The French Middle Ages had been largely Greekless, an indication of the limits within which the classical tradition had been confined. The closing years of the fifteenth century, however, saw the beginnings of a movement that would transform French literature, culture, and thought through the introduction of a language and literature that were less intimately bound up with the Catholic Church than had been the case with Latin. Yet, paradoxically, a desire to return to the original languages of the Bible was one of the motives for this interest in Greek, and French evangelism is closely tied up with the development of humanism.
The lead of Italy was crucial in the spread of Hellenism in France. Not only did the first printed editions of Greek writers emanate from Italy (first in Florence and subsequently in Venice, with the Aldine press proving to be particularly productive), but it was Italy that supplied many of the scholars who helped with the dissemination of the Greek language. These included exiles from Constantinople after its fall to the Turks in 1453. At the same time, French scholars began to develop an interest in classical antiquity, both Greek and Roman, for its own sake, and the printing press provided the necessary technology to enable a limited democratization of learning. According to the words that Rabelais attributes to Gargantua in the early 1530s, ‘‘The whole world is full of learned people, highly educated teachers, well-stocked libraries, so that I believe that neither in the time of Plato or Cicero or Papinian was there such an opportunity for study as we see nowadays’’ (Rabelais 1994: 244, my trans.).
Of the various scholars in this early period, it is Guillaume Bude (1468-1540) who had the most significant impact. Largely self-taught in Greek, he made the most of the resources at hand, both human and literary, in order to extend his knowledge of the classical tradition. Benefiting from brief periods of intense study with the eminent Greek scholar Janus Lascaris (1445-1534; Grafton 1997: 135-83), Bude developed a profound knowledge of the Greek language and culture that permeates all his writings. As well as contributing to the teaching of Greek through his Commentarii linguae Graecae (Commentaries on the Greek language) of 1529, he also reflected at a more profound level on the balance between classical culture and Christianity, in particular in the De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum (On the transition from Hellenism to Christianity) of 1535. It was also thanks to his lobbying of the king, Francois Ier, that the College des lecteurs royaux was established in 1530, with the express purpose of teaching the three ancient languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (Fumaroli 1998). In sharp contrast to the religious authorities and the University of Paris, which were highly suspicious of the new learning (in 1523, the Sorbonne tried to suppress the spread of Greek, and Rabelais’s Franciscan superiors confiscated his Greek books; Rabelais 1994: lxiv), the College royal provided public lectures aimed at students of all levels of knowledge and ability. With royal support, interest in classical culture flourished, and the newly refurbished palace of Fontainebleau was beginning to be filled with frescoes celebrating the ruling dynasty in the guise of Greco-Roman gods and heroes.
At the same time, humanist colleges were educating an emerging urban middle class for whom language skills were a central requirement. If dialectic had been the most highly prized element in the medieval trivium, the requirements of a more meritocratic society in the sixteenth century led to a greater emphasis on the communication skills offered by rhetoric. Following Erasmus’ recommendations in the De copia (On abundant variety), there was an expectation that, to achieve rhetorical expertise, students would read and assimilate the whole corpus of classical literature, and this soon had an impact on writing of all kinds, both in the vernacular and in neoLatin (Cave 1979: 3-77; Moss 1996). Indeed, it is the early neo-Latin poets - Jean Salmon Macrin, Nicolas Bourbon, lltienne Dolet, and many others - who prepared the ground for the introduction of classical topoi, genres, and styles into French poetry. The College de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where Montaigne studied in the 1540s, also helped introduce the classical theater to France, with the Scottish poet and humanist George Buchanan (1506-82) both translating Euripides and composing original biblical tragedies (Jephthes and Baptistes) for performance by the students (Ford 2001: 58-60).
By the 1540s, the stage was set for a massive advance in the presence of the classical tradition in all aspects of French culture. to the work of early Hellenists such as Bude, Jacques Toussain (ca. 1498-1547), and Pierre Danes (1497-1557), knowledge of Greek was spreading, with Parisian printers such as Robert Estienne (1503-59) providing reliable editions of Greek authors, encouraged by royal favor (Girot 2002: 7-30). Marsilio Ficino’s editions and commentaries of Plato were also having an impact thanks to the interest of humanists such as the Lyon polymath Symphorien Champier (1471-1537/9) and Jacques Lefevre d’lltaples (died 1536), whose Platonizing evangelism had a strong impact on the king’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre (Walker 1972: 63-131). Scholasticism was seen by the new brand of thinkers as standing in the way of both educational and religious progress.
But it is the Limoges-born humanist and poet Jean Dorat (1508-88) who had the most profound effect on the direction that French writing followed in the middle years of the century. Tutor to Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Jean-Antoine de Baif, he was instrumental in forming the poetic values of the Pleiade, whose aesthetic ideals were based on raising the status of French poetry through the imitation of classical, and principally Greek, sources. Convinced that ancient poets such as Homer, Hesiod, and
Orpheus had acted as intermediaries between the divine and the human worlds (like the biblical David), Dorat saw the role of the poet in society as that of presenting divine truth in allegorical form. Under his influence, the Pleiade set about the composition of highly allusive, at times obscure, poetry that aimed to rival the works of Italian authors such as Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. Dorat, who took up the post of professor of Greek at the College royal in 1556, was also responsible for introducing his pupils to a form of syncretism that tended to emphasize the similarities between classical pagan thought and Christianity: Homer was aware, thanks to the sibylline prophecies, of the coming of the Messiah, and Plato’s ideas were in perfect harmony with those of the Scriptures (Demerson 1983).
