Giorgetto Giorgi’s Les poétiques de l’épopée en France au XVIIe siècle presents a valuable contribution to scholarly works on French epic poems thanks to its focus on the Grand Siècle. Up until now, the focus of these scholarly works has relied heavily on the Middle Ages—e.g., Keith V. Sinclair’s Tristan de Nanteuil: Thematic Infrastructure and Literary Creation (1983) and Carlos Alvar’s edited collection In limine Romaniae: Chanson de geste et épopée européenne (2012). The methodological approaches of the majority of these works include gender and queer studies (Kimberlee A. Campbell’s, Sarah Kay’s, and Jane E. Everson’s studies on women warriors); historiography (Lothar Struss [1980]); critical editions (François Suard [2008]); translations (Michael A. H. Newth [2014]); and poetics (Philippe Sellier [1970]). As for the last of these approaches, the poetic scholars have rarely focused solely on the seventeenth century, favoring instead the analysis of the evolution of French epic poetics throughout the centuries, such as Sellier or Anne-Elisabeth Spica. Giorgi’s study of seventeenth-century poetics is therefore a welcome contribution to the scholarship of epic poetry.

Giorgi’s introduction traces the genealogy of the French seventeenth-century epic poem starting from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s De Arte Poetica. Both Aristotle and Horace defined the epic genre by its unity of action, its description of heroic deeds, and its ultimate purpose: the delectation of the reader. Horace, however, also underlined the importance of the moral education of the reader with his maxim delectare et docere. The poets of the French and Italian Renaissance, championed by Pierre de Ronsard and Torquato Tasso, continued the concentrated study of the epic poem by demanding unity of action and the importance of delectare et docere. Tasso demanded as well that the merveilleux (marvelous) linked itself only to Christian mythology because he found religious miracles to be more credible than pagan mysteries. Furthermore, he demanded that the choice of a historical subject be not too recent because he felt it impeded fictional elements; on the other hand, neither did he want it to be too ancient because he preferred the plot to be relevant. In sum, the poets of antiquity and the Renaissance built the foundation for the French seventeenth-century epic, which adopted the established criteria of the epic genre. Yet some characteristics of the French epic were not accepted unanimously, such as Pierre Mambrun’s criticism of the inclusion of female protagonists and warriors and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s of the merveilleux chrétien. As Giorgi states, the fervent elaboration of the rules and restrictions of the epic poem culminating in the seventeenth century contributed to a certain sterility that impeded the success of the French epic poem yet allowed for a better poetic definition of this genre (31).

Giorgi’s anthology includes thirty entries comprised of poetic works, prefaces to epic poems, and critiques by well-known authors such as Jean Vauquelin de La Fresnay or Honoré d’Urfé and less well-known authors such as Pierre de Deimier and Laurent Le Brun. These excerpts are presented in chronological order, starting with La Fresnaye’s Art poétique (1605) and ending with François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon’s Mémoire au Père Michel Le Tellier (1710). A short introduction prefaces each text with a brief sketch of the author’s life and the historical and political context of the work and its structure. Giorgi then gives a short summary of the entire work, situating it in contemporary debate of what constitutes the criteria of a French seventeenth-century poem. Giorgi’s anthology is therefore accessible to laypeople interested in seventeenth-century French poetics yet it also appeals to French seventeenth-century scholars. Giorgi’s anthology allows for a meaningful overview of seventeenth-century poetic works beyond better-known tragedies, comedies, and novels, and represents a successful and significant contribution to the study of seventeenth-century French epic poems.