FRENCH 17

ABÉ, TAKAO. “The Missionary Réductions in New France: An Epistemological Problem with a Popular Historical Theory.” French Colonial History 15 (2014), 111-33.

Refutes the widespread notion that Jesuits in New France modeled their “réductions” (settlements for indigenous peoples) solely on the missions created by Jesuits in Paraguay. Posits instead a variety of influences including Europe as well as Paraguay and other non-Christian parts of the world.

ARBIB, DAN. “Note sur une maxime cartésienne: “A nosse ad esse valet consequentia, AT, VII, 520, 5.” RPL 111 (2013), 491-512.

“On se propose d’analyser ici une maxime cartésienne, Du connaître à l’être la conséquence est bonne. Rappelant les grandes interprétations de ce principe, on examine toutefois le cadre polémique où il s’insère, à savoir la discussion avec le jésuite Bourdin, auteur des Septièmes objections. Au moyen d’une analyse du concept de res cogitans entendue comme affirmation de l’immatérialité de l’âme, la critique de Bourdin prend pour cible le doute, accusé d’autoriser indûment le passage d’une négation mentale des étants matériels à leur négation dans l’être. Là-contre, Descartes développe les grandes lignes d’une option épistémologique idéaliste mais non réductionniste, option à laquelle il soustrait paradoxalement le casus belli, la res cogitans, par refus de toute objectivation de l’ego pour lui-même.”

BOUTEILLE-MEISTER, CHARLOTTE, AND KJERSTIN AUKRUST, eds. Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres, XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010.

Review: S. Guyot in Ren Q 64.1 (2011), 232-233. Wide-ranging, rich, and highly interdisciplinary, these analyses examine “the history of a visual fascination with violated bodies” (B-M. and A. 351). Additionally they call for a reconsideration of the baroque, its contours, both historically and conceptually. Sections include studies which consider the moral, the erotic, ethics, body metaphors, practices of devotion, judicial ruling, actual and theatrical scenes of horror, wounds as propaganda, and so forth. The 17th c. scholar will not want to miss Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard’s essay on the Anatomical Works of Riolan which demonstrates its relation not only to the spread of his medical practice but also to the “discipline” of feminine bodies (G. 232). Index, illustrations, bibliography.

BRAIDER, CHRISTOPHER. The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Review: K. Smith in MLR 108.4 (2013), 1284-85: “Braider’s aim is to show that Descartes’s views, and in particular his mind–body dualism, which ushered in what is called the ‘modern subject’, had less of an influence on French intellectual culture during this ‘Age’ than scholars have traditionally claimed. Braider’s approach is more literary criticism or deconstructionism than philosophy or history of philosophy….”

CROPPER, CORRY. “Prosper Me´rime´e’s ‘Federigo,’ or How to Cheat God and Beat Pascal.” Neophil 95 (2011), 395-401.

C.’s study, instead of ignoring or dismissing the story as many past critics have done, argues that M.’s originality lies in attempting “to undermine Blaise Pascal and his famous celestial wager” (395). Helpful inclusion of brief literature review, references to similar elements in folk tales (including a Grimm version), and a synopsis of the story. Challenging and thought-provoking argument of ‘‘Federigo,’’ as a “Pascalian parody” (401).

DUGGAN, ANNE E. “Epicurean Cannibalism, or France Gone Savage.” FS 67.4 (2013), 463-77.

Examines the ways in which the Jesuit priest Garasse uses the image of the cannibal in his attack on Théophile de Viau. Author posits that the comparison of the “Epicureans” to cannibalistic animals in what they consume and how serves as a warning to the community of the dangers posed by heterodoxy of every sort.

GOLDSTEIN, CLAIRE. Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Review: Matthew Senior in CdDS 14.1 (2012): 145-147. Goldstein "revisits Fouquet’s arrest and the confiscation of his cultural and political vision by Louis XIV, in order to ascertain what aspects of what became known as classicism were derived from Vaux." Chapter one focuses on Molière's Facheux, performed at Vaux and is contrasted with the Plaisirs de l'île enchantée. "Subsequent chapters analyze Mme de Villedieu’s Favory, tapestries designed by Le Brun for Vaux and Versailles, literary visits to Versailles by Félibien, La Fontaine, and Mlle de Scudéry, Neptune’s Grotto at Vaux, explicated by La Fontaine in Le Songe de Vaux, the Grotte de Thétis and commentary by Félibien, and a concluding chapter on La Quintinie and horticulture."

