{"title":"Being ‘time-bound’: Montaigne on Touch, Contagion, and the Contemporary","authors":"C. Godard","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2022.2161862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2022.2161862","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49578554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thought about action: ergon in Gargantua","authors":"N. Kenny","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200370","url":null,"abstract":"Rabelais’s fictional chronicles communicate thought about action, including about the relationship of action to social status. They explore and test the view, which was widespread in the period, that the actions you undertake in life should be determined by your social status. The notion that certain actions properly characterise different social groups because those groups have distinct functions in society is widely communicated by the term ergon in key ancient Greek texts which Rabelais knew in the original. So ergon provides a way into the wider question of Rabelais’s representation of, and relationship to, social hierarchy. That question, explored here in relation to a key sixteenth-century work, was opened up in relation to key seventeenth-century works by Michael Moriarty’s pioneering Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (1988).","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"5 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44635037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Calvin the mimic: Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545)","authors":"Timothy Chesters","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200444","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines some instances of mimicry in Jean Calvin’s Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545). Calvin’s denunciation of the spiritual libertines, an obscure antinomian sect which had recently spread from the Low Countries to northern France, is made all the more vehement by a fear that others might confuse some aspects of their theology with his. Mimicry of his opponents’ Picard dialect is one way among several of marking off their voices from his own. Although Calvin shows himself elsewhere capable of trenchant humour (for example, in the Traité des reliques) examples of speech-parody are rare in his work, possessing a farcical quality more readily associated with Rabelais (the episode of the ‘écolier Limousin’) or Molière (Nérine in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac). The blending of heretical voices with regional ones raises broader questions of language and nation, just four years before the publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549).","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"14 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43587779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contre Vaugelas: Antoine Arnauld on good usage, reason and the perfection of French","authors":"Elizaveta Al-Faradzh","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200467","url":null,"abstract":"Antoine Arnauld was a polymath: a major theologian and leader of the seventeenth-century French Jansenists, he also contributed to linguistic theory as a co-author of the ‘Grammaire générale et raisonnée' (1660). Less is known about his role as a lexicographer and observer of linguistic usage. In the ‘Réflexions sur cette maxime Que l'usage est la Règle et le tyran des langues vivantes' (1707), Arnauld contributed to a discussion over good usage launched by Vaugelas with the ‘Remarques sur la langue françoise' (1647). This essay compares the positions of Arnauld and Vaugelas concerning sources of usage, the role of reason and the ways in which language changes and argues that Arnauld postulated the autonomy of the language from the political sphere. It shows that Arnauld challenged Vaugelas's definition of good usage while suggesting ways to preserve French in its perceived state of perfection.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"63 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49065758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"François de Sales and the paradoxes of abjection","authors":"J. Lyons","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200447","url":null,"abstract":"François de Sales is, next to Pascal, the early modern French religious author whose work has for centuries reached the widest audience. Whereas Pascal conceived many of his reflections and arguments in the Pensées for persons uncommitted to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, de Sales aimed at a wide audience of faithful Roman Catholics. This difference of intended public (or interlocutor) explains much about the advice the two writers offer about how to think and what to think about. In his Introduction à la vie dévote, de Sales’s figurative language makes it seem that he is teaching a form of easy-going religiosity, similar to the dévotion aisée that Pascal mocks in the Provinciales. For today’s reader, the Introduction can seem a cloying confection, full of suavité. And yet, Salesian devotion promotes the radical vision of a deeply degraded humanity.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"46 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47790139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music and the shape of the dialectic: what Hegel’s discussion of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau shows","authors":"M. Hobson","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200535","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the prominence given by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau. It locates its cause in the dialogue’s account of the quarrel in contemporary French music, between Italian opéra comique and French opera seria, in particular, Rameau. Hegel makes his account of this section of Diderot’s dialogue his first clearly explicit account of a dialectic operating in culture. The French audiences cannot hear the French style of opera with innocent ears, having once taken pleasure in the Italian operas. And movement forward in music, it is implied, will have to go beyond both styles, to please the current audiences.