The Dictionnaire de Pierre de Ronsard, edited by François Rouget, is undoubtedly a rich and essential resource for the study of Ronsard’s poetry. This book, which is the product of a workshop involving about fifty scholars, is aimed at specialists of early modern literature but also at graduate and undergraduate students and every person who might be interested in early modern French culture.

In a short introduction of four pages, Rouget reminds us that Ronsard stands out as the greatest poet of the second half of the sixteenth century. After describing the different steps of Ronsard’s poetic career, he finally points out that abundance (copia) and variety (varietas) are the main principles of his way of composing verses. Such abundance and variety can be found again in this dictionary: there are, indeed, more than 500 entries, written by specialists who represent a great variety of disciplines, including poetry, music, religion, history, linguistics, and Renaissance sciences. The entries, which are not exhaustive, concern every aspect of Ronsard’s life, career, and works. Each entry is accompanied by a short reference bibliography, which is a way for its author to refresh existing approaches on the subject dealt with. Furthermore, the reader can find at the end of every note many suggestions for other entries in the dictionary that can usefully complete the first search made. Most of these notes are short but a few ones are longer, especially when they concern important concepts such as “love,” “poetic genres,” or “women.”

Despite the great number of contributors and the considerable work of Rouget, I sometimes noticed little discrepancies, especially on the little-known festive poetry of Ronsard. If Jean Braybook writes that Ronsard’s Bergerie, composed in 1564, “must never have been performed (according to the opinion of Paul Laumonier)” (76), Margaret McGowan considers that this masquerade has been performed during the Carnival of Fontainebleau, at the beginning of the royal “tour de France” of Charles IX, in the place called “la Vacherie” (249). I regret that this masquerade is qualified as “a kind of masquerade-pastorale or eclogue-ballet” (76), without any precision. Indeed, the term ballet was not used by Ronsard before 1581 (“Cartel pour le combat à cheval, en forme de balet”), and it is really questionable to speak about ballets while the poet himself chooses to insert his Bergerie in a collection entitled Elégies, Mascarades et Bergerie (1565). These critical remarks, however, do not in any way question the value of those two brilliant contributions or the interest of the whole book, which is both scholarly and accessible. On many subjects, this dictionary can be used as a real companion to Pierre de Ronsard: it is complete and definitely well grounded in the historical and critical materials.