Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance

French Love Lyric and Natural-philosophical Poetry

Kathryn Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351570909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Renaissance images could be real as well as linguistic. Human beings were often believed to be an image of the cosmos, and the sun an image of God. Kathryn Banks explores the implications of this for poetic language and argues that linguistic images were a powerful tool for rethinking cosmic conceptions. She reassesses the role of natural-philosophical poetry in France, focusing upon its most well-known and widely-read exponent, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas.Through a sustained analysis of Maurice Sceve's Delie, Banks also rethinks love lyric's oft-noted use of the beloved as image of the poet. Cosmos and Image makes an original contribution to our understanding of Renaissance thinking about the cosmic, the human, and the divine. It also proposes a mode of reading other Renaissance texts, and reflects at length upon the relation of 'literature' to history, to the history of science, and to political turmoil.

PART I

The Cosmos In Du Bartas’s Sepmaine: Images Of God And Of War

Introductione

‘Scientific Poetry’: Diverse Representations of Cosmic Causality

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the flourishing in French of poetry which focused upon the objects of natural philosophy, that is, upon cosmic phenomena and cosmic processes. However, the poems differ greatly from one another, in particular concerning their representation of causality, that is, the ways in which they account for cosmic change. In addition, the poems highlight differing subject matter: God is more present in some poems than in others, and some describe the whole cosmos whereas others discuss only the heavens or only a particular type of natural-philosophical object (as in Rémy Belleau’s Pierres Precieuses). Therefore it is difficult to define the genre or its sub-groups without misrepresenting the depiction of the cosmos in some poems.

Albert-Marie Schmidt, who brought these poems to the attention of scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, designated them as ‘poésie scientifique’.¹ The name continues to be used but it is generally agreed to be anachronistic and unsuitable, since — as I discussed in my Introduction — our concept of ‘science’ did not exist, and the term had a very different meaning within a very different organization of knowledge. To a twenty-first-century reader, natural-philosophical poems constitute a remarkable reminder of our distance from the late sixteenth century, and of the non-essential nature of our own classification of knowledge and discourse: these poems strike us as strange; we cannot fit them easily into our categories of ‘literature’, ‘science’, or ‘religion’.

However, although these poems all surprise us primarily for the same reason (that they versify natural philosophy, or ‘science’), this should not conceal from us the vast differences between them. Some critics have attempted to provide definitions of the genre in its entirety but these tend to be based on selective readings of the corpus. Jan Miernowski suggests that ‘scientific poetry’ is defined by a combination of fiction and causal explanations which are brought together in an attempt to ‘capter le divin’ [grasp the divine].² However, the various poems manifest extremely varied attitudes towards fiction and causal accounts.³ In fact, as I have suggested, poems within the genre differ enormously in assessing the correct way of representing the cosmos and causality.

When it is necessary to refer to all of these poems as a group, I would propose ‘cosmic poetry’ or ‘natural-philosophical poetry’ as relatively unproblematic; nonetheless, for the twenty-first-century reader these terms do not suggest the imbrication of nature and the divine found in some of the poems, even though the divine played an important role in many forms of sixteenth-century natural-philosophical writing. Isabelle Pantin’s term ‘poésie du ciel’ solves this problem but does not represent the entirety of the genre since many ‘natural-philosophical poems’ do not discuss the celestial realm in isolation but rather the whole cosmos or solely sublunary phenomena.

Odette de Mourgues suggested dividing the genre into three broadly chronological groupings: poems of the first category — which include Jacques Peletier Du Mans’s Amour des amours (1555), Ronsard’s Hymnes (1555–56), and Maurice Scève’s Microcosme (1562) — proudly display encyclopaedic knowledge; the second type represents the fragmentation of a previously unified view of knowledge and the cosmos, and includes Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s Premier des Meteores (1567) and Belleau’s Pierres Precieuses (1576); finally the third group is constituted of those poems which express a renewed religious aspiration, such as the Sepmaine (1578) and its many imitations.⁴ De Mourgues’s tripartite classification is more convincing than proposed definitions of all cosmic poetry, since it distinguishes poems in terms of their subject matter, including the relative centrality of God.

