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MLN 120 Supplement (2005): S60–S83 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Livres de haulte gresse:Bibliographic Myth from

Rabelais to Du Bartas❦

Walter Stephens

Few books before Pantagruel and Gargantua were as saturated withbookishness and the consciousness of what makes a book. Rabelais’snarrator, Alcofrybas Nasier, and his other characters often unwittinglyburlesque the mannerisms and pretensions characteristic of book-consciousness in the 1530s. Gérard Defaux and others have writtenconvincingly of the satirical program behind Rabelais’s depiction ofsophistry and related excesses of the learned world in his time.1

Burlesque, however, is not necessarily satire. Underneath and along-side the satire of sophistry, Rabelais’s first two books reveal a vein ofidealistic, even utopian attitudes toward books as vehicles for thetransmission of culture and wisdom. This bookish idealism can betreacherous for critics: on the one hand, it can look deceptively likesatire, causing us to mistake Renaissance irony, with its skepticalambiguity, for the simplistic negations of modern irony. But, con-versely, to ignore the element of burlesque and play is to misconstrueRabelaisian seriousness as sobersided and sententious.2

1 See esp. Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien auXVI e siècle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). Defaux has revised his studies of Rabelais intoRabelais Agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Études sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, le Quart livre.Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, no. 309, Études Rabelaisiennes, vol. 32 (Geneva:Droz, 1997).

2 Rabelais’s difficult irony is well illustrated in the history of interpretations ofGargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (Pantagruel, chap. 8). For a brief history of interpreta-

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Rabelais and his humanist contemporaries were indeed heirs to along tradition of idealistic discourse about books. Their idealism andthat of the previous generation had been intensified by the advent ofprinting, which seemed to make possible a vast increase in thebenefits brought by books. As Floyd Gray comments regarding theLibrairie de Saint-Victor (Pantagruel, chapter 7): “le chapitre tout entiersemble pivoter sur l’idée d’une tension, voire d’une opposition entrelivres manuscrits, reliques d’une culture périmée, et livres imprimés,promesse de renouvellement et de ‘librairies très amples.’” Gray iscertainly right to remark that “derrière le ‘réel’ de Saint-Victor, onvoit poindre le réel du monde naissant de l’imprimerie et la crise quece nouvel art va entraîner dans la réproduction des livres.”3 However,the age of Rabelais was still capable of idealistic enthusiasm forprinting; like humanistic philology, printing was useful above all forpreserving the heritage of the ancients, both Classical and Judeo-Christian. If the early sixteenth century revered the printing press, itdid so not only or primarily because printing was an “agent ofchange,” as Elizabeth Eisenstein has called it, but also becausemechanical multiplication of copies represented the most powerfulmeans yet found for preserving the integrity of ancient texts.4 Interms that were familiar to Rabelais and his contemporaries, theprinting-press represented a powerful new weapon in the ongoingstruggle of memoria literarum against the forces of obliteratio. At a timewhen the total number of books had increased manyfold in abouteighty years, and when some revered Latin and Greek classics nowexisted in several hundred or even several thousand copies, thedanger of loss was certainly felt less acutely than before Gutenberg.Yet hope was still tinged with wariness, for anyone seriously involvedwith books knew how close several venerated authors had come tototal erasure or definitive mutilation. Even today, when books num-ber in the billions, we are still keenly susceptible to the pathos of therare or unique copy and to any form of mass biblioclasm: the

tions, see Lionello Sozzi, “Ancora sulla lettera di Gargantua a Pantagruel,” L’educazionee la formazione intellettuale nell’età dell’umanesimo, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan:Guerini, 1992) 261–66.

3 Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: Champion, 1994) 98.4 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and

Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1993); still extremely useful and suggestive is Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin,L’Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958) 396–409.

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destruction of the libraries of Sarajevo and Baghdad and the burningof the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, like book-burnings byfascists or fundamentalists, affect us in somewhat the same way asplague, murder, or genocide.5

The struggle against obliteratio was already sharpening a centuryand more before Gutenberg. In the generation before Petrarch, thelove of books was eloquently described by Richard of Bury (d. 1345)in his Philobiblon,6 but by the early 1400’s, bibliophilia began inspiringbook-hunting on an unprecedented scale. Like Richard, Petrarch,and Boccaccio, their humanistic heirs became avid book-hunters, andrestored texts to circulation that had hitherto been neglected oravailable only in fragmentary form.7 These discoveries increased theknown output of several esteemed authors, and some book-huntersrecovered unique exemplars of texts that, in another ten or twentyyears of neglect or concealment, might have been lost forever.Discussing his recovery of a complete text of Quintilian, PoggioBracciolini and his friends evoked and reversed the terms with whichPetrarch, writing to the ancient Roman rhetor as though to a livingfriend, had compared Quintilian’s surviving literary corpus to amutilated corpse.8 In the same years, Nicholas of Cusa recoveredtwelve hitherto unknown plays of Plautus,9 while Poggio, in anotherstartling feat, found a complete copy of Lucretius’s De rerum naturaand removed it from the list of “lost” works.10 Though Lucretius

5 Aside from the recent resurgence of interest in the Library of Alexandria,punctuated by books of Luciano Canfora and others, see Lost Libraries: The Destructionof Great Book Collections Since Antiquity, ed. James Raven (Houndmills, Basingstoke,Hampshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

6 Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, ed. Antonio Altamura (Naples: Fiorentino, 1954). Thetitle is often corrected to Philobiblion or Philobiblius by editors. In Familiares, 3.1,Petrarch speaks of meeting Richard in Avignon in 1333. See Altamura’s “Premessa,” 8–9 and Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Albany/Baltimore: SUNY Press/Johns Hopkins UP, 1975–85) 1:116.

7 See Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici Latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (1905–14),ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1967); Giorgio Pasquali, Storia dellatradizione e critica del testo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1952). Sabbadini (1:1–22;2:1–10) is especially important for bookhunters before Petrarch and Boccaccio,showing that, as elsewhere, the term “discovery” is best used cautiously.

8 Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3:329–31; on Poggio see Sabbadini 1:77–79;2:247–48 and Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan, trans., Two Renaissance Bookhunters: TheLetters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis (New York: Columbia UP, 1974) 187–213, esp. 192–95. In fact, Poggio later discovered another complete Quintilian;moreover, still another complete Quintilian had apparently been used before 1397 byNicolas de Clamanges (Sabbadini 2:60, 84–85).

9 Sabbadini 1:111–12; 2:17, 26, 240–41.10 Sabbadini 1:80 and n. 37; Gordan, Two Renaissance Bookhunters 197, 213.

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would cause theological dismay owing to his Epicurean doctrine ofhuman mortality, the rediscovery of his pre-Vergilian poem wasinitially cause for celebration.

