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This volume breaks new ground in the exploration of Anglo-Italian cultural relations: it presents analyses of a wide range of early modern Italian texts adapted into contemporary English culture, often through intermediary French translations. When transposed into English, their Italian origin was frequently categorized as marvellous and consequently censured because of its strangeness: thus, English translators often gave their public a moralized and tamed version of Italy’s uniqueness. This volume’s contributors show that an effective way of moralizing Italian custom was to exoticize its origins, in order to protect the English public from an Italianate influence. This ubiquitous moralization is visible in the evolution of the concept of tragedy, and in the overtly educational aim acquired by the Italian novella, adapted for an allegedly female audience. Through the analysis of various literary genres (novella, epic poem, play, essay), the volume focuses on the mechanisms of appropriation and rejection of Italian culture through imported topoi and narremes.
This wide-ranging collection of essays, written by leading specialists, furnishes previously unpublished evidence of France's role and importance in the early modern English literary and dramatic fields. Its chapter-length introduction offers an up-to-date critical presentation of the issues involved: representation, cultural identity, the construction of otherness, Frenchness, and the social and cultural dynamics of theater. The essays in the five sections of the book continue the debate with a series of in-depth studies touching on important critical themes such as intertextuality; old and new historicisms; language, semiotics, and nationhood; imagined geographies; and stereotypes and social satire. The book will appeal to students and specialists of Renaissance literature, to scholars working on the construction of national identity and will be required reading for anyone interested in cultural exchange or comparative literature. Jean-Christophe Mayer is a senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
At a time when the French monarchy traced its origins back to ancient Troy, Homeric epic was fated to play a significant political role. Homer came to Renaissance France packaged with an ancient interpretive tradition that made him an authority on all matters but also distinctly separate from Virgil and the Aeneid, rival Italy's foundational myth. Thus, once French humanists learned to read Homer in Greek, they quickly began putting him in the service of their king in order to teach him prudence and amplify his authority. Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France provides a stimulating perspective on how Homeric authority went from being used by humanists in the role of royal...
Bawdy satirical plays—many starring law clerks and seminarians—savaged corrupt officials and royal policies in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France. The Church and the royal court tolerated—and even commissioned—such performances, the audiences for which included men and women from every social class. From the mid-sixteenth century, however, local authorities began to temper and in some cases ban such performances. Sara Beam, in revealing how theater and politics were intimately intertwined, shows how the topics we joke about in public reflect and shape larger religious and political developments. For Beam, the eclipse of the vital tradition of satirical farce in late medieval and...
In this 1969 text Mrs Jondorf studies Robert Garnier as a sixteenth-century writer, attuned to the thought and art of his own time.
In The Lily and the Thistle, William Calin argues for a reconsideration of the French impact on medieval and renaissance Scottish literature. Calin proposes that much of traditional, medieval, and early modern Scottish culture, thought to be native to Scotland or primarily from England, is in fact strikingly international and European. By situating Scottish works in a broad intertextual context, Calin reveals which French genres and modes were most popular in Scotland and why. The Lily and the Thistle provides appraisals of medieval narrative texts in the high courtly mode (equivalent to the French dits amoureux); comic, didactic, and satirical texts; and Scots romance. Special attention is accorded to texts composed originally in French such as the Arthurian Roman de Fergus, as well as to the lyrics of Mary Queen of Scots and little known writers from the French and Scottish canons. By considering both medieval and renaissance works, Calin is able to observe shifts in taste and French influence over the centuries.
This 1983 book is a comprehensive study of the French sacred theatre at the crucial transition from medieval to modern conception of theatre.
"The French vision of Rome was initially determined by travel journals, guide books and a rapidly developing trade in antiquities. Against this background, Margaret McGowan examines work by writers such as Du Bellay, Grevin, Montaigne and Garnier, and by architects and artists such as Philibert de L'Orme and Jean Cousin, showing how they drew upon classical ruins and reconstructions not only to re-enact past meanings and achievements but also, more dynamically, to interpret the present. She explains how Renaissance Rome, enhanced by the presence of so many signs of ancient grandeur, provided a fertile source of artistic creativity. Study of the fragments of the past tempted writers to an imaginative reconstruction of whole forms, while the new structures they created in France revealed the artistic potency of the incomplete and the fragmentary.
This is the first book in more than thirty years on the playwright who is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. In Lukas Erne's book, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and criticaltreatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to whatemerges in this study for the first time as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.
This book focuses on the public life of the ancien regime over the course of more than 300 years, from the late fifteenth century to the French Revolution. Not merely a narrative of that crowded history, it offers both a reconstruction and an analysis of a variety of religious and cultural movements, from the Renaissance and the Wars of Religion to the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, within the social and political context of Toulouse, a regional capital and a city with a strong local tradition. Professor Schneider takes up a wide range of early modern topics: popular culture, religious riots, municipal government, lay piety, and spiritual kinship, and he also treats learned acade...