Bøger i Medieval and Early Modern French Studies serien

«In this readable and closely argued study, Charles Stone sheds light on a phenomenon that has baffled generations of scholars: why did plays about Christian martyrs grip seventeenth-century French audiences? After all, these tragedies are not very tragic. Stone unravels this mystery of the plays¿ success, showing how martyr-themed plays tackled wider questions of theology, language and performance. In this thought-provoking book, Stone relates not only why these plays mattered to their first spectators but also why they should matter to us.»(Professor Paul Scott, University of Kansas, USA)This study examines the genre of tragedy through the lens of one of its most curious manifestations: the martyr play. The equation of Christianity with tragedy has often been seen by literary and theological scholars as specious at best, sacrilegious at worst. During the mid-seventeenth century, however, a group of French playwrights saw fit to produce tragedies that drew not on Roman or Greek mythology, as was the norm, but on stories of Christian heroism. The author examines a broad corpus of plays ranging from the famous works of Pierre Corneille to near-forgotten examples of female-authored tragedy. Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault as well as a host of contemporary and modern-day theologians, the author shows the martyr to be a major figure in theatrical performance and religious thought alike, exposing the porosity of the boundary separating the spaces of stage entertainment and church worship. The martyr plays, whether they threaten to destabilize the genre or define it, are ultimately shown to be integral to our understanding of what constituted tragedy in early modern France.

This collection of essays is dedicated to John D. Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia and a preeminent scholar of early modern France and Italy. The book is organized around the key themes of Lyons's research throughout his illustrious career.

The Waldensians, members of a dissident religious movement originating in twelfth-century France, are particularly significant for understanding early Church history. This collection discusses the construction and transmission of Waldensian identity through discourse and cultural production at an international level.

This book follows the many echoes of Jean Racine's oeuvre across Europe, from courts to schools to other arts, opening up vistas for further exploration across cultural and political borders.

This book brings together essays from scholars working on the first century of French print culture, with a particular focus on the networks formed by authors, editors, translators and printers in the earliest years of print technology. The volume is structured around the themes of collection and translation. The first part of the book examines the gathering of sources, the creation of anthologies and collections and the efforts of collectors to create a legacy. The second part deals with translation and the ways in which editors present a text to a new audience, either in a different language, as part of a different culture or through images that translate the text visually. Together, the essays raise important questions about early modern French culture, revealing how texts are the products both of the networks that create them and of those that distribute, read and interpret them after publication.

Drawing on a range of approaches in cultural, gender and literary studies, this book presents Chrétien de Troyes¿s Erec et Enide as a daring and playful exploration of scandal, terror and anxiety in court cultures. Through an interdisciplinary reading, it locates Erec et Enide, the first surviving Arthurian romance in French, in various contexts, from broad cultural and historical questionings such as medieval vernacular ¿modernity¿s¿ engagement with the weight of its classical inheritance, to the culturally fecund and politically turbulent histories of the families of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II Plantagenet. Where previous accounts of the tale have not uncommonly presented Chrétien¿s poem as a decorous ¿resolution¿ of tensions between dynastic marriage and fin¿amors, between personal desire and social duty, this reading sees these forces as in permanent and irresolvable tension, the poem¿s key scenes haunted ¿ whether mischievously or traumatically ¿ by questions and skeletons from various closets.

In June 2006 delegates from eight countries representing six French, US, and British-based learned societies met at St Catherine's College, Oxford, for a conference on the French long seventeenth century entitled 'Modernités/Modernities'. Twenty of the best papers on religion, ethics and history were selected for this volume, and they present new perspectives on topics as diverse as devotion and pornography, artifice and the pursuit of truth, Bruscambille and Pascal, historiography from the sixteenth century to Voltaire, and, of course, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. En juin 2006 un colloque sur le thème de la modernité pendant l'âge classique a réuni à St Catherine's College, Oxford des spécialistes venus de huit pays pour représenter six sociétés savantes dont quatre françaises, une américaine, et une britannique. Vingt communications choisies parmi les meilleures sont recueillies dans le présent volume, sur des sujets aussi divers que la dévotion et la pornographie, l'artifice et la recherche de la vérité, Bruscambille et Pascal, l'historiographie tant du seizième siècle que de Voltaire et, bien entendu, la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.