However, De Mourgues’s taxonomy does not consider the types of argument or discourse used to account for cosmic phenomena and change. For example, in Ronsard’s Hymnes, fiction is extremely important: processes of cosmic transformation are explicated by myths, notably the amorous adventures of the Olympian gods. By contrast, Scève’s Microcosme (which De Mourgues classifies with Ronsard’s Hymnes) presents causal explanations in proper rather than allegorical terms (although it does frame these with the fiction of a prophetic dream which Adam recounts to Eve). Furthermore, Jean-Edouard Du Monin — who writes after Du Bartas — attributes a reasonably important role to fiction or allegory, whereas Du Bartas is extremely wary of it.⁵ Finally, Baïf’s Premier des Meteores and Isaac Habert’s Trois Livres des Meteores presumably both fall into De Mourgues’s second category (since they discuss only one part of the universe), but they use predominantly the proper terms of Aristotelian natural philosophy, and in this sense resemble Scève’s Microcosme far more than the amorous mineral mythologies of Belleau.⁶

Since cosmic poems differ so greatly, my analysis of the Sepmaine cannot be taken as representative of the genre as a whole. However, it should be considered in the light of the brief survey of it outlined above, insofar as the Sepmaine plays a role in implicit debate about, firstly, the correct way to describe cosmic causality, and, secondly, God’s relationship to the cosmos. My reading will focus upon images, that is, upon a mode of representation which provides an alternative to both the proper terms of Aristotelian natural philosophy and also the mythological terms of Ronsardian fictions. It is for this reason that I propose to examine the Sepmaine. In addition, the Sepmaine was by far the most popular and influential cosmic poem (as well as the most criticized at a later date): there were at least seventy-three French editions of Du Bartas’s works between 1574 and 1590, and at least two hundred between 1574 and 1632;⁷ the poem inspired a flurry of imitations (by both Catholics and Protestants),⁸ two commentaries by the Protestant pastor Simon Goulart and the Catholic Pantaléon Thévenin, and translations into English, Dutch, Latin, German, Italian, Polish, Danish and Swedish.⁹

The Sepmaine: Imagistic representations of the divine and the Elemental

Images are fundamental to the poetic style of the Sepmaine. As part of a particularly pronounced ‘baroque’ style,¹⁰ Du Bartas often lists different images for the same object. Images do not always correspond clearly to a particular phenomenon or to a particular section of the argument. Sometimes one image, or group of related images, seems to direct the movement of the poem. Some individual images are developed at length in the form of epic comparisons: the poet considered himself to be imitating — at least in part — the epic,¹¹ and, whereas Ronsard tends to employ only discursive epic comparisons imitated directly from an ancient text, Du Bartas also invents his own.¹²

However, this stylistic practice is not used to describe all objects. Images depict primarily that which is not available to the human senses: underlying cosmic processes (the elements and prime matter), God, the soul, and the internal organs and workings of the human body. Images reflect, in part at least, Du Bartas’s unwillingness to provide definitive causal accounts for that which cannot be perceived by the senses. The poet does not distrust sensory information but it is not available for all subject matter; Du Bartas does not claim that therefore we can know nothing about such subjects, but he often prefers not to be too authoritative in the knowledge he presents.¹³ One solution he finds is to list several explanations rather than deciding upon one: sometimes these are definitely alternatives and each is introduced by ‘soit que’;¹⁴ elsewhere the causes are apparently not mutually exclusive, and each cause may be introduced by ‘puis que’ or ‘car’.¹⁵ Another solution to the lack of knowledge about imperceptible processes seems to be to represent them through images rather than through definitive causal arguments.

Therefore some sections of the Sepmaine are much more imagistic than others. The representation of animals, birds, and plants, for example, is stylistically very different from that of underlying cosmic forces. In the case of the former, the genus is broken down into its species, which are catalogued in lists, not unlike those of the works which Du Bartas probably consulted, such as Pierre Belon’s Histoire de la nature des Oyseaux (1555) or Pliny’s Natural History; the poet also lists causes and effects, very often the uses that the various species serve for man. Images are employed only intermittently for visible phenomena, whereas they tend to dominate the depiction of the invisible.¹⁶

Part I of Cosmos and Image will examine those ‘objects’ which the Sepmaine represents imagistically. This corresponds to my concern with not only the specificities of imagistic language but also the divine, the cosmic, and the human. Images represent the divine. They also depict the cosmic forces and matter which, according to sixteenth-century physics, underlie all cosmic phenomena. Of course descriptions of specific cosmic objects, such as a particular type of bird or plant, also play a role in the poet’s conception of the cosmos; however, arguably underlying cosmic forces are of central importance for this, as well as constituting the more usual material of natural philosophy. Finally, the human soul also belongs to the category of the invisible, and the human body is discussed at length with reference to the four imperceptible elements which govern all cosmic phenomena. These images render visual that which the reader might otherwise have difficulty picturing but also, I shall suggest, serve to explore similarity and causality in and between the divine, the cosmic, and the human.

