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Lyon et l'illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance by Gérard Defaux; Bernard Colombat Review by: Bernd Renner The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 883-885 Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477532 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 12:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sixteenth Century Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.77.82 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:40:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Lyon et l'illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance

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Lyon et l'illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance by Gérard Defaux; BernardColombatReview by: Bernd RennerThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 883-885Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477532 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 12:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

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Book Reviews 883

history of the Reconquista and the flourishing number of new military orders it produced. The spaceWalsh gives to the military orders as regards the Crusades outside the Levant entails the best feature of the book, for, following the explicit lead ofJonathan Riley-Smith (one of the few historians he explicitly notes his dependency on) in regard to the Crusades in gen eral, Walsh seeks to set the military orders in the broader context of European history and beyond the mere history of the Crusades in Palestine.A book that treats the Teutonic Knights could not do otherwise. This helps explain the elongated buildup, though it hardly excuses it. Again, like Riley-Smith (and per Thomas Madden, who goes unmentioned), Walsh sets the Crusades in the context of the "world's debate," though again, this entails material super fluous to the peculiarities of the military orders.The seventh chapter surveys the various rules the orders followed, and the eighth summarizes the orders' various fates. A first appendix touches on the Templar myths; a second gives a comprehensive list of all the orders, including the numerous ones that arose in conjunction with the Reconquista. The first appendix proves

wholly disappointing; it summarily treats the use made of the Templars by conservatives, romantics, and radicals in the nineteenth century, but completely ignores twentieth- and twenty-first-century lunacy (e.g. Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent et al. [NewYork: Delacorte, 1982]; Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown [NewYork: Doubleday, 2003]).At places the text is completely confused, and thus confusing; for example, the discussion of the events that led up to the Battle of Hattim and the loss ofJerusalem.Yet for all this the book at least gives to the general public an idea of life within the military orders. An extended treatment of what drove men (and women in those orders that had such ancillary posts) to take up this peculiar life could certainly have been added.Walsh's discussion of the three main orders' for tunes after the Crusades foundered highlights the place of the Hospitallers in the conflicts of CharlesV and Philip II with the Ottomans. He also points out that the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic regions (they were split between Livonia and Prussia) became secularized: the grand master in Prussia converted to Protestantism in 1523, secularized the order's lands, and became a hereditary duke; in Livonia, because of the decimation visited on Livonia by Ivan the Terrible, the order there also became secularized.The order was reorganized in 1606 and still exists, as does that of the Hospitallers. Perhaps not too much should be expected of this type of work, but for all that, it could have been done much better.

Lyon et l'illustration de la langue frangaise a la Renaissance. Ed. Gerard Defaux and Bernard Colombat. Lyon: ENS Editions, 2003. 544 pp. ?54.00. ISBN 2-84788 032-1.

REVIEWED BY: Bernd Renner, Brooklyn College, City University of NewYork

This collection of essays gathers the contributions of a colloquium that celebrated the installation of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in Lyon, effective as of the fall semester 2000.The transfer of this prestigious institution from Paris to Lyon serves as an example of the gradual decentralization of French higher education in recent times. This phenomenon was mirrored in the sixteenth century when Lyon held an eminent posi tion in the development of French humanism, most often as a flourishing counterweight to the more conservative center of power in Paris. Initially this status was mostly due to the city's geographical position as a gateway to Italy and its reputation as a refuge from the restric tive influence of the Parisian Parlement and the Faculty ofJTheology (the Sorbonne). It seems therefore quite appropriate to mark the modern transfer of an important establishment of

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884 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/3 (2005)

higher education with a broad investigation of Lyon's role in the "defense and illustration" of the French language at a time when the latter was at the point of replacing its illustrious predecessors, Greek, Latin, and Italian, as the dominant language of French administration and culture.

The collection chooses to examine Lyon's influence in three main domains, corresponding to the headings that divide the twenty-one essays: (1) "The Politics of Language," (2) "Presence of Peregrine Languages (Latin, Italian)," (3) and "Literary Struggles of the Renaissance."This division enables the authors to furnish a very thorough and well organized analysis of the topic, which profits from a multitude of approaches-essentially linguistic, philological, historic, and literary-and therefore leaves very few domains untouched. The scope of the essays ranges from very detailed case studies (such as William Kemp's analysis of a hispanism, the comparative "non pas") to sweeping panoramic views of the general linguistic developments of the time (Gerard Defaux's text on Marot, Tory, Rabelais, and Etienne Dolet). Even those few essays that present at best merely a tenuous link to Lyon are generally informative and succeed in putting the problematic of the struggles of the vernacular language into a broader context. The biggest gap is doubtless the absence of essays on the influence of the Reformation, a gap that the main editor, Defaux, addresses in his detailed introduction, in which he also attempts to establish links between the main issues facing the French language then and now, thus further underlining the pertinence of the topic even for modern readers who might not be specialists of the Renaissance.