Such themes as these are particularly important for Pantagruel andGargantua. Pantagruel, it will be remembered, goes to Paris for hiseducation. Along the way, he stops off at the library of the Abbey ofSaint Victor, where he discovers a treasure-trove of books, facetiouslydescribed as miraculous in their variety and erudition.11 Pantagruelreceives a letter from his father praising the new age of learning andexhorting him to become ung abysme de science by mastering the entireencyclopédie or circle of knowledge.12 Alcofrybas later informs hisreaders, in chapter one of Gargantua, that, if Pantagruel can be said tobe restitué à son naturel, this is in part due to the discovery near Chinonof a vast bronze tomb, containing not only the astonishing propheciesof the Fanfreluches antidotées, but also the complete genealogy ofPantagruel and his father, in a manuscript that was, however, somoldy and worm-eaten that it could be read only à grand renfort debezicles and en pantagruélisant.13

These and other burlesque incidents have satirical targets, asDefaux and others including myself have maintained.14 Yet at the sametime they also allude, not disrespectfully, to the situation of serious

11 As Barbara Bowen observes, “the list of books in the Saint-Victor Library, hasattracted curiously little scholarly attention, especially in recent years” (“Rabelais andthe Library of Saint-Victor,” in Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for Donald A.Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash [Lexington, KY: French ForumMonographs, 1991] 159–70; quotation from 159; significantly revised in Enter Rabelais,Laughing [Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1998] 95–101). In addition to being relativelyscarce, compared to the wealth of commentary on other moments of the Rabelaisianœuvre, studies of the Librairie de Saint-Victor do not tend to engage with the titles of itscatalogue as anything other than vehicles of satire: “Parodie des ouvrages de dévotion,satire des théologiens, critique des appétits des gens d’Église, choix de titres scatologiquesdessinés sans doute à déprécier l’ensemble du catalogue . . .” (François Moreau, “LaBibliothèque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor [Pantagruel, chapitre VII],” Littératures 19[1988]: 37–42; quotation from 41). The pioneering commentators were Paul Lacroixand Gustave Brunet, Catalogue de la bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor auseizième siècle redigé par François Rabelais commenté par le Bibliophile Jacob [Paul Lacroix] etsuivi d’un Essai sur les bibliothèques imaginaires par Gustave Brunet (Paris: Techener, 1862),and are still worth reading. Among recent commentators, Floyd Gray stands out(Rabelais et le comique du discontinu 83–105).

12 For a history of the question over the mixture of jest and earnest in this chapter,see Sozzi, “Ancora sulla lettera di Gargantua a Pantagruel.”

13 Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism(Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989) chap. 7.

14 Defaux, Rabelais Agonistes; Stephens, Giants in Those Days chaps. 5–7.

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scholarship in Rabelais’s time: the hope of renewing or “reviving”learning; the insatiable desire to master all the knowable; and thedependence of such efforts on the retrieval of texts, often fortuitously,from precarious environments; their conservation, decipherment, andtransmission to future generations via philology and the printingpress. The theme of writing, erasure, and recovery—inscriptio, obliteratio,and restitutio—was explicit in many classics, including Plato’s Timaeus.In this work, available in Latin translation throughout the MiddleAges, the tension between memoria literarum and obliteratio was exploredat length in the legend of Atlantis.15 Had Solon not journeyed to Egyptand consulted the priests of a temple in Sais, Plato wrote, Athenianswould never have learned the true story of how, 9,000 years previously,their city had saved the rest of Europe from a massive invasion by theAtlantides. Thanks to its unique situation on the Nile delta, the city ofSais was immune to the forces of obliteratio, the frequent floods andconflagrations that periodically wiped out memoria literarum among theGreeks and other unluckily situated peoples. And without memorialiterarum, there was no memoria at all, not least because Atlantis itselfhad been “literally” obliterated, swallowed up by the sea in a cataclys-mic earthquake, shortly after the Athenians saved civilization.

Plato’s tale of Atlantis is regarded as a myth by all but the mostbesotted occultists among our contemporaries. However, long afterRabelais’s time, erudite and serious-minded scholars accepted it as areminiscence of factual history, gathered by Plato during his ownpilgrimage to Egypt.16 Moreover, the struggle of memoria literarumagainst the erasures of flooding and fire was a constant in thecollective literary imagination of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and

15 Plato, Timaeus 22C–23C. Much of my terminology is taken from the Latin translationavailable throughout the Middle Ages, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioqueinstructus, ed. Jan Hendrik Waszink (London: Warburg Institute, 1962) 14–15.

16 See Marsilio Ficino, Commentum in Critiam, in Opera omnia (Basel, 1576) 1485–86.The dependence of Greek philosophers on the wisdom of Egypt is highly explicit inJamblichus (quoted below, n. 24) and is based in part on Plato (Timaeus 47A andelsewhere). On the Renaissance topos of Greek philosophers in Egypt, see PietroCrinito, De honesta disciplina (1st ed. 1504), ed. Carlo Angelieri (Rome: Bocca, 1955)217; Ravisius Textor, Officina (1st ed. 1520; Lyon, 1541) 1:555, and D. P. Walker, TheAncient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century(London: Duckworth, 1972) esp. 70–73. See also Werner Goez, Translatio imperii: einBeitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtesdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und inder frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958) for the wider context.

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the Renaissance; the terrible fascination of this theme lasted deepinto the eighteenth century.17

Nowhere is the power of bibliographic myth better illustrated thanin legends associated with Biblical literature. The Bible itself does notunambiguously stage the duel between memoria literarum and theobliterationes of floods and conflagrations, but the book of Genesisdoes recount that the entire world was once destroyed by water, and,beginning with the Second Book of Peter (3:5–7), God’s promise toNoah that he would never again destroy the world by water wasregularly interpreted as an implicit threat to send “the fire next time.”From the time of Christ onward, the destructiveness of water and firetook increasing hold on the European imagination, thanks evenmore to the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus than to Plato’sTimaeus.

In his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus recounted that Adam had pre-dicted that the world would be destroyed twice, once by a universalflood, and again by a cataclysm of fire. Being anxious to preservetheir astronomical discoveries from obliteration, the sons of Adam’sthird son Seth engraved them on two columns, one of brick and oneof stone, so that their knowledge would survive whichever disastercame first. Though Josephus recounted other bookish legends thatwould appeal to Christian writers of later times, he left this anecdoterelatively undeveloped, adding only that the column of stone couldstill be seen in his own time, yet not claiming explicitly to have seenit.18 Not until 1544 would the Greek original of Josephus’s Antiquitiesbe published, so it is likely (though not proved) that Rabelais would

17 For compendia of commonplaces, see Joachim Johann Mader, De bibliothecis atquearchiviis (1st ed. 1666), ed. Johann Andreas Schmidt, 3 vols. (Helmstadt, 1702–05), whichincludes (in vol. 2), a reprint of Johannes Lomeier, De bibliothecis, 2nd ed. (Utrecht,1680).

18 “ . . . it would take me too long to speak of the rest [of Adam’s children], and I willonly endeavour to narrate the story of the progeny of Seth . . . . they also discovered thescience of the heavenly bodies and their orderly array. Moreover, to prevent theirdiscoveries from being lost to mankind and perishing before they became known—Adam having predicted a destruction of the universe, at one time by a violent fire andat another by a mighty deluge of water—they erected two pillars, one of brick and theother of stone, and inscribed these discoveries on both; so that, if the pillar of brickdisappeared in the deluge, that of stone would remain to teach men what was graventhereon and to inform them that they had also erected one of brick. It exists to this dayin the land of Seiris” ( Jewish Antiquities, 1:68–71 in Josephus with an English Translation byH. St. J. Thackeray, 9 vols, quotation from vol. 4 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961]33).

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have known the story in the Latin translation of Rufinus, which was ascholarly best-seller throughout the millennium preceding Rabelais’slifetime.19 In the unlikely event that Rabelais never saw Josephus’soriginal anecdote, he might still have encountered versions of it indozens of medieval chroniclers and Biblical commentators, fromIsidore of Seville to Werner Rolewinck and Hartmann Schedel.20

In the final, 1744 edition of his Scienza nuova, Giambattista Vicowould still be combatting literal belief in this anecdote, dismissing itas “da riporsi nel museo delle credulità.”21 Vico had good reason tomention the anecdote, for in his day imaginatively-inclined Christianscholars were still arguing for its veracity and historicity, in massiveessays such as Gottfried Vockerodt’s treatise on antediluvian literatureand literary societies (1704), or the Essay Toward an Introduction toAntediluvian Literary History, that is, into the History of Scholarship andScholars before the Flood (1709) by Jacob Friedrich Reimmann, a writerwho was (incongruously from a modern perspective) one of theearliest systematic historians of German literature.22

19 For the Latin version of Rufinus, see The Latin Josephus, ed. Franz Blatt (Copenhagen:Universitetsforlaget, 1958). The first volume, the only one published, has the JewishAntiquities, books 1–4. See also Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus Tradition inAntike und Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 1972) 56–171 for Josephus’s fortunes amongChristian readers down to the sixteenth century.

