Le sang embaumé des roses: Sang et passion dans la poésie amoureuse de Pierre de Ronsard byMarc CarnelReview by: Katherine MaynardThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 830-831Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20478037 .

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830 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV1I/3 (2006)

existed between the events of the poet's life (his encounters with the Friulian noblewoman Maria Savorgnan and with the duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia), the echoes of those events that we find in his private letters, and their literary transposition in amorous lyrics.

With the passage from "Laura" to "Olive," Guglielmo Gorni considers the relationship between Petrarch and Du Bellay rather as a tempered imitation than as a true imitatio in the strictest sense of the word. In sum, it is no longer enough today just to use the simple cate gory of"petarchism." Instead it is a question in France, as in all European poetry, of"a con scious institutional depression of the model for a lyric 'canzoniere' that tradition had imposed" (82).

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Le sang embaume des roses: Sang et passion dans la poesie amoureuse de Pierre de Ronsard. Marc Carnel. Etudes Ronsardiennes, 10. Geneva: Droz, 2004. 509 pp. SF 148.00. ISBN 2-600-00965-5.

REVIEWED BY: Katherine Maynard, Washington College

The French poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85) wrote copious amounts of love poetry throughout his long and fruitful career, including Les Amours (1552), La continuation des Amours (1555), La nouvelle continuation des Amours (1556), and two books of Sonets pour He'lne (first included in the 1578 edition of his Oeuvres completes). Le Sang Embaume des Roses, an appropriate addition to the Etudes Ronsardiennes series published by Droz, attests to the breadth and variety of these poems by considering Ronsard's use of imagery related to blood, passion, and the body.

The first section of the book summarizes the theories of blood common to Renais sance medical discourse. Expertly crafted by the author, the chapter guides the reader through the essentials of medical theory while gesturing to their importance in Ronsard's love poetry. The subsequent chapter provides a demonstration of these theories at work in Ronsard's love poetry by analyzing the roles of eyes, arrows, and the heart in the illness caused by innamoramento. In his discussion, the author discusses the role of Neoplatonic the ory (notably Ficino's commentaries on Plato's Symposium) and in particular its emphasis on the disastrous effects of unrequited love on the health of the lover. The lover is infected by vapors of poisoned blood that originate in the eyes of the beloved. The poison quickly spreads to the heart and alters the blood and thus humors of the lover. Carnel provides mul tiple instances of these images in Ronsard's love poetry and concludes that the poetic voice originates in the lover's wound. By analogy, love poetry is blood spilling onto the page.

In the next chapters, entitled respectively "Le venin" and "Le sang et la folie," Carnel analyzes the lover's infected blood and the madness provoked by passion. Here, the author traces an evolution in Ronsard's poetry. The choleric poet in Ronsard's first collection of love poetry, les Amours, burning for the love of fiery Cassandre, evolves into the alternately phlegmatic and melancholic poet of the Continuation, inundated by the aquatic nature of Marie. In contrast, Ronsard's most complex mistress, Helene, allows the poet to undergo a moderate folly of his own will and to experience the white melancholy lauded by Ficino for its benefit to artists. Given the number of images that recur in all of the collections, the evo lution of love sickness as it relates to Ronsard's mistresses is not as linear as the author's argu

ment would make it seem. The argument is nevertheless compelling, and Carnel finds ample examples in the poems to support his point of view.

The final section of the book, "Echanges de sangs," concludes the study with a consid

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Book Reviews 831

eration of the violence and cruelty of passion. The carnage of love includes the enraptured heart, the cannibalized body of the other, and, of course, the blood of both the male lover and the female beloved. This section encompasses a large range of subject matter, from the image of love's prison to Prometheus to vampires to banquets to the metaphor of the woman as flower. These thematic groupings seem to stray from the book's declared subject at times, yet the material is quite interesting and original, especially the discussion of the complex fig ures of Prometheus and Helene.

Throughout the book, Carnel takes great pains to include (and, for the most part, agree with) the opinions of the most respected French authorities on Ronsard, along with a few Anglo-Saxons. His bibliography is rich, although quite often the authors listed in the bibli ography are cited only once in the entire book, a fact which points to a lack of engagement with the bibliography. Of course, the extensive bibliography also attests to the erudition of the author who is knowledgeable about any number of source texts-classical, medieval, early modern, and beyond-and a large group of contemporary literary critics.

The interdisciplinary pairing of medicine and literature has been successfully imple mented by other French critics, one notable example being Patrick Dandrey's work on Moliere, La me'decine et la maladie dans le the'atre de Moliere (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993). Ronsard, like Moliere, offers ample material for an investigation of medical metaphors, a fact evinced by the scope of this book and by Olivier Pot's earlier work, Inspiration et me'lancolie (Geneve: Droz, 1990). Carnel, however, is careful not to blur the lines between disciplines. This work remains foremost a piece of literary criticism: the first, historically grounded section of the work sets the context for the analyses to follow but does not determine them. On the whole, Carnel's readings of Ronsard are thoughtful and insightful and his erudite book will serve as a helpful tool for scholars of Ronsard.

Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 456 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8223-3467-4.

REVIEWED BY: Audrey DeLong, Suffolk County Community College

This book is a collection of essays previously published, excerpted, or adapted from a variety of respected journals. The twenty articles date from between 1994 and 2003 and cover an ambitious range of time and space. The book divides these essays into three main sections: "Thresholds of Modernity," which deals with early modern empires; "Global Empires, Local Encounters" treats specific examples of colonial encounters from the eigh teenth century and into the twentieth; and the third section, "The Mobility of Politics and the Politics of Mobility," considers the way migration, immigration, travel, and a growing awareness of geopolitics enact colonialism (and anticolonialism) on the modern body. For the sixteenth-century scholar, the articles in the first section would be the most attractive. Particularly relevant to the Western scholar would be "Male Travelers, Female Bodies and the Gendering of Race Ideology, 1500-1700," "Christian Morality in New Spain: The Nahua Woman in the Franciscan Imaginary," and "Eva's Men: Gender and Power at the Cape of Good Hope."

Tackling such an enormous project, even in the scope of a generous number of essays, the editors decided to select articles for breadth of coverage. The first essay in section 1, for example, deals with the changes in masculine self-perception in northern India, and the last

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