GRELL, OLE PETER, ANDREW CUNNINGHAM and JON ARRIZABALAGA, eds. Centres of Medical Excellence? Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500-1789. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Review: G. Giglioni in Ren Q 64.1 (2011), 227-228. Judged “engaging and insightful,” the collection of essays examines both famous medical schools, including those of Paris and Montpellier, and student responses to the education obtained there. Other aspects treated include patterns of mobility, prohibitory edicts, and the spread of the vernacular in instructions. Index, appendices, illustrations, and tables.

HUFF. TOBY E. Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Review: C. Nappi in Ren Q 64. 3 (Fall 2011), 938-939. Mixed review appreciates the breadth and comparative nature of the project and H.’s success in “bringing together major works in the history of the Scientific Revolution with secondary literature on many local traditions of early modern science” (N. 939). While outlining H.’s argument demonstrating the failure of Eastern civilization in understanding or developing scientific innovations of early modern Europe, N. refers readers to other articulations pointing out the insufficiency of this approach. Illustrations and bibliography.

JAMES, TONY. Le Songe et la raison: essai sur Descartes. Paris: Hermann, 2010.

Review: C. Belin in FS 67.3 (2013): 404. In a work that forms part of a larger effort to reevaluate the ensemble of Descartes’s work, James analyzes the three 1619 dreams of the young Descartes. The author closely reads both Latin and French versions of the texts and situates them in the context of Descartes’s life and other works. Author concludes that the dreams are a foundational experience for Descartes’s philosophy, and reviewer agrees that they merit this carefully constructed, thought-provoking second look.

JOHNSON, CHRISTOPHER D. Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 52. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Review: C. Braider in Ren Q 64.1 (2011), 234-236. Highly appreciative review notes that J.’s exploration of hyperbole extends far beyond the figure of speech to the very “nature of language, of imaginative conception and so of thought as a whole” (B. 234). Chapters on the theory of hyperbole from Antiquity to the baroque provide a rich backdrop against which well-informed close readings examine several relevant genres. For France, chapters on Descartes and on Pascal explore the figure in its relation to literature, doctrine, theology, and apologetics. Highly recommended for “as wide and enthusiastic readership as hyperbolic praise can give it” (B. 236).

KESSLER, HERBERT L. and DAVID NIRENBERG, eds., Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Review: Y. Even in Ren Q 64.3 (2011), 916-917. Highly valuable and diverse collection which demonstrates how Christians “used Jews and Judaism to construct their . . . claims about the material and sensual world” (K. and N. 74). Following a fine and compelling introduction by N., essays analyze by art-historical methods specific artworks and ideas from the late Roman period through Romanticism. Index, illustrations and tables.

KMEC, SONJA. Across the Channel: Noblewomen in Seventeenth-Century France and England. Trier: Kliomedia GmbH, 2010.

Review: S. E. Dinan in Ren Q 64. 2 (2011), 634-636. Praiseworthy examination focuses on an elite Huguenot family as it considers “issues of property management, marriage arrangements, and artistic patronage” (D. 634-635). The noble, bi-confessional family in question is that of Marie de La Tour and Charlotte de la Trémoïlle from western France. Valuable for its analysis of the authority exercised by these women and others of the family. Rich bibliography, appendices, bibliography, and index.

LONG, KATHLEEN P., ed. Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010.

Review: A. Rankin in Ren Q 64.3 (2011), 936-937. Praiseworthy exploration of the “relationship of women and questions of gender to the scientific domain in early modern Europe” (L. 1). The collection of eleven essays examines gender and early modern science from diverse approaches and in diverse material, including, for example, manuscripts and emblems. Focus is on alchemy and obstetrics. French scholars will particularly appreciate Penny Bayer’s essay on women in the alchemical circle of Joseph du Chesne and Bridgette Sheridan’s account of “the relationship between gender, experiential knowledge, and authority at the seventeenth-century French court” (R. 937). Despite some conceptual and editing concerns, R. finds the volume a “rewarding” read and a “significant contribution” towards a “field desperately in need of new scholarship” (R. 937). Index, illustrations, tables, bibliography.

MORIARTY, MICHAEL. “Grace, Predestination, and Jansenism.” SCFS 35.2 (2013), 148-168.