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"83 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46289814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La Boétie Absolutist? An episode in the history of political thought","authors":"J. O’Brien","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2202697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2202697","url":null,"abstract":"First published in 1652–1654 and then in a new edition in 1666, the Discours politiques of the académicien Daniel de Priézac (1590–1662) have been characterized as a statement of Aristotelian politics in the service of absolutism. The aspect of interest in this article is Priézac’s hitherto unnoticed practice of quoting from La Boétie’s La Servitude volontaire. It may seem strange that a treatise so often associated with anti-tyrannical literature should be used in a work of political thought defending the monarchy and the state. Priézac’s attempt to exploit it takes place against the background of the Fronde. Priézac was also a protégé of Séguier, to whom the Discours were dedicated; and Séguier owned an (extant) manuscript of La Boétie’s treatise. Through a combination of close reading and historical contextualization, this article will elucidate this absolutist turn in the reception of La Boétie.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"30 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44781101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘L’Action héroïque de Monsieur Arnauld’: A Dramatic Episode at the Sorbonne, 1641","authors":"Emma Gilby","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200446","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter deals with a university viva that took place in Paris on 25 July 1641. The thesis that was being examined hinged on a particular theological point: the question of whether the verb ‘to be’ may apply univocally to God and to humans. Antoine Arnauld had argued that it could indeed, and his student Charles Wallon de Beaupuis was now following his example. However, events soon took an unexpected turn when Arnauld changed his mind in situ. Here, I set the viva episode in the intellectual context of the summer of 1641 more broadly: a time when the protagonists in the viva episode were also responding to Descartes’s Meditations. Subsequent narrations of the viva episode by historians of Port-Royal prompt us to return to seventeenth-century ethical thinking on ‘générosité’ and ‘grandeur’.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"38 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48235662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Nicholas Hammond, J. Leigh","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2208651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2208651","url":null,"abstract":"It might seem counter-intuitive to honour Michael Moriarty, a scholar whose six major monographs add up to over 2000 pages of writing, by dedicating a series of all-too-brief essays to him. Yet, perhaps we can take inspiration from the skilful use of praeteritio used by Jean Racine, who, when faced with the task of praising Louis XIV during his first speech to the Académie française on 30 October 1678, declared: ‘Qui pouvait mieux nous aider à célébrer ce prodigieux nombre d’exploits dont la grandeur nous accable pour ainsi dire, et nous met dans l’impuissance de les exprimer ?’ So perhaps these short articles might indeed be the truest way of recognizing and paying respect to Moriarty’s prodigious and ground-breaking published output. Anybody who knows Michael Moriarty would of course recognize immediately the absurdity of comparing him to a vainglorious monarch, for he is a man of modesty, kindness and decency, someone who is far more likely to look forward to reading and learning from this collection of articles than to glory in the academic equivalent of a spotlight trained upon him. The frequency with which Moriarty’s scholarship plays a key role both in the articles that follow in this special number and in the work of so many researchers, graduates and undergraduates across the world testifies to the mark that he has left and continues to leave. From his seminal first book, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), to his latest work, the monumental study Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Moriarty manages on the one hand to present his argument cogently and persuasively for readers who have yet to encounter early modern French thought and on the other to invite readers who think they have seen it all before to re-evaluate the writings of the period from exciting new angles. To take his study of Pascal as one example, he is not content simply to place Pascal’s thought within the context of the seventeenth century, but he wishes also to question and examine its validity for modern readers. As he writes in the opening pages,","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45556984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘I have become all things to all men [and women] that I might by all means save some’ (I Corinthians 9:22, KJV). Theatricality and conversion in the poetry of Pierre Le Moyne","authors":"R. Maber","doi":"10.1080/20563035.2023.2200539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200539","url":null,"abstract":"The exceptionally diverse and extensive literary output of the Jesuit poet Pierre Le Moyne is full of apparent paradoxes and ambiguities which have always proved a challenge to commentators, from his own contemporaries to the present day. This article takes as its starting point the recent recovery of a detailed account of Le Moyne’s first known creation, a spectacular dramatic production put on by the Jesuit college in Reims, to consider a pervasive, but relatively unstudied, feature of his works: the poet’s frequent allusions to the theatre, and, beyond this, the relationship between his strikingly original imagination and the creative techniques of dramatists and actors. It is argued that these are crucial to the ways in which he sets out to engage his worldly readers, and to encourage a receptive response to the moral and spiritual ideals which he seeks to transmit.","PeriodicalId":40652,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern French Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"54 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47547639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}