The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance

The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance PDF Author: Katherine Crawford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.

The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance

The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance PDF Author: Katherine Crawford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.

The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance

The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance PDF Author: Katherine Crawford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521749503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
When the French invaded Italy in 1494, they were shocked by the frank sexuality expressed in Italian cities. By 1600, the French were widely considered to be the most highly sexualized nation in Christendom. What caused this transformation? This book examines how, as Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge rippled outward from Italy, the sexual landscape and French notions of masculinity, sexual agency, and procreation were fundamentally changed. Exploring the use of astrology, the infusion of Neoplatonism, the critique of Petrarchan love poetry, and the monarchy's sexual reputation, the book reveals that the French encountered conflicting ideas from abroad and from antiquity about the meanings and implications of sexual behavior. Intensely interested in cultural self-definition, humanists, poets, and political figures all contributed to the rapid alteration of sexual ideas to suit French cultural needs. The result was the vibrant sexual reputation that marks French culture to this day.

Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold

Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold PDF Author: Rebecca Zorach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226989372
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance. With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how, eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess. Throughout the book, abundance and excess flow in liquids-blood, milk, ink, and gold-that highlight the materiality of objects and the human body, and explore the value (and values) accorded to them. The arts of the lavish royal court at Fontainebleau and in urban centers are here explored in a vibrant tableau that illuminates our own contemporary relationship to excess and desire. From marvelous works by Francois Clouet to oversexed ornamental prints to Benvenuto Cellini's golden saltcellar fashioned for Francis I, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold covers an astounding range of subjects with precision and panache, producing the most lucid, well-rounded portrait of the cultural politics of the French Renaissance to date.

Taking Positions

Taking Positions PDF Author: Bette Talvacchia
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691086835
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"The book is generously illustrated and includes full translations of the infamous sonnets that Pietro Aretino wrote to accompany I modi. Exploring such issues as censorship, religious teachings about sex, and the influence of antique culture, Taking Positions is a major contribution to our understanding of the erotic in Renaissance culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing

Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing PDF Author: Floyd Gray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. He then moves from a close analysis of the rhetorical factor in the Querelle des femmes to consider ways in which writing, as a textual phenomenon, inscribes its own, sometimes ambiguous, meaning. Gray offers richly detailed readings of writing by Rabelais, Jean Flore, Montaigne, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet and Marie de Gournay among others, challenging the inherent anachronism of those forms of criticism that fail to take account of the rhetorical and cultural conditions of the period.

Rewriting the Renaissance

Rewriting the Renaissance PDF Author: Margaret W. Ferguson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226243146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Juxtaposing the insights of feminism with those of marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, this unique collection creates new common ground for women's studies and Renaissance studies. An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference. Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.

Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France

Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France PDF Author: Kathleen Wellman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses.

Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome

Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome PDF Author: Gary Ferguson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution's complex and contested history.

Homosexuality in French History and Culture

Homosexuality in French History and Culture PDF Author: Jeffrey Merrick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131799258X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirs Homosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism.

European Sexualities, 1400-1800

European Sexualities, 1400-1800 PDF Author: Katherine Crawford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521839580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
A pioneering survey of the social and cultural history of sexuality in early modern Europe.