La Consolation érudite

By Raymond Baustert. (Biblio-17, 141). Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003. 387 pp. The first part of Raymond Baustert's engaging scholarly monograph consists of eight related chapters, all of which have previously been published as articles in the last decade or so. These are now reinforced by linking material in such a way as to allow them to read persuasively as a composite survey of the classical and Judaeo-Christian material present in the lettre de consolation in the first half of the seventeenth century. Baustert shows at the outset how the writers of these pieces were at pains to identify themselves as honnêtes gens, and to communicate with their addressees on a mutual understanding of familiarity with a wide range of historical, mythical and biblical models. The thematics ranges through parallels with heroic figures of antiquity, classical attitudes towards death, and the pagan afterlife, before moving into the Christian domain (from both the Catholic and Reformed traditions), and broaching with due circumspection such intractable topics as angels, the image of God and the company of the elect. In all such writing, Baustert stresses, the emphasis is on eulogy and consolation (there is, for example, virtually no treatment of hell or even purgatory); and the pagan themes are in due course invariably subsumed into a Christian perspective. One disappointing aspect of the classical chapters lies in the absence of information about contemporary versions of the material to which the writers would presumably have had access (nearly all Baustert's references to classical texts make use of modern critical editions); however this lacuna is less evident in the later chapters, where contemporary compendia of Christian thematics are identified, although, as the author notes, the tendency of the genre is consistently towards an avoidance of specifically theological engagement, in favour of an exploitation of the appropriate biblical topoi. Overall, he concludes, ‘le consolateur du premier dix-septième siècle est un honnête homme qui conforte, dans sa douleur, un autre honnête homme selon tous les registres culturels et spirituels alors admis’. The second part is then devoted to a substantial compilation both of the corpus of letters studied and their authors, and of their addressees and subjects, in all cases accompanied by brief biographies and extensive bibliographical information. This is an impressive piece of scholarship in its own right, and affords a definitive framework of reference for any future work on these texts (of which the great majority are by unfamiliar names, many of them priests or pastors). The major presentational difficulty with this book lies in the very off-putting mise en page, with erratic spacing frequently making it difficult to work out whether one is reading a quotation or a commentary, printed characters squashed together or mysteriously isolated from each other, and a bottom-heavy look to a good many pages as a result of the excessive quantity and length of the footnotes. A little more erudite consolation for the modern readership of this important study would not have come amiss

Afterlife · Art · Consolation · Eulogy · Humanities · Literature · Parallels · Purgatory · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity