Politics and 'Politiques' in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History by Emma Claussen (review)

génie français, an assessment shared down the centuries by authors from La Fontaine to Sainte-Beuve. Yet his immediate successors as court poets, the Pléiade, deplored Marot for his perceived over-attachment to traditional poetics and his inability to craft a suitably distinct poetic voice. Recent scholarship has undermined the Pléiade’s disingenuous critique, and champions instead Marot’s role as an unprecedented innovator in French poetry, whose revolutionary poetics demarcates a literary-historical boundary between medieval and (early) modern. However, by cutting Marot off from his predecessors in order to place him at the threshold of modernity, Delvallée contends that modern scholarship risks obscuring the poet’s true genius almost as much as the Pléiade’s account, which made Marot the last of the so-called Grands Rhétoriqueurs. In Delvallée’s own words, therefore, ‘[à] l’idée de rupture nette ou de révolution esthétique, il suffit d’opposer celle de dette ou de filiation’ (p. 11). To this end, and over the course of nearly a thousand pages, the author subjects Marot’s œuvre to close analysis, placing it in relation to those of his immediate predecessors and acknowledged masters in the poetic art, such as his father Jean Marot, the polymathic Jean Lemaire de Belges, and the court poet Guillaume Cretin. In the course of this analysis, Marot’s poetry reveals itself to be deeply engaged in a process of appropriating and transforming these models, simultaneously honouring and dissimulating his debts to his poetic fathers. Delvallée concludes that Marot’s poetry is characterized by not one but a multiplicity of ‘poétiques de la filiation, constamment repensées selon les genres ou les objectifs rhétoriques’ of the work in question (p. 889).