Alduy LyricEconomies PDF

Lyric Economies: Manufacturing
Values in French Petrarchan

Collections (1549 –60)*
by C É C I L E A L D U Y
Between 1549 and 1560, French Petrarchan sonnet sequences proliferated in the wake of Du Bellay’s
Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue and Ronsard’s Amours. Yet this proliferation relied
on a remarkable economy of means, in large part due to the constant recycling of metaphors, tropes,
and forms. In fact, the genre can be read as a cost-efficient system that addressed the economic anxiety
of a generation of poets caught between the aspiration to impose the autonomy of their art and their
social dependence on a patron. It also preemptively solved the potential credit crisis that could have
resulted from having had to borrow from the Italians in order to establish a new French canon.
Looking at Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Ellain, this essay examines French Petrarchan collections as
complex lyric economies that manufacture and negotiate aesthetic, literary, monetary, and national
values.
1. I N T R O D U C T I O N
T he vogue for Petrarchan poetic collections that swept over Europe and
the Americas in the early modern period proved a prolific source of
inspiration for the poets of the time and for literary criticism during the past
century. In Renaissance Italy, France, England, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
and even Mexico and Peru, countless variations on Petrarch’s Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta gave rise collectively to a genre at once protean and
stable, recognizable in its intrinsic components even as various authors and
vernacular traditions played with its parameters to adapt them to their own
agendas. Some of the finest poets tried their hand at it, while battalions of
less-inspired followers imitated them. The plasticity of the Petrarchan
template might explain the success it had in its day; since then, it has also
provided literary critics with inexhaustible material for new interpretations,
the sheer amount of texts to scrutinize equaled only by their elusive,
*
I would like to express my gratitude to William J. Kennedy, whose conference Petrarch
as Homo Economicus (2004) gave a decisive impulse to the line of thought developed in the
present essay; to Roland Greene and Timothy Hampton for their inspiring remarks; and to
the early modern group at Stanford University. A modified version of this paper was
presented at The Renaissance Society of America annual conference in San Francisco, March
2006, under the title ‘‘The Economy of Praise: Dispositio and Retribution in French Love
Sonnet Collections.’’ All translations are mine except where otherwise noted.
Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 721–53 [721]

