I. Early modern epics : in search of a global perspective

1Malevolent wizards, exotic plants, the Virgin Mary alongside Phoebus as a figure of inspiration, a vicious dragon fighting double-headed eagles, a sea captain changed into a giant rising out of the ocean to warn fellow sailors—and (as was expected) intrigues, battles and prodigies : the epic genre is, during the early modern period, both alive and inventive. The momentous changes of modern times (technical progress like the printing press, the new Baconian and Cartesian thinking) did not put an end to the tradition of writing lengthy, versified military tales with theologico-political stakes. The epic genre endured and flourished, chronicling current events as well as revisiting olden myths, adding the technical innovations and latest discoveries to the customary resources of poetic invention.

2The liveliness and inventiveness of early modern epic poetry is still not always fully acknowledged. That may be because the early modern period comes, in literary historiography, between two great epic periods—the Middle Ages, and the Romantic era. On the one hand, literary criticism as well as common historical imagery paint the Middle Ages as a golden age of oral poetry (that of the jongleurs, mediaeval broadcasters of epics) or, at least, of the emulation of orality (as in the parlance of the Arthurian romances) ; the chanson de geste provides the post-Antiquity paradigm of epic poetry of the Western world—in short, the age of chivalry is quite spontaneously epic. On the other, Romanticism is associated throughout Europe (even more so in Central and Northern Europe) to various national revivals fuelled by philosophical idealism as well as a renewed interest for oral traditions and folklore. Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz or Victor Hugo’s La Légende des siècles are testaments to the first, and the compilations of the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg of the second ; shorter texts like Byron’s Mazeppa demonstrate the pervasiveness of the epic register in Romantic poetry.

3Squeezed between the mediaeval epic cycles and the romantic epic outbursts, the early modern period may at times come across as dull where it comes to epic poetry. The French epic attempts, from Ronsard’s La Franciade to Voltaire’s La Henriade through the resounding failure of Jean Chapelain’s La Pucelle, are a literal textbook case of early modern poets vainly trying their strength against the epic genre. A poet as celebrated as Goethe is not particularly remembered as an epic poet, and the mix of bourgeois ideals and Weimarer Klassik in epic form that is Hermann und Dorothea is regularly counted among his duller works. Some sacred epics (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Klopstock’s Der Messias) are still celebrated, albeit with caveats regarding the arduousness of their poetic language. Somehow, the early modern period seems too obsessed with the stakes of equalling (or besting) the ancient poets and succeeding in that supreme genre (a status the epic acquired at the expense of tragedy during the Renaissance) to really do either. The epic, it could seem, best survived in degraded forms through the burlesque and mock-heroic genres, to which belong some of the period’s best-sellers by Paul Scarron, Samuel Butler, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, or Ignacy Krasicki.

4And yet the epic was well alive during the early modern period. Far from being slavishly imitative of ancient models, it drew from (and renewed itself at) more modern sources ; it never stopped addressing the immediate circumstances of those who wrote and read it—which is a defining anthropological trait of the genre. This issue’s main dossier, therefore, aims to sketch the first outline of a global approach to epic literature from the Renaissance to the early decades of the 19th century in the Western tradition, which reaches, via colonial literature, to the Far East (with Camões’ Os Lusíadas) as well as far West (namely to Cuba, with Silvestre de Balboa).

5To introduce the reader to the vast inventiveness and intricate stakes of early modern epics, the choice has been made to focus on lesser-known domains which are seldom (though unduly) featured in comparative studies on the genre. The first half of the dossier comprises studies by specialists of the Slavic literatures from Central and Southern Europe (Roman Dąbrowski, Davor Dukić and Dragana Grbić) ; the second half includes two articles translated from the Portuguese (Brazil) discussing aspects of Lusitanian and Latin American epic literature (Fabio Mario da Silva and Raúl Marrero-Fente), which previously appeared in Revista Épicas, as part of a bilateral translation effort between our two journals. The transition between these two sets rests on Hélio Alves’s discussion of Luís Vaz de Camões’ Os Lusíadas—a poem which, while it may not be the “first” early modern epic, is one the earliest to have joined the Western canon and whose reception had a shaping influence on later epics, if only because it served as the direct model of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.