“Martin de Barcos’s posthumously published Exposition de la foy de l’Eglise romaine touchant la grâce et la prédestination is an important restatement of what he takes to be St Augustine’s doctrine on these matters. The first edition (1697) was condemned by the Archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, as a restatement of Jansenist doctrine, which, broken down into five key propositions, had been condemned by Innocent X in 1653. The ‘Remarques’ published with the second edition of 1700 argue that the Exposition by no means endorses the doctrines contained in the Five Propositions, and that the papal condemnation of these is thus irrelevant. This claim is assessed in a detailed analysis of the ‘Remarques’ and of the main text of the Exposition. In conclusion there is a brief discussion of the relationship of Barcos’s account of grace to Pascal’s and of the attempt to distinguish their views from those of the Calvinists.”

PARISH, RICHARD. Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing: ‘Christianity is Strange’. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Review: N. Hammond in MLR 108.1 (2013), 302-303: “Richard Parish examines the compatibility and incompatibility of thought contained in the work of a number of seventeenth-century French Catholic writers, showing the various ways in which ‘Christianity is unfamiliar, strange, and counter-intuitive’ (p. 5). In addition to Pascal himself, well-known figures such as Bossuet, St François de Sales, Fénelon, Pierre Corneille, and Madame Guyon loom large, but other less familiar names, such as Jean Rotrou, St Margaret-Mary Alacoque, Antoinette Bourignon, Jeanne des Anges, and Jean-Joseph Surin, make regular appearances over the course of the book.

PELLEGRIN, MARIE-FRÉDÉRIQUE. “Penser au féminin au XVIIe siècle.” RPFE n°3, 307-310.

Pellegrin présente le volume de la RPFE centré sur le thème “penser au féminin au XVIIe siècle. “Notre hypothèse est donc que les femmes philosophes sont importantes comme voix discordantes et minoritaires, comme porteuses de questions cruciales et impensées par la majorité des philosophes à l’âge moderne, questions qui touchent justement à la place intellectuelle des femmes dans la société et donc à la fois à la capacité de raisonner et d’agir des femmes et des hommes de toutes les catégories sociales.”

RANDALL, CATHERINE, ed. Black Robes and Buckskin: A Selection from the Jesuit Relations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

Review: T. G. Pearson in Ren Q 64. 3 (2011), 983-984. R. has here updated selected Jesuit texts of the Relations from the Canadian missionary work, published in French (1632-1673) and in the 1898-1902 English edition of Reuben Gold Thwaites. R.’s volume includes a historiographical essay on the theology, work and relations with the aborigines, introductions to the chapters, and an essay on translation issues. R,’s translations/paraphrases are generally praised as a “welcome change to the Thwaites edition (P. 983), but the reviewer includes problematic examples and would have appreciated a critical analysis of the Jesuits’ inculturation. Illustrations, bibliography.

SANTOS DASILVA, KAREN. "Pringy's Les Differens caracteres des femmes: The Difficult Case of Female Salvation." CdDS 15.1 (2013): 46-71.

The author proposes to study the meaning and importance of the Caracteres "given its complex integration of moralist, theological, and feminist influences." She revises previous feminist reading that turn the text into a form of female rebellion. Dasilva is more careful in her interpretation and argues for a more complex understanding of the text, which raises important interrogations of whether gender is tied to essence, as well as of the relationship between social self and interior self.

SÖDERLUND, INGA ELMQVIST. Taking Possession of Astronomy: Frontispieces and Illustrated Title Pages in 17th-Century Books on Astronomy. The Center for History of Science. Stockholm: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2010.

Review: D. A. Brownstein in Ren Q 64.2 (2011), 584-587. Positive aspects of S.’s volume are noted such as the inclusion of “‘pictorial references to celestial phenomena’ in over 90% of the many frontispieces she has examined” (S. 105) plus the construction of a typology and conventions as she focuses on the intersection between science and art. Although the volume’s breadth is appreciated, its analyses could be more specific and questions such as “the artists’ interest in astronomical research (B. 586) or gender and science more deeply examined. Index, illustrations, and bibliography.

THIEL, UDO. The Early Modern Subject: Self-consciousness and personal identity from Descartes to Hume. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

Review: D. Heller-Roazen in TLS 5757 (August 2, 2013): 24. Reviewer finds this a “learned and weighty book” which “reconstructs the steps” that led early modern thinkers “to offer innovative accounts of the relations between reflective awareness and identity across time.” Thiel argues that Descartes less innovative than some suppose since the doctrine of the cogito says little about “what makes each individual soul the thing it is” (Heller-Roazen). Cartesians “drew no close link between subjective awareness and the identity of the human person” (Heller-Roazen).