In June 2006 delegates from eight countries representing six French, US, and British-based learned societies met at St Catherine's College, Oxford, for a conference on the French long seventeenth century entitled 'Modernités/Modernities'. Nineteen of the best papers on theatre, fiction and poetry were selected for this volume, and they present new perspectives on novels as different as L'Astrée and Le Roman bourgeois, comedy and tragedy, actors' practices, the ballet de cour and the burgeoning genre of opera, and a time span from Du Bellay to Mme de Gomez. The cardinal feature of this wide range of topics lies in the unifying factor of vibrant modernity. En juin 2006 un colloque sur le thème de la modernité pendant l'âge classique a réuni à St Catherine's College, Oxford, des spécialistes venus de huit pays pour représenter six sociétés savantes dont quatre françaises, une américaine, et une britannique. Dix-neuf communications sur le théâtre, le roman et la poésie choisies parmi les meilleures sont recueillies dans le présent volume, qui fournit de nouvelles perspectives sur des romans aussi divers que L'Astrée et Le Roman bourgeois, la comédie et la tragédie, le jeu des comédiens, le ballet de cour et le genre naissant de l'opéra, sur une période qui va de Du Bellay à Mme de Gomez. L'aspect capital de cette envergure réside dans la vitalité cohésive de la modernité.

Of all the playwrights from the age of Louis XIV, only Moliere's work is still regularly performed in France and beyond. This book analyses certain elements of the plays that may explain Moliere's longevity: a plausible chain of events peppered with shocks and surprises; tensions between opposites; intellectual concerns that had not previously been the province of comedy; and plots founded on situations that are anything but comic. These hallmarks added up to an intense type of comic theatre, meaningful in ways that gave the genre a new dimension. The author of this study does not treat Moliere's plays as variations on a single prototype, but brings a fresh approach to each. The book's witty, learned and penetrating readings examine critical issues such as the ambiguous anti-feminism of Les Femmes savantes, Moliere's revisions of the myth of Don Juan, 'conversion' as the theological starting point of Le Tartuffe, contrariety as the basis of comedies such as George Dandin and Le Misanthrope, and coded satire in the comedie-ballets. Each play is revealed to have a seamless comic design, while at the same time speaking to the wider world. Moliere's works are shown to be entirely and immediately involved in human society, in the social dimension of the human condition.

This volume is the first book-length study devoted to gossip in early modern France. Whereas many works that focus on other countries and periods have concentrated on the relationship between gossip and women, none has explored the crucial link between gossip and same-sex desire. Using material that has never been published before and touching on different social spheres, from valets to the immediate circle of Louis XIV, the author reveals a world radically different from the traditional image of France under the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. An in-depth analysis of the theory and practice of gossip is followed by an examination of songs, poems, memoirs, letters and anecdotes from the time, bringing the milieu of what was known as 'the Italian vice' vividly to life. The book concludes by bringing these insights on gossip to a refreshing new reading of one of the period's groundbreaking novels, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves.

Taking conflict as its collective theme, this book brings together the work of early modern specialists to offer a range of insights into the sometimes overlooked political and historical significance of Savoy between 1400 and 1700, in the wider context of early modern European history.

Hellenic Whispers builds a picture of how Greek literature was received and reworked by the authors of seventeenth-century French tragedy. Using case studies, the author establishes a new methodology for exploring the variety of responses and creative processes involved in these encounters with classical Greek material. The book explores the complex interactions surrounding these adaptations of Greek dramatic material, involving the input of scribes, editors, translators and earlier authors, and asks the important question of what these dramatists conceived of themselves as doing. Focusing on a time and place where cultural predilections and a lack of linguistic training made engagement with the original Greek texts problematic, the book explores the creative role of intermediary sources, the build-up of chain reactions between sources and the cumulative processes of recreation involved in the genesis of seventeenth-century dramatic texts. The volume also goes on to explore wider questions relevant to the classical tradition and issues of 'source study' and reception.

Reflects the author's scholarly interest in the interface between religion, rhetoric and literature in the period 1500-1800. In this book, the contributors consider subjects including the eloquence of oration from the pulpit, the relationship between religion, culture and belief, and the role of theatre and ceremony during the seventeenth century.