722 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
metaphorical nature, and the potential they offer for various allegorical
readings. The Petrarchan collection has been viewed alternatively as religious
allegory, moral fable, autobiographical diary, Neoplatonic conversion,1
formal play, psychoanalytical trauma, affirmation of social status, display
of protonational or postcolonial identity, and subversion of gender roles.2
Economics, though, has rarely been considered a relevant category
through which to rethink the Petrarchan sequence.3 According to literary
criticism, the nitty-gritty of monetary transactions rarely crosses the path of
amorous poetry, as if love and money mixed only in the disenchanted world of
the novel.4 However, sixteenth-century poets, especially in midcentury France,
were not prudish when seeking compensation for their work, and conceived
of themselves explicitly as economic agents, even in their love poems. The
Petrarchan poet might first strike the pose of the disinterested artist who offers
to his beloved words unworthy of her: but whether he expects the counter-gift
of her love or the largesse of a patron, the book is never courtesy of the author.
The rhetoric of praise, which deals with worthiness, also seeks remuneration,
and aspires to impose the exchange value of its own end product, the poems.
More precisely, the French amours of the 1550s produced their own wealth
while enriching a common asset, the French tongue.
In 1549, Joachim Du Bellay’s Defense and Illustration of the French
Tongue put the question of the value, or richness, of the French idiom in the
foreground of the intellectual scene.5 The ensuing theoretical debate
1
In fact, these first readings date back to the early modern reception of Petrarch’s Rime:
see Kennedy, 1994.
2
The critical bibliography on Petrarchism and its various traditions is too monumental
to be detailed here. Representative examples of the various critical trends just noted would
include Forster; Fineman; Greene, 1991; Roche; Warley; Marotti, 1982; Kennedy, 2003;
Hampton, 2001; Greene, 1999; Kritzman; Baker.
3
Economics in its literal, modern sense, at least. As a metaphor, the economy of X (in
particular, the economy of desire) has often been used to describe the dynamics of Petrarchan
sequences. In The Currency of Eros, Jones is concerned with negotiations rather than production.
She uses currency to refer to the circulation of women and tropes within Petrarchan lyric
conventions, rather than reading the management of these conventions as an economic system.
An invigorating attempt at linking early modern discourses to economic models is proposed for
a different, nonpoetic corpus, and within a Marxist theoretical framework, by Freccero.
4
Desan, 1993, studies poetry and economics, but takes its examples mostly from
Ronsard’s Odes, Hymnes, and the Franciade — poems explicitly concerned with the courtier’s
status — and not from his Petrarchan love collections.
5
All quotations are from Du Bellay, 2007. Incidentally, the Deffence, et illustration de la
langue françoise (Paris: l’Angelier) was published in 1549 under the same privilege and bound
in the same volume as the first sonnet sequence to be published in French, Du Bellay’s
Cinquante Sonnetz de l’Olive. The latter became the full-length Olive only one year later
LYRIC ECONOMIES 723
coincided with the rise of a specifically French model for Petrarchan love
sonnet sequences, of which the Amours by Pierre de Ronsard (1552
and 1555) soon became the canonical model.6 From Du Bellay’s Olive
(1549) and Pontus de Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses (1549) to Claude de
Taillemont’s Tricarite (1556), Jacques Grévin’s Olimpe (1560), and the
many Amours by Ronsard, Olivier de Magny (1529–61), Jean-Antoine de
Baı̈f (1532–89), Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–82), and others, more than
thirty love poetry collections of this new genre — which I have proposed to
call amours 7 — were published in France from 1549 to 1560. Du Bellay’s
Defense served as a virtual preface for all of them — that is, when they did not
embrace its linguistic and protonationalist agenda explicitly. Additionally,
all shared a common set of formal, thematic, rhetorical, and structural
features that differentiated them from earlier French collections,
anthologies, and single-author compilations such as Clement Marot’s
Œuvres and Livres d’épigrammes. In contrast to these collections, which
advertised their diversity of topics, forms, and styles, the poetics of the
amours tends to unify every level of the work, from lexicon to images, lyric
voice, addressee, style, forms, and themes. With one (and only one) beloved,
sung by a single poet, in a consistent style, usually within a single poetic form
(generally the sonnet), and displaying a limited set of tropes, myths, and
situations that repeat themselves over and over again, the unifying principle
of the amours seems to rely on the concept of ‘‘less is more.’’
This equation, paradoxical in purely mathematical terms, makes more
economic sense when one notices that it is the selling argument, not only of
these poets’ books, but also of their labor: ‘‘from nothing much’’ is the deal
that these young poets, still at the very beginning of their literary careers, try
to negotiate with their patrons. Du Bellay (1522–60) puts it eloquently in
the last poem of his Regrets (1559), where he addresses the king: ‘‘Extend
your power over me / Over me, who is nothing: so everyone can see / That
under the title L’Olive augmentee depuis la premiere edition. La Musagnoeomachie et aultres
œuvres poëtiques (Paris: Corrozet and l’Angelier, 1550).
6
Alduy, 2007b.
7
The term amours distinguishes the first generation of French Petrarchan collections
from Italian canzonieri and English sonnet sequences in particular, which are constructed on
a different organizational model. For instance, the narrative of conversion of a number of
Italian sequences is almost entirely foreign to the French tradition until the first Protestant
collections of the 1570s. As their titles indicate, the amours — among which are
Jean-Antoine Baı̈f’s Amours de Méline (1552) and Amours de Francine (1555), Olivier de
Magny’s Amours (1552), and Jacques Peletier’s Amour des amours (1555) — imitate
Ronsard’s various Amours more than they do Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Together they form
a distinct genre of poetry book within the European model of the Petrarchan collection. See
Alduy, 2007b, 13–18, 22–29; for a complete list, see ibid., 479–508.
from nothing a great king can make something.’’8 If the poet’s magic lies in
finding ideas, forms, and words — inventio, dispositio, elocutio — to reveal
the beauty or disgrace of what exists before him, the ultimate alchemy resides
in the power of the patron to create something from nothing, or, more
precisely, to transform insignificance — the ‘‘me, who is nothing’’ of the
young poet — into value, such as social status and pensions. If the idea of
making something out of nothing could evoke a Christian motif, the first
word, Elargissez (extend, enlarge), clearly alludes to the largesse expected
from the king in a collection saturated with the language of debt, fortune,
and poverty.9 In a not-so-subtle way, Du Bellay asks the king to evaluate the
poet’s worth in monetary terms and to pay him back for his verses after he
has finished the book.
Two years later, Nicolas Ellain (d. 1621), a lesser-known poet in the
orbit of the Pléiade, walked in the footsteps of Du Bellay and Ronsard with
his own love collection, Les Sonnets de Nicolas Ellain parisien (Paris: 1561),
dedicated to Du Bellay’s uncles, Eustache Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, and
Jacques, Count of Tonnerre. Addressing the bishop in the hope of securing
a patronage, he echoes Joachim’s elegant flattery, but equates more bluntly
this prodigious ‘‘exchange’’ (échange) from nothing into something to an
economic transaction:
Exchange me, Prelate, into something from nothing . . .
and make of me some metamorphosis,
change me from nothing into something
10
which you will have done when you give me goods.
The word metamorphosis recalls Ronsard and his famous sonnet: ‘‘I would
like, turning into a rich yellow, / To fall drop by drop as a golden shower /
Into the beautiful lap of my beautiful Cassandra.’’11 Whereas Ronsard
8
Du Bellay, 2000, 203 (sonnet 191, lines 11–13): ‘‘Elargissez encor sur moy vostre
pouvoir, / Sur moy, qui ne suis rien: à fin de faire voir / Que de rien; un grand Roy peult faire
quelque chose.’’
9
See Hampton, 1994.
10
Ellain, 1969, 41–42 (book 1, sonnet 48, lines 1, 6–8): ‘‘Fais moy, Prelat, quelque
chose de rien . . . // Et fais de moy quelque metamorphose, / Echange moy de rien en quelque
chose, / Ce que feras en me donnant du bien.’’ Ellain’s works often copy line by line Du
Bellay’s or Ronsard’s poems, offering a great example of how these last two poets were
instantly promoted to the status of new canonical models by virtue of being imitated by
numerous followers. On Ellain’s relation to the Du Bellay family, see Joukovsky.
11
Ronsard, 1982, 4:23 (Amours, sonnet 20, lines 1–3): ‘‘Je vouldroy bien richement
jaunissant / En pluye d’or goute à goute descendre / Dans le beau sein de ma belle
Cassandre.’’
LYRIC ECONOMIES 725
dreams of turning himself richly into a rain of gold to be granted the sexual
retribution of his travails, Ellain, more pragmatically, wishes to be showered
with gold, or bien (goods), by his protector. But whether they express their
economic aspirations under the veils of metaphor or more crudely, as Ellain
does, both pursue enrichment from their poetic enterprise.
In Du Bellay and Ellain’s economic model, the mythical attributes of
the poet as divine inventor or alchemist — who creates things from nothing
and transforms what he touches into golden words — are transferred onto
the patron, who is given the power to summon the poet into existence by
recognizing his work symbolically and financially. The poetic transaction is
apparently displaced from the realm of rhetoric, where metaphors perform
a semantic exchange between two fields of references, to the realm of
economics, where king or patron has the authority to bequeath value, and
visibility, to the poet’s work.12 As one would expect, the king wields his regal
power to mint coins, and decides on the rate of the national currency in both
the literary and the monetary market. How, then, is the poet to reclaim his
creative privilege of producing meaning and symbolic value? The persona of
the poet might luxuriate in a rhetoric of poverty and humility, but this does
not prevent the author behind him from being the real kingmaker: in the
complex power relations staged by the book, it is the poet who gives the king
the authority to consecrate him by begging for favors, and it is he who will
be the source of the king’s immortality.13 The question remains whether the
ultimate source of value in the Petrarchan sequence is the patron, the poet
who bestows on him symbolic power by asking for his favors, or the genre as
a whole as a self-reliant, canon-producing system that generates new literary
values.
Looking in particular at Ronsard’s, Du Bellay’s, and Ellain’s sequences
as emblematic examples of a larger genre, the amours, the sixteenth-century
French Petrarchan collection can be viewed as an economic system that
12
We see here a shift from the rhetoric of feudal homage, where service is due to the
sovereign and the book is given unconditionally, to an economy of patronage expressed as
a relation of employment requiring payment. Ronsard, 1982, 5:265 (‘‘Élégie à J. de la
Péruse,’’ lines 91–93), puts it this way: ‘‘Thus the king, whatever he may do, dies without
glory if he does not buy the grace of a learned poet by many gifts.’’ A generation before,
Clément Marot (1496–1544) was a transitional figure, mixing the vocabulary of service with
that of reward when appealing to the king and his sister to be promoted to valet de chambre
du roy: see Marot, 2:72–77 (‘‘Epistre du Despourveu’’ and the ‘‘Petite Epistre au Roy’’), 87.
On metaphor as a system of exchange where a phrase is borrowed from one semantic field to
express an idea belonging to another, see Shell, 49–56; Posselt, 83.
13
See Murphy, 24, for an analysis of the Renaissance poet-patron relationship in terms
of counter-gift or potlatch. For the anthropological background, see Mauss; Godelier.
creates and negotiates value. This essay analyzes how poetics and economics,
metaphorical transactions in the economy of the book, and social
negotiations in the literary market, are closely tied together. The goal,
though, is not to substitute one analogical model for another and to read this
time the Petrarchan template as the metaphor for economic relations rather
than, as previously mentioned, religious aspirations, colonial ambiguities, or
gender struggles.14 Rather, the purpose of this essay is to shift the attention
from what love stands for in these collections to what these poems create
and how: from criticism as a search for hidden signifieds to an analysis of
how poetry works, and what it produces. As Marc Shell puts it, ‘‘poetics is
about production (poiësis).’’15 The number of potential allegorical readings
mentioned at the very beginning of this essay, and the number of collections
printed in the early modern period, are only signs (or even consequences) of
the productivity of the Petrarchan template: they demonstrate its ability to
produce endless meanings from a limited set of tropes and situations. The
poetics of the amours could thus be described as a well-adjusted factory
producing texts and values ad libitum.
My goal, then, is not to study economic metaphors in love lyrics per se,
but to understand how French sonnet sequences relied on a specific kind of
resource management to produce literary, aesthetic, and economic value,
primarily through their poetic arrangement and stylistic abundance. In their
authors’ eyes, what makes the collections’ worth is indeed their dispositio and
elocutio. It is in the fabric of the text, in its layout and texture, its design and its
words, that each author, although imitating the same set of commonplaces,
can generate an added value to the primary material that he, for the most part,
borrows. If images, rhymes, and arguments tend to all be the same, their
combination and reconfiguration will make the difference. This lyric
economy, based on a rarefaction of forms and contents (the ‘‘less is more’’
argument) is also cost-effective, or economical: resources and labor are
administered and ordered so as to maximize their literary potential, hence
their artistic, but also social, profit.
Three meanings of economy are intertwined in the phrase lyric economy
as used here. The first is the modern meaning of political economy, or the
14
Nor is it claimed that this exploration of the dynamics of the collection as an
economic system cancels out other interpretations of a higher allegorical meaning: different
readings of what these collections mean are perfectly compatible with the description of how
they work.
15
Shell, 9. This thought-provoking book connects literary theory, philosophies of value,
and economics from Heraclites to Marx, and the material history of numismatics and
monetary exchanges.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 727
‘‘administration of the resources of any community with a view to orderly