20 In addition to Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus Tradition, see Cora E. Lutz,“Remigius’s Ideas on the Origin of the Seven Liberal Arts,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10(1956): 32–49. I am revising a book-length manuscript provisionally entitled ImaginaryBooks: The Library of the Mind from Antiquity to the Present, which will contain fullerdiscussions of this mythical bibliography. I have touched on mythical bibliography inGiants in Those Days, and in “Berosus Chaldaeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of theEarly Sixteenth Century” (diss., Cornell U, 1979).

21 Giambattista Vico, Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. . . corretta, schiarita, e notabilmente accresciuta in Opere, ed. Paolo Rossi (Milan: Rizzoli,1959) 283.

22 Gothofredi Vockerodt, Exercitationes academicae, sive commentatio de eruditorumsocietatibus, et varia re litteraria; nec non philologemata sacra, auctius et emendatius edita(Gothae, sumtu Andr. Schalii, 1704) 147–67 (in the essay Historia societatum et reilitterariae mundi primi [125–81]; the Exercitationes contain over 370 pages of such lore);Jacob Friderich Reimmann, Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam literariam ante-diluvianam, d. i. In die Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit und derer Gelehrten vor der Sündfluth,darinnen Dieselbe Methodo Scientifica entworffen und dergestalt eingerichtet ist, daß ein curieusesGemüthe die Haupt-Articul dieser hochnöthigen und höchstnützlichen Wissenschafft alsofort ineinem kurzen begriff vor Augen haben, und sich also nebst der Sache auch den Nutzen derselbenund die eigentlichen Hülffs-Mittel zu beyden mit guter Manier zu gelangen um so viel klärer,deutlicher und gründlicher vorstellen kan (Halle, 1709) 1–50. For Reimmann see the entryby Theodor Günther and Stefan Jordan, Neue Deutsche Biographie 21 (Berlin: Duncker &Humblot, 2003) 339–40. However, this biography omits mentioning the Versuch in favorof works more congenial to modern taste; mention of the Versuch must be sought in theentry for Reimmann in Nouvelle biographie générale 41 (Paris, 1862): 913–14.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau would attest to the appeal of the legend ofthe two columns in Émile. Even while scorning the human depen-dence on books and writing, Rousseau attested to the powerfulmythic appeal of memoria literarum by getting the “factual” details ofthe Sethian columns wrong.

Je hais les livres; ils n’apprennent qu’à parler de ce qu’on ne sait pas. Ondit qu’Hermès grava sur des colonnes les éléments des sciences, pourmettre ses découvertes à l’abri d’un déluge. S’il les eût bien impriméesdans la tête des hommes, elles s’y seraient conservées par tradition. Descerveaux bien préparés sont les monuments où se gravent le plus sûrementles connoissances humaines.23

As writers had done for centuries before his time, Rousseau wasprobably confusing Josephus’s anecdote with other widespread mythsabout antediluvian columnar books. Hermetic and Neoplatonicliterature contained comparable myths, such as the one spread byMarsilio Ficino in his translation of Jamblichus from Greek intoLatin. Jamblichus opens his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum by declaring that

Egyptian writers, who believed that all things had been invented byMercury, attributed the authorship of their books to him. Mercury is pre-eminent for wisdom and eloquence. Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus,Eudoxus, and many others visited the Egyptian priests. The doctrines ofthis book you are about to read are Assyrian and Egyptian, and come fromthe columns of Mercury. Pythagoras and Plato learned philosophy fromthe columns of Mercury in Egypt. The columns of Mercury were filled withdoctrine.24

Unlike Rousseau, Rabelais and his contemporaries had not yet at-tained the luxury of despising books, or even pretending to. Norwould they have agreed that oral tradition was always a better vehicle of

23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’éducation, ed. François Richard and PierreRichard (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1964) 210. The illustration of Hermes engraving on acolumn (facing p. 210) is reproduced from the edition of J. Néaulme (The Hague,1762). Rousseau continues by trying to imagine a source of encyclopédie outside ofbooks: “N’aurait-il point moyen de rapprocher tant de leçons éparses dans tant delivres, de les réunir sous un objet commun qui pût être facile à voir, intéressant à suivre,et qui pût servir de stimulant, même à cet âge [i.e., l’enfance]?”

24 Jamblichus de mysteriis aegyptiorum. Sammelband neuplatonischer Schriften übersehen undherausgegeben von Marsilius Ficinus. Venedig 1503 [i.e., 1497]. Photographic reprint.(Frankfurt: Minerva GmbH, 1972) 1 (i.e., sig. a3r). Translation my own. For similarmyths linking the Sethian columns to Babel, Hermes, etc., especially in Masonic myth,see Myriam Jacquemier, “Babel dans la tradition scientifique,” Nouvelle revue du XVI e

siècle 14.1 (1996): 63–76.

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memory than printed monuments. True, Rabelais’s narrator Alcofrybasprofessed to believe that everyone should learn the Grandes Chronicquesby heart, so that “si d’adventure l’art de l’Imprimerie cessoit, ou en casque tous livres perissent, on temps advenir un chascun les peust bienau net enseigner à ses enfans, et à ses successeurs et survivens baillercomme de main en main, ainsi que une religieuse Caballe.”25 But wecan plausibly speculate that beneath his humor and satire, Rabelais’sfundamental attitude toward real biblioclasms would not have beenamusement—much less approval—but dread.

The peculiar appeal of the antediluvian columns is the best knownexample of what we could call bibliomythography, that is, myths andlegends portraying the vicissitudes, not of people or gods, but ofbooks and writing. Josephus and Plato likely owed their versions ofantediluvian literary myth to Near Eastern myths from previousages;26 and Josephus had certainly read a similar story in the third-century BCE Chaldaean author Berossos.27 Yet Berossos’s story, whichpreserves extremely ancient myths, would remain largely unexploredfor decades after Rabelais’s time, until Joseph Scaliger publishedthird- or fourth-hand excerpts of Berossos in his effort to reconstructthe lost Greek original of Eusebius’s universal history.28

In Pantagruel, Rabelais went beyond traditional discussions ofmemoria literarum and obliteratio to create wholly original bibliogra-phies, both imaginary and facetious, that were completely unmooredfrom serious bibliomythography. Yet he also facetiously claimed toedit a rediscovered antediluvian manuscript in the first chapter of

25 François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon. Bibliothèque de laPléiade, no. 15 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) 213.

26 Lutz, “Remigius’s Ideas,” 41–42; Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont, Les mageshellénisés: Zoroastre, Ostanès et Hystaspe d’après la tradition grecque, 2 vols. (1938; rpt. Paris:Les Belles Lettres, 1973) 1:45.

27 Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamiaand Egypt, ed. Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Ann Arbor: U ofMichigan P, 1996). Other antediluvian books appear in Old Testament pseudepigrapha:see Vita Adae et Evae (1st c. CE), 50.1–51.9 ( James H. Charlesworth, The Old TestamentPseudepigrapha, 2 vols. [London: Darnton, Longman & Todd, 1983–1985] 2:292–94; seen. 50 a); 2 Enoch (1st c. CE), 33.9–12, 35.2 (Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha1:156–59). In the former, Seth writes the history of Adam and Eve on stones whichSolomon is the first to read (though not to see) and then places in the Temple; in thelatter, God tells Enoch to write his vision and promises that angels will prevent theelements from damaging his and his forefathers’ writings during the Flood; there is nomention of writing materials in this tale.

