PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 220 Reste à savoir pourquoi Racine insiste toujours dans les préfaces à Iphigénie et à Phèdre sur Aristote et Euripide et sur ce qu’il leur doit. Selon T. Alonge, Racine aurait toujours envie d’afficher la distinction d’avoir pu restaurer la tragédie grecque sur la scène française même si, en réalité, il a adapté sa dramaturgie pour mieux plaire au public français. Ce qui paraît le plus euripidéen chez Racine l’est le moins. Il observe de moins en moins les préceptes aristotéliciens et les pratiques euripidéennes qu’il persiste pourtant à mettre en avant dans ses préfaces. La trajectoire de cette révolution euripidéenne trahie que nous peint T. Alonge n’est, comme il le dit, que partiellement esquissée ici. Il a choisi de se focaliser sur les quatre pièces inspirées directement par des tragédies d’Euripide. T. Alonge nous laisse sur notre faim en disant que « sera peutêtre menée un jour [ … ] une analyse de l’ensemble du corpus racinien pour y déceler des traces de cette évolution » (p. 16). Aucune réserve à exprimer sur ce travail d’une très grande érudition qu’aucun racinien ne pourra désormais négliger, si ce n’est le fait qu’un vers très célèbre d’Andromaque est mal évoqué en début de conclusion (« fureur » au lieu de « transport », à deux reprises, dans le vers « Je me livre en aveugle au transport qui m’entraîne », p. 375), et qu’aucune référence n’est faite au livre de Susanna Phillippo, Silent Witness : Racine’s Non-Verbal Annotations of Euripides (Cambridge : Legenda, 2003), ouvrage d’une grande érudition aussi, et trop peu connu. Michael Hawcroft Jean-Pierre Cavaillé (ed.) : Libertinage, athéisme, et incrédulité, 1, Littératures classiques, 92 (2017). Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Midi. 182 p. Rare it is to read an Introduction to a volume of papers so succinct, coherent, open-ended, and engaging. The author, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, has accomplished a pedagogical and scholarly ideal that appeared with the birth of disciplines and university departments in the late nineteenth century, but that very rarely occurs: a learned great teacher bringing along a bevy of students who initially start out adopting the perspectives of the master’s research and then build their own intellectual self-fashioning through research and writing. Indeed, J.-P. Cavaillé summarizes each of the eight papers in this volume by briefly stating their contributions and expressing the commitment he shares with these authors in the classic research paradigm of the origins or presence of libertinage, atheism and non-belief in Western culture. Comptes rendus 221 This reviewer apologizes in advance for the inevitable errors in the process of emphasis and omission engendered by brevity. Jean-Pierre Albert is not afraid to take up the entire question of the possibilities of non-belief in Medieval Europe. He frames a reading of a well-known source, the Inquisition Register kept by Jacques Fournier; but he quickly moves off to a brief critique of Lucien Febvre’s Le Problème de l’incroyance… (Paris, 1942), to remark that only sources from one or another type of learned elite are drawn upon. Where are the Menochios who had become so well-known thanks to Carlo Ginzburg’s Cheese and Worms? J.-P. Albert asserts that religious ideas are in fact weak (and susceptible to disappearing? ), unless supported by authority. This point prompted the reviewer to try to think of a religious fact or idea that has no authority. Words that bear religious messages do not escape from contextualization - oral, written, visual, memorial - but it is interesting to think about ideas as lacking strength in themselves as a step toward the primordial. Yet reading Fournier leads to the inevitable conclusion that the peasants of Montaillou had a remarkable understanding of the religion that was believed and practiced in their community. Luca Addante begins by wondering why the links between sixteenthcentury skeptical thought about the Trinity, etc., and eighteenth-century Deism found by such formidable historians as D. Cantimori, P. Hazard and, somewhat later, F. Venturi have virtually disappeared from more recent scholarship. Luca Addante has not only deepened the research on some of the already-known critics of various religious beliefs, but he has added many others, particularly from Naples. The works of Juan de Valdés, Bernardino Ochino and Valentino Gentile would become known in northern Europe; thus the break between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century in heterodox ideas cannot be explained by their absence. Perhaps another kind of authority, more general and cultural, contributed to the general trends that emphasized English and Netherlandish heterodox thinkers? As late as 1958, in the New Cambridge History edited by G. R. Elton, II, p. 