conduct and productiveness’’;16 the second meaning is the economy of the
work or ‘‘disposition, structure, distribution or harmonious organization of
the different parts of a whole, specifically a discourse, poem, play’’;17 and,
finally, the third is the careful, thrifty management of resources, a meaning
echoed in the adjective economical, or in the French économiser (to save).
These three meanings are uniquely articulated in the poetics of the French
amours. If former essays on the poetry of Ronsard and Du Bellay have
studied their use of economic metaphors, endeavored to describe the
economy of their books, or analyzed their social position and literary
careers, few, if any, have tried to consider the articulation of these three
aspects by connecting discourse, dispositio, and social positions.18 Yet
a consideration of this triad could help us to understand another
underlying blind spot of French poetic studies: the relationships between
modes of production of meanings, poems, and books on the one hand, and
literary, ideological, and socioeconomic values on the other.19 When
addressed, the relationships between modes of production and values are
often viewed through the lens of the material history of print, a decisive
contribution to our understanding of the evolving definition of the social
status of the poet and the functions of literature, but one that nonetheless
rarely factors in the specific literary qualities of the texts examined, and fails
to account for evolutions in genre theory and poetics.20
There is room, however — between the self-contained approach of strict
textual studies for which texts signify intrinsically, regardless of their
conditions of existence, and contextual methodologies where historical or
sociological determinisms explain the production of the text and dismiss
its poetic qualities as surface phenomena — for a critical approach that
connects the literariness of early modern texts and their historical
significance. My hope is that the threefold notion of lyric economy
proposed in this paper can help us navigate this critical space and expand
the realm of poetics to include an examination of how literature produces
16
OED, s.v. ‘‘economy.’’
17
Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 1st ed., 1694. It is in this sense that Sébillet, 59,
equates dispositio and economy in his Art poétique français: ‘‘disposition, referred to by the
Greeks as Economy, follows closely invention, and is necessary to the poet.’’
18
For these texts’ use of economic metaphors, see Perrier; Paré.
19
See Bourdieu, 21, 45–47, on the relationship between the production of a canonical
idiom and symbolic and political values. Geiske takes Bourdieu’s concepts as a starting point
for his analysis of the production of the literary sphere through a discourse of distinction in
English drama.
20
See, among others, Brown; Marotti, 1995.
values through specific rhetorical and literary means.21 One of the purposes
of this essay is to start to articulate the relationships between economics and
literature from within the literary field.22 The economy of poetry cannot be
reduced to a theme or trope that runs through a work and has only textual
relevance. Nor can it be simply equated to the superstructure’s overpowering
influence on the book market, regardless of the poetic qualities of the texts.
To address the economic dimension of works of literature, we should also
view the texts themselves (and the genres they belong to) as economic
systems that produce in their very fabric literary, social, and ideological
values while entering a complex dynamics of investments and trade, both
as cultural and commercial objects on the print market and as objects of
exchange in an economy of patronage.
With this in mind, economic tropes are considered here only as pointers
to a wider concern among sixteenth-century French poets with the value of
language and literature. This economic anxiety is not only conveyed
explicitly through economic metaphors, but also negotiated implicitly
by the way the collection functions as a self-sustainable system that
manufactures values. In short, poetics goes beyond explicit themes and
metaphors to include what one might call ‘‘textual economics.’’ Far from
limiting its critical scope to a formalist approach, this methodology helps
to historicize poetics. One way to refresh our understanding of the specificity
of the French Petrarchan tradition and its emphasis on the ‘‘enrichment of
the French tongue’’ is to bring back social, political, and economic history
into literary theory — not from the outside, by forcing preemptively one
historical model or another, such as protocapitalism or the economy of the
gift, onto the collection, but by contextualizing the latter from within, by
way of a close analysis of the poetic text as both an event and a system of
relations and exchanges. The assumption is that both poetics and evolutions
in poetics make history.23
Tropes are not stable in the Petrarchan world. They contradict each
other more often than not, both within a single collection and across the
genre. As we shall see, gift and potlatch alternate with considerations of
investments and surplus value, only to give way in other poems to a rhetoric
21
The phrase lyric economy is borrowed from Hampton, 2001, 157. However, it is used
throughout this essay with a slightly different meaning, one that focuses more precisely on
the three dimensions just noted, with a specific emphasis on the rhetorical dimension of the
word economy.
22
See Desan, 1993; Shell; Cave, 2001. More recently, Ingram makes a similar case for
an examination of the specific contribution of literature in the evolution of economic
concepts in early seventeenth-century England.
23
See the notion of ‘‘historical poetics’’ in Cave, 1999, 11.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 729
of theft and pillage: heterogeneous economic models coexist in the

collections (as they did in real life), forbidding any linear vision of literary
history as a reflection of an equally neat economic history.24 To account for
this instability by calling it an effet de réel designed to convey the tortured
psychology of the poet-lover does not help to explain the tensions inherent
to a particular work. At best, such a reading conveys an uneasy sense that
values and meanings are interchangeable. At the level of the collection,
though, it is possible to analyze how contradictory tropes create together
a complex system of evaluation. As Terence Cave points out, the inner
tensions of literary texts are as revealing as their potential congruency with
external historical shifts.25
If, as psychoanalysis and linguistics have emphasized, love and language
are transactional in nature, in the 1550s the poetics of the French amours
takes the shape of a system of economic transactions: a system that is also
economical in nature. This paper will first analyze the poetic collection as
a place for negotiations where the rhetoric of the gift hides a discussion of
trades and loans, and will then show how the economy of the work, its
dispositio, or ordering, is designed to manufacture values: whether by
producing the worth of the lady, the canonization of the poet, or the rise
of a new currency of eros — the French language itself.
2. T H E B O O K AS MARKETPLACE
Du Bellay, Ronsard, Baı̈f, and lesser-known poets such as Guillaume Des

Autels (1529–80), Philibert Bugnyon (1530–87), Jacques Grévin (1539–70),
and Ellain devote a considerable amount of their respective love-sonnet
sequences to questions of value and exchange: recurrent motifs are the absolute
perfection, or moral and aesthetic value of the lady; the preciousness of her
very features, made of gold, ivory, and sapphire; the price to pay for being in
love with such a goddess; the gift of a lock of hair, a ring, a painting; the
impossible exchange of words and promises; and, of course, the worth of the
verses and the poet himself. It is not difficult to detect behind this economic
anxiety the financial insecurity of young writers who need the bénéfices, or
earnings from ecclesiastical patrimony, or the favors of a patron to advance
their careers. For these poets, the amours are not so much a commodity that
they are trying to sell as an investment, and a place for negotiations.26 The
24
See Davis.
25
See Cave, 2001, 11–13, 188.
26
See Cave, 1988.
publisher will make money from the sales of the book; the author won’t. His
business is in words, not in books. As Ronsard puts it, the poet is ‘‘a trader of
the Muses’’;27 according to Du Bellay, ‘‘One can trade praise as one trades
money.’’28 If praise is a trade, then the book is its marketplace, where the
negotiations begin.
The rhetoric of the gift dominates the beginning of the collection:
typically, the poet offers in his opening dedication his heart to his idol and
his book to the altar of the Muses.29 Soon, however, the reality of the deal
looms a little more grimly: rather than a disinterested offering, this gift is
rephrased in monetary terms as the payment of a salary, for which the poet
expects to be ‘‘paid cash,’’ as Ronsard puts it in a song to Cassandra30 — or
even as a loan in disguise. From its onset, the Petrarchan condition of
unrequited love implies an economic imbalance. Love at first sight is theft:
the lover is seduced and ravished (ravi), his heart stolen by Cupid. Ronsard
could not be more clear: ‘‘from the start, too shrewd Love took away my
heart like a thief, and I can’t have it back.’’31 Thus described in terms of
dispossession, this psychological alienation — where the lover, robbed from
his heart and soul, is estranged from himself — coincides with the economic
dependence of the poet, who describes his art as being as much hard work as
it is inspiration.32 Amorous travails and poetic work require compensation.
27
Ronsard, 1982, 1:139 (Odes, 1.15, line 11): ‘‘Je suis le trafiqueur des Muses.’’ Here
Ronsard differentiates himself from the ‘‘usurier,’’ or moneylender, and claims that he does
not ‘‘sell’’ his verses. But when he addresses the king in his ‘‘Ode de la Paix,’’ he announces
that he will negotiate ‘‘deal for deal’’ (‘‘troque pour troq’’): ibid., 3:33. The apparent
generosity of the address to Berger is not surprising: it is fine to give to friends — Du Bellay
describes it as an ‘‘exchange’’ of praise among equals — but it is a different relationship
altogether with a potential patron with whom praise can be bartered (‘‘troque’’) for material
rewards. See Desan, 1993, 142–43; Cave, 2001, 170–73; Hampton, 1994.
28
Du Bellay, 2000, 174 (sonnet 152, line 12): ‘‘On peult comme l’argent trafiquer la
louange.’’ See Hampton, 1994, 54.
29
See Tyard, 1966, 6 (Erreurs amoureuses, ‘‘Vœu,’’ lines 12–14); Ronsard, 1982, 4:4
(Amours, ‘‘Vœu,’’ lines 9–14).
30
Ronsard, 1982, 4:177 (Amours, 1552, ‘‘Amourette,’’ lines 6–8, 14–16): ‘‘To appease
me you must kiss me a thousand times a day. Give me in advance the fourth of my whole
salary. . . . The desire which urges me would not cease unless it is paid in cash [paiment
contant].’’
31
Ronsard, 1982, 15.2:199 (7e livre des poèmes, sonnet 6, lines 3–4): ‘‘Amour trop fin
comme un larron emporte / Mon coeur d’emblée, et ne le puis r’avoir.’’
32
The French travail is a particularly interesting case of historical semantics in the
context of sixteenth-century love poetry. In verses such as Ronsard, 1982, 4:76 — ‘‘From
a hundred torments to not receive one good’’ (‘‘De cent travaulx ne recevoir un bein’’) — the
two meanings of travail — ‘‘pains, hardships’’ and ‘‘work’’ — start to overlap.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 731
The ‘‘gift’’ (don) that the poet makes of his verses must be followed by its
indispensable ‘‘reward’’ (guerdon).33 But the reward of the medieval
troubadours is now equated to the payment of a salary34 or, even, of an
interest rate:
I can see the day coming