28 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols.(Oxford/New York: Clarendon P/Oxford UP, 1983–1993) 2:431–36, 502–07, 536–48,and especially 681–87, 708–11.

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Gargantua.29 Given his extensive parody of Jean Lemaire’s Illustrationsde Gaule in both his first two books, it seems almost certain thatRabelais was familiar with Lemaire’s version of the antediluviancolumns. Lemaire carried forward a variant that had split off fromJosephus’s anecdote in the twelfth century. In this tradition, thecolumns were not two but fourteen, contained not just astronomy butall seven liberal arts, and were authored by Noah’s evil son Ham,identified during the Middle Ages with Zoroaster: “Aucuns historiensafferment que ledict Zoroast, que nous dirons estre Cham, futhomme de merveilleux engin et trouva premierement les sept arsliberaulx. Si les grava en sept colonnes de marbre et sept autres deterre cuite, affin qu’elles demourassent à perpetuité contre le feu etl’eau.”30 Like Lemaire, most readers of Latin in Rabelais’s time hadbeen exposed to this variant of Josephus’s tale in medieval histories ofthe world. Pico della Mirandola intimated as much in 1486 when, inthe Oratio, he warned his clerical audience that the Zoroaster whosewisdom he praised was not the one they probably had in mind.31

The mythical appeal of the antediluvian book is not hard to locate,and may well have contributed to the mythology of the Renaissance,even among authors who might have spurned the anecdote itself.32 Inthe first place, the struggle of memoria literarum against the forces ofobliteratio is portrayed in melodramatic, absolute terms. Not only doesthe Flood menace both life and culture, but writing, the vehiclethrough which human culture is transmitted across time, must fendfor itself. Neither in Berossos, in Josephus, nor in the latter’s manyepigones and commentators does the Noah-figure take writing intothe Ark. Brick and stone, the only media mentioned for preservingmemoria literarum, are extremely cumbersome and heavy, so we might

29 Stephens, Giants in Those Days chap. 7.30 Jean Lemaire de Belges, Œuvres, ed. Jean Stecher, 3 vols. (Louvain, 1882–1885) 1:30.31 “. . . non quem forte creditis, sed illum Oromasi filium . . .” (Giovanni Pico della

Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno e scritti vari, ed. Eugenio Garin[Florence: Valecchi, 1942] 150). For Ham/Zoroaster, see Peter Comestor, HistoriaScholastica, liber Genesis, 39 (Patriologia Latina 198:1090); Hugh of St. Victor, AdnotationesElucidatoriae in Pentateuchon (Patriologia Latina 175:49); Vincent of Beauvais, Speculumhistoriale, 1.101 (in Speculum Maius, Douai 1624, reprint Graz: Akademische Druck,1965) 4:37; Bidez and Cumont, Les Mages hellénisés 1:45; 2:40, 490 and passim; Lutz,“Remigius’s Ideas” 40–49 ; A. V. Williams Jackson, Zoroaster, Prophet of Ancient Iran(London, 1899) 154–57; Stephens, “Berosus” 69–76.

32 Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpre-tation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); Eugenio Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenticulturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1976) v–38.

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presume that Noah decided to forego this extra ballast on practicalgrounds. And yet, given the enthusiasm with which even seventeenth-century commentators discussed the vast dimensions of the Ark andthe inclusiveness of its live cargo, a few extra tons should havepresented no problem to their imagination.33

Still, the apparent motivation for saving life and letters separately isnot practical but dramaturgic: the writing media most in use byJosephus’s time—papyrus rolls and vellum codices—would havedestroyed the pathos so colorfully enacted in the submersion andtriumphant reappearance of the stone column. Contrary to paradox,the column represents the triumph of an immovable object over anirresistible force: writing, which is transpersonal, defeats erasure,which is impersonal. Moreover, as Rousseau let slip, writing is by itsvery nature a monument—not merely a vehicle of memory, but a realand proper edifice. Though submerged, the column forms a bridge,connecting what commentators and imitators of the anecdote regu-larly called the mundus prior and the mundus posterus. Writing bridgesthe old world and the new across the gulf of oblivion.

The Sethian columns are a monument because they do not repre-sent just any knowledge. In fact, during the evolution from Josephus tothe early eighteenth century, they came to represent all knowledge,rather than a few astrological discoveries.34 Because they are sub-merged by and triumph over a universal Flood, the Sethian columnsrepresent the resistance of all memoria literarum to all forms ofobliteration. In short, they represent the encyclopedia, the totality ofhuman knowledge, conceived as a quid, a “lump sum” rather than aninfinite semiotic web of relationships. The columns contain knowledge,as if they were a vaster Dive Bouteille.35 Though most tellers of the storyagreed with Josephus that knowledge was engraved on the columns,their idea of that knowledge was not of a signifié but rather of a contenu.

In fact, more than one early modern bibliomythographer wouldspeculate that the antediluvian columns had been an actual edifice.36

33 Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, andLetters (1949; rpt. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1963).

34 I explore this development in Imaginary Books.35 On the Dive Bouteille’s relation to this sort of lore, see Marie-Luce Demonet, “Le

nom de Bacbuc,” RHR (Réforme Humanisme Renaissance) 18.34 (1992): 41–66.36 Vockerodt 157; Johann Albert Fabricius (Codex pseudepigraphus veteris testamenti

[Hamburg, 1722] 149) attributes the idea to either Philipp Melanchthon or JohannCarion (1499–1537/8): see Chronicon Carionis, expositum et auctum . . . a PhilippoMelanthone et Casparo Peucero (Wittenberg, 1580) 17.

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According to Gottfried Vockerodt, “[Philip] Melanchthon considersthese tables [i.e., columns] to have been a sort of temple, and themarker of a certain place, in which this patriarch [Seth] was wont toconvoke his Church, where sacrifices were offered, and doctrinesrecited . . . .”37 Here the columns have effectively become inseparablefrom their literary contents, as well as from the landscape and a seriesof social practices. They literally contain Sethian society. Moreover,the resonances of authorship have been concentrated so as tointensify the monumentality of the columns. The allusions to templesand churches exploit and reinforce the significance of Seth’s name.Josephus does not name Seth as the author of the columns, but ratherhis sons or descendants, yet both Josephus and his later imitatorsknew that the book of Genesis glossed Seth’s name as resurrectio. Hewas a resurrection not only because he was “another seed in place ofAbel, whom Cain killed,”38 but also because he was thought toforeshadow—and, in some versions, to prophesy and preach about—the coming of Christ, who would truly be the resurrection.39 Who,therefore, could be more appropriate than Seth to author thewritings that would be resurrected from the universal death anddestruction of the flood?

Although he burlesqued pseudo-antediluvian literature of his ownera, Rabelais produced nothing that could be construed as a com-mentary on Josephus’s anecdote. Whether this lack indicates respectfor Josephus, fear of censure, indifference to the anecdote, orignorance of it is anyone’s guess. Certainly, Rabelais’s silence aboutthe antediluvian columns is not unusual for vernacular humanistwriters in his time. But not long after Rabelais’s death, the first of atleast three major poets took up the theme. The period of theReligious Wars was unsympathetic to Rabelais’s antiestablishmenthumor, and unlike Rabelais, the three poets saw nothing amusing inthe struggle of memoria literarum and obliteratio. Like Melanchthon,they revered the columns as crucial to the transmission of their ownideas about Christian orthodoxy.

37 Vockerodt 157: “Melanchthon has tabulas existimat tanquam templum fuisse, etcerti loci signum, in quem solitus sit patriarcha convocare suam ecclesiam, et ubisacrificia facta sint, et recitata doctrina. . . .” But Melanchthon (Chronica Carionis 17)attributes the columns to Adam, contrary to both Josephus and Vockerodt. Vockerodtgoes on, following the lead of his sources, to speculate about the many differencesbetween Seth’s “vera ecclesia” and the “ritus et secta” of Cain.

