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The Birth of the Modern French Epic: Ronsard's Independence of Jean Lemaire's Homeric Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In their ingratitude toward their predecessors, Ronsard and Du Bellay did not hesitate to ridicule unfairly the achievements of the French poets of earlier generations, even in the act of despoiling them of some of their finest treasures. This is amply illustrated in the remarkable assertion of Claude Binet, the first biographer of Ronsard, who describes the adolescent poet as “ayant tousjours en main quelque Poëte Franĉois … et principalement, comme luy mesmes m'a maintesfois raconté, un Jean Lemaire de Belges … et un Clement Marot, lesquels il a depuis appelé [sic] … les immondices, dont il tiroit de belles limures d'or.” Nevertheless, the influence of Lemaire's “rubbish” is plainly visible in Ronsard's writing from the beginning of his career, particularly in the numerous passages in which he anticipates the Franciade, as well as in the epic itself. “Ronsard, enthousiasmé par la lecture du principal ouvrage de J. Lemaire de Belges, les Illustrations de Gaule, avait jeté son dévolu sur un … sujet, qu'il croyait essentiellement national, mais qui n'était qu'une légende, inventée au VIIe siècle …” (Laum., XVI, In trod. pp. v-vi). This was the legend of the descent of the French from Francus-Astyanax, son of Hector, the Trojan hero of the Iliad.
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References
page 1118 note 1 La Vie de P. de Ronsard de Claude Binet (1586), ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris, 1910), p. 10.
page 1118 * Abbreviations: Laum.—The critical ed. of the Œuvres complètes de Pierre de Ronsard by Paul Laumonier, in progress since 1914. Stecher—Œuvres de Jean Lemaire de Belges, ed. J. Stecher, 4 vols. (Louvain, 1881–92). References in Arabie numerals are to volume and page of this edition; Roman numerals refer to book and chapter. Consonantal i and u have been changed to j and v, vocalic v to u. Valla—Homeri Poete clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem Romanum e greco in lalinum translata: et nuper accuratissime emendata. Impressum Liptzk per Melchiorem Lotterum. Anno domini Millesimo quingentesimo duodecimo. This volume contains the translation of all 24 books. The first 16 occupy fols, iir-lxxiiiiv. There is no indication that it was Francesco Aretino who translated the remainder, as Georg Finsler tells us in Homer in der Neuzeii von Dante bis Goethe (Berlin, 1912), p. 28. Here and in the passages quoted in section v the abbreviations have been resolved. Cordial thanks are due to William A. Jackson, Librarian of the Houghton Library of Harvard Univ., for his generosity in making a copy of this volume (Gh 62.719*) available to me and notably the chapters of the second book, narrate the siege of Troy. Without such a study of the debt of Ronsard's principal French precursor in the field of the Homeric epic,2 any judgment with respect to Ronsard's obligation to Homer might appear divorced from its true context in literary history. We may perhaps, in the end, accept the opinion of Francisque Thibaut that Lemaire deserves the larger credit for having maintained, or rather restored, the epic tradition in France,3 but if we do, it ought to be en toute connaissance de cause.
page 1118 note 2 “Den Boden Frankreichs betritt Homer mit dem Werk von Jean Lemaire de Belges Illustrations de Gaule et Singularités de Troye, 1510–1513.”—Finsler, p. 119. 3 Marguerite d'Autriche et Jehan Lemaire de Belges (Paris, 1888), p. 201.
page 1118 note 4 Katherine M. Munn, A Contribution to the Study of Jean Lemairede Belges (Columbia, 1936), pp. 166–167, after a MS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Ane. fonds fr. no. 25295, fol. llr. The MS. ends with the following inscription: “Fait à Lyon le premier jour de juillet, mil cinq cens et vnze.”
page 1118 note 5 Munn, p. 152, after MS. No. 652 of the Bibliothèque de Nantes, fol. 21r. The attribution of this MS. to Lemaire “seems probable” to Miss Munn. To judge by the dated compositions that precede and follow it, this composition may perhaps be assigned to the year 1514. The orthography of the MSS. has been retained without change.