267, the heterodox whom Calvin described as Nicodemites (Ochino and Valdés) are discussed, and some bridges to the eighteenth century are evident. Jérémie Barthas explores the first appearances of persons referred to as “libertini” and finds the term, briefly and importantly, in Florentine political culture, circa 1520. Individuals and small groups of young males from better-off families, and some readers of Machiavelli, expressed opposition to the rule of the Medicis. A pope referred to them as “canaille.” PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 222 Barthas measures the influence of R. von Albertini’s book on the history of Florentine consciousness (Staatsbewusstsein), 1955, for the decades of tension between republican and Medicean parties and powers. A translation of that book appeared in 1970, prefaced by F. Chabod. Albertini might have taken too seriously antique models of changes in forms of government and found that the Florentine experience conformed to them (as Marvin Becker did), thereby over-emphasizing the powers of the Medici party. The history of a collective Renaissance consciousness is difficult to write. So, from the beginning, or at least very early on, “libertine” was a negative epithet - not unlike politique in France, or Beggar in the Netherlands, or Puritan in England. Stéphane Van Damme begins with perhaps a desirably vague concept: “libertin érudit.” The quotation marks he puts around these words in his title indicate possible awareness of this. He offers readings of geographies and travel accounts by La Mothe Le Vayer, Fr. Bernier, S. Sorbière, Naudé, Psalmanazar, Lahontan, G. Delisle and Charlevoix. La Mothe’s Géographie… is characterized as “banal.” In fact, it is a work of synthesis that belongs to the mirror-of-princes genre. Apart from admitting that he is uncertain about some of the material that he, La Mothe, is including, which is excellent instruction for critical reading, there would not seem to be a shock to his own savoir and croyances as he pulls together what he can find about the world, and states it simply and critically, so that it can be understood by a youngster. The touch of le merveilleux is still part of the genre of physical geography today. Van Damme then turns to interpreting relations and descriptions, genres that are grounded on the practice of visual observation and curiositas. There is a synthesis: interpreting images and actually seeing things. Sorbière and Naudé express doubt about the veracity of these genres. A converted ex- Huguenot, Sorbière will characterize the English as “fanatics” in politics and in religion. Again, as with La Mothe, a questioning, if not a quite skeptical attitude, is grounded on their serious philosophical reading and reflection. What might be a “récit de voyage ordinaire”? The ethnographic outlook becomes stronger, it seems, in late-seventeenth and eighteenth century texts. The turn to Jesuit relations becomes stronger in this paper, perhaps because Jesuits had something of a reputation for veracity. There are some skeptical remarks in these texts, but they derive from, or belong to, a different intellectual formation than the philosophical or medical bildung of La Mothe, Sorbière and Naudé. This reviewer finds the whole Jesuit-Lazarist missionary written relation to be “étrange” in this paper entitled “libertins érudits.” There would seem to be Comptes rendus 223 little skepticism about Jesuit motives for diffusing their relations: to raise money for their missions. The project of reading Jesuit relations from a libertin-érudit perspective may be a step too far. The discussions (not debate) between Alain Mothu and Hartmut Stenzel on the concept of libertinage take L. Godard de Donville’s “Le Libertin…” (Seattle, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, «Biblio», 1989), and M. Fumaroli, “La République des Lettres …,” (Revue de l’Histoire de la Littérature française CIV/ 2. 2004, pp. 463-74) as points of departure. Mothu stresses the polemical origins and diffusion of the term “libertinage” (Garasse), and rightly so; and he asserts that it has neither an epistemological nor a hermeneutical foundation. The reviewer recalls the great work by O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Stuttgart, 1972-97), because the practice of historical inquiry was the most useful and indeed the most authoritative on concepts. Part of the issue would always seem to be how to transform a negative epithet into an analytical tool (Wittgenstein). Investigating the semantic field formally employed for libertin in each quarter century might yield surprises. Stenzel remarks that libertin and libertinage are “casiers commodes permettant de ranger tout ce qui ne se laisse pas entrer dans la ‘construction’ du siècle classique…” (p. 120). Are the two concepts in a binary tension? Stenzel grasps something of the