Jean Bouchet

Réunis par Jennifer Britnell et Nathalie Dauvois. (Colloques, congrès et conférences sur la Renaissance européenne, 34). Paris, Champion, 2003. 314 pp. 2 b&w plates. This volume, as the editors proudly proclaim, presents the papers of the first ever colloquium to be held on the rhétoriqueur poet, Jean Bouchet. As such, it not only explores further the avenues of enquiry established by Britnell in her major new study of the poet (Edinburgh University Press 1986; see FS, xli (1987), 322), but also charts work in progress and indeed anticipates the publication of a critical edition of Bouchet's Œuvres complètes by Champion to which many of the authors of these proceedings will be contributing. The Introduction, often perfunctory in such volumes, is far from being so here, a succinct résumé of Bouchet's life and literary career being followed by an état présent (inevitably passé) of research. If there are no great suprises or shifts of critical opinion in these papers (the intemperate Guy having long since been despatched and replaced by a more accommodating champion and a new orthodoxy), the task of defining this late rhétoriqueur's status and position in literary history (‘le dernier des grands rhétoriqueurs?’...‘le passeur d'un monde à l'autre?’...‘le témoin privilégié des mutations de l'univers de la Renaissance’ — no question mark there) looms large from the outset and in many of the contributions. All the papers demonstrate a high level of commitment, scholarship and enthusiasm for the task in hand (definitely no bottom-drawer stuff here). Faced with the hybrid nature of much of Bouchet's production, the editors have quite reasonably opted for a chronological ordering of material which allows the reader to sample not only the diversity of the works analysed but also their evolution. Of particular interest are those contributions bearing on how Bouchet's specific purposes, his active engagement with contemporary social issues, and his public, much wider than that of his court-poet predecessors, shaped his inheritance and refashioned his writing (C. Brown, D. Cowling, S. McKinnon); those which examine or re-examine his religious views on the crucial issues of the day and the tensions between the sacred and profane discourses in which they are expressed (Chiron, Dauvois, Britnell); Rech's essay on Bouchet as historian, his sources, methods, shortcomings and, incidently, his attitude to the use of the French language as a vehicle for history; and finally, the examination by Lecointe of the stylistic influence and assimilation of Politian's Sylvae, mediated by Nicolas Petit and the ‘cercle de Fontenay-le-Comte’, and its consequences for the evolution of Bouchet's own style. A full consolidated bibliography and an index of names and topics completes this scholarly volume

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