From the East of Europe…

6The first part of the dossier focuses on lesser-known aspects of early modern Central European literature. Davor Dukić’s study offers a detailed overview of Croatian epic poetry through the 16th and 17th centuries, accounting for parameters either ideological (defending Christianity against the Ottomans), political (Croatia being the object of an ongoing strife between the Venetian Republic and the Hapsburg Empire), and even linguistic (epics being written in one of several Croatian dialects).

7Still in the Balkans, but a little further East, Dragana Grbić discusses the first Serbian epic poem written in the learned, humanistic tradition, Jovan Rajić’s Boj zmaja sa orlovi (1791) : while in Croatia lively centres of humanist learning such as Dubrovnik had long established the vernacular language as a literary one (as shown by D. Dukić), the Serbian language was in the later decades of the 18th century only just becoming a literary language. Rajić’s epic poem combines Renaissance-style allegory (an Ottoman dragon fighting Christian eagles), the burlesque (in the buffoonish portrayal of Prophet Muhammad as the supernatural ally of the Turks), and an earnest heroic register (in the telling of the military events of cantos II to IV).

8Moving North, Roman Dąbrowski describes the evolution of the epic during the Polish Enlightenment, from Ignacy Krasicki’s poems in the 1770s to the first decades of the 19th century (demonstrating, if need be, that periodisation in a comparative setting is an exercise requiring flexibility). Epic inventiveness there mixes neoclassical poetics and ancient mythology with national themes either societal (the lives and roles of monks, treated by Krasicki in mock-heroic form) or military/political (the battle of Chocim against the Turks, the Great Northern War against Sweden…)

9These three thorough and far-reaching studies together show, beyond differences as obvious as they were to be expected, a consistency in the development of the literary epic in Mitteleuropa. The tropes and mythology of ancient epics relayed by humanistic culture is, there as all over Europe, readily available material for the poets. Metres and stanzas circulate through the area. While Latin epic was written in iambic hexameters and French epics in double-rhymed alexandrines, Central European poets seem to favour various stanzas : Tasso’s ottava rima becomes a norm in Krasicki’s Polish epics ; quatrains and octaves are the main form of Croatian epic, while the trzynastozgłoskowiec (Polish 13-syllable alexandrine) becomes in Jovan Rajić’s poem an “epic distich” of sorts, whose unequal rhythm is sometimes used to striking effect. The prestige of the epic genre also serves to ennoble the Slavic vernaculars : in Croatia, Dubrovnik štokavian and čakavian compete for prestige status via epic compositions, and the genre retained the attention of members of the Ozalj circle ; Jovan Rajić demonstrates the literary potential of the vulgar tongue by composing his epic. While no one in the 18th century would have doubted that the Polish language was a literary one, the poets of the Stanislavian and post-Stanislavian era were stylistic reformers who departed from the overly Latin (if not deliberately macaronic) poetic diction of the Sarmatian Baroque to revert to the more fluid style of humanistic poetry.

11Ideologically, regional and national stakes combine with supra-national ones, grounded in contra Turcos rhetorics and the militant ideology that conferred on the peoples of the antemurale Christianitatis the sacred mission to defend the West. From there stems an obsessive imagery of besiegement, of which the many sieges recounted by our poets (that of Szigétvar for the Zrinski brothers, in Hugarian and Croatian ; those of Bender and Belgrade in Jovan Rajić’s poem) are as many particular instances. Homeric inspiration, with the Iliad as a paragon of the siege poem, runs through this corpus.

…to the West Indies

12In the West, besiegement is less important than colonial conquest. Hélio Alves delivers a concise but firm synthesis on the political, ideological and aesthetic stakes of Luís Vaz de Camões’ Os Lusíadas, a seminal work of Renaissance epic poetry that launched the poetic treatment of colonial expansion : the figure of the epic poet, his involvement with political power, the representation of living or recently deceased characters, and the concurrence (and competition) between the poem’s aesthetic objectives and its political overtones. Seamus Heaney’s remark about Aeneid VI, that it was “the best of books and the worst of books” (aesthetically sublime, politically subservient), could mutatis mutandis be applied to Camões’ work : beautifully inventive, but written with political urgency and riddled with a xenophobia that today elicits more that raised eyebrows.