merit in using concepts that are vague or imprecise, but there is the danger in the deductive method, that is, pulling usages together from very different genres and times. Perhaps more than we realized, seventeenth-century polemical writers chose terms that shocked - not unlike Mothu’s procedure here, when l’effarouche is sought by the writer? His second reply to Stenzel has many of the features of a tirade, and well done too, which this reviewer mentions because it reveals how argumentative structures appear when there are replies and assertions. Mothu’s nominalist impulse leaves close reading as the “method” (the reviewer’s word): only authors, works, and their contexts: not such a bad approach to all types of texts. Mothu does not rise to the defense of the concept of classicism, which Stenzel finds useful for seventeenth-century French studies. Stenzel offers his approach as the “chercheur pour rendre visible tel ou tel aspect [concept? ] d’un passé dont il veut construire la mémoire; en bon procédé hermeneutique, il met en relations des œuvres et un sujet [concept? ] qui interrogent ses œuvres dans la perspective qui est la sienne.” Stenzel then offers some libertine readings from Molière. Exemplary work that would serve well in any history or literature or social-science seminar for weeks! PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 224 With immense learning and analytical bon sens, J.-P. Cavaillé suggests that the history of libertins has yet to be written. He begins by confessing that his early work on “radical” libertinism did not always work out. But this does not mean that he has abandoned the study of libertinism which, he notes, has stood the test of time (légitimité scientifique). Of course, libertins do not call themselves “libertins.” Thus the researcher must turn a term of castigation into one with enough analytical magnetism to discern an outlook at once skeptical and outside religious thought. The deep ties between ethics and religion must also be carefully scrutinized in order to respect how the libertins accomplished this. Cavaillé connects and pulls together evidence from the sixteenth century (not in L. Febvre’s way) to find contexts for that term and for others as well, that began as derision. Cavaillé continues his brief for the use of libertin as a concept by pointing out how other individual groups did not belong, or thought they did not belong, or did not want to belong to the generalized and strengthening Roman Catholicism in seventeenth-century French society. Not too many years ago, there were studies of marginaux; and currently exclus has momentary categorical power. However, Becker’s Outsiders (1963) is proposed as an éclairage on how individuals and small groups may be effectively formed and characterized. Becker and Erving Goffman take their place of honor here. They are more useful than M. Foucault for understanding the insane, and may help interpret some libertins. Scratch a libertin and one often finds a family with medical training, or a family of ex- Huguenots. Experience in reading controversies is stronger in some groups than in others; it may lead to non-religious self-fashioning. Sorbière’s description of religion in England may partially be interpreted as resulting from his conversion, as late as age thirty-nine; perhaps he was never bien dans sa peau. Cavaillé’s program for further research is so attractive that this reviewer is tempted to offer to be his research assistant. Ettore Lojacono moves deftly and convincingly across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to propose strong contours of skepticism, its origins, its practitioners. One thinks of W. Bouwsma’s work on Postel (1957) and R. Popkin’s on Sextus (1964), irrespective of whether one accepts Popkin’s thesis about skepticism being used as a tool in the Protestant argument against Catholicism. Also not mentioned is L. Joy’s Gassendi, the Atomist (Cambridge UK, 1987), the best, or at least one of the best studies of Epicurean thought in the mid-seventeenth century. Bérangère Parmentier frames Jean de Silhon’s Lettre on the superiority of Christianity over all other religions (published in 1627), in a concrete, effective way. Silhon sought Richelieu’s protection and received it for a Comptes rendus 225 work that challenged heterodox religious thought. How did he present or finesse the divisions in Christianity that were still so strong? Silhon also proposed himself as a councilor to the government at a time when Richelieu was consolidating control over the council as principal minister. Some readers, among them Silhon, were familiar with Machiavelli’s casuistry about the argument of necessity, and about how a bad action can produce good results, and so forth. Silhon never lost Richelieu’s support, but Guez de Balzac, with his Prince of 1631, did. Silhon probably got the idea of