La Comédie française et la ville (1550–1650): L’“Iliade” parodique. Goulven Oiry. Bibliothèque de la Renaissance 15. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015. 794 pp. €59.
laume Berthon), a perfect definition of the poetic “revolution” hinted at in the section title. Another, less known quarrel, documented in the Panegyric des Damoiselles de Paris (1545), contributes to the creation of a Lyonnais poetic identity and retraces a path from victorious and sadistic Muses to a more saintly vocation (Elise Rajchenbach-Teller). The five essays of the following section focus on the Pléiade poets and their heritage, beginning with Du Bellay’s complex relationship with the Muses (George Hugo Tucker), reflecting shifting attitudes and approaches (otium/negotium, voluptas/virtus, France/Rome, vernacular/Neo-Latin). In Ronsard’s elegies, the use of the Muses marks the genre’s status with regard to the lyric and the epic (Benedikte Andersson), whereas, for Étienne Jodelle, their juxtaposition with the diabolic allows them to surpass the domain of inspiration to provide a bona fide theory of poetic genius (Emmanuel Buron). Des Autels’s Rabelaisian Mitistoirebarragouyne constructs an inverted Parnassus, a lascivious parody, whose chapter 14 serves as a seriocomical artpoétique in its own right ( Jean-Charles Monferran). A countermovement, E. R. Curtius’s challenge or rejection of theMuses, illustrates a distancing from a cultural ideal and a tarnishing of poetic values, which can only be accomplished in a poetry of paralipsis (Audrey Duru). Seventeenthcentury satyrical, burlesque, and polemical Muses form the coherent endpoint of the volume. Whereas they are rare in the satyrical collections of 1600–22, showcasing a changing aesthetic (Guillaume Peureux), they are the object of paradoxical praise in Cortese’s attempt to elevate the Neapolitan language (Roland Behar). Afterward, their menacing presence reaches a peak in midcentury polemical writings of Labadie and his followers (Julien Goeury), or, alternatively, they are a marker of derisive distancing from love or poetry, no longer transgressive, however, but grotesque, ridiculed, or devalued (Claudine Nedelec). The diversity of approaches, topics, and texts makes this mandatory reading for students of early modern poetic writing, in verse or in prose.