page 1118 note 6 Jean Lemaire de Belges, sa vie, son œuvre et ses meilleures pages (Paris, 1926), p. 112.
page 1118 note 7 Referring to the sources of Lemaire for Book n in a quite different connection, Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit, p. 120, mentions the 6 whose names I have given, but adds that of Guido délie Colonne.
page 1118 note 8 Georges Doutrepont in Jean Lemaire de Belges et la Renaissance (Bruxelles, 1934), p. 315; Ph. Aug. Becker, Jean Lemaire, der erste humanistische Dichter Franhreichs (Strass-burg, 1893), p. 226.
page 1118 note 9 The following is a census of all references in Book ii of the Illustrations to the 6 authors who head the list of Lemaire's authorities for that book: Dictys 59; Dares 37; Homer 33; Ovid 22; Boccaccio 13; Virgil 12. Lemaire's preference for Dictys and Dares, and especially for the former, is even stronger than these figures appear to indicate. The late R. V. Merrill overstated the case when he said that Lemaire “makes the double contribution to the French Renaissance of following Homer rather than Dares and Dictys and of serving as model to Ronsard's ill-fated Franciade” in “Jean Lemaire, Du Bellay, and the Second Géorgie,” MLN, li (1936), 453:
page 1118 note 10 See the articles on Dares of Phrygia and Dictys Cretensis in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
page 1118 note 11 For other examples of Lemaire's attachment to Dictys cf. Stecher, 2.61, ii, vi; 2.106, ii, xi; 2.118, ii, xii; 2.138, ii, xiv; etc.
page 1118 note 12 P. Costil, “La question homérique et le goût littéraire en France,” Annales de l'Université de Grenoble, xix (1943), 100. 13 The lines in the Elégie à J. Grevin (Laum. xiv, 197):
Par un vers héroïque ils ont mis en histoire
Des Princes & des Rois la proesse & la gloire,
do not prove that Ronsard changed his position between 1556 and 1561. The word “histoire” in this context evidently means story.
page 1118 note 14 The Poetics had been available: 1) in the Latin translation of Giorgio Valla, 1498; 2) in the 1st Greek edition of Aldus, 1508; 3) in an edition by Erasmus, 1531; 4) in the text and translation of Pazzi, 1536; 5) in the commentaries by Robortello and Maggi, which had appeared in 1548 and 1550, respectively. I have been unable to consult C. Zeppa de Nolva, “La Poétique d'Aristote en Italie et en France au XVI” siècle,“ in Actes du Congrès de Nice (1937), Assoc. G. Budé (Paris, 1938), pp. 400–402. 15 Poetics, 1451a–b.
page 1118 note 16 P. Costil, p. 107.
page 1118 note 17 The French trans. (1519–30) by Jean Samxon of Lorenzo Valla's Latin translation of the Iliad appeared with the following title: Les Iliades de Homere, poete grec et grand hystoriographe …“
page 1118 note 18 P. Costil, p. 107.
page 1118 note 19 Léon Feugère, Œuvres choisies d'Etienne Pasquier (Paris, 1849), i, 49.
page 1118 note 20 Doutrepont, pp. 417–422, “Liste des auteurs ‘alleguez’ par Lemaire dans les ‘Illustrations’.”
page 1118 note 21 Doutrepont, p. 28. Cf. p. 8, where one learns that Lemaire's contemporaries and successors had a higher opinion of his erudition than he merited, because they erroneously thought that he cited the ancient texts at first hand.
page 1118 note 22 Ph. Aug. Becker, p. 226. Like the majority even of his learned contemporaries, Lemaire knew no Greek and his knowledge of Greek authors came to him through the medium of Latin translations (Doutrepont, pp. 146 and 279). When he occasionally gives a Greek etymology, he does not do so on his own authority. Thus, to explain the meaning of the name Alexander he says “qui vaut autant à dire, comme homme aydant, selon letymologie Grecque, ainsi comme met Antoine Volsc, au comment sur lepistre de Paris à Heleine …” (Stecher, 1.163, i. xxiii). Doutrepont, pp. 142–143, gives 3 other examples.
page 1118 note 23 This and the following quotations from Homer are taken from A. T. Murray, The Iliad, with an English Translation, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1946).