publishing a letter from Balzac’s success in that genre (see C. Jouhaud). Ioana Manea tackles the venerable questions about how La Mothe Le Vayer understood the relations between religion and morality. A very important clue is mentioned: the philosopher’s intention “pour combattre les disciples de saint Augustin” (p. 161); but this remark about motives is not mentioned again. Starting as she does with a close reading of the “dixième trope sceptique,” readers should not be surprised by the absence of formal Christian apologetic. There is a lengthy account of foreign customs and habits, most of which involve violence, including suicide and cannibalism. Juxtaposed is Christian morality; and La Mothe lets the reader choose one or the other. The role that religion plays in legitimating mœurs does not receive attention from La Mothe, and La Mothe does not propose to uncouple manners from religion. When the two moralities are juxtaposed, it is not difficult to determine La Mothe’s choice: Christian morality. Reception and participation in a controversy are two different things. La Mothe says that he is participating in controversy. This clarifies the strategy of his argument: he leaves the reader a choice. By selecting the most non- Christian morals on the pagan-savage side, the reader did not have to have all that much “natural light” or “reason.” The result does not contribute to La Mothe’s reputation for finesse. Sylvie Giocanti does not accept Ioana Manea’s interpretation of La Mothe Le Vayer’s “dixième trope sceptique.” Her critique begins with an assemblage of learned works (including Cavaillé’s) that supports an interpretation that La Mothe is a skeptic. To refute Manea, she also appeals to Montaigne, Pascal and possible skeptical ideas of reason (T. Gregory). Giocanti does not offer an alternative interpretation, nor does she refer specifically to interpretations of the “Dixième trope…,” which is among the works on La Mothe that she cites. In the end, Manea’s argument about the interpretation of a paradoxical choice for readers at the end of the “Dixième trope …” is not refuted. Is the strategy of leaving the reader a choice, in fact PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 226 a strategy used more frequently by skeptics than by non-skeptics? Recall how David Hume ends his Dialogue on Natural Religion. Orest Ranum Edwige Keller-Rahbé (dir.) avec la collaboration d’Henriette Pommier et Daniel Régnier-Roux : Privilèges de librairie en France et en Europe XVI e - XVII e siècles. Paris : Classiques Garnier, « Études et essais sur la Renaissance », 2017. 539 p. Le privilège de librairie est familier aux critiques littéraires, qui ne se rendent toutefois pas compte de la diversité de cet instrument régularisant le marché du livre. Au XVI e siècle, il favorise les éditeurs, puisqu’il « procède d’une concession [d’impression] et les auteurs ne jouissent pas, du seul fait qu’ils ont composé un ouvrage, d’un droit au privilège » (Laurent Pfister, « Les conditions d’octroi des privilèges d’imprimerie de 1500 à 1630 », 65). A Venise, Johannes de Spira est autorisé en 1469 « à exercer seul l’art de l’imprimerie dans la ville pendant cinq ans ». La « protection de l’inventeur et de ses techniques de production » y fait partie d’une « loi générale du mai 1479 » (Angelo Nuovo, « Naissance et système des privilèges à Venise du XV e au XVI e siècle », 332-333). Le privilège constitue donc un mécanisme économique avant d’impliquer une mesure de censure idéologique, sur laquelle les historiens aiment attirer l’attention. Après avoir été longtemps négligé, les critiques littéraires, depuis les années 2000, profitent de plus en plus des recherches menées par les historiens du livre et du droit d’auteur pour « mieux cerner les trajectoires culturelles et sociales des auteurs » (11) et pour faire avancer « la critique d’attribution » (11). Ce volume présente en deux volets les « apports historiographiques, théoriques et prosographiques » (12) d’un séminaire de recherche, dirigé par Edwige Keller-Rahbé entre 2009 et 2013 : un premier centré sur la France (23-327), un deuxième élargi sur l’Europe (331-474). L’excellente postface de Nicolas Schapira résume bien l’état de la recherche tout en indiquant des pistes pour les travaux futurs (« Les privilèges et l’espace de la publication imprimée sous l’Ancien Régime », 475-485). L’ouverture de perspective vers l’Europe apporte des compléments importants. Depuis 1480 le Saint Empire, où l’imprimerie fut inventée, délaisse des privilèges qui sont des « instruments légaux portant sur le commerce des livres » et des permissions d’imprimer « accordées dans la plupart des cas par des autorités religieuses » (Ian Maclean, « Saint Empire romain germanique et Allemagne, les privilèges d’impression du XV e au XVII e siècle », 402). Le Vatican ne protège pas seulement les œuvres reli-