Chapter 1 will analyse elemental images of the divine, especially as wind and water. Chapter 2 examines images of cosmic forces, focusing on the depiction of elemental discord as human warfare, and of the human body as the body politic. The human soul is discussed in Chapter 1, and the human body — as well as human society — in Chapter 2. Thus, Chapter 1 considers objects of theology, and Chapter 2 objects of natural philosophy. However, my heuristic separation of theology and natural philosophy will be belied by a poem in which conceptions of God and of the cosmos are inextricably intertwined. As will become clear, the consequences of this intertwining will be crucial to the claims made in Part I.

During the course of Part I, I will discuss theological writings by Jean Calvin and others, political literature including that of Huguenot resistance theorists, discussions of ‘vicissitude’, and poetry, especially Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Tragiques and Pierre Du Val’s De la Grandeur de Dieu. These texts have been chosen because the Sepmaine touches upon similar questions to those which they address, and employs similar commonplaces or outils mentaux, but ultimately does so to different effect. In other words, these other texts serve to situate the Sepmaine’s depiction of the world in relation to those of contemporary or near-contemporary writers, and also to highlight its specificities. Therefore I do not examine all facets of the other texts but focus on their treatment of matters which also arise in the Sepmaine. For example, although it has already been shown that in general the Huguenot Du Bartas’s thinking differs from Calvin’s,¹⁷ in Chapter 1 I focus on Calvin’s discussion of the imago dei in order to pinpoint Du Bartas’s difference from him on this issue, which the poet explores through images.

Finally, since my primary concern is to consider the Sepmaine as a case study of an imagistic poem, I shall refer to Du Bartas’s other poetry only occasionally and briefly. Indeed since a key difference between the first and second ‘Weeks’ lies in the greater importance of narrative and the more explicit treatment of theological points in the latter, and since the dual narrative and descriptive aims of the former are crucial to the issues I analyse within it, the Seconde Semaine offers a striking contrast to the Sepmaine which within the scope of this study it will only be possible to indicate occasionally.

Notes

1 La Poésie scientifique en France (Paris: Éditions Rencontre, 1970).

2 ‘La Poésie scientifique française à la Renaissance: littérature, savoir, alterité’, in What is Literature? 1100–1600, ed. by François Cornilliat, Ullrich Langer and Douglas Kelly (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1993), pp. 85–99.

3 Hallyn’s ‘Poésie et Savoir’ offers a brief but nuanced account of the different ways in which some natural-philosophical poets used narrative and natural-philosophical knowledge. See also Pantin, Poésie.

4 De Mourgues, pp. 31–41. Pantin also classifies ‘poésie du ciel’ chronologically.

5 Du Bartas believes that the poetic fictions of Classical mythology are ‘lies’ which betray the divine function of poetry rather than fulfilling it. See the Sepmaine, Day II, ll. 1–30; Day IV, 89–91; and Uranie, in Works, i, 172–85. On Du Bartas and fiction, see also Miernowski, Dialectique, pp. 83–97. Le Fèvre de La Boderie, whose Galliade was first published in the same year as the Sepmaine, expresses similar views: La Galliade, ou de la Revolution des Arts et Sciences, ed. by François Roudaut (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), for example I, 153–64, 361–76, 867–68, 1303–06; V, 1–46.

6 Le Premier des meteores, in Jean-Antoine de Baïf: le premier Li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on References
• INTRODUCTION: THE COSMOS, IMAGES, AND POETRY
• PART I THE COSMOS IN DU BARTAS’S SEPMAINE: IMAGES OF GOD AND OF WAR
• PART II IMAGES, DIVINITY, AND DIFFERENCE IN MAURICE SCÈVE’S DÉLIE
• Bibliography
• Index