38 “semen alid pro Abel, quem occidit Cain,” Gen. 4:25; Latin Josephus, trans. Blatt132.

39 John 11:25; Vockerodt 146–51, 156.

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According to Josephus, the two columns were erected becauseAdam had predicted twin cataclysms, and so, in his Microcosme (1562),Maurice Scève depicted Adam recounting a prophetic dream to Eve.In Scève’s version, Adam dreams of

L’Armenien deluge, et l’inondationAu Monde meilleurant sa restauration:Marbre, et Brique enseignans les sciences gardeesPar leur provident Seth aux sauvés retardees:Inventions, et arts, mesmement liberaux,Et revolutions des signes syderaux.40

Scève’s version shows the influence of medieval legends such as theone Lemaire followed, by adding the liberal arts to the astronomicalobservations Josephus mentioned. Scève’s choices harked back to thetwelfth century and earlier, when Christian scholars regularly para-phrased and expanded the stories of Genesis, often with the help ofJosephus, and sometimes in verse.41

In 1578, Gui Le Fèvre de la Boderie put Josephus’s myth topatriotic use in his Galliade, combining it with the fictions of Anniusof Viterbo and his revisionist French disciples. La Boderie proclaimedthat the ancient Gaulois had invented the mathematical sciences soonafter the Flood; boastful and mendacious Egyptians, Greeks, andItalians later wrongly appropriated the honor of this invention, whichwas made long before they were civilized. The ancient Gaulois hadlearned natural philosophy from a written and oral tradition stretch-ing back to the time of Seth:

Eux la tenoient de Dis, Dis de son pere Atlant [i.e., Japheth],Atlant du bon Noach, et Noach pere-grandSur les vieux fondemens l’avoit plus haut bastieDepuis les fils de Seth, qui nomma la Scythie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . où fut aussi trouveeLa science du Ciel par longs siecles prouveeDe ses fils et suyvants, lesquels de main en mainEnseignoient l’un à l’autre. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40 Maurice Scève, Microcosme, ed. Enzo Giudici (Cassino/Paris: Editrice Garigliano/Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 1976) 212 (i.e., 3.31–36). Italics added.

41 See, e.g., Petrus Comestor, Historia Scholastica, Liber Genesis (Patriologia Latina, 198:1055–142); Peter Riga, Aurora Petri Rigae Biblia Versificata, ed. Paul E. Beichner,Publications in Medieval Studies, no. 19, 2 vol. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1965).

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Et d’autant qu’ils sçavoient qu’Adam bien-adviséDeux ruïnes du Tout avoit prophetisé,L’une par feu ardent qui bruleroit le Monde,L’autre par un Deluge et impetueuse ondeQui couvriroit le Rond de la terre estonné :Pource bien sagement ils avoient façonnéSur double piedestal double Colonne ou Terme,L’une de brique cuite, et l’autre encor plus fermeToute à pierre de taille, où ils avoient gravezLes sciences et arts qu’ils avoient observez.42

Whereas Scève had returned to the older, idealistic paradigm ofmemoria literarum and obliteratio, La Boderie reattached it to theAnnian tradition of chauvinistic polemics.

Six years later, in 1584, Guillaume Salluste du Bartas expandedJosephus’s myth in “Les Colomnes,” a section of his religious epic LaSeconde sepmaine, ou l’Enfance du monde.43 This was the sequel to his firstSepmaine, which recounted the Biblical story of creation. Altogether,Du Bartas’s version of the Sethian columns is probably the mostidealistic and highly literary treatment of the myth ever undertaken.He completely avoided drawing the sorts of polemical pseudo-historical conclusions that La Boderie had drawn, yet in no wayindicated that he considered Josephus’s story unhistorical.44 By inte-grating the “Book of the Sethians” into a retelling of human history asnarrated in the Book of Genesis, Du Bartas granted the Flavian myththe same authority as Biblical history. At the same time, his decisionto versify and expand Biblical narratives implied that they benefitedfrom embellishment and modernization. Du Bartas’s Biblical para-phrase was extremely popular with both Protestants and Catholics,

42 Gui Lefèvre de la Boderie, La Galliade (1582), ed. François Roudaut (Paris:Klincksieck, 1993) 262–63 (i.e., 1.1601–04; 1607–10; 1613–22). Italics added. Roudaut’scritical edition is based on the last edition printed during La Boderie’s lifetime, ratherthan on the 1578 princeps.

43 Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, La Seconde semaine [sic] (1584), ed. YvonneBellenger et al., 2 vols. (Paris: Société des Textes Modernes Français, 1991–1992). Thefirst Sepmaine, which was considerably more popular than the second, paraphrased thecreation story of Genesis; the Seconde sepmaine began with Eden and the Fall, andshould have continued through to the second coming and last judgment. However, thesection of the poem discussed here was the last over which Du Bartas is known to havehad total artistic control. See Bellenger, “Introduction,” in Seconde semaine (1584)1:xviii–xix.

44 See Du Bartas’s attacks in the Seconde sepmaine on rationalists who doubt or scoff atthe historicity of the Bible in “L’Arche” (bk. 5.65–294; 359–92) and “Les Colonies” (bk.7.479–540).

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who could both find vindication of their doctrines in the twoSepmaines.45

Du Bartas’s “Les Colomnes” culminates a process in which genera-tions of European Christian bibliomythographers built upon oneanother’s speculations. Josephus had told his concise yet evocativestory mainly to defend the Hebrew Bible against the scorn of pagans,especially Greeks, who dismissed it as barbarous and unhistorical. Anumber of writers, among them Annius, Lemaire, and La Boderie,had followed Josephus’s lead, bending the myth to patriotic advan-tage. Yet Josephus’s anecdote inspired most Christian imitators andcommentators to create a kind of meta-myth, idealizing the power ofwriting and memory over erasure and oblivion.46 Du Bartas was notthe last or most loquacious of these writers, but his was probably themost deeply evocative treatment of the myth.

Du Bartas sets “Les Colomnes” early in the second century afterNoah’s Flood. In his two Sepmaines, the poet has proceeded to thispoint in chronological order, beginning from the Creation. As “LesColomnes” begins, Heber, the mythical founder of the Hebrew people,is walking on the plains with his son Peleg. Thanks to the identities ofthese protagonists, Du Bartas’s initial readers would have been able todate the events of “Les Colomnes” quite precisely. Genesis and FlaviusJosephus had both glossed Peleg’s name as divisio, asserting that thebuilding of the Tower of Babel and the consequent confusion oflanguages had taken place around the time of his birth; those eventswere conventionally dated at 100 years after Noah’s Flood.47 Thus,since Heber initiates Peleg into the mysteries of the columns, DuBartas depicts the latter as a very young man, and thereby alludes to adate in the late second or early third decade after the Flood.

