Mars et les muses dans L'Apologie pour Hérodote d'Henri Estienne by Bénédicte BoudouReview by: George HoffmannThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 1130-1132Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4144159 .

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1130 Sixteenth Century ournal XXXIII/4 (2002)

No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's is compared at length with La sorella, it must be assumed either that the authors intend their work for advanced students of comparative literature or that it is a reflection of their respective areas of expertise.

The most regrettable shortcomings of the introduction are the factual errors it contains. The dedicatory letter preceding The Sister is referred to by Beecher and Ferraro as a "pro- logue" (13, 21); prologues themselves are referred to as "prefaces" (14); the braggart Bellero- fonte Scarabombardon and the liar Spazza are characters in Sforza degli Oddi's comedy La

prigione d'amore (1590), not, as the authors state, in his I morti vivi-a comedy which they sub-

sequently attribute (48) to lacopo Nardi.These factual errors are compounded by distracting linguistic and stylistic idiosyncrasies. The authors frequently resort to archaic or obsolete ter-

minology such as "woe to weal" (17, 23, 32), "colling" (35), "yammering" (52), and the puz- zling "alazon" (32, 44, 50), the meaning of which is unclear. In their discussion of the theme of incest, they hypothesize that it is "an Edenic beauty that beggars the horror" (35), and, ironically enough in their treatment of the comedy's language, they suggest that "Della Porta

manages, through his linguistic bravura, to corroborate the various typologies in the lan- guage" (56). The typographic, grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and spelling mistakes in the introduction, too numerous to specify here, further detract from the value of its content.

These mistakes are again in evidence in the translation itself. The comedy is preceded by a dedicatory letter by the publisher Lucretio Nucci, addressed to Don Francesco Blanco, which appeared in the 1604 edition of La sorella, published in Naples. The first note in the Beecher-Ferraro translation (159) wrongly identifies this dedication as appearing in the 1607 edition of the comedy, printed in Venice. Linguistic and stylistic shortcomings are possibly more abundant in the translation than they are in the introduction. At times, the translators resort to deliberate vulgarization for the sake of rhyme, absent in the original Italian; at other times, the gratuitous use of alliteration is given precedence over meaning. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the translation (the Italian fortuna, for instance, becomes variously for- tune/Fortune/Lady Luck/Fickle Goddess/fate/ill luck; poltrone is translated as lazy buggar, sack of bones, sluggard, etc.), the inappropriate use of archaic language, the inexplicable use of diacritics ("forked" appears several times), Italianate expression ("I was sick there during two months"), and missing lines of dialogue all give the impression that the translation did not undergo much-needed editorial scrutiny.

In the absence of any statement on the part of the translators, it must be assumed that volume 3 of DI)ella Porta's Teatro, edited by Raffaele Sirri, was the basis for this seriously flawed translation. Nicole Prunster ................... ............. La Trobe University

Mars et les muses dans L'Apologie pour H6rodote d'Henri Estienne. Benedicte Bou- dou. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2000. 686 pp. SFr 142. ISBN 2600004025. This work lies close to the genre of the old thlise d'etat of which one is thankfully see-

ing less. A thousand pages in length, idiomatically organized and often without an index, narrowly focused but concluding with sweeping claims, these cumbersome artifacts from the pre-Reformed French academy usually prove exhaustive and, in equal measure, exhausting. They served to stake out a terrain, and hence aspired to be respectfully skirted rather than followed, referred to but not read. Fortunately, Benedict Boudou's disarming modesty, and the decency to assume that her subject's erudition deserves more attention than her own, makes this voluminous study of Henri Estienne's 1566 Apologie pour Hrodote a welcome addition to the serious scholar's library.

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Book Reviews 1131

Henri II Estienne is the last of the overlooked giants among French humanists. Unlike Turnebe, Scaliger, and Budt, for whom there now exist recent and thorough monographs by John Lewis, Anthony Grafton, and Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, Estienne has received passing notice and slight interest at best (John O'Brien's recent Anacreon Redivivus, nowhere mentioned by Boudou, is the notable exception).Yet, he was the first to edit Ana- creon's poetry, a decisive influence upon the Pleiade poets, and he became the century's greatest editor of Aeschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and, most significantly, Plato. He also

occupies a place in the history of ideas thanks to his edition of Sextus Empiricus in 1562, one of the founts of modern skepticism. He wrote incisive stylistic and literary criticism, and he created the monumental Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. His scholarship remained unsurpassed well into the nineteenth century and his editions so respected that modern editors still iden-

tify verse and line by the so-called Stephanus numbers.Were this not enough, he composed some of the period's most original polemical works.

The reasons why such a major figure should elude study--or, more precisely, scare off

potentially interested scholars-inheres in the very list of his accomplishments. To cover the

scope of his output, one would need be an expert in the history of the book as well as the

Byzantine complexity of sixteenth-century confessional politics, fluent in Greek, widely knowledgeable in the classics, and endowed with the imagination required to bring such an erudite and reserved writer to life in an age that particularly prizes neither quality. In short, to do Estienne justice, it would take the talent of an Anthony Grafton, who has resurrected

Joseph Scaliger and, more recently, Girolamo Cardano. Boudou makes no claim to have undertaken such a lofty task; she self-effacingly qualifies her approach as "pedestrian."Yet, in

bringing every facet of his life and learning to bear upon the Apologie, she ends up producing a major monograph on Estienne that will stand as a reference for all further study of this figure.

