PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 266 Mais il y a encore plus ennuyeux. De nombreuses inexactitudes, confusions ou anachronismes trahissent une négligence regrettable, tout comme une accumulation d’erreurs factuelles doublées de contradictions à quelques pages ou même lignes d’intervalle : le duc Anton Ulrich n’est pas né en 1645 (p. 110), mais en 1633 ; il se voit qualifié successivement de « plus jeune petit-fils » du duc Auguste (p. 107), puis de plus jeune des trois fils du duc, et de son épouse Sophie Elisabeth (p. 111), alors que cette dernière n’est que la belle-mère d’Anton Ulrich (p. 111 toujours ! ) et qu’il est le second fils du duc Auguste. Ce dernier meurt en 1665 (p. 113) puis en 1666 (p. 115). Les textes des ballets et mascarades dus à Morhof sont attribués (p. 118) à sa poétique, Unterricht von der deutschen Sprache, alors que l’auteur les a fort logiquement inclus dans son recueil de poésies, les Teutsche Gedichte. Les considérations poétologiques, en revanche, se trouvent bien dans le Unterricht (mais curieusement, Laure Gauthier ne cite pas d’après cette édition, p. 122 ? ), et démontrent au reste que Morhof conçoit clairement ces spectacles comme des ballets, et nullement comme des opéras. Trop d’incertitudes et de tâtonnements, accompagnés de jugements de valeur déplacés (le ballet n’était pas qu’une « mode »...) fragilisent la démonstration, notamment au sujet des déterminations génériques des œuvres, certes délicates à établir (ballet, opéra-ballet, pastorale, Singspiel, etc.) ou du rôle des divertissements dans l’opéra (lien ou non avec l’action principale, p. 206), alors qu’il aurait été préférable de s’appuyer sur un ouvrage de référence tel que Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart  qui curieusement n’est pas mis à contribution, alors que le travail porte sur la musique et sur un genre lyrique développé dans l’espace allemand... ? Les références bibliographiques sont souvent anciennes (pour les deux spectacles dus à Morhof, on regrette l’absence de référence à l’étude majeure de Claudia Schnitzer, Höfische Maskeraden, pourtant parue en 1999), ou citées sans être réellement mises à profit. C’est dommage, car ce travail riche présente un intérêt incontestable, et offre un très bon aperçu sur un aspect encore trop peu connu, mais passionnant de l’histoire culturelle allemande du XVII e siècle. Marie-Thérèse Mourey Larry F. Norman : The Shock of the Ancient : Literature & History in Early Modern France. Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 260 p. + Bibliography, Index. Larry F. Norman’s The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France is only ostensibly an analysis of the quarrel of the Ancients Comptes rendus 267 and Moderns. In fact, this new study charts nothing less than the process through which literature gained autonomy from the constraints of rationalscientific method. Along the way, Norman offers a fresh look at the polemics between partisans of the old—the Ancients—who felt wonder and awe towards the Greco-Roman world, and the partisans of the new—the Moderns—who rejected the brutality, coarseness and disorder of ancient texts and authors in favor of the philosophically ordered, rational, and morally-refined works of seventeenth-century France written in the wake of Descartes. 1 Norman complicates our sense of the division between the two constituencies, as he makes a convincing case that, “There were, Modern and Ancient positions to be found in writings, but no pure and simple Ancients and Moderns among actual writers” (p. 49). Nuance characterizes Norman’s analysis. Though the term, “the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns,” originated in the seventeenth century with the participants themselves who vociferously asserted their affiliation with one or the other groups, Norman patiently unveils the overlap and porosity between the arguments advanced by authors on either side. It quickly becomes evident that even at the height of le siècle classique there was never a blind obedience to classical precepts, nor did seventeenth-century writers possess an idealized vision of the Greco-Roman world; in short, this book will force us to reassess how we teach neoclassicism. For both sides, Norman demonstrates, ancient works felt distant and foreign: the ancients were the seventeenth century’s cultural Other (revealingly, both sides drew parallels between Homer’s Greeks and the mores of the Iroquois). Furthermore, we learn that both parties elaborated complex periodizations of antiquity—a “primitive” age, the world of Homer and Sophocles, home to the great epic and tragic genres; and a preclassical period—the Augustan age of Virgil, in particular, though the philosophers Socrates and Plato were important “advanced ancients.” Antiquity was not, then, a homogenous idealized whole which the French naively adulated and imitated. Norman makes abundantly clear how complex and historically contextualized the ancient world was in the eyes of the quarrelers. Norman surveys the terrain with admirable even-handedness. His refusal to universalize or discern a winner differentiates his study from the most prominent works on the topic of the quarrel to date. He is far from defending a parti pris as Joan De Jean did in Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997), where her condem- 1 Following Norman’s practice, I will capitalize “Ancient” and “Modern” when referring to the parties and their positions in the seventeenthand eighteenthcentury quarrel; the historical time periods under debate will not be capitalized. PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 268 nation of the conservatism of the Ancients in the cultural politics of the seventeenth century became a means of taking aim at the conservatives of her own century. Nor does Norman follow the similarly partisan work of Marc Fumaroli and Alain Finkelkraut whose respective studies, “Les Abeilles et les Araignées” (2001) and Nous Autres les modernes (2005) advocated unabashedly for the ancient side. Norman refrains from engaging these critics directly, preferring instead to let the Ancients—our “Ancients,” the seventeenthand eighteenth century authors—speak. Though Norman is certainly learned in contemporary scholarship and turns to twentiethcentury anthropological and literary criticism from a wide spectrum when needed, he prefers to listen attentively to the early modern writers, such as Racine, Fénélon, Dacier, La Motte, Boileau, and Perrault. The organization of these authors’ dispersed interventions into the debate and their ripostes display Norman’s mastery of the field; he is clear, methodical, and always engaging in his convincing demonstrations. The study is divided into three sections, each of which treats a major issue at stake in the Ancient versus Modern debate. The first four chapters focus on the perception of historical progress. Norman dismantles the cliché that Antiquity