An Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought: Other Times, Other PlacesThe 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. |
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absence ancient Greek antiquity Antoine Héroet Aristotelian Aristotle astrology Bartas became Bellay Bèze Bible bien body Book Budé Calvin Calvinist Cartier Catherine Catholic century Christian chronicles Church Cicero claimed Clément Clément Marot cosmos culture D'Aubigné described divination elocutio Erasmus especially eternal ethics Étienne example external senses fiction France François Ier French Gargantua Geneva genre gentry God’s Guenelic Guillaume heaven Henri Henri II here-and-now humanism humanist imagined imitation Italian Jacques Jean judgement judicial astrology Labé language Latin Léry Louise Labé love poetry Marguerite de Navarre Marot Maurice Scève modern monarchy Montaigne Montaigne’s moral neo-Latin neo-Platonic one’s oneiromancy Pantagruel Paris Petrarchism philosophy Pierre places Platonism Pléiade poem poet poetic present prose Protestant pyrrhonism Rabelais readers Reformation Renaissance rhetoric rhétoriqueur Roches Roman Ronsard scepticism Scève scholasticism Sepmaine sixteenth sixteenth-century sonnets soul spirit studia humanitatis theology theory Thevet traditional tragedy Tragiques translation treatise Tupinambá vernacular Wars of Religion Whereas words writing wrote