La Renaissance et la nuit.
Kennedy, William J.
Daniel Menager. La Renaissance et la nuit.
Les seuils de la modernite 10. Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2005.
270 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. CHF 80. ISBN: 2-600-00990-6.
Both elite and popular culture in the Renaissance seem to have
privileged day over night in their discourse about social, cultural,
artistic, and intellectual practices. On the positive side, humanists
from Petrarch onwards fashioned a vocabulary of clarity, illumination,
and enlightenment to express their program of education. On the negative
side, urban as well as rural dwellers documented their fears about night
and darkness as a setting for theft, riot, and violence. Or so it might
seem until we begin to look carefully at complex figurations of night in
major texts of the period. This is exactly what Daniel Menager does as
he challenges the privilege accorded to day over night in early modern
Europe. Biblical texts, he argues, accord night the same status as day
since God created both, and believers themselves dedicated night as a
special time for prayer. Furthermore, he contends, the logical
relationship of night to day emphasizes a natural succession rather than
artificial opposition, a cyclic progression from one to the other and
then back again that valorizes night as a concomitant of day. Finally,
night enjoys a productive association with scholarship, science, and the
creative and performing arts. It's not for nothing that many of us
enjoying this journal think of ourselves as happy night owls, a charter
extended to us by none other than Minerva herself.
The book's five chapters pursue these themes with an
exceptionally rich variety of interpretation and analysis. Beginning
with a study of cosmology, Menager contrasts Hesiod's version of
night as chaos with the aforementioned biblical approval of it as part
of divine creation, and he uses the tension between these two views as a
structural principle for assessing Renaissance representations of night.
It helped the proponents of tenebrosity that the Hymn to Night
attributed to Orpheus came to publication by Henri Estienne in 1566,
ritualizing the beneficence of the dark hours for scholars and artists
alike. Earlier devotees of Cupid and erotic pleasure needed no such
inducement to celebrate their nocturnal preferences. Neo-Latin elegists,
Italian Petrarchists, and the poets of the Pleiade alike found night
inseparable from their dreams of amatory conquest or frustration. In
this regard, Ronsard emerges early in the chapter as a master-poet for
his Amours, just as later in the chapter he holds sway for his sober
assessment of night as principle of order in his "Hynne a la
Nuit" and "Hynne de l'Hyver." His senior
contemporary, Michelangelo, commands an important subsection for his
sculpture of Notte on Giuliano de' Medici's tomb as a figure
of repose, as a sign of fecundity and triumph over death, and as a
veiled statement of liberation from the growth of Medici tyranny.
The book's next two chapters treat respectively of imaginative
literature and moral representation. In the former, Sannazaro's
pastoral Arcadia affords a model that later writers would take in
different, productively divergent directions. The shepherds of his prose
narrative spend starry nights singing poetic eclogues of compliment and
complaint, investing their performances with a plenitude that fuses
private and public concerns. Its private dimension would inform the
amatory poetry of Remy Belleau's pastoral sonnet sequence Bergerie
in the late sixteenth century, while its public dimension would help
shape the hermetic Rosicrucian allegory of Johann Valentin
Andreae's The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz just before
the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The keystone of the third
chapter--and the fulcrum of the book--is a generous subsection on Don
Quixote. Here Cervantes's insomniac hero transforms his
sleeplessness into an act of devotion, fusing ethics and aesthetics in
his construction of an ideal while affording a countervailing critique
of the outmoded chivalric ethic that occupies him during daylight hours.
Quixote's obsessive reading habits distort the aims of study
espoused by Petrarch in De vita solitaria just as surely as they
reproduce the indecision of Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I, which
captures the exact moment when Melancholy abandons the tools of
intellectual work to reflect upon their use or uselessness.
The book's last two chapters focus respectively upon spiritual
and worldly concerns. The first leads us from the vesper prayers of
Dante's Purgatorio through Abendlieder lyrics of
seventeenth-century German Protestant poets such as Andreas Gryphius and
Paul Gerhardt and Jesuits such as Friedrich von Spee to the mystical
poetry of the same century inspired by the noche oscura, noche serena of
St. John of the Cross. The second juxtaposes secular and sacred forms in
its approach to courtly nighttime entertainments in the reign of
France's Charles IX; to the painterly arts of Antoine Caron,
Georges de La Tour, and Adam Elsheimer which depict crepuscular realism;
and to collections of popular tales deigned to be read at evening
firesides, such as Guillaume Bouchet's Serees and Estienne
Tabourot's Les escraignes dijonnaises. Menager's unerring
instinct for illuminating detail, his capacious vision of cultural
currents and crosscurrents, and his lively presentation of materials
ranging from Dante and Petrarch to Tasso, Galileo, and beyond make this
an exceptionally rewarding volume.
WILLIAM J. KENNEDY
Cornell University