TUTINO, STEFANIA. “Nothing But the Truth? Hermeneutics and Morality in the Doctrines of Equivocation and Mental Reservation in Early Modern Europe.” Ren Q 64.1 (2011), 115-155.

Theology, morality, and hermeneutics are at the heart of this well-documented and convincingly argued essay on equivocation and its theories. 17th c. French scholars will appreciate T.’s “forward-looking perspective” as the essay moves from Augustine to Spanish theologians, notably Domingo de Soto and Martin de Azpilcueta (Doctor Navarrus) and on to the Louvain Jesuit Lessius, the French Jesuit Théophile Raynaud, and the Sorbonne theologians of the early 17th c. T. reminds us of the large and dangerous conflict “between certain sectors of the French church and the Roman Curia, whose relations were very delicate from the 1610s and in the aftermath of the murder of Henri of Navarre . . . and became dramatically tense after the publication of Cornelius Jansenius’s Augustinus in 1640” (148-149), and of the eventual condemnation of Raynaud in 1681. Rich bibliography includes archival and printed sources.

VERVILLE, BÉROALDE DE. Le Palais des curieux. Véronique Luzel, ed. Geneva : Droz, 2012.

Review: B. Renner in FS 67.4 (2013): 550-51. A well-executed critical edition of Verville’s 1612 oft-overlooked attempt at encyclopedic knowledge. This textual reflection of the chaos found in nature forms an important link between the humanism of the Renaissance and the neoclassicism that thrived during Louis XIV’s reign. The thought process that contributed to Verville’s treatment of various topics is revealed through Luzel’s extensive research of the author’s other writings, including a number of relatively inaccessible sources.

VITULLO, JULIANN and DIANE WOLFTHAL, eds. Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Review: S. Deng in Ren Q 64. 2 (2011), 625-626. While this volume’s breadth is impressive, in the subjects (disciplines of history, art history, literature and musicology are included), genres, and geography covered, the reviewer would have appreciated more attention to the “complex relations between economy and morality in this key transitional period of European history” (D. 626). French scholars will benefit from Kathleen Ashley’s essay on the motives of the French philanthropist Abigail Mathieu. Index, illustrations, bibliography.

VUILLEMIN, JEAN-CLAUDE. Épistémè baroque. Le mot et la chose. Paris : Hermann, 2013.

Review : C. Venner in QL1089 (du 1er au 31 août 2013), 18 : Vuillemin “entend montrer, par un biais non pas littéraire mais philosophique, comment la crise métaphysique qui préside au baroque, et qui implique un désenchantement du moi et du monde, conduit en réalité à la sacralisation de l’individu, annonçant l’ère moderne. Cette réflexion suppose de justifier la pertinence de l’approche foucaldienne et de réhabiliter le baroque, trop souvent occulté par le classicisme”.

WILKIN, REBECCA. Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008.

Review: B. Woshinsky in CdDS 14 (2012): 137-142. Woshinsky praises the originality of the structure of this erudite study that "traces a general movement in early modern French thought from hermeneutics to ethics to epistemology 'proper.'" Rather than starting with Descartes, Wilkin concludes with him, perceiving his work as “a confrontation of positive and skeptical modes of seeing." While she builds upon feminist studies, she also proposes her individual point of view, which is well-established, and argued convincingly through a wide variety of examples, including 17th-century witchcraft trials, philosophical thought, and medical thinking.

WOSHINSKY, BARBARA R. Imagining Women's Conventual Spaces in France, 1600-1800. The Cloister Disclosed. Great Britain: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010.

Review: J. Perlmutter in CdDS 15.1 (2013): 105-107. Woshinsky turns to works that reference convents but were written outside the walls of the cloister. Her goal is “to illuminate the unique place the convent occupies in the early modern imaginary, in the context of space, gender and power." The first chapters are devoted to religious writings and offer a slightly different feel from the latter that turn to secular and feminocentric representations of thresholds, parlors, cells, and, finally, tombs. The reviewer particularly enjoyed the humorous tone of several passages and mentions the ample bibliography. There are very few criticisms, except for some errors of proofreading and some elements/authors that Woshinsky fails to mention.