Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (review)
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries dedicated to suggesting “a new way of conceiving death” (126). Paula Barros shifts the focus to England, where Puritan hagiography redefined the place of the deceased in the society’s memory by producing role models and promoting individual canonization. Bruno Petey-Girard shows that even funeral orations for famous figures, such as Mary Stuart or Charles IX, are subject to rhetoric and often celebrate the life of the speaker rather than the deceased. Adrien Roig insists on the importance of orality in the life-and-death narrative of Inès de Castro, subject of the first Portuguese tragedy. Agnès Delage analyzes the celebration of pagan heroes’ lives and deaths that became popular at the beginning of Philip IV’s reign, mostly in order to provide the young king with models of government, to praise the new regime, and to correct the depraved morals of contemporary society. The publication of press reports of Philip III’s death, a rare event at the time, leads Didier Rault to question the reasons behind this occurrence: to ensure the sacred status of the king against rumors of diabolic temptation, particularly harmful to the throne in Catholic Spain. The paradoxical presence of death in autobiographical texts is the topic of the third section, in which Patricia Eichel-Lojkine looks at the curious tale of Pius II’s quasi-deaths, miracles, or simply extraordinary events whose meaning the author is unable (or unwilling) to define and which frustrate the reader deprived of certainty. Ethics and aesthetics also govern Piero Quirino’s autobiography that Nicole Chareyron presents as an exemplum for the Christian reader incited to meditate on the fragility of human existence, an observation that brings the collection full circle. Michelle Bianchini’s reading of Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita points in a similar direction, even though the narrator, despite an undeniable ironic distance to his text, seems to use the exemplary character of his life to underline his own extraordinary existence. Véronique Lacarde also focuses on the poetic qualities of her texts, the Mémoires of Monluc and Jean d’Antras, to distill a specifically Gascon manner of talking about life and death, preoccupied with survival more than anything else. Nadine Kuperty-Tsur finally analyzes the diverse strategies of closure in the inherently open-ended genre of the autobiography. In addition to all the topics touched upon in this overview, Michel Bideaux, in his closing remarks, insists on the central importance of the narrator’s role in this problematic genre, a genre that will certainly be subject to further scrutiny, not in the least thanks to the many venues of inquiry opened up by this heterogeneous collection. BERND RENNER Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York