L'Histoire des Sévarambes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9835249 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wallace Kirsop (Monash University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 255-256 |
| Publication date | 2005-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-1128 • E-ISSN: 1468-2931 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fs/kni100 |
| OpenAlex | W2148866056 |
| Language | FR |
| Citations received | 8 |
Denis Veiras: Édition critique par Aubrey Rosenberg. (Libre pensée et littérature clandestine, 5). Paris, Champion, 2001. 333 pp. The attention directed to imaginary voyages in recent decades is clearly not diminishing. Students of the free-thinking tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are used to including this class of fiction alongside philosophical treatises and clandestine manuscripts in their work of analysis and exhumation. Aubrey Rosenberg, who has a number of major studies and editions of Simon Tyssot de Patot to his credit, turns in the present volume to giving us a plain text — rather than a classical ‘édition critique’ with an apparatus of textual variants and notes — of Denis Veiras's highly successful and much reprinted and translated Histoire des Sévarambes. The version chosen for reproduction is the first French printing of 1677–79, issued by Claude Barbin with a 1676 privilege, and then by Étienne Michalet and the author himself (constantly concealed by the initials ‘D.V.D.E.L.’) with a new one dated the following year. This mixture of discretion and bravado is not untypical of a sub-genre that played a considerable part in the questioning of political and religious orthodoxy. Rosenberg's substantial introduction, well nourished by secondary sources extending to unpublished theses, deals successively with Veiras's shadowy life and career, with the various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of what can be assumed with some certainty to be his work, and with an analysis of its content coupled with the diverse reactions and interpretations of contemporary and modern readers and scholars. A five-page list of the relevant literature completes this part of the editor's contribution. The text itself is a modern-spelling one, thereby aiming at more accessibility than the 1979 Slatkine facsimile reprint of the original duodecimos accompanied by an introduction written by Raymond Trousson. No explanatory notes are provided, but the name index at the end of the volume covers both Rosenberg's introduction and the Histoire des Sévarambes. The ampersands of the original are preserved, but some changes — in the direction of modern grammatical norms — are made to punctuation. In what is overall a sober, sensible and well-informed presentation, the greatest strength is the descriptive bibliography of older editions and translations. Although Rosenberg claims for his work no more than that it is a ‘liste préliminaire’, because not enough copies have been seen, the range of libraries searched on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Equator is impressive. This is an important step on the way to a full bibliography, in itself a significant contribution to the study of dissemination and reception. One can quibble about some details, for instance, the absence of long s in the quasi-facsimile title-page transcriptions and the use of acute accents rather than tildes over vowels in formulae of preliminary signatures, but a solid basis is there. A point made in an earlier version of this section (‘Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes: A Preliminary Checklist of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Editions’, The Culture of the Book (Melbourne, BSANZ, 1999), pp. 120–35), namely that the greatest concentrations of exemplars are at the University of Michigan and in Australia, has to be worked out by reading the lists of locations. Yet it is worth pointing out that collecting and curiosity have followed different paths and fashions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and thus reinforced the appeal and the resonance of a once marginal text
Art · Art history · Certainty · Champion · Epistemology · Humanities · Literature · Orthodoxy · Political science · Privilege (computing · Theology · Classics · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 1.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2019 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |