Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance

Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance PDF Author: Gary Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351907182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Focusing on multiple aspects of Renaissance culture, and in particular its preoccupation with the reading and rewriting of classical sources, this book examines representations of homosexuality in sixteenth-century France. Analysing a wide range of texts and topics, it presents an assessment of queer theory that is grounded in historical examples, including French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, the poetry of Ronsard, works in praise of and satirising Henri III and his mignons, Montaigne's Essais, Brantôme's Dames galantes, the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, and religious discourses and practices of penance and confession. Close comparison with the ancient models on which they drew - the elegy and epic, the works of Plato, Ovid, Lucian, and others - reveals Renaissance writers redeploying an established set of cultural understandings and assumptions at once congruent and at odds with their own society's socio-sexual norms. Throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the coexistence of different models of homosexuality during the Renaissance - homosexual desire was simultaneously universal and individual, neither of these views excluding the other. Insisting equally on points of convergence and difference between Renaissance and modern understandings of homosexuality, this book works towards a historicisation of the concept of queerness.

Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance

Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance PDF Author: Gary Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351907182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Get Book

Book Description
Focusing on multiple aspects of Renaissance culture, and in particular its preoccupation with the reading and rewriting of classical sources, this book examines representations of homosexuality in sixteenth-century France. Analysing a wide range of texts and topics, it presents an assessment of queer theory that is grounded in historical examples, including French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, the poetry of Ronsard, works in praise of and satirising Henri III and his mignons, Montaigne's Essais, Brantôme's Dames galantes, the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, and religious discourses and practices of penance and confession. Close comparison with the ancient models on which they drew - the elegy and epic, the works of Plato, Ovid, Lucian, and others - reveals Renaissance writers redeploying an established set of cultural understandings and assumptions at once congruent and at odds with their own society's socio-sexual norms. Throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the coexistence of different models of homosexuality during the Renaissance - homosexual desire was simultaneously universal and individual, neither of these views excluding the other. Insisting equally on points of convergence and difference between Renaissance and modern understandings of homosexuality, this book works towards a historicisation of the concept of queerness.

Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome

Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome PDF Author: Gary Ferguson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution's complex and contested history.

Setting Plato Straight

Setting Plato Straight PDF Author: Todd W. Reeser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630700X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
In 'Setting Plato Straight', Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations.

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France PDF Author: Nora Martin Peterson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611496268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France is an interdisciplinary study of moments in which the early modern body loses control of its surface. Rather than read these moments as forerunners to the Freudian slip, it suggests that these moments are vital players in shaping various early modern discourses. This book pairs literary texts with religious, legal, and courtly documents in order to highlight the urgency and messiness of the relationships between body, self, and text.

Early Modern Visions of Space

Early Modern Visions of Space PDF Author: Dorothea Heitsch
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146966741X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
How writers respond to a cosmology in evolution in the sixteenth century and how literature and space implicate each other are the guiding issues of this volume in which sixteen authors explore the topic of space in its multiform incarnations and representations. The volume's first section features the early modern exploration and codification of urban and rural spaces as well as maritime and industrial expanses: "Space and Territory: Geographies in Texts" thus contributes to a history of spatial consciousness. The construction of local, national, political, public, and private places is highlighted in "Space and Politics: Literary Geographies"; the contributors in this segment show how built forms as architectural or literary constructions and spatial orientation are intertwined. "Space and Gender: Geopoetical Approaches" traces the experience of gender as political, territorial, and communicative exploration; the essays in this division deal with social organization and its symbolic analysis, resulting in literary texts featuring what could be called psychological production theories. The development of ethical approaches adapted to or critical of colonial expansion is analyzed in "Space and Ethics: Geocritical Ventures"; here we encounter early modern globalization where locals, explorers, immigrants, adventurers, and intellectuals remake themselves in new places, engage in or meet with resistance, or attempt to rework local sociopolitical systems while reassessing those they are familiar with. "The Space of the Book, the Book as Space: Printing, Reading, Publishing" analyzes the tactile object of the book as an arena for commerce, politics, and authorial experimentation.

Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France PDF Author: Kirk D. Read
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317174070
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.

Villainy in France (1463-1610)

Villainy in France (1463-1610) PDF Author: Jonathan Patterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.

The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne

The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne PDF Author: Philippe Desan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190215348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In 1580, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) published a book unique by its title and its content: Essays"R. A literary genre was born. At first sight, the Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. The chapters of this Handbook offer a sweeping study of Montaigne across different disciplines and in a global perspective. One section covers the historical Montaigne, situating his thought in his own time and space, notably the Wars of Religion in France. The political, historical and religious context of Montaigne's Essays requires a rigorous presentation to inform the modern reader of the issues and problems that confronted Montaigne and his contemporaries in his own time. In addition to this contextual approach to Montaigne, the Handbook also establishes a connection between Montaigne's writings and issues and problems directly relevant to our modern times, that is to say, our age of global ideology. Montaigne's considerations, or essays, offer a point of departure for the modern reader's own assessments. The Essays analyze what can be broadly defined as human nature, the endless process by which the individual tries to impose opinions upon others through the production of laws, policies or philosophies. Montaigne's motto -- "What do I know?" -- is a simple question yet one of perennial significance. One could argue that reading Montaigne today teaches us that the angle defines the world we see, or, as Montaigne wrote: "What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."

French Studies in and for the 21st Century

French Studies in and for the 21st Century PDF Author: Philippe Lane
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781386617
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
French Studies in and for the 21st Century draws together a range of key scholars to examine the current state of French Studies in the UK, taking account of the variety of factors which have made the discipline what it is. The book looks ahead to the place of French Studies in a world that is increasingly interdisciplinary, and where student demands, new technologies and transnational education are changing the ways in which we learn, teach, research and assess. Required reading for all UK French Studies scholars, the book will also be an essential text for the French Studies community worldwide as it grapples with current demands and plans for the future.

French Studies in and for the Twenty-first Century

French Studies in and for the Twenty-first Century PDF Author: Philippe Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1846316553
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
With contributions from leading scholars across the entire range of French studies, this up-to-date volume examines both the current state of French studies in the United Kingdom, as well as its future in an increasingly interdisciplinary world where student demand, new technologies, and developments in transnational education are changing the ways in which we teach, learn, research and assess achievements. Required reading for French studies scholars worldwide, this volume builds upon the findings of the influential Review of Modern Foreign Languages Provision in Higher Education and maps the present and future of the field.