13Turning to the West Indies, Raúl Marrero-Fente examines, through thorough close readings, the way in which the flora of the New World was integrated to epic imagery in the first Cuban epic, Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia (1608). The exoticism and luxuriousness of Cuban plant life inflected the epic inventio as much as it was assimilated into it : the classical topoi of the cornucopia and a locus amoenus populated by nymphs and satyrs serve as an excuse for a well-informed botanical description which, in turns, reinvigorates these somewhat hackneyed figures. The mythological marvellous (still widely accepted in modern Christian epics) is complemented by botanical marvels which inspire the poem’s fiction (by providing a new setting) and diction (as the poet employs native terminology the refer to the new plants). The so-called “language of the Gods”, one of the traditional means of achieving epic admiratio, is superseded by the language of the Other.

14Last but not least, Fabio Mario da Silva studies female epic writing in 17th-century Portugal through the works of Maria de Mesquita Pimentel, who wrote a sacred epic in Portuguese about Jesus Christ’s childhood, and Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda, whose epic in Castillan on the Moorish conquest of Iberia and the subsequent Reconquista remained unfinished. While they are aware that epic poetry is primarily a masculine business, these poetesses treat serious subjects (the military past or sacred history), using several strategies to legitimise their projects, such as claiming Mary’s holy patronage for their works, at once emphasising their piety (and eminently female virtue) and stressing the female element at the heart of Christianity. Female writing is therefore an integral part of the history of early modern epic poetry, both in the subgenbre of sacred epic (Maria de Mesquita Pimentel’s poem belongs in the same category as Du Bartas’ Sepmaine, Milton’s Paradise Lost or Klopstock’s Der Messias) and the more tradition genre of the foundation epic, with its theologico-political stakes.

Overall remarks

15These papers together throw some light on themes, devices and problematics that are recurrent in early modern epic literature. Here is a quick overview.

The Definition Issue

16One of the most recurrent questions about the epic during the early modern period is that of its definition : what is, exactly, an epic poem ? Do texts that are put forward by their authors as epics only deserve the name ? From Scaliger to Dmochowski through Boileau and many others, early modern poetics are full of attempts to answer this burning question. Dmochowski, author of a Polish Art of poetry (Sztuka rymotwówcza) eventually concedes that the genre has not yet rally appeared in the national language, and ends his development on the epic with a literal “call for poems” : Poland has would-be epics, and still lacks a real one. In the 20th century, analyses inspired mostly by the theorists of the novel (Gyorgy Lukács in particular) saw this generic instability as a sign that the mantle of the epic had been taken up by the novel, which was the modern genre par excellence (an idea Henry Fielding both theorised and illustrated in his works). And indeed there is something of the romance in the early modern epic : Tasso (who is also the author of a pastoral novel, Aminta) introduced romantic plots which have on occasion, at least in the work of his followers, created narrative unbalance and generic confusion (D. Dukić in particular shows this happening in Croatian epics). One should not forget, however, that this “romantic” side of the epic goes back at least to the story of Dido and Aeneas, and that characters such as awfully powerful (and sexually fascinating) enchantresses (like Circe) or warrior maidens (like Camilla) are modelled after Homer and Virgil as much as after Ariosto (whose Orlando furioso is itself a case study of generic ambiguity, in constant oscillation between verse romance and romantic epic). At the end of the day, as H. Alves show quite clearly, the definition of the genre may be more of an anthropological than a poetical nature : an epic should first and foremost do what is expected of it (and of the genre it belongs to). Os Lusíadas is, in that sense, an effective text, as are the Croatian and Serbian epics discussed by D. Dukić and D. Grbić. An epic is a poem that works as an epic should.