when my mistress . . .
holding me madly a whole night
in her arms, will be generously paying
the interests of my long-lasting pain.35
Usury, decried for centuries as a capital sin by the Catholic Church, was then
in the process of escaping the confines of a theological discourse to become
a secular ideology of profit. Francis I and his successors had borrowed heavily
from the city of Lyon, allowing in effect interest-bearing loans, while John
Calvin contended as early as 1545 that nothing in scripture condemned the
practice.36 In France, Charles Du Moulin (1500–66), a highly regarded jurist
and economist with sympathies for the Reformation — and whose work
remained authoritative in France until he left for Geneva in 1553 —
published in 1546 a treaty on contracts and usury that justified earned
interest on commercial loans.37 Still a polemical topic, interest-bearing
loans — a more precise term than usury38 — were winning their first
proponents. This recent legitimization was not lost for everyone: if the poet
invested his lady with the highest virtues, he certainly expected a return on
his investment. Far from being a simple counter-gift, the debt contracted by
the lady in exchange for the poet’s services carried an interest rate. From
33
The rhyme is exploited in ibid., 4:27 (Amours, sonnet 24, lines 1–2): ‘‘Tes yeulx divins
me promettent le don / . . . Que mon service aura quelque guerdon’’ (‘‘Your divine eyes
promise me the gift that my service will be rewarded’’).
34
See ibid., 4:149 (Amours, sonnet 155, line 14): ‘‘For the payment of its fair salary’’;
Tyard, 1966, 17 (Erreurs amoureuses, sonnet 10, line 14): ‘‘To pay me for my great
loyalty.’’
35
Ronsard, 1982, 5:113 (Amours, 1553, sonnet 46, lines 9–10, 12–14): ‘‘je sen venir le
jour, / Que ma maistresse . . . / Toute une nuit, folatrement m’aiant / Entre ses bras,
prodigue, ira paiant / Les intérés de ma peine avancée.’’
36
See Baumgartner, 128–29, on the various names and payment plans used to conceal
these loans as gifts. Individual usurers were still sued by the Parliament and the king in the
1540s: see Hamon, 524–28. For Calvin, see Desan, 1993, 44.
37
Du Moulin, 1546, followed by a translation into French, Du Moulin, 1547. See
Thireau; Cave, 2001, 152–57; Kennedy, 2004.
38
The legitimacy of usury was contentious during the Reformation and well into the
seventeenth century: see Cuvelier.
salary to usury, the economy of praise seems to have been adjusting to

a nascent capitalist economy.39
The economic metaphors used to describe the sexual rewards negotiated
with the lady also have a very literal meaning in the context of patronage.
The ‘‘fruits’’ the lover hopes to receive hint at — or sometimes refer quite
plainly to — the earnings that the poet expects for his hard work. He engages
indeed in a twofold bargaining: he seeks retribution in kind with kisses (or
more) from his beloved, and payment in cash with pensions from his patron.
Ellain rather crudely links this dual benefit. In a poem addressed to a fellow
poet, Dreux, he links through lexical echoes these two sources of income:
Listen, my dear Dreux, the pitiful voice

of your frail Ellain, who weeps and laments
for having been cheated from the fruit of his long wait,
which he was hoping for, trusting the laws of love. . . .
May our prelate, dear Dreux, be favorable to you,
may his hand rescue you,
40
and your labor not be cheated from its salary.
Throughout Ellain’s Sonnets, both his beloved and his patrons are asked to
make him ‘‘rich,’’ or else suffer accusations of being ‘‘chiche,’’ or cheap.
While he redefines the lady’s cruelty in terms of stinginess — ‘‘Exchange
then cruelty into sweetness, / exchange also into liberality / the stinginess of
your scant favors’’41 — Ellain summons the Cardinal Du Bellay to live up to
his reputation of liberality: ‘‘Now with this hand that was never cheap /
Make me, Prelate, soon become rich / Then I will write of you more
richly.’’42 The rhyme ‘‘chiche/riche’’ — also used for Pandora in a later poem
39
The emergence of traits of a capitalist economy in the Renaissance has spurred heated
debates among historians. It is so ideologically charged that any statement runs the risk of
leading to controversy and misunderstanding. Beyond the debate on the actual level of
integration of a market economy linked to capitalist modes of production, property, and
accounting in sixteenth-century France, another aspect to consider is the emergence of
a discourse of profit and investment, which is our main concern here. For the historical and
economic context, see Wallerstein.
40
Ellain, 1969, 61–62 (book 2, sonnet 30, ll. 1–4, 12–14): ‘‘Escoute, mon cher Dreux,
la lamentable voix / De ton chetif Ellain, qui pleure, qui lamente / De se veoir defraudé du
fruict de son attente / Qu’il esperoit selon les amoureuses lois. . . . // Ainsi nostre Prelat,
Dreux, te sois favorable / Ainsi sa main te soit encores secourable / Sans veoir de son loyer
defraudé ton labeur.’’
41
Ibid., 33 (bk. 1, sonnet 32, ll. 9–11): ‘‘Eschange donc en douceur cruauté / Eschange
aussi en liberalité // La chicheté de tes faveurs avares.’’
42
Ibid., 17 (bk. 1, sonnet 4, ll. 12–14): ‘‘Or d’une main qui ne fust jamais chiche / Fais
moy, Prelat, bien tost devenir riche, // Lors j’escripray de toy plus richement.’’
LYRIC ECONOMIES 733
belonging to the same book43 — is reminiscent of Ronsard’s famous

definition of his trade in his ‘‘Ode de la Paix’’ (an ode that, incidentally,
follows the Amours in the 1552 edition):
Dear Prince, I send you this ode,
trading my verses in the fashion
that the merchant sells his goods
tit for tat: you who are rich,
you king of goods, don’t be cheap,
44
don’t be weary of giving.
Trading (trafiquer), selling (bailler), bartering (troque pour troc): far from
being free, praise is a trade in which payment comes first. By echoing
Ronsard’s ode within his love sequence, Ellain exposes how the rhetoric of
the gift found in Petrarchan collections is but a cover for a poetics of loan
and exchange with real patrons. He also pushes this economic model a step
further in the direction of a negotiation with investors. Both lady and
patrons are promised immortality in exchange for investing in his trade. In
a blatant inversion of the imagery of gift-giving found in the dedication, the
poet asks his addressees for a loan before he can start to praise them.
Since you want me to die, Pandora . . .

I do want to die, if such is my fate . . .
I remember, though, in this moment,
that I cannot consecrate your immortal name
on your altar, as was my wish,
if you don’t help me stay alive.
Now if you want to live throughout the universe,
I will dedicate my verses to this task,
when you lend me this mortal life.
So lend it to me, and from now on
I will promise and promise right away
45
as interest to give you back another, immortal one.
43
Ibid., 59 (bk. 2, sonnet 25, ll. 12–14). The rime ‘‘riche/chiche’’ has a long history in
French poetry, and is exploited in particular by François Villon.
44
Ronsard, 1982, 3: 33–34 (Les Odes, 5.1, ll. 469–75): ‘‘Prince, je t’envoie cette Ode, /
Trafiquant mes vers à la mode / Que le marchant baille son bien / Troque pour Troq’: toi qui
es riche, / Toi roi de biens, ne soi point chiche / Ne te lasse point de donner.’’
45
Ellain, 1969, 32 (bk. 1, sonnet 31, ll. 1, 3, 6–14): ‘‘Puis que tu veulx, Pandore, que je
meure . . . / Je veulx mourir, si mon destin est tel . . . // Il me souvient toutesfois à cest’heure /
Que je ne puis ton renom immortel / Selon mon voeu sacrer à ton autel, / Si tu ne fais qu’en
vie je demeure. // Or si tu veulx vivre par l’univers / Je te voüeray le faire par mes vers, / En
From the expectation of a salary to the request of a loan, the poet now stages
himself as a creditor: borrowing his own life from the lady, who stole it, he
promises to give it back to her plus interest: at a pretty high return rate, since
the interest amounts to no less than immortality. Sure enough, the bargain is
the same with the bishop, but the metaphorical loan becomes a more
pragmatic request for seed money:
When I will have felt your liberality

