[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
In Gargantua (ed. princ. 1535) Rabelais has his narrator describe the accidental discovery and unearthing of a bronze tomb containing ancient writings. One of these he appends to his account, in fragmentary form, “par reverence de l’antiquaille” (sic). At the same time the whole rollicking account is a singular illustration of Rabelais’ irreverence, as the collection’s editor shows in his introduction, where he foreshadows the diversity of approaches to the ancient literary inheritance that the book explores. Some obvious diversities emerge in the titles of the four sections into which the book is divided, and the wide range of figures and topics discussed in them. The first three sections treat transmission and reception through the lenses of different categories: editors, commentators and translators; encyclopedists and philologists; and poets. The last returns to veneranda antiquitas via Guillaume Budé (“premier révérent de l’antique en France”, p. 198) and Rabelais himself.
Inevitably (and interestingly), the chapters are not all devoted to central ancient authors or to well-known transmitters of the inheritance (for whom French has the handy term ‘passeurs’). The first essay is an informative but rapid survey of editions and translators of Aristophanes up to the end of the 16th century deftly handled by Simone Beta, author of the irresistible Io, un manoscritto (2017, see BMCR 2019.09.04), and done with the same flair.[1] Next comes Mathieu Ferrand on Plautus in the 16th century, a detailed study of the edition of Jakob Omphalius (1500–1567) of the first three plays, Amphitruo, Asinaria, and Aulularia, printed in Paris in 1530 during Omphalius’ legal studies there. Omphalius avowedly incorporates the commentary of Gilbert de Longueil in his edition printed the same year in Cologne. At the same time he introduces a new way of reading the poet by silently applying to Plautus the moralizing approach and modes of rhetorical analysis of Philipp Melanchthon’s edition of Terence (Cologne, 1528). The result, Ferrand argues, is that these plays of Plautus become “des comédies de Terence comme les autres” (p. 34). The third chapter, by Raphaël Cappellen, focusses on the little-known French translations of Greek authors by Jean Brèche (1514–1583), in particular on the complex nature of his translation of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, partly based on the Latin translation of Niccolò Leoniceno in an edition curated by Rabelais (1543/1545).
The encyclopedists and philologists are Biondo Flavio (1392–1463), Polydore Virgil (1470–1555), Raffaele Maffei (1451–1522), and Franciscus Modius (1556–1597). The first three incorporate sections on ancient literature and authors (laudes litterarum) in their ‘encyclopedic’ works: Roma triumphans (1459),[2] De inventoribus rerum (1499) and Commentarii urbani (1506), respectively. In analyzing these treatments Anne Raffarin brings out the ways in which their authors recognize the contributions of contemporary Greek scholars to the diffusion and understanding of Greek literature. The humanists’ own consciousness of coming under the guidance of Greek intermediaries mirrors that of the ancient Romans themselves in relation to the Greeks, the first inventors of the literary genres. Franciscus Modius was a poet, an editor of texts, and a compiler of works of erudition (e.g. Pandectae triumphales, 1587). Lucie Claire studies his Novantiquae Lectiones (1584), an original philological miscellany that takes the form of 100 letters, addressed to contemporaries, each one of which contains, besides the conventional epistolary niceties, a segment devoted to textual criticism of a Latin author, mostly post-Republican. One of his most cited authors is Silius Italicus, for whom he used the now lost MS in the Cologne cathedral library, but the number of authors he emended, listed in an index, is an impressive twentyseven. [3]
The poets of the fourth section are Giovanni Pontano (and Horace) and Guillaume de la Perrière (and Homer). In a relatively brief contribution, slightly marred by slips in the quotations of Greek and Latin (pp. 132, 135),[4] Florence Bistagne asks some interesting questions about the place of Horace in Naples in the humanist era, noting his “quasi-absence” from some important libraries of the period and, compared to Catullus, Ovid, Martial and Virgil, from the work of Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503). Nonetheless, her analysis of Pontano’s dialogue De sermone (1501) leads her to suggest that Horace is allusively present as a model for the portrait of the ideal social companion constructed in the dialogue, a sketch for the humanist writer’s own self-portrait. Guillaume de la Perrière (1499/1503–1565) is known for his books of emblems. In a meticulous tour de force of scholarship that leaves no stone unturned Anne Rolet unpacks an image (no. 14) contained in his second book of emblems, Morosophie (1553). This shows Homer standing on a twin–peaked mountain (Parnassus) peeing into a fountain basin from which robed figures of writers drink. The accompanying Latin quatrain refers to a similar depiction by Galaton, known from Aelian, Var. Hist. 13.22, where Homer was shown vomiting. The French quatrain has a different message: “doctrine” rather than inspired furor. This leads Rolet to a broader treatment of the reception of Homer in France, taking into account the Latin elegiac preface of the volume, translated and annotated in an appendix.[5]
