The figures of the Muses are frequently considered a symbol of poetic fixedness or even schematic monotony and stagnation. This is especially true in a period whose lyrical production was known to oscillate between pragmatism, craft, and persuasiveness, linked to rhetorical categories, on the one hand, and inspiration, aesthetics, and inventiveness, attributes of (lyrical) poetry, on the other. This impressive collection of eighteen articles is very successful in its attempt to tip the scale in favor of the latter, presenting the Muses as fundamental agents of poetic experimentation, risk taking, and reinvention. It is in this way, it seems, that they contribute to the varied and complex representation of Mount Parnassus via their carnal presence, their strategies of appropriation, and their force of incarnation in space and time, as Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou states in her detailed introduction (13).

The first section (four essays) is dedicated to Neo-Latin Muses, touching on such diverse aspects as the traditional dream topos and divine intervention (Virginie Leroux), Pontano’s infringement on traditional codes of invocation via an eroticized and desirable Muse (Mélanie Bost-Fievet), an examination of two models of Muses (“Musa facilis, fusca musa”) as illustrated by the Neapolitan poet Giano Anisio (John Nassichuk), and the multiple and fragmented Muse in Nicolas Bourbon’s Nugae (Silvie Laigneau-Fontaine). This essay provides a neat transition to part 2, “Muses maccaroniques,” comprised of two articles, the first one being a very general overview touching on the presence of notions such as “the dynamic opening of discourse” in Ariosto, Rabelais, and, especially, Folengo (Ivano Paccagnella). These sketches are then developed with more depth in a study of the “nourishing Muses,” countermodel to the conventional incarnations, in Folengo’s Baldus, illustrating key concepts such as the creative force of originality, macaronic aesthetic, and serioludere (Alice Vintenon). The following section (three essays) turns to French Muses, from the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to the Pléiade, starting with Saint Gelais, Lemaire, and Bouchet, to insist yet again on the binary nature of the phenomenon, in this case establishing the dichotomies “serious/seductive” and “reason/passion” (Nathalie Dauvois). The famous quarrel between Clément Marot and François Sagon provides the background for an investigation of the role of the Muses in the transition from the erudite authority of rhetoric to the mysterious prestige of poetry (Guillaume Berthon), a perfect definition of the poetic “revolution” hinted at in the section title. Another, less known quarrel, documented in the Panegyric des Damoiselles de Paris (1545), contributes to the creation of a Lyonnais poetic identity and retraces a path from victorious and sadistic Muses to a more saintly vocation (Elise Rajchenbach-Teller).

The five essays of the following section focus on the Pléiade poets and their heritage, beginning with Du Bellay’s complex relationship with the Muses (George Hugo Tucker), reflecting shifting attitudes and approaches (otium/negotium, voluptas/virtus, France/Rome, vernacular/Neo-Latin). In Ronsard’s elegies, the use of the Muses marks the genre’s status with regard to the lyric and the epic (Benedikte Andersson), whereas, for Étienne Jodelle, their juxtaposition with the diabolic allows them to surpass the domain of inspiration to provide a bona fide theory of poetic genius (Emmanuel Buron). Des Autels’s Rabelaisian Mitistoirebarragouyne constructs an inverted Parnassus, a lascivious parody, whose chapter 14 serves as a seriocomical artpoétique in its own right (Jean-Charles Monferran). A countermovement, E. R. Curtius’s challenge or rejection of the Muses, illustrates a distancing from a cultural ideal and a tarnishing of poetic values, which can only be accomplished in a poetry of paralipsis (Audrey Duru). Seventeenth-century satyrical, burlesque, and polemical Muses form the coherent endpoint of the volume. Whereas they are rare in the satyrical collections of 1600–22, showcasing a changing aesthetic (Guillaume Peureux), they are the object of paradoxical praise in Cortese’s attempt to elevate the Neapolitan language (Roland Behar). Afterward, their menacing presence reaches a peak in midcentury polemical writings of Labadie and his followers (Julien Goeury), or, alternatively, they are a marker of derisive distancing from love or poetry, no longer transgressive, however, but grotesque, ridiculed, or devalued (Claudine Nedelec). The diversity of approaches, topics, and texts makes this mandatory reading for students of early modern poetic writing, in verse or in prose.