and you will order me to sing your praise . . .
I will besiege so much the sacred deity
of the sisters, that your virtue . . .
By my verses will gain immortality.
46
In the meantime, I will practice my style writing amours.
Show me your gold first and I will sing your praise: the whole book is written
in the future tense of a conditional celebration. The vocabulary of nobility
(‘‘liberality’’) used for the patron conceals the negotiation of a contract for
a prepaid service. The poet as economic agent sells everlasting fame rather
than books. Before any praise can be produced and any gain accrued,
though, seed money must be advanced. In contrast to the profuse liberality
he asks from his patron, Ellain’s bargaining shows a more conservative sense
of his own economic interest: as a courtier who waits for money before
writing in earnest, he might be said to be cheap. In economic terms though,
he is just thrifty (économe): a careful manager of his own resources, he ‘‘saves’’
his words of praise (his work and linguistic capital) for a secure, well-paying
job for which he needs advance funding. As he puts it in numerous sonnets,
before he can become a new Virgil, he needs a new Maecenas.47
In the meantime, the sonnet sequence resembles an artist’s portfolio,
compiled to convince a potential patron to fund work on a larger scale.
Before launching an epic glorifying the name of his protector, Ellain gives
a sample of his talent in the form of the stylistic exercises of his Sonnets: ‘‘In
me prestant ceste vie mortelle. // Preste la moy doncques, et desormais / Je promectray, et dès
présent promectz / Pour l’ususfruit t’en rendre une immortelle.’’
46
Ibid., 47 (bk. 2, sonnet 4, ll. 1–2, 4–8): ‘‘Quand j’auray esprouvé ta liberalité / Et que
tu m’enjoindras de tes louanges faire . . . // J’importuneray tant la saincte deité / Des seurs,
que ta vertu . . . / Par mes vers gaignera une immortalité. // Aux amours ce pendant
j’excerceray mon stile.’’ The running metaphor in Ellain’s Sonnets is that of trading words for
money: he begs his patrons throughout to ‘‘sustain his Muse’’: ibid., 42 (bk. 1, sonnet 49,
line 14).
47
Ellain, 68 (sonnets 42–43), 21 (sonnets 46–47). See also in ibid., 8, 10, 12, the
opening epistle by Grégoire Gourdry to Cardinal Eustache Du Bellay, where he first
introduces the comparison with Maecenas and Virgil.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 735
the meantime I will practice my style writing amours.’’ Using the generic
term amours, Ellain describes here the function of the whole genre: the
amours are prolegomena for a grand epic, a foretaste for the reader and an
apprenticeship for the poet. The actual trajectory of Ronsard, who won the
favors of Henry II by his love sonnets and who keeps promising his
Franciade in his various Amours, is exemplary in that respect. But his
companions did the same: Du Bellay, Peletier du Mans, Grévin, Baı̈f, and
later Agrippa D’Aubigné (1552–1630) all started with a Petrarchan
collection before launching their epics, oftentimes once they had secured
a patronage.48 If we may pursue the metaphor further, the love sequence
functions as a portfolio in a double sense: as a selection of the writer’s work
showcasing his gifts for the artist; and as an investment for the patron, who
hopes to receive the highest dividend possible, literary immortality.
But why wait for someone else to appraise one’s worth? And is it not
clear that in these negotiations, someone — the poet — has the monopoly
on speech? In this monologue of a bargain, it would not be surprising to
discover that the poet also gets to fix the price of the deal. More accurately,
he attempts to prove the value of his compositions by creating a work that in
itself produces symbolic wealth. Between what the poetic persona says about
his financial dependency in individual poems, and what the actual poet does
while organizing the whole collection, there is room for a self-sufficient
aesthetics: for the affirmation and production of literary and linguistic
values. From an underlying discourse of economic dependence to the self-
sustaining economy of the book, from the collection as negotiation table to
a poetics of self-produced linguistic and literary enrichment, we need to turn
our attention to the fabric of the text as a cost-effective system that
manufactures values.
3. M A N U F A C T U R I N G V A L U E S
The most visible device used to manufacture values is the overt display of
signs and narratives figuring the poetic activity as a creation of precious
artifacts, the first of which is the object of love itself. At first glance, the
48
Ronsard announced his epic project as early as 1550, but published first his Amours
for Cassandra (1552), Marie (1555–56), and Sinope (Second Livre des Meslanges, 1559),
before the first four books of his unfinished Franciade (1572). Similarly, Scève published
Délie (1544) before publishing his cosmological epic Microcosme (1562), Peletier his Amour
des Amours (1555) before La Savoye (1572), Grévin his Olimpe (1560) before the Proeme sur
l’histoire des François et hommes vertueux de la maison de Medici (1567), and Baı̈f his Amours
de Méline (1552) and Amours de Francine (1555) before Amymone (in Baı̈f, 1572–73).
celebration of the lady seems to be a spontaneous and disinterested

expression of the lover’s admiration: as a reflection, and not as a creation,
of her hyperbolic value. However, this view, which is based on a literal
reading of the fiction that overlooks the writer’s agency, is deceptive. The
illusion relies on the power of description to suggest that it mirrors, and
hence depends upon, a preexisting object. But in the amours, description
starts with a specific narrative, that of the advent of the lady on earth, or
more precisely, of her creation by the gods, a metapoetic myth that debunks
this conception of celebration as transparent mimesis. The various gifts
showered on the lady at her birth are immediately described in terms of
ornaments crafted by the gods to shape and adorn her.49 Her natural gifts are
thus immediately attributed to an elaborate chiseling of decorations: in
Ellain’s Sonnets, Pandora is described as ‘‘Nature’s masterpiece,’’ a work of
art ‘‘decorated’’ by Jupiter and ‘‘designed’’ by him ‘‘on a perfect mold.’’50 It is
more than tempting to read this as a description of the poet’s activity under
the thin veil of mythology. Divinities and writer alike excel at embellishment
and ornamentation. If nothing is given in the economy of patronage, where
the initial gesture of dedication belies a bargain between poet and lady or
patron, nothing is a given in the realm of nature, for nature constructs and
beautifies her own artifacts too.
This tension between innate and ornate qualities, between the natural
and the artificial, is highly reflective of the activity of the poet himself, who
gives praise at the same time as he produces the very qualities he exalts.
Significantly, these poems on the genesis of the lady always appear near the
very beginning of each sequence, usually between the second and fifth poem:
the placement of these sonnets indicates that before the poet-lover can begin
to sing the lady, he has to create her. In other words, the dispositio of the book
conveys the idea that before he can praise her worth, he has to produce it. Far
from being a passive worshipper, as the official scenario of the poetic persona
would suggest, the author is the manufacturer of her value.
As the poet borrows metaphors from jewelry, painting, sculpture, and
architecture to describe the lady’s embellishment by the gods, it also
49
Even as Ronsard, 1982, 4:6–7 (Amours, sonnet 2, ll. 1–5, 7), describes this paradoxical
process of an artistic embellishment by Nature, he resorts to economic metaphors: ‘‘When
she was adorning the lady who was to command the most rebellious by her gentle manners,
Nature gave her the most beautiful beauties, which she had been keeping as savings for
a thousand years, and all that Cupid was avariciously hatching . . . sweetened her immortal
graces.’’ See also Ellain, 1969, 17–19 (bk. 1, sonnets 6 –9).
50
Ellain, 1969, 19 (bk. 1, sonnet 8): ‘‘Jupiter heureusement decore [ma Dame] . . .
pour . . . faire un chef-d’œuvre de Nature’’; ibid., 20 (sonnet 9): ‘‘[Jupiter] avoit formée /
Premierement sur son moule perfaict.’’
LYRIC ECONOMIES 737
becomes clear that the lady is an object for rhetorical ornamentation,

a pretext for linguistic enrichment. Du Bellay explicitly equates the two in
the Defense: ‘‘My main goal is the defense of our tongue, [its] ornamentation
and amplification.’’51 From the start, the lady is but an artifact that allows
the poet to excel at ekphrasis. Freed from mimesis and the demands of
reproduction, the poet can dive into imitatio and the production of new
poems, exercising his art of combining phrases, images, and rhymes
ceaselessly refined and reworked. Far from following a narrative of
conversion (like Petrarch) or of conquest, in which the fruits of a long
labor are redeemed at the end of the journey, the French poet dwells in the
present moment of incessant variations for the sake of stylistic embroidery
and immediate (lexical) enrichment. The collection is not organized along
the temporal or theological axis of a narrative, but as the spatial display of
myriad facets of the same object for dazzling effects. It goes without saying
that the cornucopia of artistic metaphors used to describe the lady also
displays the abundance of an author’s style and the treasures of the French
language itself. This show of stylistic wealth gathers momentum as new
variations on the lady’s beauty occur later in the book: endless praise proves
the copia of author and tongue as much as it produces the worth of the lady.
In addition, the rhetoric of praise is not the monopoly of the poet-lover,
and the lady is not the only person to be appraised in the amours. Symbolic
gold adorns the poet too, as his book usually includes his own celebration
by his peers. The economy of the book, the very arrangement of its
components, plays again a decisive role in engendering its worth, or at least
representing it. The French amours play with structuring devices to create an
image (and, in some cases, an illusion) of artistic mastery, representing the
coronation of the poet before he has even entered the literary arena:
encomiastic poems and emblems of fame anticipate the positive reception of
the book within its very confines. This effective apparatus evaluates the work
and signifies its worth symbolically, assessing its price before any negotiation
begins.
To borrow the title of a book on Spenser, Jonson, and Milton by
Richard Helgerson, French poets too are ‘‘self-crowned laureates.’’52
Whether in texts or woodcuts, they all stage themselves already crowned
with laurels, or — considering the particular anxiety of influence that haunts
any Petrarchan sequence — with myrtles (Ronsard), olive branches (Du
Bellay), or any other tree leaf that would recall, and replace, Petrarch’s
51
Du Bellay, 2007, 171: ‘‘Le principal but où je vise, c’est la défense de notre langue,
l’ornement et amplification d’icelle.’’
52
Helgerson.
FIGURE 1. Portrait of Ronsard and Cassandra. Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours.

