The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Warren Boutcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191066028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume one focuses on contexts from within Montaigne's own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume two focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book's significance in literary and intellectual history. Montaigne's is now usually understood to be the school of late humanism or of Pyrrhonian scepticism. This study argues that the school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. For the Essais were shaped by a battle that had intensified since the Reformation and that would continue through to the pre-Enlightenment period. It was a battle to regulate the educated individual's judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era. The study draws on new ways of approaching literary history through the history of the book and of reading. The Essais are treated as a mobile, transnational work that travelled from Bordeaux to Paris and beyond to markets in other countries from England and Switzerland, to Italy and the Low Countries. Close analysis of editions, paratexts, translations, and annotated copies is informed by a distinct concept of the social context of a text. The concept is derived from anthropologist Alfred Gell's notion of the 'art nexus': the specific types of actions and agency relations mediated by works of art understood as 'indexes' that give rise to inferences of particular kinds. Throughout the two volumes the focus is on the particular nexus in which a copy, an edition, an extract, is embedded, and on the way that nexus might be described by early-modern people.

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Warren Boutcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191066028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 565

Get Book Here

Book Description
This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume one focuses on contexts from within Montaigne's own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume two focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book's significance in literary and intellectual history. Montaigne's is now usually understood to be the school of late humanism or of Pyrrhonian scepticism. This study argues that the school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. For the Essais were shaped by a battle that had intensified since the Reformation and that would continue through to the pre-Enlightenment period. It was a battle to regulate the educated individual's judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era. The study draws on new ways of approaching literary history through the history of the book and of reading. The Essais are treated as a mobile, transnational work that travelled from Bordeaux to Paris and beyond to markets in other countries from England and Switzerland, to Italy and the Low Countries. Close analysis of editions, paratexts, translations, and annotated copies is informed by a distinct concept of the social context of a text. The concept is derived from anthropologist Alfred Gell's notion of the 'art nexus': the specific types of actions and agency relations mediated by works of art understood as 'indexes' that give rise to inferences of particular kinds. Throughout the two volumes the focus is on the particular nexus in which a copy, an edition, an extract, is embedded, and on the way that nexus might be described by early-modern people.

Signs of the Early Modern

Signs of the Early Modern PDF Author: David Lee Rubin
Publisher: Rookwood Press
ISBN: 9781886365025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700

Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700 PDF Author: Francesco Venturi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004396594
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ożarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

EMF Studies in Early Modern France

EMF Studies in Early Modern France PDF Author: David Lee Rubin
Publisher: Rookwood Press
ISBN: 9781886365186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This major collection of essays on 18th century French literature in relation to Enlightenment culture includes the subjects of medicine, the art of conversation, devotional writing, gastronomy, divorce, and the Revolution.

Modern Perspectives on the Early Modern

Modern Perspectives on the Early Modern PDF Author: Anne L. Birberick
Publisher: Rookwood Press
ISBN: 9781886365544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Essays show how 19th- and 20th-century artists (writers, film makers, etc.) as well as critics and historians have interpreted 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century French literature. Index. Full bibliographies.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: David Lee Rubin
Publisher: Rookwood Press
ISBN: 9781886365100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Five essays explore 18th-century Francophone utopias in Patot's Masse's Haircut, the schemes of two French exiles in the Netherlands, Rousseau's thought, and the sexual universe of Cercle Social writer Restif de la Bretonne. One contribution is in untranslated French (L'Icosameron de Casanova: Nat

Thuanus

Thuanus PDF Author: Ingrid De Smet
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600010719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The Parisian magistrate Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was a major figure in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) and their immediate aftermath. Best known for his magisterial History of his own times (covering 1546-1607), and his complementary Memoirs (covering 1553-1601), de Thou was a key political negotiator, a famous book-collector and an influential patron to scholars and writers, as well as a respected poet in his own right and a prolific correspondent. This is the first monograph on de Thou since Samuel Kinser's bibliographical study of 1966. In the course of five chapters, thematically arranged between a substantial introduction and a dramatic conclusion, Ingrid De Smet meticulously unpicks de Thou's strategies of self-fashioning and career enhancement as well as the conditions that led to his fall from grace. In doing so, this monograph not only rehabilitates de Thou as a creative (neo-Latin) writer of international allure, it also uncovers and contextualizes the complexities of de Thou's life, writings, and thought.

