Peter Schaeffer

Rudolf Agricola 1444-1485, Protagonist des nordeuropaischen Humanismus, zum 550. Geburtstag.

Frances Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne, Farnham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2010, pp. xi + 134, hb. £50.00, ISBN: 978-1-4094-0480-4.This slim, elegant work on the theological freight of early modern poetics comes with an unusually polemical frame. Frances Cruickshank explicitly resists and rejects the new historicist methodologies that have dominated Renaissance literary studies for the last few decades, and cogently advocates in her opening pages a move away from contextual considerations towards the contemplation of lyric verse as a dynamic and multivalent form of art. In the analogy of excavation, she writes, poems are more like tools or toys than like potsherds (p. 5). There is much to applaud in this stance, not least its pedagogical utility in an academic culture rather too inclined to dismiss the affective insights of the humanities; the work concludes with some admirably pointed thoughts on the civilizing potential of poetic difficulty. Nor is the political the only pleasure of this approach: in the course of an argument that takes in rhetoric, cognition and the tropes of garden and eucharist, Cruickshank offers some beautiful readings of Donne and Herbert, unfettered and illuminating. There is a real sense of engagement here: the poetic qualities of their devotional writings are confronted with a clear-eyed confidence, and the argument abounds in graceful reflection.The book is divided into four sections, each of which has interesting and original things to say about its two canonical poets. The structure as a whole, however, is not entirely successful: the chapter on garden imagery feels like it interrupts the imaginatively coherent sweep of the books narrative, and it is, too, conceptually weaker that the other three strands. The final chapter, on the eucharist, serves as a culmination to the argument patiently advanced throughout for verse as a means to transfigure experience: itself irreducible, material, sacramental. This is perhaps the most valuable insight Cruickshank crystallizes, and her careful attention to individual moments in particular poems, and within lines of verse, throws up a series of richly suggestive thoughts on the significance of devotional patterns for literary composition. For a book with verse and poetics in the title, there is comparatively little on the poems formal or prosodic qualities, but they nonetheless stay firmly focused for the duration of the discussion as supremely created artefacts.The difficulty with trying to break free from the ossifying accretions of diligent historicism, however, is that the alternative risks justifying or even privileging a distinct lack of interpretive rigour. At times, the argument is asserted rather than demonstrated, and not just because that is an occupational hazard of attempting to pin down such numinous subject-matter, and such intellectually agile poets. One or two of these observations might have been deepened, even modified, by taking into account the kind of extra-literary background that is stigmatized as hampering critical discussion (but which is, nonetheless, sporadically invoked throughout). …

Qu'il Me Baise des Baisers de sa Bouche: Le Cantique des Cantiques a la Renaissance.

Lhistoire du Cantique des cantiques au XVIe siecle navait encore suscite aucune etude dimportance. Apres avoir dresse un repertoire bibliographique de toutes les editions du texte et de ses commentaires, entre 1468 et 1600 (annexe de deux centsxa0pages avec plus de sept cents entrees), lauteur constate que le Cantique fut autant commente que lEpitre aux Romains ou lEvangile de Jean au siecle des Reformes! Il fallait rendre compte de cet engouement. Louvrage etudie lexegese des annees 1500-1550 (trente nouveaux commentaires reperes). Il eclaire en outre les usages non-exegetiques, tant ecclesiaux (liturgies, prieres, cantiques, sermons, illustrations bibliques...) que profanes (lettres, chansons, poemes, emblemes...). Bien plus quau cours des siecles precedents le desir «xa0des baisiers de sa bouchexa0» trouble les commentateurs.