Du Bartas differs from most western European accounts by allud-ing to the rediscovery of the columns after the Flood; instead of usingonly Latin sources, he may have also relied on Byzantine tradition, inwhich the stone column of the Sethites was discovered by Heber’sfather or grandfather.48 As “Les Colomnes” opens, Peleg gets his first

45 See Yvonne Bellenger, “Introduction,” Seconde semaine (1584) 1:xii–xvii.46 Not until the fifteenth century did Europeans return to Josephus as a sourcebook for

cultural polemics. See Stephens, Giants in Those Days, chap. 3, and “Berosus,” chap. 1.47 Genesis 10:25 (“nomen uni Faleg eo quod in diebus eius divisa sit terra”); Latin

Josephus 142.48 See “Les Colomnes” 749–50, where Cainan interrupts Heber’s lecture to Peleg;

versions in bono of the discovery-story begin with the 1st c. CE Vita Adae et Evae (citedabove, n. 27), and are repeated by John Malalas, Chronographia (Anonymi Chronologia),

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sight of the column, and marvels at the strange sight, which Du Bartascompares to a lighthouse, indeed a to fortress surmounted by abeacon. Peleg sees

Un Pilier qui, bravache, en la plaine se montreTel qu’un Roc qui, veincueur du flo-flot importunSemble, assis au milieu, faire peur à Neptun;Et qui portant un phare, empesche qu’AmphitriteDe ses flots ne nous jette ès noirs flots de Cocyte.49

The insistent repetition of flot and the concentrated allusions to perilat sea dramatize the dangers through which knowledge has passed,while the contrast of light and blackness prepares the allusion todamnation, rather than mere ignorance, carried by Cocytus.

Du Bartas undertook a programmatic return to understanding theSethian columns mythically—or as he would have insisted, historically.He felt that their credibility had been endangered by Annius ofViterbo and such epigones as Lemaire and La Boderie. AlthoughRabelais had reacted to these forgeries by mocking them good-naturedly in Pantagruel and Gargantua,50 Du Bartas indignantly de-nounced Annius’s supposé Bérose and his forged transcripts of antedilu-vian history. (Nonetheless, Du Bartas, like many of pseudo-Berosus’sdetractors, was not above borrowing from that text when it supportedconclusions he favored.)51 To the extent that such forgeries werediscredited, they endangered the credibility of any attempt to reimaginethe Bible and defend its claims against developments in the study ofhistory and the sciences. “Il me suffira donc . . . / [En] pendant attentifde la bouche dorée / Du sage fils d’Amram [i.e., Moïse], rechanterdans ces vers / Que Sem, Japhet, et Cham peuplerent l’Univers.”52

Du Bartas’s version of the myth, like Melanchthon’s, depicts the

Patriologia Graeca 97:69; Michael Glycas, Annales (Patriologia Graeca 158:253); Joel,Chronographia compendiaria (Patriologia Graeca 139:224–25); versions in malo begin in the2nd c. BCE with the apocryphal Book of Jubilees 8.1–3 (Charlesworth, Old TestamentPseudepigrapha 2:71), and continue with Anonymous, Patriologia Graeca 97:73–74;Georgius Monachus, Georgii monachi chronicon (ed. Carolus de Boor [1904], 2nd ed. byPeter Wirth, 2 vols. [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1978] 1:10); and Georgius Cedrenus, Compen-dium historiarum (Patriologia Graeca 121:53); see also Schreckenberg, Flavius-JosephusTradition 104.

49 “Les Colomnes,” Seconde sepmaine (1584), ed. Bellenger, bk. 8.22–26. All quotationsfrom this ed.

50 Stephens, Giants in Those Days chaps. 5–7.51 “Les Colonies,” Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 7.101–34.52 “Les Colonies,” Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 7.213–16.

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stone column as an edifice—a temple, and also a museum of sorts.53

Moreover, in Du Bartas’s definitive redaction, he never indicates thatthe antediluvian text is displayed on the surface of the column;rather, it is contained inside. Nor is the text inscribed in a conven-tional alphabet and language such as Hebrew or Syrian.54 Inside thecolumn, ordinary language is replaced by allegorical portraits of themathematical arts, combined with the nonlinguistic symbols by whichthey are made intelligible. The elimination of inscriptio in favor ofpictorial allegory would have surprised medieval writers even morethan Du Bartas’s transposition of the text to the interior of thecolumn. After all, the story had always been interpreted as being aboutthe power of writing. Yet the allegorical portraits of the Quadriviumare modelled on the sixteenth-century conception of the Egyptianhieroglyphs as something like the emblems of Alciati or the supposedhieroglyphs of Horapollo.55 The reading or explication of thesesapiential signs takes the form of a religious initiation, when Heberexplains to Peleg the “divins secrez . . . cachez doctement sous [les]outils sacrez.”56 Like Renaissance Hermetists and Neoplatonists, DuBartas thus makes a clear connection between hieroglyphic writingand ancient sacred mysteria, but those mysteries are as much scientificas metaphysical.

By limiting the column’s contents to the mathematical disciplinesof the medieval Quadrivium, Du Bartas radically redefined the natureof the Sethian writings. His contemporaries, and even later writers

53 James Dauphiné observes that, already in the first Sepmaine (bk. 5.911–12), DuBartas referred to his poem as “mon riche edifice” (“De la bibliothèque,” in Labibliothèque de Du Bartas. Études par James Dauphiné. Index par Marie-Luce Demonet et GillesProust [Paris: Champion, 1994] 72, n. 11. Dauphiné argues that the Library is one of DuBartas’s prime metaphors for his poem: “À l’image de l’architecture du monde et decelle du poème qui la restitue, la bibliothèque qu’est La Sepmaine répartit spectacles etmerveilles du cosmos, classe théories et mécanismes . . . fourmille de références etprécisions judicieusement organisées . . .” (ibid., 73).

54 Between the first edition of April 1584 and the second, five months later, Du Bartaseliminated his sole reference to texts written on the exterior of the columns, changingvv. 57–58 from “Puis dans la pierre dure, et la rougeur des briques, / Gravent pourleurs enfants les loix Mathematiques” to “Et les fit pour long temps Loyaux depositeres /En faveur de leurs fils, de cent doctes mysteres.” Except for orthographic details, theverses then remained unchanged (Seconde semaine [1584] 2:433).

55 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1964) 163–64; 416–21; Erik Iverson, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs inEuropean Tradition (1961; rpt. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993); Walker, Ancient Theology,100–04.

56 “Les Colomnes,” Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 8.71–72.

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hypothesized diffuse, encyclopedic lists of omnia scibilia for thecolumns. Even the old variant of Josephus’s anecdote that JeanLemaire followed asserted that all seven liberal arts were preservedon columns.57 (It also glorified Ham, an idea abhorrent to Du Bartas,since Ham supposedly reintroduced magic as well as the liberal artsinto the postdiluvian world.58) Du Bartas, by contrast, described acompact encyclopaedia Sethiana, a systematic body of knowledge,similar in its concision to Josephus’s original concentration onastronomy, but far broader in its physical and allegorical implications.Mathematics makes this possible: it is Du Bartas’s universal language,though not for the same reasons as for modern science. Number bothforms the language of God’s Book of Nature, and inexorably leadsthe contemplating mind to God.59 Mathematics is language in a sensethat still can be translated with precision into human language bymeans of allegoresis, as it is when Heber explains the allegoricalportraits to his son.

Du Bartas arranges the four disciplines hierarchically. Arithmeticcomes first because it deals with the rudimentary functions ofnumber; if number is the language of the antediluvian book, then itsgrammar is arithmetic. Arithmetic is also numerology, for one andthree are not simply components of reality, but its principles. Geom-etry, which comes next, is the “loy mesme de la loy qui formal’univers”: echoing the Book of Wisdom, Heber declares to his sonthat “Je ne voy rien que pois, que compas, que mesures, / Que regles,

57 Lutz, “Remigius’s Ideas,” focuses on the history of Josephus’s anecdote in medievaltreatments of the Seven Liberal Arts, including earlier versions of Lemaire’s variant.Jean-Marie Fritz is preparing a study of Latin and Old French versions of the mostabundantly-documented alternative to Josephus’s columns, preserved in Vita Adae etEvae. Aside from over 70 MSS in Latin, there are 13th- and 15th-c. versions of LaPenitence Adam, and Jean d’Outremeuse excepts it (Ly myreur des histors, chronique de JeanDes Preis dit d’Outremeuse, ed. Charles Joseph Adolphe Borgnet and Stanislas Bormans.Collection des Chroniques Belges Inédites. Corps des Chroniques Liégeoises. 7 vols.Vol. 1 [Bruxelles, 1864] 321). A study of the ancient versions is in Michael E. Stone, AHistory of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).