“Epic work” and reportage

17What should, then, an epic do ? One of the defining traits of the early modern epic as seen in this dossier seems to be an emphatic referential function, at work in a great many texts : the early modern epic is often, as least in part, a poetic reportage. In Croatia, it can even be the main source of information regarding current political and military events (D. Dukić), continuing—in an era of the written word—one of the primary functions of oral epic singing. The same is true of Rajić’s epic (D. Grbić), but also of the New World epic of Sivestre de Balboa, whose minute depictions draw from reliable sources (R. Marrero-Fente). This referential dimension even influences the typographical disposition of the epic, some poets taking it upon themselves to add historical notes to their verses (something Voltaire did extensively in the Henriade, and which is practiced by Rajić and Muśnicki as well) : the poetic text is supplemented by a referential counterpoint whose function is to authorise the fiction, in that it both attests of the factuality of the events depicted and gives more leeway to the poetical imagination (as accurate, prosaic informations are readily available should the fiction adapt, omit or distort them in any measure). Other epics (notably in Poland, as shown by R. Dąbrowski) are concerned with the recent military past (going more or less a century back from their time of composition) : their function is then to shape the collective memory of relatively fresh events. A more remote, faraway, or even mythical past is also still the subject of numerous epics : Krasicki’s Wojna chocimska, Tomaszewski’s Jagiellonida are set in the early 17th century or in the Middle Ages but are built around the core myths and values of the szlachta (the noble class who defined the Polish national identity in early modern times). Sister Maria de Mesquita Pimentel’s sacred epic goes the furthest back (to the rebel angels), an may not be as concerned with ongoing events as others ; but the account of the fights between the Spaniards and the Moors in Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda, remote as they are, serves to outline the solidarity between the Iberian kingdoms. What Florence Goyet has dubbed “epic work” (the transposed representation and narrative exploration of modern crises) is certainly not absent from early modern epic literature.

Epic urgency

18The proximity of the composition of the poems with the events they depict induces a sense of epic urgency, particularly visible in Balkan epics (Jovan Rajić’s and some Croatian poets’). The most striking example remains the oldest in the corpus discussed here : H. Alves examines how the pressure Camões was under to publish swiftly affected the poetic equilibrium of the poem. While epic urgency is a widespread phenomenon it is certainly not universal : female epic writing, in particular, seems to flourish in a state of otium studiosum, as a direct consequence of the marginalisation of women in early modern times (and let’s not forget that Maria de Mesquita Pimentel was a nun leading a monastic life).

Intertextuality

19However they were born, these epics all share obvious and deliberate intertextual relations with the ancient canon (Homer and Virgil) and the pagan Fable. This intertextuality at times dominated the genre to such an extent that some critics (Alexander Pope in Scriblerian guise e.g.) denounced epic poetry as a somewhat subservient rewriting game. The emulation of prestigious forbears could thus appear as playful at best and “mechanical” at worst, only furthering the vain pleasure of cultural reminiscence and textual estrangement (which goes to show that such literary practices, while often deemed post-modern, are also early modern). The Polish epics in the dossier are probably those in which intertextual determinations are the more obvious and avowed. In Krasicki’s Manachomachia, the mock-heroic treatment of Homeric topoi is deliberately parodic ; in Wojna chocimska, the avowed imitation of the ancient epics in the poetic treatment of national history amounts, following R. Dąbrowski, to a de-realisation of the raw historical material. However, the sway of prestigious models over early modern epic poetry was not absolute : see Dživo Gundulić who set out to translate Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, but ended up writing his own epic, Osman, on recent events (the battle of Khotyn and the coup against Osman II) : epic urgency got the better of humanistic tradition in this case. It must also be noted that the burlesque and the mock-heroic are not only rewriting devices, and also occur in the treatment of profoundly serious events : D. Grbić shows quite clearly that the comic in Jovan Rajić’s poem does no disservice to the political and cultural stakes of the poem. (This goes to show that the seriocomic style was already emerging as a defining trait of Mitteleuropean literature, and echoes Claudine Nédélec’s position, that burlesque epic poems are fully epic poems).

