Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisivete in the French Renaissance

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2004 by Edward Benson

Virginia Krause. Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisivete in the French Renaissance

Newark and London: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2003. 230 pp. index. bibl. $48.50. ISBN: 0-87413-835-3.

The University of Delaware Press is out to establish a presence in studies of the Renaissance in France, first with works by such established scholars as Marian Rothstein and Cathy Yandell, and now with the first book from Virginia Krause, currently an assistant professor at Brown. Krause takes the figure of Dame Leisure (Oiseuse) from sixteenth-century editions of Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose as the embodiment of the aristocratic enthusiasm for idleness, particularly for ladies. No sooner does she show the accursed nature of work, however, than she points out the contradictions in late-medieval ideology enacted in the infamous trial of Gilles de Rais, who blamed idleness for his downfall.

Krause shifts her attention to what she calls the "technicity of leisure" in the abbey of Theleme at the end of Gargantua (1534). While Rabelais made space there for reformers and humanists, Krause rightly notes how much Theleme owed to traditional aristocratic notions of pleasure, but the most striking development for her is the attention Rabelais devoted to the production of the Thelemites' leisure. Work had moved over the three centuries since the first pages of the Roman de la rose from a biblical curse to a condition necessary to life and to its enjoyment. Thelemites were spared the newfangled clocks, born of the new commerce in time on the part of laborers and masters alike, precisely because they could be counted on not to waste it.

Krause then moves on to the struggle between the traditional nobility, from which the royal family had arisen primus inter pares, and the new variety defined by service to the king who never died. She rightly points out that the nobilities of the sword and the robe were more alike than either one cared to admit; but, even so, the two differed in their attitudes toward the performance of their leisure. The point became less to exhibit aristocratic independence from work than to perform leisure in productive ways, which were nonetheless not useful. That is, activity could not be purposeful if it were to be leisurely, but it could still turn out--Essais. Krause evokes Michel de l'Hopital's attack on Castiglione's sprezzatura in order to make the distinction: robins sought diligent negligence rather than the latter's negligent diligence.

Krause is sensitive to the gender implications of leisure throughout her study, but she focuses most specifically on women's role in the circulation of male honor in the chapter on Helisenne de Crenne, whom she sees as opening up a confessional mode, which she characterizes as "sentimental discourse." Krause's writing on this topic is rich and evocative: the confessional mode produced the notion of privacy by withholding some of the facts most sought by male readers or, more precisely, denying a transparent relationship between the author's writing and her extra diegetic identity. I must confess, however, that I would like to know more about sentimental discourse as a genre.

The last chapter is, predictably, on "De l'oysivete" (Essais I, viii) and, in general, on the first chapters the scripteur (claimed he) wrote after selling his magistracy. Krause is venturing into territory more widely and deeply known than the rest of her study, but her writing is still provocative, as when she points out the importance for Montaigne of "a hyperbolic freedom from work and an idealized self-sufficiency." The most original part of this final chapter for me was her section on his annotation of Lucretius's De rerum natura, which she sees him as exploiting to help him imagine contemplation in a desacralized context. Montaigne's efforts to insulate his own enterprise from any association with his roturier origins led him to demonstrate a kind of solitude that "ambitious idlers" used over the course of the next century to advance their own careers: an outcome that shows some of the contradictions inherent in early modern leisure.

I disagree with Krause over the nature of Rabelais's prologue to Pantagruel, which she labels "facetious." I see the comedy in it as far more subversive: the remark that the Chronique Gargantuine was outselling the Bible was less a celebration of than a lament over recreation (129-30). This is my most serious quibble. Krause has held some of the best-known texts of the French Renaissance up to new lights, and has substantially enriched our understanding of the way they relate both to the culture of their time and to our own.

EDWARD BENSON

University of Connecticut