58 See Du Bartas’s treatment of Ham in “L’Arche,” Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 5.65–138.

59 On Pythagorean symbolism in the Renaissance see Yates, Giordano Bruno 146–48,151; Walker, Ancient Theology 22–23 and passim. Bellenger lists Francesco Giorgi’sHarmonia mundi, in the translation by Gui Lefèvre de la Boderie (Paris, 1578) as aprobable source for Du Bartas’s thinking about the Quadrivium (Seconde semaine (1584)2:434 and passim), and warns that Du Bartas’s “science” was antiquated even withrespect to the late sixteenth century (ibid., 1:xl–xliii).

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que niveaux, qu’esquierres, que figures.”60 Astronomy holds thecrucial position in Du Bartas’s antediluvian encyclopedia, because itenables humanity to read and transcribe the Book of the Heavens.Everything that exists in the sublunar world is the copy of an originalthat God “engraved in the bronze of the rapid firmament” (v. 484):Du Bartas proclaims that the “livres du Pole” contain the “sainctsoriginaux” of every minimal object or event on earth, written by theWord of God. “Et l’air, la terre et l’eau n’ont en eux chose belle, /Qu’on n’en treuve là-haut quelque insigne modelle. / Mesme noscoutelas, nos couronnes, nos traits, / Nos balances, nos dards, ne sontque les extraits / Des saincts originaux que Dieu par sa parole /Escrivit pour jamais dans les livres du Pole.”61 Reading the Book of theUniverse is possible because Seth and his sons—who were astrono-mers, as Josephus reminds us—wisely provided the code: they gavenames to the heavenly bodies that hieroglyphically or allegoricallysymbolize their effects on the world below.62 Du Bartas makes theheavens an open book explaining God’s goodness to all who will readaright; however, he condemns both determinism and judicial astrol-ogy, which menace the idea of God’s absolute freedom.63

Just as the upper and lower worlds are so interrelated that thesublunar world is a copy of the Book of the Heavens, so the latter is inturn a copy of the mind of God: “L’exemplaire eternel, l’avant-

60 Bk. 8.148–50. Cf. the Book of Wisdom 11:21 (“omnia in mensura, et numero, etpondere disposuisti”). Heber’s exposition of number symbolism is at bk. 8.91–134;geometry is at bk. 8.135–236; astronomy at bk. 8.237–672; music at bk. 8.672–747.Naturally Du Bartas has to omit prisca musica, of which nothing has survived. Onnumber symbolism, Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 501–09.

61 Bk. 8.417–22. On the relation between Du Bartas’s poems and the Book of theWorld, see Frank Lestringant, “La Bible et le Jardin: Les deux voies de la révélationdans la Sepmaine de Du Bartas,” Littératures 29 (1993): 11–24. For an analogue of DuBartas’s idea of the Book of the Heavens, see the constellation map “AlphabetumHebraeum Coeleste,” reproduced from J. Gaffarel, Curiositez Inouyes (Hamburg, 1676,p. 284) in James Dauphiné, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Poète Scientifique (Paris: LesBelles Lettres, 1983) 133. As its name indicates, this map substitutes Hebrew letters forthe iconic constellations. On the Book of Nature, see Curtius, European Literature, 319–26, and Eugenio Garin’s critique in “La nuova scienza e il simbolo del ‘libro’” in Lacultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano: ricerche e documenti (1961; rpt. Florence:Sansoni, 1979) 451–65.

62 “Puis nos doctes parens, qui sur ce rond ouvrage / Des clairs Signes du ciel firentle beau partage, / Donnerent à chacun et les noms, et les traits, / Qui vont symbolisantà leurs puissans effaits” (“Les Colomnes” bk. 8.353–56).

63 “Les Colomnes” bk. 8.555–78; see Bellenger, “Introduction,” Seconde semaine (1584)1:xl–xli.

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conceu portrait / Et l’amirable seau de tout ce qui s’est fait, / Logeoitdivinement dans l’esprit du grand Maistre, / Et l’Univers avoitessence avant son estre.”64 Music comes last in Du Bartas’s schemebecause it constitutes the highest order of “numerositas.” And hereDu Bartas has to forsake the vocabulary of books, writing, andcopying, though not that of language, communication and logos.Music is the principle of movement, intimately tied to the life of thecosmos. Du Bartas compares the cosmos to an organ activated by thebreath of God, whose chords create the harmonies of the fourhumors and the four seasons. Indeed music moves everything in thecosmos, from the most material to the most spiritual, because it issheer numerosity, and acts upon the “semences du nombre,” themathematical essence of all being. Best of all, music moves theEternal; it bends him to pity or calls and unites the Holy Spirit to thesouls of prophets.65

Du Bartas goes further than anyone before him in imagining thesupreme importance of the Sethian columns to humanity. For DuBartas, the columns were the codex containing the code that made itpossible to read the books of the upper and lower worlds, which areultimately copies of the book, that absolute unity of the divine mindthat Dante saw when he looked into the depths of the luce etterna andsaw “Legato con amore in un volume, / Ciò che per l’universo sisquaderna.”66

The legend of the antediluvian book takes on its full symbolic forcein Du Bartas’s apostrophe to astronomers, who, like Seth and hissons, are “vrais Endymions,” lovers of the Moon. In the poet’s praise,the astronomers’ achievement imitates the solidity of the Sethiancolumns: “Atlas non fabuleux, colomnes eternelles / Du Palais duSeigneur, ames doctement belles: / Las! sans vos monumens ladoctrine des cieux / Ruineuse cherroit dans le flot oublieux.”67 DuBartas’s celestial doctrine is no longer the mere “orderly array” ofplanetary motion mentioned by Josephus, but rather the providentialplan of God for humankind, which includes eternal salvation.

In “Les Colomnes,” Du Bartas managed, as only poets can, to wringevery note of symbolic concordance from the ancient legend, exploit-ing the full range of associations his contemporaries made between

64 “Les Colomnes” bk. 8.403–06.65 “Les Colomnes” bk. 8.735–46.66 Paradiso 33.86–87.67 “Les Colomnes” bk. 8.649–55.

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memoria literarum, obliteratio, the encyclopedia, the liber mundi, the libercoeli, and the mind of God. He raised the stakes of the antediluvianmemoria literarum from the salvation of culture to the salvation ofeternal life. To see how flat Du Bartas’s achievement could have been,one has only to turn to the treatment of the same motifs by hisyounger contemporary and commentator, Claude Duret. Comparedto Du Bartas, Duret returns to the medieval modalities of biblio-mythography; his uncritical consolidation of all written “testimony”blurs the boundaries between Josephus’s mythopoesis and centuries ofspeculative commentary, but without ever rising above the charm of agrocery-list.

