italian Voyage</i>. Richard E. Keatley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. x+233.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTextual Spaces: French Renaissance Writings on the Italian Voyage. Richard E. Keatley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. x+233.John D. LyonsJohn D. LyonsUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this deeply erudite exploration of the important corpus of sixteenth-century French accounts of journeys to Italy, Richard E. Keatley offers much both for specialists in Renaissance travel literature, topography, and antiquarianism and for those beginning their own expeditions in this domain. For the experienced scholar Keatley’s book offers suggestive and thought-provoking descriptions of a range of discursive operations. For those newer to the field the exceptionally extensive apparatus of notes and bibliography (a quarter of this rich volume) will facilitate future research. Textual Spaces is articulated into an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion.The book begins and ends with chapters about the author most associated with the journey to Italy, Michel de Montaigne. The first of these concentrates on the inception of Montaigne’s voyage and his travels across what is now France and through the Alps, his praise of German culture, and the interaction of Montaigne and his secretary in the writing of the journal. This somewhat loosely structured chapter problematizes the journal (first published in 1774), pointing out that Montaigne did not himself “write” the text in the way the authors of the other travel accounts studied in subsequent chapters did, but Montaigne rather appears as a character in a text written by his secretary. It takes therefore considerable attention and intuition to determine the various ways “Montaigne” is present in the text. As Keatley writes, “The secretary often appears to write the Journal on his own, while at other times his voice clearly overlaps with that of his master in a complex mixing of the nous of the troop, the je of narration, and the il of Monsieur de Montaigne” (21). It seemed to me that a somewhat more detailed account of the shifts between third-person and first-person manifestations of Montaigne in the journal would have been interesting. In the final chapter of the book Montaigne at last reaches Rome, and, as Keatley describes his critical enterprise, it will “highlight, through a detailed tracking of Montaigne’s movements, how a detailed sense of spatial dispersion contributes to and modifies an evolving sense of identity” (147). Here Keatley bases his reading on careful inspection of contemporary maps, architectural descriptions, and guidebooks to suggest probable interpretations of the spatial remarks and descriptions in the text of the journal itself.The second chapter is centered on two works by the prolific grand rhétoriqueur André de la Vigne about the French king Charles VIII and his attempt to assert French claims on Naples, La Ressource de la Chrestienté (written before the 1494 invasion and available in Cynthia J. Brown’s critical edition) and the Voyage de Naples (written during and after the war), both published in 1500. This chapter describes de la Vigne’s use of the eroticized allegory of Christianity to promote a religious and racial rationale for the French territorial claims, while at the same time the poet promotes himself and advertises his usefulness as propagandist. Chapter 3 considers Joachim Du Bellay’s account of his experience of Rome in his sonnet collection Les Regrets (1558). Whereas erotic allegory is the thread that ties together de la Vigne’s writings, here Keatley considers the concept of work as the central element of Du Bellay’s representation of his life in Rome. Keatley parses various terms for work current in the poet’s lifetime and spells out the nuances of œuvre, labeur, travail, industria, and others in this semantic range, sketching Du Bellay’s self-representation as a man torn between the degrading servitude of his duties and the heroic work of poetry that is largely prevented by the Roman environment. The fourth chapter, “The Topographical Narrative,” gives examples of works in which the writer-observer organizes his text primarily with reference to the experienced space of the writer’s visit rather than by themes, concepts, or references to previously published books. The chapter begins with Rabelais’s ultimately abandoned attempt to write a topography of Rome based on visual survey from above, as Rabelais describes the effort in his introduction to the Lyon edition of Bartolomeo Marliani’s Topography of Ancient Rome (1534). A second example of the topographical narrative is De l’antiquité de Pezoles (1573) by the lesser-known Burgundian lawyer Joseph Catin. Although Catin’s writing about the Phlegraean Fields is organized by reference to the visitor’s movement through space, this spatial structure is replete with a multitude of references to writers from antiquity who were associated with the places he visited. Thus he “highlights the relationship between authority and his personal journey” (78).The fifth chapter, the most accessible and least technical, offers a synoptic view of the experience of a multitude of travelers as they crossed the Alps and moved south through the peninsula. Organized by the typical spatial itineraries of travelers and with a choice of valuable exemplary quotations, this chapter includes observations from Montaigne’s journal along with information from many other travelers such as Jacques Sirmond, Jean-Jacques Boucher, Nicolas Audebert, Jean Tarde, Henri de Condé, Henri de Rohan, and Jacques de Villamont. We learn of the dreadful experiences, injuries, and deaths of travelers, the storage of frozen corpses of the French who did not make it across the mountains, the enforcement of quarantines, robbery, bribes, and various forms of transportation. We learn of the way French expectations, ideology, and political views determined the travelers’ understanding of what they found. And we glimpse their aesthetic experience of Italian architecture and urbanism.The complex and intricately organized bibliography is articulated into three major sections. The first, alphabetical by author, includes both books and chapters of books from the Renaissance to today (primary and secondary sources combined). The following section lists editions of accounts of travel to Italy (1568–1656). A third section on “Renaissance geographical sources” is separated into fifteen subdivisions: 1. Ancient authors; 2. Renaissance cosmographers and geographers; and thirteen other subdivisions based on location such as the Alps, Italy, Verona, south of Naples, and so forth.Textual Spaces is a valuable resource for readers interested in a wide variety of aspects of the Renaissance—literary, art historical, and broadly cultural. It will surely stimulate and facilitate further research in its field. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 3February 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711670 Views: 164 HistoryPublished online September 30, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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