The final section contains two of the highlights of the volume for me: Romain Menini on Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) and Claude La Charité on Rabelais’ edition of the Will of Cuspidius and The Roman Contract of Sale (Lyon, 1532). Anyone who has read Menini’s and Luigi-Alberto Sanchi’s captivating L’Antiquité selon Guillaume Budé: à l’école d’un humaniste érudit (2025, BMCR 2025.05.32) will be ready for more. Menini’s chapter is related to that project. Briefly put, in the vein of Anthony Grafton, it shows how close inspection of Budé’s characteristic use of maniculae (pointing hands) and other marginal symbols, often accompanying annotations, has led to additions being made to the volumes identified with Budé’s library. At the same time, the gesture of the hand is seen as a metaphor for Budé’s mode of reading and writing, and for his “style maniériste“. Claude La Charité returns to a topic he has treated before: the fascinating question debated by Rabelais specialists as to whether, when he published a small volume of legal texts, he and some others who followed him were aware that two of them were not genuine products of antiquity.[6] All had been printed before Rabelais took them up. The concoctor of the Will of Cuspidius is still unknown, but the parodic contract of sale derives from a work of Pontano. Was Rabelais deceived? But being Rabelais, how could he not recognize a spoof? In this contribution La Charité discusses the editions which provide the context for Rabelais’ and the phrase that heads his title page (Ex reliquiis venerandae aniquitatis) in relation to the “révérence de l’antiquaille” of Gargantua, both, he argues, ambiguous and polysemic phrases. Finally, Diane Desrosiers reminds us of the importance in the 16th century of the manuals of rhetorical exercises such as the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius. She points to instances of the chreia (an anecdote with a hero) in Rabelais, and the presence of a popular anecdote concerning Diogenes and his barrel in the prologue of the Tiers Livre (1546).
The volume is a conference proceedings and shows some of the unevenness of that genre, but on the whole the disparity of subjects and approaches is a gain. Apart from the rather indistinct illustrations it is attractively produced. It contains an Index nominum.
Authors and titles
Nicolas Le Cadet, Introduction
- Simone Beta, Aristophane édité et traduit à la Renaissance
- Matthieu Ferrand, À l’école de Melanchthon. Lire Plaute comme Térence dans les Plauti comœdiæ… selectioresde Jakob Omphalius
- Raphaël Cappellen, Jean Brèche, traducteur en français des Anciens. Plutarque, Isocrate, Lactance, Galien, Hippocrate
- Anne Raffarin, De litterarum laudibus. Éloge des littératures classiques à l’époque de l’humanisme
- Lucie Claire, Miscellanées et épistolographie. Les Nouantiquæ Lectionesde Franciscus Modius
- Florence Bistagne, Ut iniquæ mentis asellus. L’autoportrait horatien de Giovanni Pontano
- Anne Rolet, Le répugnant au service de la transmission et de la poétique. L’Homère vomissantde Galaton revu par la Morosophie de Guillaume de La Perrière
- Romain Menini, Les manicules de Guillaume Budé
- Claude La Charité, Testamentum imperfectum, contractus ludicer. Rabelais et les vénérables reliques de l’Antiquité
- Diane Desrosiers, La tradition des progymnasmataet le tonneau de Diogène
Notes
[1] Rabelais owned a copy of the first complete translation (p. 25 n. 20).
[2] See Giuseppe Marcellino, “Un excursus umanistico sulle letterature dell’antichità: Biondo Flavio e i classici (Roma triumphans IV, pp. 96–100),” in Maurizio Campanelli and Frances Muecke (eds), The Invention of Rome. Biondo Flavio’s Roma Triumphans and its Worlds (Geneva: Droz, 2017), 119–133.
[3] I see no need to correct leviuscula to levicula in the quotation from letter 26 on p. 121.
[4] For Biondo’s mistake in attributing a Callimachus to Umbria (p. 140) see Jeffrey A. White (ed. and trans.), Biondo Flavio, Italy Illuminated, Volume I (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), Umbria 4.7 as well as 4.11.
[5] Here I do not see an address to the book itself in liber iste … penetrabit (p. 191 n. 14).
[6] In contrast to La Charité see Richard A. Cooper, “Rabelais’s Edition of the Will of Cuspidius and the Roman Contract of Sale,” Études Rabelaisiennes 14 (1977), 59–70; on the antiquarian context see William Stenhouse, “Georg Fabricius and inscriptions as a source of law,” Renaissance Studies 17.1 (2003), 96–107.