Figures of the early modern epic poet

20Originality was not, during the early modern period, a dominant standard of literary value (a status it would start to claim increasingly during the 18th century and achieve with the Romantics) ; intertextuality and emulation proved no obstacle to the expression of strong creative personalities. H. Alves thus studies the poetic ethos of Camões in light of Robert Durling’s analyses of the figure of the epic poet in the Renaissance. The Portuguese epic poetresses discussed by F. Mario da Silva, while they are aware of the patriarchal structure of the social and literary worlds, are not made self-conscious by it : they do assert their right to a poetic voice and some poetic merit, albeit more discretely than their male colleagues. Jovan Rajić uses his roles as a poet and an archimandrite to “wish for or invent” what is not factually certain in his epic, despite the referential effort displayed in his footnotes, thus distancing himself from the figure of a chronicler and asserting the autonomy of his poetic voice. Krasicki opens Wojna chocimska without any call on a superior power—be it the Muse, pagan (Calliope or Clio) or christianised (like Milton’s “Heavely Muse”), or even Truth (under whose patronage Voltaire placed the Henriade). R. Dąbrowski sees in this refusal to follow the traditional opening of the epic, in this intertextual void, the assertion of the poet’s complete mastery over his material.

When mythology malfunctions

21The lack of a proper invocatio in the opening of a poem recounting a battle between the forces of Christendom and their Ottoman enemies points the reader in the direction of one of the most problematic things in early modern epic poetry : the elaboration of a consistent mythology to constitute, as Voltaire put it, a “system of the marvellous”. In short, the early modern epic malfunctions when it comes to belief systems. According to H. Alves, the main structural fault in Os Lusíadas is the somewhat erratic behaviour of its mythological entities (whose comings and goings and arbitrary changes of heart makes them little more than dei ex machina), which is nowhere near systematic. Superior beings must be at once consistent within the fiction and doctrinally acceptable for the reader, sometimes putting poets at odds with religious sensibility (and, in the worse cases, religious authority) : both those parameters vary greatly through the corpus. Silvestre de Balboa’s luscious Cuba has all the trappings (including satyrs and nymphs) of a tropical Arcadia, as discussed above ; F. Mario da Sila’s epic poetesses have no qualms mentioning Apollo and the Virgin Mary (Such syncretism is also to be found in Milton, who calls upon the “Heavenly Muse” and writes a version of Eden where dancing satyrs can be spotted).

22Another solution for the superior plane of the poem is allegory, as recommended by Boileau in the Art poétique. Jovan Rajić merges mythological allegories with a baroque fondness for didactic riddles : the titular Dragon stands for the Sultan, and the Eagles for the Christian empires of Catherine the Great and Joseph II. While it is a defining trait of the genre, the superior plane of the action is a very complex thing to balance : does it merely illustrates the main events, or materially cause them ? is it only subject to poetic licence, or must it have proper theological substance ? All the more interesting, then, is Davor Dukić’s approach of the genre in terms of its secularisation : if some poems make ample use of the marvellous machinery (those of the Zrinski brothers e.g.), in others the course of human events is radically detached from any superior influence, thus affirming the autonomy of the political from higher determinations, real or invented (in Dživo Gundulić’s epic e.g.).

Ideologies and poetic justice

23Scholars of early modern epic poetry face the momentous philological task of reconstructing local contexts, sometimes very transient ones (especially in the case of “breaking news epics”), whose stakes have long lost all urgency : an allegiance to such or such, the satire of so-and-so, do not immediately connect with the preoccupations of 21st-century readers. Early modern epics today cannot dispense of an erudite commentary—although some poets did anticipate the philologists’ task by writing (some of) their own footnotes. This may be the challenge of any epic : to inject transient historical events with a poetic distance and sublimity that allow them to resound beyond their time. The poet’s task is therefore to combine harmoniously the poetical and the ideological, which is no easy task (see H. Alves’s conclusion) and gives rise to much of the mythological or political inconsistencies in the texts discussed here (and some aspects of this poetic/ideologic concurrence may prove quite unpalatable to post-modern readers, such as the xenophobia that transpires in numerous passages of Os Lusíadas and contra Turcos epics). Early modern epics do offer nobler attitudes to otherness, however, and still features the kind of poetic justice that is to be found in Homer’s portrayal of Hector and other Trojan heroes (that is the case of Dona Bernarda de Lacerda ou Barne Karnarutić e.g.). Even Jovan Rajić, whose poem savagely caricatures the most sacred tenets of Islam and violently derides sultan Selim and his officers, offers some compassion for the Muslim civilian population of Belgrade after the victory of field marshal Laudon.