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Fabienne Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351151266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
By examining nearly sixty works, the author traces the prehistory of the French prose poem, demonstrating that the disquiet of some eighteenth-century writers with the Enlightenment gave rise to the genre nearly a century before it is habitually supposed to have existed. In the throes of momentous scientific, philosophical, and socioeconomic changes, Enlightenment authors turned to the past to revive sources such as Homer, the pastoral, Ossian, the Bible, and primitive eloquence, favoring music to construct alternatives to the world of reason. The result, the author argues, were prose poems, including F lon's Les Adventures de T maque, Montesquieu's Le Temple de Gnide, Rousseau's Le L te d'Ephraïm, Chateaubriand's Atala, as well as many lesser-known texts, most of which remain out of print. The author's treatment of Bible criticism and eighteenth-century religious reform movements reveal the often-neglected spiritual side of Enlightenment culture, and tracks its contribution to the period's reflection about language and poetic invention. The author includes in appendices four unusual texts adjudicating the merits of prose poems, making evidence of their controversial nature now accessible to readers.

Love Letters and the Romantic Novel during the Napoleonic Wars

Love Letters and the Romantic Novel during the Napoleonic Wars PDF Author: Sharon Worley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Love letters during the Napoleonic wars were largely framed by concepts of love which were promoted through novels and philosophy. The standard texts, so to speak, which were written by major authors who inherited this Enlightenment bearing, responded to the emerging concepts of love found in novels and philosophical essays. Love among this Napoleonic coterie is unique because it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the love letter and the romantic novel. Germaine de Staël, Juiette Récamier, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Lady Emma Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien Bonaparte, were the authors and recipients of some of the most passionate love letters of this period. They were also avid readers of the newly emerging genre of the romantic novel, and many of them were also authors of such works where they projected their personal romances onto the characterization of their fictional heroes and heroines. In addition, these authors had lived through the recent French Revolution and the Terror. Imprisoned during the Revolution, or branded as emigrés upon their return to Paris, their mature adult lives were spent in the shadows of the Napoleonic wars in which they shifted political loyalties as the specter of Napoleon’s powers grew from First Consul to Emperor of Europe. The looming threat of war ignited the depths of their passions and inspired their intellectual analysis of love, happiness and suicide. Their evolving concept of love was a romantic, all-consuming passion which gripped the lovers in fatal embraces. This book’s analysis of their love letters and romantic novels reveals the emerging political landscape of the period through extended metaphors of love and patriotism.

Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain

Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain PDF Author: Jill Shefrin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351941623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Posing a challenge to more traditional approaches to the history of education, this interdisciplinary collection examines the complex web of beliefs and methods by which culture was transmitted to young people in the long eighteenth century. Expanding the definition of education exposes the shaky ground on which some historical assumptions rest. For example, studying conventional pedagogical texts and practices used for girls' home education alongside evidence gleaned from women's diaries and letters suggests domestic settings were the loci for far more rigorous intellectual training than has previously been acknowledged. Contributors cast a wide net, engaging with debates between private and public education, the educational agenda of Hannah More, women schoolteachers, the role of diplomats in educating boys embarked on the Grand Tour, English Jesuit education, eighteenth-century print culture and education in Ireland, the role of the print trades in the use of teaching aids in early nineteenth-century infant school classrooms, and the rhetoric and reality of children's book use. Taken together, the essays are an inspiring foray into the rich variety of educational activities in Britain, the multitude of cultural and social contexts in which young people were educated, and the extent of the differences between principle and practice throughout the period.