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Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance
Romanic Review, Jan 2005 by Lovell, Alison Baird
Virginia Krause. Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Pp. 230.
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In her first book, Virginia Krause of Brown University has analyzed a concept intrinsic to Renaissance culture in France, that of idleness, which is inextricable from the definition of work. Notions of leisure and work form the core dialectic in the book, which complements recent scholarship on early modern work, social class and time. Leisure, or more precisely the idea of leisure, was manipulated by writers, consonant with their social or political goals. This implies contingency: secular idleness would have little meaning in solitude, and the religious contemplation of the hermit or monk is not in question here. The dual opposites of otium/negotium (from Roman antiquity), sacred/secular, public/private, work/play, and work/idleness give rise to a host of tangential issues which Krause explores. Among them are social status and the meaning of aristocracy; time and how it is spent; boredom; women's societal roles; the moral connotations of idleness leading to vice; and the rise of the so-called Fourth Estate. After providing the background on classical conceptions of idleness, otium as a condition of the nobility (notably based upon Cicero) and Aristotelian schole which stems from ethics, Krause develops her arguments through readings of several French Renaissance texts: certain episodes from Rabelais; Les angoysses douloureuses (1538) of Hélisenne de Crenne (the pseudonym of Marguerite Briet); serialization in the 1540s, focusing on Herberay des Essarts' adaptation of Amadis de Gaule; and a few essays of Montaigne, including I, 8, "De l'oisiveté" and III, 9, "De la vanité." Idle Pursuits presents an introduction followed by an initial chapter devoted to aristocratic idleness (which includes a study of Rabelais' Thélème from Gargantua); a second chapter follows on the Fourth Estate and the noblesse de robe. Then, the texts of Hélisenne de Crenne, the Amadis, and Montaigne respectively constitute the last three chapters of the book. Rabelais, being a major Renaissance author, would have merited his own chapter and further treatment. Krause analyzes Thélème, Diogenes (from the Tiers Livre prologue), and the prologue to Pantagruel in the context of serialization, but these discussions are interspersed in chapters 1, 2, and 4. It is unfortunate that Idle Pursuits did not include a full section on idleness as a theoretical condition of the passe-temps of comic narrative in the texts of Rabelais, whose exuberant production diverted his readers on many levels.
In her study Krause emphasizes the "idle" genres: the essay, the romance, and the early modern novel. The book is well researched, and includes an extensive bibliography and index. Krause draws upon social theorists to flesh out her arguments, particularly Veblen, Bataille, and Bourdieu. It was Thorstein Veblen in his subversive critique of the aristocracy The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) who first argued that the rich derived prestige from being exempt from the necessity of earning a living to survive: Veblen's phrase "conspicuous consumption" described the displays of wealth and leisure, far beyond the scope of common people's income.
Scholarship on idleness in the early modern period usually points to developing notions of the private, the interior life, and the subjective. I observed two core paradoxes concerning idleness that emerged from Krause's book: first, there was little true inactivity, literally doing nothing; and second, far from being a waste, idleness was quite useful (can we still call it idleness then?). One was supposed to exhibit one's idleness, not merely cultivate it in private, but render it public in order to benefit by attaining status from it. Krause argues convincingly that idleness belonged as much to the realm of public practice as to that of individual cultivation. For this reason humanists, industrious though they were, rhetorically cultivated images of themselves as oisifs. The ancestors of modern professors, humanists tried to reconcile (intellectual) labor with the cultivation of idleness based on classical paradigms. According to Krause, the Fourth Estate developed an underlying symbiosis of work and leisure, each dependent upon the other. This was manifested through the cultivation of intellectual interests in maps, plants, animals, and knowledge of all kinds.
Since Krause mentioned the Italian writers Castiglione and Boccaccio in her book, I was hoping to find mention of Léon Battista Alberti's treatise, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (1428-29), in which the author as a young humanist confronted the difficulties of intellectual labor and penury, and yet for whom the study of letters served as a respite from daily troubles. But perhaps this text, written before the advent of the printing press, was not read by many sixteenth-century French humanists. Anthony Grafton has written on Alberti's treatise in his 1997 book Commerce with the Classics. Alberti's text recently has been translated into French by Christophe Carraud and Rebecca Lenois as Avantages et inconvénients des lettres (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2004).