Paris, 1552, fols. 1v–2r. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. P Ye 1482. By
permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
laurels. The most famous example is Ronsard’s self-coronation in the

opening pages of his 1552 Amours (fig. 1). His portrait is a model of efficient
marketing.53 The woodcut displays all the signs of poetic success: the profile
evokes antique medals; the crown and Roman garments the coronation of
a new imperator of classical letters, who writes this time in the vernacular.
Around and beneath Ronsard’s portrait, Latin and Greek inscriptions
recall his humanist agenda, the poetic emulation of classical authors, and
engrave his authority for eternity. What is more, this rich iconography is a
transparent reworking of the new public image of Petrarch promoted by the
French editions of his lyric poetry.54 In the 1547 and 1550 editions
published in Lyon by Jean De Tournes and Guillaume Rouillé, the
Canzoniere opened with a double portrait of Petrarch and Laura facing
53
Quainton; Fragonard.
54
On the iconography of Petrarch in France, see Rieger; Alduy, 2007b, 44–50; on its
imitation by Ronsard and his companions, ibid., 318–30.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 739
each other, the poet crowned with laurels to evoke both his coronation and
the name of his muse (fig. 2). Ronsard adopts this iconographic model but
twists it ever so slightly so as to conform to his own agenda: self-crowned this
time with myrtle as the poet of love, he poses in Roman attire to impose his
instant canonization as classical author. In this not-yet-global economy of
fame, importing Petrarch is not enough: one must naturalize his patent and
produce a new, French currency of love, a currency whose coinage bears the
effigy of a new emperor of letters, Ronsard.
His consecration as poet laureate is also reinforced by the textual wreath
that frames the book with the narrative of Ronsard’s coronation. In the 1552
edition, the last three poems of the sonnet sequence, written not by Ronsard
but by a select audience of friends, withdraw from the fiction of the failing
lover to applaud the success of the poet. Du Bellay, Baı̈f, and Denisot take
turns to confirm his achievements. While Du Bellay’s alliterations in ‘‘or’’/
‘‘dor’’ turn Ronsard’s words into gold,55 Baı̈f stages the coronation: ‘‘Now,
then, receive the glorious crown and wear the myrtle in sign of victory on all
the lovers who sing across France.’’56 The acme of this glorification is reached
in the final poem, where the painter Nicolas Denisot (1515–59), who also
drew the opening woodcut that represents Ronsard with a crown, now
recounts the mythological narrative behind this engraving. Ronsard has been
offered the crown — a symbol for the first prize in poetry — by no less than
Venus herself: ‘‘Here is the prize (she says kissing him), which you have
earned as the most eloquent.’’57 Venus epitomizes the ideal patroness: she
immediately rewards a collection composed in her honor with the best prix,
a word whose double meaning — ‘‘prize’’ and ‘‘price’’ — perfectly conveys
the dual value, social and economic, that Ronsard seeks from his work.
Meanwhile, the book opens and closes with Ronsard’s coronation: symbolic
echoes between the woodcuts and the last poems enclose the collection
within their praise, weaving together another flattering garland, one made of
words and images.
A new poet laureate, or French Petrarch (Pétrarque français), Ronsard
can in turn become the new model to imitate. His canonization is indeed
complete when Ronsard’s self-fashioning is itself imitated by other French
55
Ronsard, 1982, 4:179: ‘‘Le Siecle d’or qui pour se redorer / Dore tes vers du plus fin or
du monde/ Me fait ici par l’or de ta faconde / En mon esprit ton esprit adorer’’ (‘‘The golden
age that, to restore [literally regild] itself, gilds your verses with the most delicate gold, entices
me, because of your golden eloquence, to adore your mind in my mind’’).
56
Ibid., 4:180: ‘‘Or reçoy donc la couronne de gloyre / Et ceint le myrte en signe de
victoire / Sur les amants qui chantent par la France.’’
57
Ibid.: ‘‘Vela le prix (dit elle en le baisant) / Qu’as mérité comme le mieux disant.’’
FIGURE 2. Portrait of Petrarch and Laura. Petrarch, Il Petrarca. Lyon: Jean de

Tournes, 1547, title page. Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, BM Lyon, Rés
809817. By permission of the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon. Photo credit:
Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 741
FIGURE 3. Portrait of Des Autels and his ‘‘Sainte.’’ Guillaume Des Autels,
L’Amoureux Repos. Lyon, 1553, fols. 1v–2r. Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon,
BM Lyon, Rés 808208. By permission of the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.
Photo credit: Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.
poets, such as Des Autels, Magny, and Taillemont, who, like Ronsard,
include visual representations of their impending coronations while
adopting the framing device of the encomiastic wreath. Des Autels in
particular copies the exact format, gestures, respective postures, and Latin
and Greek inscriptions of Ronsard’s woodcuts (fig. 3). He even reproduces
the kind of symbolic displacement Ronsard had achieved with Petrarch’s
image: just as Ronsard had substituted myrtle for laurels for his own crown,
Des Autels exchanges myrtle with ivy leaves. A decade later, the opening
profiles of poet and lady locking eyes had become a staple of French
Petrarchan collections: it appears, for instance, in Nicolas Renaud’s Chastes
Amours (1565), transplanted in a bourgeois setting (fig. 4).58 Magny’s
58
Laurels adorn the brim of the poet’s hat, in a modernized version of the symbolic
crown.
FIGURE 4. Portrait of Nicolas Renaud and Lucrecia. Nicolas Renaud, Les Chastes
Amours, Ensemble les chansons d’amour de N. Renaud, Gentilhomme Provençal. Paris,
1565, fols. aiv–aijr. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ars 4° B 3271. By permission of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Amours (1553) and Taillemont’s La Tricarite (1556) offer a variation on this

model. This time, only the lady appears in a woodcut: represented in the act
of offering a wreath to the poet, she replaces the character of Venus in
Denisot’s narrative of Ronsard’s coronation.59 And when the crown is not
rendered in a woodcut in other French collections, celebratory poems in
honor of the author often bookend the work to create another, this time
textual, crown woven of golden words. The multiplication of benevolent
readers at each edge of the book flanks the reading experience with positive
reviews in an attempt to frame and manipulate the reader’s response. The
praise of the poet by his peers is in effect an appraisal of the value of his work:
an appreciation in the double sense of ‘‘an expression of admiration’’ for the
author and ‘‘an assessment of [his] market value,’’ which appreciates with
each new compliment. And as Ronsard’s eulogies circulate from one
59
Alduy, 2007b, 317–25.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 743
collection to another when his fellow poets compliment and imitate him in
their own works, his currency increases. Value-attribution and canon
formation are not (or not only) the result of a retrospective judgment by
an outside institution: here, they are produced directly by the economy of
the book, framed as it is by its own evaluation, and by the economy of the
genre, where compliments are traded within a domestic market.
4. L I N G U I S T I C C A P I T A L
In this system of cross-congratulations and self-coronation, as the Petrarchan
poet sees his own value on the literary scene appreciate, a new currency of
love — the French language — also arises. The idea that language is
a currency subject to fluctuations on an international market is expressed
time and again in the poetic treatises of the time. This obsession with
economics, which coincides historically with a sudden inflation and the near
bankruptcy of the French crown — buried in debts, especially to Italy — is
directly expressed in the program of the enrichment of the French tongue
that becomes the catchphrase of the Pléiade in the 1550s. Their motto is
simple: ‘‘to enrich our vernacular.’’ Their goal is to bypass foreign models
and tap into self-replenishing national resources.
The means for this linguistic growth are first and foremost the accrual of
lexical capital through import and exchange — that is, by imitating foreign
models so well that it will jumpstart the domestic production of high-quality
poetry.60 Du Bellay describes this transfer of cultural capital in this way:
‘‘Our French tongue is not so poor that it would not be able to render
faithfully what it borrows from others; so infertile that it would not produce
by itself some fruit born of sound invention, thanks to the industrious and
diligent labor of the people who cultivate it.’’61 In this ideal linguistic
ecology, the happy conjunction of a fertile soil and a diligent nation feeds the
domestic literary economy and instigates an ideal cycle where natural (that
is, native) resources, need only be cultivated to produce endless fruits, and
pay back Italian creditors once and for all.
The insistence on domestic production and self-sufficiency (‘‘produce
by itself’’), on the one hand, and on productivity (semantic investment and
60
For a different, but complementary, analysis of the economics of poetry according to
Du Bellay, see Hampton, 2001, 157–60.
61
Du Bellay, 2007, 83: ‘‘Notre langue française n’est si pauvre qu’elle ne puisse rendre
fidèlement ce qu’elle emprunte des autres; si infertile qu’elle ne puisse produire de soi
quelque fruit de bonne invention, au moyen de l’industrie et diligence des cultivateurs
d’icelle.’’
efficient labor), on the other, suggest that copia, or linguistic and stylistic
wealth, resides for Du Bellay in the ‘‘fertility,’’ or expressive potential of
a language, rather than in the sheer accumulation of riches.62 According to
him, all tongues are valuable in essence, but some do not yield as much
because no one has invested any labor in them to make them fructify: the
linguistic capital inherent in the French language has so far been left
dormant, and as a result, the tongue has become ‘‘poor,’’ or rather,
unproductive.63 But French would soon harvest new and renewed
meanings if its writers were to invest in its natural resources. Its wealth
lies not so much in the number of its words as in its literary and
philosophical potential: in how much the language can create and signify
rather than how many signs it contains. In this dynamic view of the
productivity of languages, the insistence is on what can be produced within
the parameters of specific domestic resources — and the amours, which
display a staggering number of variations on a limited set of themes and
images, are a perfect example of this self-sustainable textual productivity.
In the amours, unity produces multiplicity: a drastic unifying principle
tends to reduce every formal and thematic constraint to a single paradigm,
which is then reproduced time and again in an inexhaustible series of
variations. The collection multiplies from a limited but fertile set of rules:
a single original template, the Petrarchan love sonnet, proliferates into
hundreds of different incarnations to compose not one book, but dozens
of collections — a whole genre. The productivity of the text is enhanced by
the recycling of metaphors and the reuse of forms. As the scene of the
innamoramento (falling in love) is replayed again and again, the icy fire
antithesis reworked, the lady’s charms retold, and the sonnet revisited, the
Petrarchan collection produces countless versions of a single discourse by
exploiting the full potential of limited primary material. Capitalizing on
62
Ibid., 80–81: ‘‘Similarly . . . our language . . . is only starting to flourish without
bearing fruits, or rather, like a plant or twig, it is not yet in bloom, and is far from having
borne all the fruits that it could produce. And it’s certainly not because of a natural
deficiency, since it is as apt as any other to engender: but the fault belongs to those under
whose guard it was resting, and who did not cultivate it enough: thus, like a wild plant . . .
they let it wither and almost die. And if the ancient Romans had been as careless with the
cultivation of their own tongue . . . for sure it would not have grown so much in so little time.
But they, like good farmers, first transplanted it from a wild to a domestic place; then, to
make sure that it would bear fruits sooner and more abundantly, pruning the superfluous
branches all around, restored the latter with vigorous and domestic ones, beautifully taken
from the Greek language, and these new branches were so carefully grafted and seamlessly
attached to the trunk, that they didn’t look adopted anymore, but native.’’
63
Du Bellay, 2007, 13, 80–81.
LYRIC ECONOMIES 745
a set of commonplaces, a rarefied idiom, and a single, very productive poetic

