At just shy of 750 pages, Gouery and Hunkeler's collection, aptly titled Anatomie d'une anatomie, is an invaluable aid to any scholar whose interest turns to the blason anatomique. The inception of the blason anatomique in French poetry is well known. Composed in exile in Ferrara in 1535, Clément Marot's Beau tétin was the beginning of the vogue for blasons anatomiques du corps féminin. But part of the intrinsic value of this collection of essays, drawn from two conferences, held, respectively, in 2015 and 2016, is that it goes beyond the relatively limited sphere of sixteenth-century French poetry. The temporal and linguistic scope of the study of descriptio puellae is expanded to range from antiquity to the seventeenth century and places Marot and the blasonneurs in a context that includes Latin and Italian texts composed both by poets and prose writers. The essays also encompass other art forms, such as works by engravers, musicians, and painters.
The editors note that these representations of the female body take the place of the “complicit (or not) gaze of doctors, philosophers and theologians” (11). Their introduction, in addition to explaining the impetus for this collection, provides a clear and cogent summary of the chronology of the various editions of the blasons. The twenty-eight essays in the volume are divided among three thematic groups. The first, “Préhistoire du blason anatomique,” comprises four essays in which Marion Uhlig, Laurence Boulègue, Andrea Torre, and Uberto Motta highlight other literary genres that precede the French blason. “Histoire d'un phénomène: Les blasons anatomiques du corps féminins,” the second and longest group of the volume, with thirteen essays subdivided into three subgroups, resituates the genre in its French context and explores some of its influences (the contreblasons being one example).
Guillaume Berthon, Michèle Clément, and Nina Mueggler analyze the early collections of blasons. Clément especially focuses on the editions, including tables of contents. Emmanuel Buron considers the blason anatomique in relation to the blason domestique, citing Gilles Corrozet's 1539 text. Peter Frei explores the relationship between text and image while Alison Saunders considers the illustrations found in some printed volumes and posits that they reflect the publisher's choices and not those of Marot himself. Irene Salas suggests that although the female body is the overt subject of these blasons, the gender of the body parts is ambiguous. She revisits Laurence Kritzman's notion of a utopian body, one that is neither female nor male, defying gender limitations. Alice Tacaille explores the encounter between music and poetry.
Other essays concentrate on specific body parts that have been blasonné: Jean de Vignes's analysis of the contreblason of the mouth; Jeff Persels's probe of the ass; Marianne Bournet-Bacot's study of the breast; Valérie Auclair's focus on the eye. Victor Stoichita takes a different path and looks at Michelangelo as an innovator in terms of the cult of the artist. The essays in the final section, “Au-delà des blasons anatomiques,” reflect a broader geographic and temporal scope. Elsa Kammerer considers a late sixteenth-century German text; Roland Behar turns his attention to Spain; Line Cottegnies looks toward English literature, including Shakespeare. Each essay highlights that the blason as Marot conceived of it cannot simply be translated to other cultures. Various other ways of approaching the theme are presented. Elise Rajchenbach foregrounds the importance of René Bretonnayau in creating a medical-poetic discourse in the late sixteenth century; Antoinette Gimaret focuses on the corporal significance of Christian relics; Dominique Brancher examines the significance of importing Egyptian mummies to France; Audrey Duru examines Jean Edouard du Monin's Phénix (1585) and how Monin's poems fit in the genre of the blason.
The volume concludes with essays treating the satiric possibilities of the blason. Diane Robin, Hugh Roberts, Guillaume Peureux, and Louise Deholdt each offer examples of the lasting influence of the blason and the contreblason in the seventeenth century, most particularly in farces and satirical poetry. In addition to the illustrations and charts that accompany many of the essays the volume also includes three appendixes: the musical scores for the Blason du beau tétin and for the Blason du laid tétin (Annex 1A and 1B) and examples of the blasons and contreblasons of the mouth from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. In sum, the editors have put together a collection of essays that redefines scholarship on the blason.
