Theatrum Mundi: Studies in Honour of Ronald W. Tobin by Claire L. Carlin , Kathleen Wine (review)

MLRy 99.3, 2004 773 it. Some are colleagues of Daniel Menager at Nanterre while others are drawn from France, Canada, England, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and the USA. All the essays are in French except for Nuccio Ordine's piece on Giordano Bruno's I furori. They are distributed more or less equally between four sections, each representing one of Menager's interests within the period of the Renaissance: political ideas, poetry and politics, poetry and theology, spirituality and theology. An advantage of a collection of this kind is to focus attention on lesser-known figures of the past and their works. Thus, Catherine Magnien examines the career ofJacques Faye d'Espeisses (1544-90), a self-effacingparlementaire whose devotion to Henri III led him to ride from Krakow to Paris in record time! Using the memoirs of Philippe Hurault, comte de Cheverny, and of Nicolas de Neuville, seigneur de Villeroy, Nadine Kuperty-Tsur shows how upwardly mobile civil servants justified their conduct in the face of aristorcratic criti? cism by giving precedence to the interests of the State over those of the king. Myriam Yardeni traces the impact of the writings ofPierre de La Place and of Louis Regnier de La Planche on later Protestant historians. Michel Magnien stoutly defends the attri? bution of the Memoire sur I'edit dejfanvier to Estienne de La Boetie, and Alain Dufour considers Theodore de Beze's concept of history, particularly his reliance on docu? ments and his providentialism. In the second section, Jean Vignes explores the 'assaut de lyrisme martial' (p. 207) triggered by the conquest of Calais by the due de Guise in 1558, Philip Ford (surprisingly, the only English contributor) interprets Primaticcio 's frescoes in the Porte Doree at Fontainebleau in the light of Ronsard's Le Satyre, Yvonne Bellenger considers three sets of satirical sonnets by Jacques Grevin, and Frank Lestringant assesses La Cabale des reformez,attributed to Guillaume Reboul, as a satirical blast for the Counter-Reformation. In the third section, Jean-Claude Margolin discusses two religious poems by Charles de Bovelles published in 1552, Nicole Cazauran points to an emotional contradiction in Marguerite de Navarre's poetic response to death, Mireille Huchon focuses on a Trialogue published by Pacquier Pissart of Antwerp (1544), imperial propaganda which portrays Francois Ieras a follower of Satan. The last section opens with a examination by Mare Venard of the problems associated with translating the Pater Noster into French. A brief review of a large and diverse Festschrift cannot be more than arbitrarily selective. Suffice it to say that this well-produced volume successfully underscores the close ties binding literature, history,and religion during the French Renaissance and Reformation. University of Birmingham R. J. Knecht Theatrum Mundi: Studies in Honour of Ronald W Tobin. Ed. by Claire L. Carlin and Kathleen Wine. (EMF Critiques) Charlottesville: Rookwood Press. 2003. 280 pp. ISBN 2-7453-0729-0. This disciplined and wide-ranging volume consists of a brief biography of the distin? guished critic, a list of his voluminous publications, and some thirtyarticles, arranged in four sections, on a variety of topics reflecting the range of Ronald W. Tobin's intellectual interests. Some of these are mainstream; others, such as William Calin's study of dramatized eclogues in Occitan, are splendidly esoteric. The opening sec? tion, 'Theatre of Learning', justifies the title ofthe whole collection. Louis Van Delft revisits the metaphor of the world as theatre as an indicator of the cultural unity that prevailed in early modern Europe; Henry Phillips demonstrates how Poussin in Confirmation artfully arranges a theatrical exhibition of ecclesiastical learning; and Bernard Beugnot sees the Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugene as a semi-dramatic meditation . So we have theatre serving as a metaphor for the organization of knowledge. In the final three articles in this section, we also see intriguing epistemological functions 774 Reviews assigned to LTllusion comique, Phedre, and Tartuffe. In the second section, 'Comedy and the World', we see that the perception of the world as theatre was often a negative one, emphasizing illusory aspects of human existence, as in Claire Carlin's startling 'The Staging of Impotence: France's last Congres'. Similarly, while Delia Gambelli argues that Moliere...

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