form, the sonnet, it maximizes its literary ‘‘production,’’ and potential social
benefits, thanks to a cost-effective management of lexical and formal
resources.
Rhymes, tropes, phrases, and also entire hemistiches and verses, are
recycled. For instance, in the 1550 edition of L’Olive entire verses are
imported from the 1549 version and inlaid into the new work.64 Likewise, in
his Erreurs amoureuses (1549), Tyard (1521–1605) repeats twice verbatim
the same phrase in a song and in a sonnet situated only a couple of pages
apart: ‘‘As I feel entirely robbed from hope’’ is slightly reworked into ‘‘Has
already entirely robbed me from hope.’’65 Ellain represents an extreme case
of this concept of writing as a combinatorial manipulation of reified
segments that can be inserted in different places of a gigantic jigsaw. He
frequently borrows entire segments from the last stanzas of one poem in
order to build the opening lines of the following one. Following are the
tercets of sonnet 40:
And as I am writing these verses,
alas! I believe that your green eyes
are shooting ten thousand arrows, and another ten thousand
into the eyes of some lovers,
who distraught, shivering, and languid
66
can’t stop looking at you, and courting you.
These provide the raw material for the next poem:

Admittedly, I believe, I really believe it,
that while I am suffering,
64
In Du Bellay, 1974, 98 (sonnet 43, l. 12), the verse ‘‘Si de parler au moins eusses
l’usage’’ (‘‘If I had at least the power of speech’’) becomes in ibid., 104 (sonnet 50, l. 2), ‘‘Si
de parler mon coeur avoit l’usaige’’ (‘‘If my heart had the power of speech’’). In 1550, the
second line of ibid., 130 (sonnet 77), ‘‘De mon amer la tant doulce racine’’ (‘‘Of my love the
root ever so sweet’’) is slightly reworked to conclude ibid., 147 (sonnet 103), ‘‘Tant mon
amer a la racine doulce’’ (‘‘So sweet is of my love the root’’); while ibid., 121 (sonnet 67, l. 6),
‘‘Engravez moy au marbre de cete ame’’ (‘‘Inscribe for me in the marble of that soul’’) is
recycled into ibid., 125 (sonnet 71, l. 13), ‘‘Mieulx engravée au marbre de mon ame’’ (‘‘More
forcefully inscribed in the marble of my soul’’). See Alduy, 2007a.
65
Tyard, 1966, 25 (song 3, l. 68): ‘‘Lors que je sens du tout l’esperance ravie’’; ibid., 29
(sonnet 18, l. 11): ‘‘M’ha ja du tout l’esperance ravie.’’
66
Ellain, 1969, 37 (bk. 1, sonnet 40, ll. 9–14): ‘‘Et cependant que je t’escriptz ces vers, /
Helas! je crois, je crois que tes yeux verts, / Dix mille traictz, dix mille encores dardent //
Dedans les yeux de quelques amoureux, / Qui esperduz, transiz, et langoureux / Te
courtisans sans cesse te regardent.’’
some lover enjoys your presence,

and rejoices at the thought of my misery.
Yes, I believe it, I strongly believe it,
67
that a lover is now courting you, and kissing you.
Louis Le Caron (1534–1613) goes even further when he reworks and

