Castara's Smiles... Sabrin's Tears: Nature and Setting in Renaissance River Poems

Abstract

as Ronsard often did, or east to Italy, as Montaigne did, you would not go very far before encountering a river, spring, or fountain. France is a well-watered nation, and the landscape is made both beautiful and fruitful, pleasing and profitable, by her rivers, as the seventeenthcentury travel writer, Robert Johnson, states in his book, The Travellers Breviat: there is nothing in France more worthie the noting then the number and pleasure of navigable rivers.' Virtually the same thing could be (and was) said about every national landscape in Europe; such descriptive topographical propaganda poured from the presses across Europe from the early sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. With rare exception the rivers are the natural features praised most for their beauty and utility; often they not only receive special attention from the authors but are also used narratively to shape the description of the landscape-to order and control the prose no less than the topography.