represented a universal timelessness for seventeenth-century authors. In fact, the two parties responded emotionally to the awareness of a distinct rupture—a chiasmic remoteness—between French culture and the Greco-Roman world. The question became how to regard this distance. Whereas the Ancients valued the primordial essence of Homer as the first link in a continuing chain of artistic glory, the Moderns saw a lopsided competition between an ignorant, crude, and superstitious past versus a glorious present whose crowning achievement was the invention of scientific method. In their eyes, the Cartesian Revolution made the seventeenth century unassailably superior. These discussions slowly led to the growing distinction between progress in the arts and humanities in contrast to progress in the sciences—the latter being much less controversial than the former. Where Perrault applied scientific notions of order, clarity, and precision to the arts, Boileau and the Ancients endorsed an affective reaction, an emotionally charged response to creative works, which they deemed to be independent from the empire of reason and method. By the close of this section, we begin to see how these arguments slowly forged the congruent notions of literary independence from tradition and an experiential approach to art. Norman further challenges a long-held principle when he offers up the image of Boileau the radical in place of Boileau the conservative guardian of tradition. The author of the Art poétique appears here as the defender of creativity and inspiration, one who wishes to break Comptes rendus 269 free from the constraints dictated by the more conformist and censorious Moderns. The second section, encompassing chapters 5 through 9, discusses the ancient works themselves and the sticking points that became either a focus of condemnation or approbation. The Moderns identified three “shocking” aspects of the Greco-Roman worlds: their perceived political disorder and brutal power structures; the irrationality of pagan religion; and the moral turpitude of ancient works. All of these stood in profound opposition to French Ancien Régime identity. In a dialectical approach, Norman covers the accusations levied at the ancients’ failings and the countervailing defenses urged by their champions. Norman demonstrates that in the course of these disputes, the Ancient partisans arrived at a relativistic approach as they embraced a notion of tolerance, separate from contemporary demands of politics, philosophy, and morality, in which literature could be freely admired on its own terms. In the last section, chapters 10 and 11, Norman turns his attention to Boileau’s use of the Longinian sublime to counter Cartesian rationalist poetics. Paradoxically, the defenders of antiquity become avant-gardists in creating a space where empiricism and imagination trumped the methodically ordered and morally refined poetry promoted by the Moderns of the Age of Louis XIV. The “Longinian Revolt” rejected generalized poetic principles in its embrace of the senses, emotions, and imagination. Norman sheds light here and throughout the study on the unexpected role that old texts played in creating new concepts. He is particularly acute in tracing how the emotional engagement with the “shock of the ancients” led to a valuing and theorizing of the ineffability of artistic experience. We understand why the title of Norman’s study bears no reference to the querelle but emphasizes instead how the affective relationship which Greek and Roman texts produced in French readers of opposing affiliations led to new conceptions of literature and history. Beyond its convincing and erudite character, the study is beautifully written and a pleasure to read. Its lack of explicit chronology within the debate and Norman’s decision not to adopt a linear, historical approach leads him to return multiple times to the same quotations. Yet this repetition is attributable to the dialectical nature of the study. Norman’s goal is not to trace, year by year, or text by text, the exact progression of the querelle or its authors. He instead addresses the issues that framed the discussion—the arguments are central. Certain passages are emblematic of more than one concern regarding the ancient authors and are therefore repeated. Similarly, Norman’s explicit interests lie with the literary implications of the quarrel, not its strictly political ones. The Crown’s role in the PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 270 debate, despite its potentially explosive religious and political consequences, is minimized. We are told that Louis XIV chose to take a backseat in the quarrel, though it is surprising that he should have chosen both Boileau and Racine, both stalwart supporters of the Ancient party, as his royal historiographers. An expanded commentary on that seeming paradox would be welcomed. However, to find fault here is to nitpick. In his conclusion, Norman takes us into the French and British Enlightenment to trace the effects of how the seventeenth-century Ancients’ elevation of emotive response influenced the philosophes of the two nations. This study of literary transformations recovers a neoclassical world that had been lost to us, obscured, ironically, by the consequences of a later quarrel—the Romantics’ debate with neoclassicism. Norman makes evident what the Romantics made us forget: just how scandalous those ancients were. Hélène Bilis Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton (eds. and trans.) : Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers. Toronto : Inter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010 (« The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series », 9). 310 p. + Appendix, Bibliography and Index. Enchanted Eloquence is a most welcome addition to works in English about the seventeenth-century conteuses. Anthologies by Jack Zipes, including Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments (1989) and The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001), were the first in English to provide an inclusive view of tales by the 1690s conteuses in a literary and scholarly field that had been dominated by the works of male authors and collectors such as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, and for which Charles Perrault served as the primary representative of the French tradition. Lewis Seifert and Domna Stanton’s translations of tales by the conteuses complement these earlier anthologies at the same time that their focus on women authors offers the Anglophone reader a unique perspective on the seventeenth-century French literary field as well as the tradition of the fairy tale. While new critical editions of tales by the conteuses have been available in French with the tricentennial edition of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s tales (1997-98) and Honoré Champion’s Bibliothèque des Génies et des fées (2004-), there are few