rearranges more than half of the poems he has just published in his first love
collection, La Claire (1554), to compose ten months later a new Petrarchan
sequence, La Poésie. In a two-step recycling strategy, he slightly rewrites fifty-
one epigrams of various lengths from La Claire so that they now conform to
the structure of the sonnet, and then adds to those enough new poems to
produce a refurbished collection now counting one hundred sonnets, an
ideal number that hides a more pragmatic production process. Made of only
forty-nine new sonnets out of one hundred, the latter could be said to be
made of 51 percent recycled material.68
Lexical repetition and metaphors are other linguistic transactions by
which the semantic value of individual words increases, and the linguistic
capital of the tongue fructifies. As one word is repeated in different poems, it
accrues new semantic overtones from its various contexts. Each poem, tinged
with its own set of ambiguities and connotations, capitalizes on the semantic
depth conferred on it by the larger work, as is apparent in the semantic
itinerary of a word like error in Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses (1549). The title
word erreurs stretches from the poet’s symbolic ‘‘wanderings’’ (errance) in his
quest for Pasithée to his occasional ‘‘mistakes’’ (erreurs) in believing hearsay
and rumors that spur his jealousy, but also allude to his moral erring when he
lets his desire govern his reason, and to the potential poetic error of a volume
of verses whose erratic pattern alternates various poetic forms in opposition
to Tyard’s admitted model, Maurice Scève (1501–64), and his rigorously
uniformed sequence of 449 dizains, Délie (1544). The word also looks back
to Petrarch’s giovenile errore (youthful errors), a defining Petrarchan motif
constantly reworked by his French imitators, starting with Scève, who
alludes to it in the dedication of his work69 — a poem that Tyard imitates in
the dedication of his own sequence to none other than Scève.70 As the word
erreur travels from Italy to France, and circulates from one sequence to
67
Ibid., 38 (bk. 1, sonnet 41, ll. 1–6): ‘‘Certes je crois, je le crois voyrement, / Que ce
pendant que je suis en malaise, / Quelque amoureux pres de toy est bien ayse, / Qui s’esjouist
de mon pauvre tourment // Ouy, je le crois, je le crois fermement, / Qu’un amoureux te
courtise, et te baise.’’
68
Alduy, 2007b, 193–214.
69
See DellaNeva.
70
Tyard, 9 (sonnet 1).
LYRIC ECONOMIES 747
another, and across Tyard’s own collection, it cashes in on the cultural value
of an illustrious literary lineage while establishing the dominance of a new
gold standard minted in France: soon enough, erreur would indeed come to
refer almost exclusively to Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses, effacing its Italian
root in Petrarch. The naturalization process was completed when Ronsard
saturated a whole sonnet of his 1553 Amours with a dexterous polyptoton on
erreur to celebrate Tyard as his own source of inspiration, rather than any
foreign model.71
Metaphors prove the wealth of the tongue in another way, when a word
or image is borrowed from one lexical field to express an idea from another.
Reflecting back on three decades of linguistic expansion, the grammarian
and printer Henri Estienne (1528–98) uses this argument in his Precellence
du langage François (1579): ‘‘I would ask the reader to consider how rich our
language must be in all the places where it borrows so many beautiful words
and ways of speaking to accommodate them to another usage — which the
Greeks call speaking metaphorically — since only the rich have a lot to
lend.’’72 The exchange, or rather the addition, of literal and figurative
meanings within a single metaphor multiplies in one concise expression the
imaginative power of words while augmenting the semantic and aesthetic
value of the whole work with a remarkable economy of means. Eventually,
this cost-efficient system of producing poems and meanings proves the copia
of author and tongue.73 As the poet alternates metaphors to sing the lady’s
beauty in dozens of different ways, the amours seem to apply the
prescriptions listed in Erasmus’s De Copia quite literally: like exercise
books, they display the countless ways by which one can express a single
idea — such as ‘‘you are beautiful,’’ or, alternatively, ‘‘I love you’’ — using all
71
Ronsard, 1982, 5:64 (‘‘Sur les Erreurs amoureuses de Pontus de Tiard Masconnois,’’ ll.
13–14): ‘‘Pour contr’errer tu fais errer mes pas / Après l’erreur de ton erreur si sainte’’ (‘‘By
‘counter-erring’ you make my own steps wander after the error of your saintly error’’).
72
Estienne, 1579, 142 (quoted by Desan, 1993, 109): ‘‘Je prieray le lecteur considérer
combien il faut que nostre language soit riche en tous endroits dont il emprunte tant de
beaux mots et tant de belles façons de parler, pour les accommoder à autre usage (ce que les
Grecs appellent parler par metaphores), veu qu’il n’y a que les riches qui puissent beaucoup
prester.’’ See also Trudeau.
73
Estienne, 1579, 104, defines the wealth of a tongue by its ability to produce various
signifiers and phrases for a single thing: ‘‘To judge adequately of this richness [of the French
language], we first have to consider what things are required of a tongue to be deemed
rich . . . and first, in the same way that a man is not said to be rich if he possesses only what is
of primary necessity, but he must possess things that he does not need and could do without;
and of what is of primary necessity he must have plenty . . . in the same way, [the French
language] can surely be said to be rich since it has plenty of what is only of primary necessity:
since it can express one single thing in many guises.’’
the tools of amplificatio. The poetics of variation that defines the dispositio of
the French Petrarchan collection displays at once how the genre is both cost-
effective and prolific, how the economy of the book is both economical and
productive.
The amours also enrich the French tongue through the imitation of
Italian, Latin, and Greek models, importing new treasures of figures, images,
and poetic forms. But instead of becoming indebted to these foreign
traditions, which is a common accusation raised against translation, they
turn these riches, and imitation itself, into a domestic trade. In the second
half of the sixteenth century, there was a nagging suspicion among poets and
grammarians that imitation and translation were akin to borrowing money,
and that, instead of enriching the kingdom, they sank it farther into debt,
worsening an already severe cultural deficit. Striking a populist chord of
economic xenophobia, Estienne — who devoted his life to promoting the
supremacy of the French language — complains in his Traicté de la
conformité du langage François avec le grec (1565) that lexical borrowings,
and in particular Italianisms, threaten to drive the kingdom into
bankruptcy: ‘‘If these borrowings continue, what else can we expect but
that our language, which used to have . . . such good credit in the past, in the
end, through not being able to pay back its creditors, will be forced to file for
bankruptcy?’’74
In his Dialogue de l’orthographe et prononciation française (1555),
Peletier du Mans, himself the author of an Art Poétique, of a Petrarchan
collection, L’Amour des Amours (1555), and of various linguistic treatises,
anticipates the objection and suggests a remedy: ‘‘Words that are borrowed
should be naturalized. In this way we will deceive our creditors, who will be
very surprised to see that we become richer than them without noticing that
it is partly theirs.’’75 What is true of words is also true of works. Soon
Ronsard’s Amours, and, to a lesser extent, Scève’s Délie and Du Bellay’s
sonnets, supersede Petrarch’s Canzoniere as the primary source of textual
borrowings. The success of the amours as a genre starts a cycle of imitations
of imitations in which, as we have seen with Ronsard’s coronation and
Tyard’s naturalization of the Petrarchan error, verses, images, and words
74
Estienne, 1853, 32: ‘‘Si tels emprunts continuent, que pouvons-nous attendre autre
chose avec le temps sinon que notre langage qui a eu . . . si grand credit par le passé, en la fin à
faulte de pouvoir payer ses créditeurs, soit contrainct de faire un tour de banqueroutier?’’ The
economic metaphor of language as capital is used throughout his book. On Estienne’s
anti-Italianism, see Balsamo, 59–68; Trudeau; Hampton, 2001, 155.
75
Peletier du Mans, 1966, 104: ‘‘Les mots empruntés se doivent rendre domestiques . . .
Par ce moyen nous tromperons nos créanciers: qui seront tout ébahis que nous deviendrons
plus riches qu’eux sans qu’ils s’aperçoivent que ce soit du leur.’’
LYRIC ECONOMIES 749
circulate from one French collection to the other, short-circuiting their now-
distant Italian origin. The cut-and-paste operations of Ellain and other
secondary poets, who stitch together whole verses and phrases from Ronsard
and Du Bellay to create their own patchworks, are in this sense exemplary.
Not only do they capitalize on past domestic productions, but this self-
sustainable lyric economy, congruent with the mercantilist theories that
soon developed, proves the value of a new poetic currency in the vernacular.
The direct transaction from French sonnet to French sonnet precludes
a potential debt to Italy. Imitation becomes a domestic trade negotiated in
French currency throughout. This process of canon formation within the
French national space fulfills the mercantilist ideal of self-sufficiency
promoted in France in the second half of the century. As Desan has
shown, this economic theory goes hand in hand with a rising nationalism.76
Just as economists Antoine de Montchrétien (1575–1621) and Barthélemy
Laffemas (1545–1612) would later call for a system functioning in a closed
circuit, one that would rely on its own resources and that would limit
imports, the amours as a genre create their own self-enclosed, autarkic
national economy, in which they trade and borrow words among
themselves.
5. C O N C L U S I O N
From 1549 to the early 1560s, in the works and lives of Ronsard, Du Bellay,
and their fellow poets, we notice a tension between a claim for the autonomy
of their art on the one hand, and their social dependence on a patron on the
other: between the self-sufficiency of the text, which creates and proves its
own worth, and the necessity to bargain, invest, and promote oneself in
order to obtain more tangible economic wealth. Both aspects rely on
a similar economic mindset, one that encourages a consideration of the
productivity of tongue, texts, and loans, in a kind of cost-benefit analysis.
The Petrarchan poet proves to be not only a savvy negotiator and self-
promoter, but also a judicious manager of his lexical and linguistic capital. In
his amours, he favors a rhetorical economy based on resource management
and maximum yield to manufacture aesthetic, social, literary, and linguistic
values with a remarkable economy of means. This redefinition of the
humanist ideal of stylistic copia in terms of productivity and self-sufficiency
represents a shift from a quantitative aesthetics of affluence, which values
varietas, diversity, and numbers, to a poetics of variation, whose riches lie in
the appreciation of qualitative differences.
76
See Desan, 1991.
If the poet never loses sight of his own reward and seems to be
borrowing from lady, patron, languages, and texts, he also gives back to the
community. As Ronsard is crowned a classical author, the literary value of
his work is transformed into the cultural supremacy of the French: from
literary to political values, from the appraisal of the author’s craft to the
recognition of the cultural power of a nation, the Petrarchan poet emerges as
the unexpected economic agent who transforms natural resources — both
local and imported — into cultural values and imperial glory.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
LYRIC ECONOMIES 751
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Lyric Economies: Manufacturing

Values in French Petrarchan

Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 721–53 [721]

‘‘administration of the resources of any community with a view to orderly

of theft and pillage: heterogeneous economic models coexist in the

Du Bellay, Ronsard, Baı̈f, and lesser-known poets such as Guillaume Des

I can see the day coming

salary to usury, the economy of praise seems to have been adjusting to

Listen, my dear Dreux, the pitiful voice

belonging to the same book43 — is reminiscent of Ronsard’s famous

Since you want me to die, Pandora . . .

When I will have felt your liberality

celebration of the lady seems to be a spontaneous and disinterested

becomes clear that the lady is an object for rhetorical ornamentation,

FIGURE 1. Portrait of Ronsard and Cassandra. Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours.

laurels. The most famous example is Ronsard’s self-coronation in the

FIGURE 2. Portrait of Petrarch and Laura. Petrarch, Il Petrarca. Lyon: Jean de

Amours (1553) and Taillemont’s La Tricarite (1556) offer a variation on this

a set of commonplaces, a rarefied idiom, and a single, very productive poetic

These provide the raw material for the next poem:

some lover enjoys your presence,

Louis Le Caron (1534–1613) goes even further when he reworks and

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