The strength of the collection is precisely the variety of angles from which it examines Lyon's status, which peaks in the 1540s and 1550s, an ascent that, in the domain of literature, was marked by the poets of the "Ecole lyonnaise."Whereas Maurice Sceve is omnipresent throughout the volume, particularly in Mich&le Clement's essay that attributes the 1545 Para doxe contre les lettres to the poet, it is all the more surprising that Louise Labe and Pernette du Guillet are given relatively little consideration, the former being virtually absent and the lat ter merely constituting one of three poets, with Mellin de Saint-Gelais and Jean Salmon

Macrin, demonstrating the interplay of Latin and French in Perrine Galland-Hallyn's essay on "imitation-emulation."Virtually all the other important humanists of the mid-sixteenth century are given their due, which impressively underscores Lyon's significance, rivaling and at times even outdoing Paris, in the development of the French language and letters: To name but five examples, we find Rabelais, who, as Mireille Huchon states, was published exclu sively in Lyon from 1533 to the publication of the Third Book in 1546 (406); Clement Marot, as a poet and editor, alongside his famous colleagues-Rabelais, Guillaume and Maurice Sceve, Dolet, Aneau, Baduel, Bourbon, and Alciat (410)-in the flourishing Lyonnais print ing shops;Jacques Peletier du Mans, who had his most productive period in the city (463); Bartelemy Aneau, to whose Quintil Horatian the final two essays are devoted, widening thus the focus to the pivotal quarrel between the Ecole marotique and the Pleiade; and Jean Lemaire de Belges, whose Concorde des deux langages reveals the immense significance of the linguistic struggles of the times, "une affaire d'Etat" (371), as Fran,ois Cornilliat underlines,

who then goes on to interpret the Temple de Venus as a poetic failure since Lemaire's strategy reposes on a delicate foundation (an equilibrium between the charms of the poetic discourse and the satire), that is, the production of a Gallic Petrarch, the problematic end point of the Concorde, as it demonstrates at the same time where this development will take the poet: a description "in very carnal terms" of the love inVenus'Temple (387 and n. 83).

The more technical issues of grammar and regional languages are mostly covered in section 1, which revisits not only Louis Meigret's pivotal role but also sheds light on lesser

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Book Reviews 885

known humanists such as Honorat Rambaud and his radical effort to create an entirely new alphabet. This juxtaposition of established and virtually forgotten figures of French humanism is another one of the main strengths of the collection as it ends up creating a more complete panorama of this watershed era for the French language and further ensures that readers with diverse backgrounds will find useful and enriching information in this very readable volume.

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Die Studenten an der Universitat Wittenberg: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des studentischen Ailtags und zum Stipendienwesen in der zweiten Hailfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Andreas GoBner. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2003. ?44.00. 299 pp. ISBN 3-374-02075-5.

REVIEWED BY: Susan R. Boettcher, University ofTexas at Austin

The author's doctoral dissertation in history at the University of Leipzig and second book-his first publication was Weltliche Kirchenhoheit und Reichstddtiche Reformation (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1999)-this volume provides a comprehensive treatment of areas of Wittenberg student life from 1547 (a date marking the university's reconstitution after the Schmalkaldic War) and 1602 (its first centennial). Although over thirty thousand students were enrolled during this period (almost three times as many as during the more actively researched first half of the century), these matters were heretofore primarily the subject of anecdote and disparate or fragmentary discussion in the secondary literature. In concise, economical prose, GoBner presents information about enrollment numbers and the social background of the students, matriculation, university regulations and punishment for their transgression, local lodging conditions, discipline, relations with the town government and local residents, the organization of scholarships and stipends, length of study, transfer to and from other universities, the reception of university degrees, and death. A particular point of interest is the effect of the crypto-Calvinist dispute and the resulting expulsions as a turning point in the history of the university. The greatest emphasis of the book, however, and its most significant contribution, concerns the distribution of stipends.While many individuals, typically residents of Wittenberg or university professors, provided stipends, most were financed and administered by territorial and civic governments (Franconian territories and the city of Nuremberg were most active here). In electoral Saxony, the support of students at Leipzig was more actively pursued for most of the century; after the 1580s the scholarship system was rationalized under the influence of the models of Hesse andWuirttemberg. In this period, both Leipzig and Wittenberg students were supported more actively in order to pursue the goal of an educated elite of pastors and teachers in the territory.At the same time, the revised stipend system intensified the theological focus of university studies. Private stipends could be complex; many specified a successively changing distribution of the interest on donated capital according to which a student would follow a widow or the local poor in receiving the stipend for a number of years. GoBner is able to provide an interesting and suggestive prosopography for the scholarship recipients of electoral Saxony at the university in 1586. As in the medieval university, degrees were awarded only rarely as they were not necessary for employment; ordination was the decisive experience for most Wittenberg students. As the century wore on, however, ordinations were increasingly undertaken by the consistory that would employ the new pastor rather than by the university.

The book includes a great deal of supporting apparatus. Tables and graphs chart the

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