It was Du Bellay, in the Deffense et illustration de la langue frangoyse (Defence and illustration of the French language) of 1549, who expounded many of these ideas in their most memorable form. For him and his colleagues, the assimilation of classical writers was a sine qua non of poetic composition, and like the Romans with the Greeks it was necessary for modern authors to
Transform themselves into them, devour them, and after properly digesting them, turning them into blood and sustenance, to choose, each one according to his own genius and the subject he wanted to tackle, the best model, whose rarest and most exquisite qualities he would carefully observe (Du Bellay 1904: 99, my trans.)
This thoroughly classicizing form of imitation would mark the poetry of virtually the entire century, and was extended to other genres such as drama, notably in the tragedies of IStienne Jodelle, Jean de La Taille, and Robert Garnier (Jondorf 1990: 9-28), where classical themes often mirrored the dire situation France faced during the Wars of Religion (1562-98).
As well as Dorat, other French humanists such as Henri Estienne, Denis Lambin, and Adrien Turnebe were working to disseminate classical literature through their teaching and publications, and there can be no doubt that the sixteenth century witnessed at all levels of society the results of this educational and cultural ethos. Classical mythology was used to celebrate the Valois dynasty in the visual arts, court entertainments, public occasions such as royal entries and marriages, and literature, so that it became commonplace to depict the members of the French court as Greco-Roman gods and heroes, as in the Tour de la Ligue (Tower of the League) in the chateau de Tanlay (Yates 1977: 121-48). At its height, this enthusiasm for the classical world is characterized by an unrestrained exuberance which first finds its expression in the works of Rabelais, but which was not without its critics. In particular, the Catholic Church, after the Council of Trent, became increasingly hostile toward the syncretism espoused by Dorat and his followers, while a new canon of classicism was being elaborated by J. C. Scaliger, which would prepare the way for seventeenth-century neoclassicism.
Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem (Seven books on poetics) was published posthumously in 1561, and its impact in Renaissance France was gradual. Taking his inspiration from Aristotle’s Poetics, the Italian-born humanist explores all areas ofpoetry and drama, but one of his main concerns is to demonstrate the superiority of Latin literature over
Greek. For him, elegance, sophistication, and verisimilitude are more important literary qualities than the raw energy of earlier writers, with the result that Vergil is held up as the supreme model of poetry over Homer and his Greek followers (Michel 1986: 63-73). This aesthetic approach would be readily taken on by the Jesuit colleges, which in the second half of the sixteenth century began to offer serious rivalry to the humanist colleges in France and which, in line with the post-Tridentine reforms, revived a form of scholasticism in their teaching and exercised considerable caution in the choice of classical texts included in the curriculum (Farrell 1938). The seeds of a far narrower view of the classical tradition were being sown, and their effect would not be limited to the popularity of individual Greek and Latin authors, but would determine the way in which sixteenth-century vernacular authors were viewed in the closing years of the century, in particular leading to a sudden and dramatic decline in the popularity of the Pleiade (Faisant 1998).
Yet one of the greatest authors and thinkers of the latter part of the century would escape these trends. Montaigne’s enthusiasm for the classical past was wholehearted and down to earth. His favorite ancient writers, for the most part historians and poets, come over in his Essais (Essays) as privileged interlocutors, with whom he engages in a dialogue shared with his readers. It is precisely the self-revelation of the ancients that he prizes and exploits in order to reveal something of his own nature. They provide him with consolation after the loss of his closest friend, iltienne de La Boetie, and, in his numerous citations and adaptations of their works, they often reveal more about the author than he is prepared to state explicitly. Intertextuality becomes in the hands of Montaigne a means of encouraging the complicity of the reader (Coleman 1979: 108-79).
The sixteenth century is thus the period at which the classical tradition reaches its peak. For the first time, there is a widespread knowledge amongst the educated classes of the two languages of classical civilization, and a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman literature for its own sake, and not simply as an adjunct to Christianity. For nationalistic reasons, Greek is prized more than Latin, partly because Latin is closely associated with the rival Italian culture, partly because scholars such as Henri Estienne claimed that French was derived from Greek (Estienne 1565). All the main forms of writing - poetry, theater, and prose - are thoroughly imbued with classical notions, owing in part to the central role of the commonplace book, and the various literary genres take classical texts as their models. The ideas and ideals of the classical world - Platonism, skepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism - all make an appearance in Renaissance thought and help shape attitudes to the often-turbulent events of the times. Above all, there is an attempt, whether by scholars such as Bude and Dorat or the general reader such as Montaigne, to understand ancient authors in their own right, to engage with them as individuals, and to consider what they had to say to be every bit as valuable as the works of Christian writers.
World History