Iosephe autheur Hebrieux au livre de ses antiquitez des Iuifs, Cedrenusautheur Grec fort ancien en ses oeuvres, et les Rabbins Hebrieux en leursEscrits, ont asseuré que Seth et Enos, ou bien comme il est plus vraysemblable, nepveux de nostre premier pere Adam, enfans de Seth,construisirent assez long temps devant le deluge universel, par eux preditet annoncé auparavant, deux colomnes, l’une de pierre, et l’autre d’argilecuitte, dans lesquelles ils escrivirent ou engraverent en leurs characteres Hebrieux, etleur langue Hebraique, tous les arts, sciences, cognoissance de Dieu, desMathematiques, ensemble les promesses du Messiah ou fils de Dieu, Iesus Christ,affermant le surnommé Iosephe avoir veu l’une de ces colomnes encordebout de son temps en Syrie.68

Josephus had given the barest hint that the era of the Sethians wasa golden age, and that God had lengthened their lives in order toencourage their study of the heavens. Periodically in the subsequentmillennium and a half, Josephus’s imitators portrayed the era of theSethians, or even most of the antediluvian world between the Fall andthe birth of the Giants, as a Golden Age of wisdom (sapientia veterum).Just as Du Bartas set a new standard for defining that wisdom inmetaphysical terms, so he seems to have gone further than anyoneprevious toward defining the Golden Age wisdom as science ortechnology. He further emphasized the technicality of Golden Agewisdom by having Heber demonstrate two of its secrets to his son: thesquaring of the circle and the doubling of the cube (vv. 195–200).

And, without opening his poem to speculation about cycles of

68 Claude Duret, Thrésor de l’histoire des langues de cest univers. . . . (Yverdon, 1619) 115;emphasis added. Duret’s entire chapter 10 (ibid., 115–41) is a compendium of com-monplaces about the antediluvian book and a catalogue of previous discussion. OnDuret and Du Bartas, see François Secret, “La Kabbale chez Du Bartas et soncommentateur Claude Duret,” Studi francesi 7 (1959): 1–11.

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golden knowledge and iron ignorance, he hints that a scientificgolden age is repeatable. The encyclopedic knowledge saved fromthe Flood inevitably suffers some loss or degeneration; but Du Bartasimagines that scientific losses can be recuperated by human reasoneven when they cannot be retrieved from the past in writing. Indeed,he imagines that such losses had already occurred by the time ofPeleg, barely a century after the Flood. Heber tells his son thatArithmetica has lost some of the rules (règles) her tablet formerly held(v. 90). But knowledge can be renewed, and can eventually bring backa Golden Age.

Plus dur que dans l’airain tien pour jamais graveesEn ton fidele esprit cent regles non prouveesPar foibles argumens, par syllogismes vains,Ains dont la verité se touche de nos mains:Science sans dispute, et qui, mere feconde,De miracles nouveaux remplira le Monde.69

The future golden age will eventually come about despite the loss ofan occasional line from the total book of human knowledge. In fact,the golden age has already returned to some extent in Du Bartas’sown time: its miracles are gunpowder, oceanic navigation, and theprinting press, by which “L’imprimeur en un jour fera plus devolumes / Que le subtil travail de mille doctes plumes.”70 Du Bartasmakes allowance for further restorations of knowledge, and eveninnovations, prophecying manned flight and the creation of au-tomata.71 Thus, while retaining its thematic relationship to theantediluvian encyclopedia, Du Bartas transposes the Golden Agefrom the past to the future. He leaves only a vestigial reminder ofJosephus’s antediluvian Golden Age, when he describes the longevityof Seth and his sons, and their happy pastoral life as they made theirastronomical observations by night.72 Yet despite his confident toneand a vision of technological progress that seems to declare him a“modernist,” Du Bartas retains the essential thematic structure of the

69 Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 8.201–06.70 Bk. 8.207–36; quote from vv. 221–22. Du Bartas seems to attribute these wonders

mainly to Geometry (v. 233), though he may intend Arithmetic as well (v. 237).Compare the irony of Rabelais’s Éloge du Pantagruélion and its relation to Pliny’scondemnation of linen and navigation (Tiers livre, chap. 51 [Œuvres complètes, ed.Huchon, 505–09, 1451–54nn.]).

71 Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 8.229–32.72 Seconde semaine (1584) bk. 8.39–52.

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antediluvian book: memoria literarum versus obliteratio, the incompa-rable wisdom of the ancients or sapientia veterum, the universal bookor encyclopedia containing it, the Golden Age radiating from it. Thishe accomplished even as he sublimated scriptura into hieroglyphicsand emblems, creating a memoria that was more Kabbalistic thanalphabetic, as François Secret rightly understood.73

Writing over a century after Du Bartas, Gottfried Vockerodt de-clared that he considered “the case of the columns of the Sethiani,mentioned by Josephus, as not entirely desperate,” that is, notentirely fraudulent or counterfeit, in contrast both to other writingsattributed to Seth by Gnostics and other heretics, and to the pseudo-erudite “antediluvian” counterfeits of Annius of Viterbo and hisimitators. But in the very moment he expressed his confidence inJosephus, Vockerodt hinted delicately at the perils of mythologizing:“This writer’s [Josephus’s] authority over some very serious [scholars]has led them, not merely to have faith in his story, but even to indulgein wider conjectures.”74 The reality was in fact somewhat different:rather than putting unlimited faith in Josephus’s rectitude, Vockerodt,Du Bartas, and generations of scholars before them had beenseduced by the mythic resonances of the struggle between inscriptionand obliteration, memory and oblivion, culture and desolation.

Like Josephus’s mythologizers, Rabelais realized the dangers towhich culture and its necessary written vehicles are constantly ex-posed, not only from human malice and obtuseness, but from thevery natural order of things. Yet he stood aside from the preoccupa-tions that drove writers before and after him to daydream overJosephus’s anecdote. He was clearly amused by the patriotic lengthsto which earlier writers like Lemaire took their bibliomythographicspeculations and “wider conjectures.” And religious controversy,while often sharp in his time, had not yet reached its flashpoint; hecould still find aspects of the Bible amusing without feeling guiltilyirreverent.75 It may be that after his time both Protestants andCatholics felt the need to paraphrase the earliest book of the Bible

73 Secret, “La Kabbale chez Du Bartas.”74 “De Sethianis columnis, a Josepho memoratis, res non omnino desperata videri

poterar. Apud nonnullos gravissimi scriptoris autoritas effecit, ut non solum narrationifidem haberent, sed et largioribus coniecturis indulgerent” (Vockerodt 157).

75 For example, compare Rabelais, Tiers livre, chap. 1 (Œuvres, ed. Huchon 353), andGoulart’s commentary to “Les Colonies” (Seconde semaine [1584], ed. Bellenger 2:404n.)on the vast numbers of Israelites who left Egypt with Moses, “sans les femmes et petitzenfans.”

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because their own growing rationalism endangered their sense of itshistoricity, as Don Cameron Allen has suggested in The Legend ofNoah.76 Or, conversely, in times when the meaning of New Testamentpassages for current Christian practice was vitally important preciselybecause it was so controversial, it may have been comforting toexperience the stories of Genesis, to which everyone subscribed inequal measure, in contemporary dress. But why were Josephus’scolumns so often interpolated into the story of antediluvian human-ity? Partly, it would seem, because they vouched for the historicity ofGenesis itself. Such a guarantee could only be made if Adam or oneof his early descendants had invented writing, a feeling that wascurrent as early as the ninth century.77 But perhaps it was simplybecause all history requires words, and because, at least in ourfantasies, scripta manent.

The Johns Hopkins University

76 Allen, The Legend of Noah, cited above, n. 33.77 See Frechulf of Lisieux (fl. 829), Historiarum libri XII, in Frechulfi Lexoviensis Episcopi

opera omnia, ed. Michael I. Allen, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis,169–169A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002) 2:40–41. Noting that the Epistle of Jude (vv. 14–15) says that Enoch prophetavit, Frechulf construes this as a written prophecy, and leapsto the conclusion that Adam invented writing: “Liquido namque claret ab ipsoexordium litterarum primo homine coepisse, qui adhuc supererat quando filii acnepotes sui in studio sapientiae feruebant. Unde etiam filii Seth cum Iobal eorumconsanguineo in columnis ea quae sapienter de disciplina caelestium rerumadinuenerunt cum reliquis artibus conscripserunt . . . .”