Textes au corps: Promenades et musardises sur les terres de Marie Madeleine Fontaine. Didier Kahn, Elsa Kammerer, Anne-Hélène Klinger-Dollé, Marine Molins, and Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, eds. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 550. Geneva: Droz, 2015. 526 pp. $90.

Abstract

Marie Madeleine Fontaine has spent her long and successful career crisscrossing the Renaissance landscape working on and editing texts covering topics ranging from games to war to love. In addition to contributing many books and articles dealing with different aspects of early modern life, history, and literature, she has also directed several conferences (and edited their actes for publication) in which participants have explored the body, translation, and laughter in the Renaissance. In the current volume, admirers and former students collaborate to pay homage to someone who has so profoundly marked our understanding of how humanity lived, loved, wrote, played, and worked in the Renaissance. Accordingly, contributions in this collection tend more to demonstrate or explain what was said, written, or sung rather than analyze why. The gamut of subjects this collection of essays covers is as varied as the work of the one to whom it is dedicated and is, therefore, useful to a wide-range of scholars interested in Renaissance history. The most substantial part of the book is the first chapter, which deals with body parts, humors, and senses. Contributors catalogue Renaissance presentation of noses and women's bodies and explore the uses of the human body and senses in medical, alchemic, and religious texts. Particularly helpful is Max Engammare's analysis of Jean Calvin's understanding of the sense of hearing and the resulting implications for music in Calvinist congregations. This sense notably holds for Calvin both a sensual and spiritual use. Accordingly, Engammare demonstrates both its positive capacities (as it is by hearing the Word of God that Calvin believes people come to salvation) and its negative abuses (especially through music that can lead people away or distract from the words of spiritual songs).