La Mirtilla: A Pastoral

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 2004 by Constance Jordan

Isabella Andreini. La Mirtilla: A Pastoral.

Ed. Julie D. Campbell. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. xxx 106 pp. bibl. $26. ISBN: 0-86698-284-1.

Madeline de Scudery. The Story of Sapho.

Trans. Karen Newman. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxxii 155 pp. illus. bibl. $18. ISBN: 0-226-14399-6.

Jacqueline Pascal. A Rule for Children and Other Writings.

Ed. John J. Conley. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxxii 172 pp. index. bibl. $47.50 (cl), $18 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-64831-1 (cl), 0-226-64833-8 (pbk).

Before 1996, when the University of Chicago Press began publishing works in its series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, few readers had access to literature by or about women of this period. Through the efforts of the series' editors Margaret King and Albert Rabil, this deficiency is being admirably addressed; at least a dozen volumes in the series are now out and some fifty more are projected. Many of its authors are canonical: Louise Labe and Isabella d'Este, for example; others appear as new lights on the cultural scene. The few male contributors feature as quasi-outsiders (the other Other Voice?), not infrequently apologizing for constraints that their female counterparts have been busy protesting. Andreini's La Mirtilla, newly translated by Julie Campbell, a publication in the series Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, adds to the Center's already large collection of works in English by Renaissance women: this series is now represented by over ten volumes each containing several texts, edited by Betty Travitsky, Patrick Cullen, and, more recently, Anne Lake Prescott and Heather Wolfe. One could argue that the current emphasis on early modern "cultural" history is in some measure due to publications of works by women (I mention only a few) which have made more diverse and searching the criteria by which a Renaissance text may be judged worth reading today.

The works currently under review, one a dramatic pastoral, the second a novella extracted from a long romance, and the third a treatise on aspects of conventual life, share a common characteristic. They each exploit a rhetoric devoted to the production of copia, the amplification of a subject, theme, or trope in order to give it verve, color, and persuasive force. As the English rhetorician Henry Peacham observed, amplification is designed to enhance the appeal of the bare limbs of a matter by clothing it in ornaments to startle and delight the reader. Andreini's dialogue celebrates the timelessness of pastoral in light of its temporal dimension; de Scudery marries the art of love with the art of verse as she also repudiates marriage; and Pascal draws on all the resources of language to dwell on the deep inner silence of prayer.

Introduced by a dialogue in which Venus scolds Amore for thwarting marriage by passion, the action in La Mirtilla revolves around nymphs and shepherds who seek and must find spouses. Certain nymphs prove difficult converts to the match-making game: Ardelia is a female Narcissus who protesting admits "I desire to love a body" (91) and accepts Uranio; Mirtilla is loving but unloved until she meets Tirsi, a shepherd-hunter who, in the spirit of venatical pastoral, acknowledges the fact of death, itself an apology for Hymen and procreation. Nisa, the nymph beloved by the shepherd Coridone, never actually appears: exemplifying the georgic element in pastoral, Coridone extols the life of plants, and, bearing flowers that Nisa gave him, joins the group of nubile nymphs and shepherds at the end of the play with a betrothed who is present only symbolically. Certain characters appear as concessions, in order to be dismissed: Opico, a shepherd, is too old to do more than recommend a virtuous unity of persons; Gorgo, a goatherd, is exclusively focused on roast kid and cannot be part of a group inspired by Amore; and Satiro is hugely uncouth--his brutal advances are checked by the nymph Filli, who ties him up with a rope. Throughout her slight but charming drama, amplification serves Andreini well: she covers the topoi of pastoral with a brilliant grace, humorous, sad, and richly pathetic all at once.

Quite a different copia is evident in Mme. de Scudery's Story of Sapho, an intercalated novella in her compendious romance Artamene ou Le grand Cyrus. Deftly translated by Karen Newman, de Scudery's text is nothing if not wordy. The heroine Sapho, a reincarnation of the ancient poet of that name, argues against marriage and for love, an artless art, and an unpretentious learning. These topics are linked by de Scudery's emphasis on the role of poetry, which allows a lover to read the innermost feelings of his beloved. Examining and again reexamining the nature of true love, Sapho is at last convinced that because her lover Phaon is susceptible to the beauty of her verse, he is also capable of love. Thus Sapho has her way: she is united with Phaon but not married to him. What, then, has she avoided?