<i>Lucrece and Brutus: Glory in the Land of Tender</i> . Edited and translated by Madeleine de Scudéry, Sharon Diane Nell de ScudéryMadeleine, <i>Lucrece and Brutus: Glory in the Land of Tender</i> . Edited and translated by NellSharon Diane. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.) Toronto: Iter Press, 2021. 382 pp., ill.

The scene feels familiar: a young lover lingers in a hidden spot of a garden, hoping to catch sight of his beloved who has recently moved to this country estate in an effort to create distance between the pair. Despite the unmistakeable echoes with the famous garden episode in Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), this scene in fact comes from the story of Brutus and Lucrèce in Part Two (Book 1) of Madeleine de Scudéry’s six-volume work, Clélie: histoire romaine (1654–60), which predates Lafayette’s better-known novel by about twenty years. Yet, the parallels with La Princesse de Clèves are not entirely misleading, for Scudéry’s night-time scene was surely an inspiration for Lafayette — as Sharon Diane Nell argues in the Introduction to her exciting new edition of Scudéry. In an elegant English translation of the story of Brutus and Lucrèce, Nell presents one of the most important intercalated stories from Clélie. In addition to this story, Nell provides supplementary translated material: other excerpts from Scudéry featuring Lucrèce; ancient and early modern sources on Lucretia; the famous passage from Clélie where the heroine describes the ‘Carte de Tendre’; and Scudéry’s prize-winning essay, Discours de la gloire (1671). Given that the bulk of this material has not been translated into English since the eighteenth century, Nell’s edition offers a welcome intervention that will be especially useful for transnational studies of early modern women’s writing at a moment when Scudéry’s influence on European literature is attracting considerable interest. The sum of this material enables the reader to grasp the rich and competing approaches to ‘gloire’ within Scudéry’s milieu whilst underlining the significance of Lucrèce as a character within Clélie. Not only does she function as a ‘double’ of Clélie throughout the text, but Lucrèce also plays a key — and often overlooked — role across the narrative, especially her posthumous appearance to Clélie in a dream, convincing the latter to escape the violence planned for her by Sextus Tarquinius and swim across the Tiber with her friends. As well as these connections to the eponymous character, the story of Lucrèce and Brutus remains valuable in its own right as a tale about glory and self-sacrifice. When Lucrèce realizes that her father is close to discovering her secret relationship with Brutus, and by extension Brutus’s identity as a political conspirator, Lucrèce opts to marry the loathsome Collatin rather than compromise the safety of the man she loves. For readers then as now, it is difficult to encounter this story without forewarning of Lucrèce’s eventual fate, but, as Nell expertly lays out, any and all knowledge of the figure of Lucretia in the ancient and early modern imagination helps to situate Scudéry’s contribution to this cultural history. Scudéry’s Lucrèce is dishevelled, bewildered, and desperately pained after being raped by Sextus, imbuing Lucrèce’s suicide with emotional heights that are sometimes missing from other depictions and that render Scudéry’s reworking unusually resonant with contemporary discourse on trauma and affect.

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