L’écriture des femmes à la Renaissance française II

Abstract

comptes rendus 251 the genre as a "transparent allegory, " thus reconciling fable and truth. Cécile Lignereux follows with a fascinating contribution analyzing the rhetorical and stylistic strategies used by Madame de Sévigné in her epistolary exchanges with her daughter. She presents conciliation as douceur, or conciliatory "sweetness, " functioning as a purely linguistic and pragmatic device permitting Madame de Sévigné to dispense motherly advice without causing the habitual or expected reaction of defiance in her susceptible recipient.This collection of essays paints a very broad picture of the multifaceted notion of conciliation and from the very first pages the reader will clearly perceive a lack of cohesion and unity in spite of the valiant efforts of Cornic and Servet, in their short introduction, to trace a type of conceptual or thematic continuity through the essays of the collection. Nevertheless, the many contributions found in L'art de la conciliation do indeed contribute to our understanding of the complexity and diversity of the idea of conciliation and its thematic, rhetorical, and generic exploitation, and should encourage further investigations.