Closely devoted to the theme of the collection, the sixteen essays of this absorbing volume are clustered in four sections: “Desportes orateur à l'Académie du Palais,” “Desportes poète profane,” “Desportes poète sacré,” and “La réception des œuvres de Desportes: poésie et musique.” The introductory essay by Jean-Marie Constant provides a very useful backdrop to Chartres, Philippe Desportes's birthplace, portraying it as a geographically and economically strategic city in relation to Paris.
The four articles in the first section are mainly centered on Desportes's role at Henri III's Palace Academy, where, as Alexandre Tarrête points out, the king surrounded himself with poets, philosophers, and aristocrats as his equals and companions. Desportes, as Henri III's favorite, participated in the sessions and wrote at least three discourses, which he presented between 1576 and 1578, discussed in detail in the first two essays by Claire Couturas and Tarrête. François Rouget meticulously describes an unedited and unpublished manuscript of “formules oratories” entirely handwritten by Desportes, an ambitious project that the poet started in 1579, aimed at contributing to Henri III's education on eloquence. Rouget convincingly argues that Desportes's role at the Palace Academy was greater than previously believed.
The second section of the volume analyzes the Chartrain writer in his crucial role as court poet, demonstrating how, in various functions, Desportes's non-religious writings faithfully followed the culture of the court and of the end of the Renaissance. The first article by Daniel Ménager compares Desportes's cartels and mascarades with those of Ronsard, and sheds some light on yet more cultural and literary associations between Desportes and the court, as both the king's favorite and Ronsard's rival. The second essay focuses more closely on Desportes's elegies. In fact, Olivier Halévy offers an accurate study in light of the culture of love letters written in neo-Petrarchist diction. In the third article, Nicolas Lombart scrutinizes Desportes's hymns, the tradition of the genre, as well as their relation to his profane poetry. Concetta Cavallini, in the last article of the section, provides a useful analysis of the language of Amours de Diane, the spiritual sonnets and their Petrarchan intertextualities, persuasively arguing that both share the same inspiration and philosophy.
The third section's four articles are devoted to Desportes's religious compositions, starting with Guy Poirier who compellingly demonstrates the perfect equilibrium of sacred and profane, looking more specifically at the usage of the terms Dieu and dieu. Bruno Méniel analyzes anger in Desportes's Poésie Chrétiennes and argues that their beauty and characteristics are inspired by the Book of Job. Jean Vignes's particular focus is a valuable comparison of Desportes's “Psaume I” with other French writers' psalms, demonstrating his great and erudite ability in composing this genre. Finally, Audrey Duru's essay studies the wide reception of Desportes's religious poems, arguing that their circulation and imitation by other poets was greater than previously thought.
The last part of the volume discusses the reception of the French poet in the fields of both poetry and music. Denis Bjaï looks at the life and works of Claude Rabet, a Chartrain poet and emulator of Desportes, to whom he addressed several sonnets. Charles Whitworth offers an exhaustive analysis of Elizabethan poetry inspired by Desportes, who was imitated because of his “sweet conceits.” In the Netherlands, on the other hand, he was imitated because of his perfect, spiritual and humorous Petrarchism, as Paul J. Smith's remarkable article illustrates. Isabelle His, in the following essay, surveys how Desportes's poems have been musically interpreted. Marc Desmet as well examines musical interpretations of Deportes's work, concentrating though on Desportes's psalms, and showing in detail how and why this genre became a favorite music at court.
Philippe Desportes: Poète profane, poète sacré assembles some of the papers presented at the international conference on Desportes, which took place in Chartres in 2006, the four hundredth anniversary of Desportes's death. It undoubtedly provides solid and relevant scholarship on an important poet of the sixteenth century, caught in the crucial “in between,” as the editors note: “une place non seulement secondaire face aux plus grands . . . mais de plus très transitoire” (8). The variety of topics and methodologies, the connections from one essay to the other, and especially the necessary and relevant four main themes of the volume, make it not only an important contribution to the study of sixteenth-century French literature and culture, but certainly a welcomed and indispensable addition to the understanding of Philippe Desportes and his work. Specialists and students alike can undoubtedly benefit from this volume as a whole, and in particular from the two indispensable unedited texts that it provides.