By way of conclusion : the epic, or the enchantments of the early modern world

24The case has been made that the epic genre is alive in the early modern period, and reinventing itself at a crossroads of many traditions (literary and oral, popular and learned). Maybe the inventiveness displayed by the epic poets between 1500 and 1800 had, beyond all their differences, a common goal : not so much to re-enchant the world (which was not that disenchanted in the Renaissance) as to keep it enchanted. It found many ways to achieve that purpose : mythology resurrected from ancient books in Christian times, exotic plants whose novelty refreshes the charms of the fauns and nymphs ; testing the readers’ erudition with subtle rewriting games, or their sagacity with playful riddles, awing them with newfound resources of invention : early modern epics, while they still at times serve as something like poetic gazettes, add to the historical chronicle or the reportage of current events something more : poetry. The sublime and wit of poets is touches every aspect of early modern life : conquest and resistance, litchis and bloodshed, love and hatred ; they serve as a lens that allows readers to make better sense of a bygone past or a confused present. The readers’ imagination is engaged when they’re asked to marvel at the invention and decipher the metaphors that make the objects of the epic clearer, closer, or more acceptable.

III. New features in the revew Projet Epopee

A new section : an overview of Brazilian epic scholarship

25Our revew will henceforth include French translations of articles that previously appeared in Revista Épicas, edited by our Brazilian colleagues of the CIMEEP (based at the Federal University of Sergipe). The CIMEEP already translates articles from our revew in Portuguese (Brazil) to be published in Revista Épicas. This is, once again, to reinforce the synergy between our research groups and publications, and ensure a better global diffusion of research on the epic genre by offering French- and Portuguese-speaking scholars easy access to articles and corpuses they might not come in contact with otherwise. This sub-section is edited by Camille Thermes, currently a doctoral student at Université Grenobe Alpes, and whose research concerns lusophone literature.

26We aim to make an important number of articles available to the francophone public as quickly as possible. The articles published here were first translated by the DeepL AI, and post-edited in close coordination with our Brazilian colleagues, who have all our thanks for their time and effort. The editors of Projet Epopee take full responsibility for the French versions.

27Six papers have been selected for this first run. Two of them discuss aspects of early modern epic literature and have been included in the dossier presented above. The four other explore aspects of the epic in Brazilian and Latin American literature.

28Acízelo de Souza’s genetic study of Gonçalves Dias’s unfinished epic Os Timbiras explores the rationale choosing the epic form, drawing on biographical sources to explain how Dias’s project matured, and also examining the ambiguous reception of the work of this poet of mixed descent in the 19th and 20th centuries.

29Danielle Corpas shows that the epic tone and references in Guimarães Rosa’s novel Grande Sertão, Veredas further a tragic sense in the approach to Brazilian matter : the composition sheds light on the eternal return of systemic violence and unresolved existential questions.

30Teresa Virgínia Ribeiro Barbosa opts for a sociolinguistic approach in her analysis of dialectal variants in the works of Homer and Guimarães Rosa, which allows her to offer a bold “metaplasmic” translation of sections of the Iliad.

31Éverton de Jesus Santos and Gisela Reis de Gois offer a comparative reading of Pablo Neruda’s “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (a section of Canto General) and Sharon Doubiago’s novel South America mi hija, showing that while those texts have shared imagery and problematics (such as poetic justice and Latin American identity), Sharon Doubiago’s work is centred around women, making their absence in Neruda’s work all the more obvious.

An article on Italian scholarship joins Section 4

32The present revew includes the first part of a large-scale article by Giulio Martire (University of Bari) discussing the Italian scholarship on the chanson de geste. To characterise this rich scholarly tradition, G. Martire analysed all Italian contributions to the proceedings of the Société Rencesvals, recording the interests and breakthroughs of Italian epic scholars. Our next instalment, under the editorship of Philippe Haugeard, will be centred on “Intelligence in the chanson de geste” and include the second part of G. Martire’s article, discussing the essential conference of 2015 and recent Italian doctoral theses on the genre.