| Summary: | This volume of conference proceedings sets out to reappraise the phenomenon of plagiarism in early modern France, starting from the conceptualization of an ‘emprunt non déclaré, mais encore littéral’ (p. 8), first formulated by Gérard Genette in his Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982). By the late seventeenth century, this kind of literal borrowing was denounced as ‘friperie’, an insulting term conflating the reselling and refashioning of old materials with notions of theft and imposture. As Christophe Schuwey argues in the volume’s concluding essay, the figure of the ‘fripier du Parnasse’ suggests a growing uneasiness (among those who would impose their own hierarchy of ‘bonne littérature’) towards the commercial viability of reconstituting texts by ‘non-Auteurs’. This negative (and pervasive) view of literary recycling is thus what this volume intends to challenge by bringing to light a range of practices of extraction and reuse that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term ‘réemployer’ has more analytical purchase throughout the book than the rather anachronistic ‘copier-coller’. ‘Reuse’ affords a nuanced understanding of the often occluded means of textual transfer: large or small sections of text might be transferred with little alteration, along with other elements (for instance, engravings), from one text to another. But more often than not, these instances of reuse point to a larger process of re-composition: a process that involves altering, rearranging, even suppressing old materials around new content and, in so doing, creating distinctive new forms of text. The volume editors Marie-Gabrielle Lallemand and Miriam Speyer have organized the essays into three sections according to three types of reuse. The first section interrogates varieties of early modern citation which fed into humanistic practices of translation, commentary, compilation, and enrichment (‘innutrition’) of texts from multifarious sources. Elsa Kammerer offers an intriguing study of ‘entrelardements’ (borrowings from erudite and non-erudite sources) inserted into the earliest German translations of Rabelais’s Gargantua, thereby parodying Erasmian copia. The second section highlights the diversity of ‘auto-copillage’ among leading writers of the seventeenth century. As Lallemand shows, this ranged from a discreet echo of one’s previous œuvre (Madeleine de Scudéry), to brazen reproduction of it as an ‘autofiction’ glorifying one’s career (Georges de Scudéry). The third and largest section focuses on the crucial role of booksellers and compilers in shaping anthologies and recueils collectifs: here, economic and aesthetic considerations largely determined practices of reuse, though the former did not always trump the latter. Speyer and Edwige Keller-Rahbé demonstrate in their respective pieces that the long-term success of recueils collectifs cannot be measured solely by the prevalence of integral re-editions, but also through the continual reuse and rearrangement of their constituent parts, some of which may gain a newfound independence. In sum, this book continues recent scholarly trends in foregrounding the ingenuity of early modern textual reuse. The volume opens up further areas of research such as the malleable threshold of unforgiveable friperie with respect to an individual’s recycling of their own literary corpus.
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