You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) was celebrated as one of the "seventy most famous women of all time" in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Montaigne, as well as his editor, Gournay was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time—The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes Gournay's last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises, The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.
Disputes, discord and reconciliation were fundamental parts of the fabric of communal living in early modern Europe. This edited volume presents essays on the cultural codes of conflict and its resolution in this period under three broad themes: peacemaking as practice; the nature of mediation and arbitration; and the role of criminal law in conflicts. Through an exploration of conflict and peacemaking, this volume provides innovative accounts of state formation, community and religion in the early modern period.
After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance and depictions of the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Realism and Role-Play draws on literature, social history, and affect theory in order to understand the way that figuration performed social positions.
This book is probably the first to explore a question that can crop up in everyday situations and that has a long history: in what tense should we refer to the dead? That question relates both to the recently deceased and also to those who died long ago, for example in antiquity. The book explores it through many kinds of texts, mainly in French but also in Latin, produced in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, including by celebrated authors(Rabelais, Montaigne). Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate something about posthumous presence (andabsence) that could not easily be communicated by other means? This is primarily a work of literary and cultural history, but it also draws on linguistics. It compares its early modern examples with modern French and English, asking whether changes in more recent beliefs in posthumous survival have led to different tense usage.
Tapping into selected works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, this book offers a series of philosophical meditations designed to retrieve and deploy a distinctively Erasmian manner of thinking - one that is capacious in its perception, agile in its judgments, and unsettling in its irony. In purpose, it takes a philosophical route, addressing perennial questions of self-knowledge - what we can know and how best to communicate what we take to be true, what we ought to do or how we should live, and what we might hope for or what would offer us fulfilment. In method, however, this work taps into the various strategies of irony at play in the works of Erasmus, looking for guidance in handling these age-old questions. What readers will find in Erasmus is a knack for playfully reversing appearances and realities, a penchant for pushing disturbing questions relentlessly to the limit, and a skill for juxtaposing oddly matched opposites. Again and again, Erasmus presses readers to rethink these fundamental questions with dexterity and nuance, ever ready to appreciate the surprising and unsettling upshot of ironic insight.
Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Moliere's famous comedy, L'Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice -- but perhaps not ...
Performative literary culture emerged as a set of practices that shaped production and distribution of learning in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, both in Latin and the vernacular. Performative literary culture encompasses the plays, songs, and poetry performed for live audiences in (semi-)public spaces and the organizations championing performative literature through meetings and events. These organizations included chambers of rhetoric, confraternities of the Puy, joyous companies, guilds of Meistersingers, the Consistory of Joyful Knowledge, academies, companies of the Basoche and Inns of Court, and the institutions or people organizing the Spanish justas. Written by a team...
In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued t...
The first volume of a major two-volume study centers on the fortunes of Michel de Montaigne's Essais in both the early-modern (1580-1725) and the modern period (1900-2000). This volume examines how the Essais made Montaigne a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his peers.
UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.