The Gift in Sixteenth-century France
The Gift in Sixteenth-century France

Author: Natalie Zemon Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780199242887

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Must a gift be given freely? How can we tell a gift from a bribe? Are gifts always a part of human relations--or do they lose their power and importance once the market takes hold and puts a price on every exchange? These questions are central to our sense of social relations past and present, and they are at the heart of this book by one of our most intersting and renowned historians.

Less Rightly Said
Less Rightly Said

Author: Antonia Szabari

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-10-23

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0804773548

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Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that "corrected vices" but "spared the person"—yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas. By focusing on popular pamphlets along with more canonical works, Less Rightly Said shows that the satirists did not simply renounce the moral ideal of elite, humanist scholarship but rather transmitted and manipulated that scholarship according to their ideological needs. Szabari identifies the emergence of a political genre that provides us with a more thorough understanding of the culture of printing and reading, of the political function of invectives, and of the general role of dissensus in early modern French society.

An Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought
An Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought

Author: Neil Kenny

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1472521358

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The age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Erasmus, Luther, and Machiavelli produced in France too some of Europe's greatest ever literature and thought: Montaigne's Essays, Rabelais' comic fictions, Ronsard's poetry, Calvin's theology. These and numerous other extraordinary writings emerged from and contributed to cultural upheavals: the movement usually known as the Renaissance, which sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman culture for present-day purposes; religious reform, including the previously unthinkable rejection of Catholicism by many in the Reformation, culminating in decades of civil war in France; the French language's transformation into an instrument for advanced abstract thought. This book introduces this vibrant literature and thought via an apparent paradox. Most writers were profoundly concerned to improve life in the here-and-now - socially, politically, morally, spiritually. Yet they often tried to do so by making detours, in their writing, to other times and places: antiquity; heaven and hell; the hidden recesses of Nature, the cosmos, or the future; the remote location of an absent loved one; the newly 'discovered' Americas.The point was to show readers that the only way to live in the here-and-now was to connect it to larger realities - cosmic, spiritual, and historical.

"Monstrueuse Guerre!" Literature and Warfare in Late Sixteenth-Century France

Author: Margo Meyer

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13:

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The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referred to as the Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. While substantial work has been done on structures of violence during this period, literary scholarship has yet to engage fully with the implications of war in the development of literary discourse. Moving beyond readings in which war is relevant only as context, I recuperate both major and minor texts of this period as a corpus that offers a sustained reflection on the problem of how to represent violence in language. Because representing war requires writers to grapple with how to use language to represent violence inflicted on physical bodies, formal literary choices become part of a broader cultural discourse of how to think about and judge war. Looking at four different genres--essays, tragedy, epic, and memoir--my analysis highlights how, in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, literary form develops in part as a discursive response to a larger problem of how to represent war. Montaigne's Essais offers a hermeneutic of war based upon the assumption that choices about representation are also ethical choices. In humanist tragedy, language becomes an expressive vehicle for shaping our understanding of virtue, heroism, and community in the context of warfare. D'Aubigné's Les Tragiques reinvigorates epic and recuperates its potential for critiquing the excesses of warfare, while Monluc's Commentaires gives voice to a new kind of war hero who is neither glorified nor martyred but who epitomizes the professional. By exploring the diverse characteristics of war writing during this period, I contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship between the activity of war and related literary production, which can be traced and studied comparatively over different periods and literary traditions to help us better understand how we shape and are shaped by our experience with war.

Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France
Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France

Author: Diane C. Margolf

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2003-12-25

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 027109091X

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Diane Margolf looks at the Paris Chambre de l’Edit in this well-researched study about the special royal law court that adjudicated disputes between French Huguenots and the Catholics. Using archival records of the court’s criminal cases, Margolf analyzes the connections to three major issues in early modern French and European history: religious conflict and coexistence, the growing claims of the French crown to define and maintain order, and competing concepts of community and identity in the French state and society. Based on previously unexplored archival materials, Margolf examines the court through a cultural lens and offers portraits of ordinary men and women who were litigants before the court, and the magistrates who heard their cases.

Iron and Blood
Iron and Blood

Author: Henry Heller

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780773508163

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Iron and Blood will permanently change the way we perceive sixteenth-century French history. Henry Heller shows that mounting social unrest in the first half of the century finally resulted in the French Civil Wars. Challenging the works of Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Heller argues that well before the 1560s, in the midst of the apparent prosperity and tranquillity of the French Renaissance, French society was marked by acute social tensions that regularly exploded in uprisings and rebellions. Heller demonstrates that the historical events of sixteenth-century France were unified by an increasing level of social conflict.