Estienne's French treatise originated in an earlier Latin Apologia pro Herodoto (1565), and it is to this neglected work that Boudou turns for insight to the genesis of Estienne's project, providing in the appendix a welcome edition and translation of the Apologia.The enterprise began in Estienne's revision ofValla's translation of Herodotus; his predecessor's work was

problematic enough to make Estienne feel the need to justify Herodotus. What began as a Latin preface to a compromised translation would soon seem to require its own translation into French, however, a self-translation that ended in the complete rewriting of the work, illustrating the gradual stages and multiple affinities in Estienne's mind between the tasks of the translator and those of the author.

Why Herodotus? The father of history, he attracted renewed attention from those who followed a growing interest in historiography, evidenced by Bodin's Methodus and sparked by Castellion's controversial treatment of the Bible as a work of history, and, more generally, the Reform's avowed desire to return Christianity to its historical origins in the primitive church. Defending Herodotus, then, amounted to defending a certain attitude toward the

past as well as the present. Rather than methodic treatise, Estienne's apology works by anec- dote; Boudou rightly sees in this Estienne's desire, in the wake of editing the skeptical works of Sextus in 1562, to avoid dogmatism-the anecdotal is by definition fragmentary, perspec- tive-bound, and able only to make a partial claim upon its audience's convictions. Upon the heels of the diffusion of a skeptical philosophy, Estienne seems to pursue here a sort of skep- tical anthropology aimed at destabilizing readers' sense of the familiar, availing himself of the opportunity to extend his reflection on literary criticism by treating it as an instance of the larger skeptical problem of the proper uses ofjudgment.

Under the pressure of contemporary concerns, Estienne's project to compare accounts

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1132 Sixteenth Century ournal XXXIII/4 (2002)

from the past with those from the present slowly transformed itself into a corrosive compar- ison of Roman Christians to pagans. Boudou happily situates both the content and style of this turn toward the controversial in relation to Protestant polemic, particularly that of Pierre Viret and Theodore de B&ze. Behind these figures she discerns a son's filial piety toward his father and Robert Estienne's battles with the Sorbonne. Her overarching thesis, admittedly vague but general enough to do justice to Estienne's eclecticism, claims that he sought to

"join Mars to the Muses," that is, to transcend the agonistic tone of polemical writing through endowing it with a poetic quality of its own. In fact, she further suggests, Estienne

gravitated toward the genre of the "apology" in the first place because it permitted him to

step outside traditional rhetorical forms' dichotomy between praise or blame, in order to

adopt a properly critical stance. It is hard not to think that this study would have benefited from being boiled down to

a few hundred pages. Boudou instead proceeds on the assumption that most of her readers will not have read the Apologie, let alone the Apologia.While true enough, no amount of para- phrasing can replace these originals; one can only place one's faith in the strength of one's

arguments, hoping that they will convince readers to return to the sources. Here, Boudou's

encyclopedic temptation does not serve either her or Estienne well: out of a fear to leave

anything out, too little gets pursued in satisfying depth. On occasion, her finest points are buried in an avalanche of examples, references, and rhetorical-logical categories; thus most readers will require fortitude to reach her penetrating remarks on Estienne's use of analogy (he was apparently the first to use the word in French) as a historical tool for open-ended skeptical inquiry. Otherwise, the seventy-nine-page section on forms of argumentation makes for slow going; it is a relief to reach the succeeding reflections on irony and Estienne's

uneasy position astraddle criticism and satire. Elsewhere, intriguing remarks on how Esti- enne's refusal to avail himself of techniques of suspense could be related to his rejection of

allegorical models of reading, observations that would have merited further development, are marooned in section 1.3.5 of chapter 6, entitled "Hypothesis." Boudou's nostalgia for the outline format leads her to partition her subject into discrete blocks of expository matter at the expense of sustained argument.

Boudou's forte emerges in the way that she attends to the detail of writing, finding, for

example, Estienne's thoughts on cultural relativism turning on how he translates and anno- tates a Latin word for shoes. Patiently, she tracks Estienne the cultural critic through the underbrush of partisan politics, humanistic preoccupation, and polemical precedent. But, in the end, Estienne's book is a study of belief; as Herodotus himself declared, "greekness dis-

tinguished itself from barbarity in being more aware and freer from foolish credulity." Esti- enne sets himself both against backwards Catholic superstition, and also against overly cynical modern skepticism which would dismiss Herodotus as a writer of fables. It is not simply enough to debunk; one must also maintain an open mind to the nearly infinite richness of human possibility that unfolds over the course of history. Boudou thus presents the Apologie as the somme critique of Protestant satirical verve. I'd like to see Pierre Viret receive more of the attention he deserves before conceding this crown to Estienne, but it is hard to dispute that she is going in the right direction toward giving this towering figure his due.

George Hoffmann................... ........ University of Michigan

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