Late Renaissance France Research Articles

The evidence of hearsay in criminal proceedings from Late Renaissance France

AbstractThis article argues that Renaissance legal culture provided a robust means of evaluating the epistemological status of rumour, informed by the Roman law of proof. In order to do so, the article explores the meaning of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings from late Renaissance France, focusing on a major series of interrogations for homicide in the Parlement of Paris. It contributes to legal history by demonstrating how the inquisitorial procedures employed by the Parlement’s magistrates exemplified the sophisticated Roman law of witness evidence concerning hearsay. And it contributes to social and cultural history by revealing how effectively people throughout the social hierarchy understood the significance of hearsay in all its forms, so that witnesses, the accused, and the magistrates leading their interrogations knew well how to manipulate hearsay evidence to achieve their ends in the courtroom. Ultimately, this approach reinforces the growing consensus among recent histories of communication concerning the continued primacy of oral culture in the new age of print, but it does so from a new perspective that emphasises the fundamental role that oral evidence played in creating legal knowledge.

Of masks and precariousness, or individuality in late Renaissance France. A change in the imagination of subjectivity at the end of the 16th century

Au cours du xvie siècle, les entrecroisements du masque et de la précarité avec les champs et formes de la théâtralité festive, alors en pleine mutation, provoquent l’émergence d’une (con)science de l’individualité moderne. Par l’analyse des images, cet article propose l’approche d’une « sociologie des transformations des comportements ». Elle permettra d’éclairer les (en)jeux sociaux et politiques par lesquels la précarité et ses champs (pauvreté, misère, instabilité) permirent la transposition sur le plan symbolique de tensions nées des apories de la religion chrétienne, consécutives à la Réforme. Les pratiques du « masquer » jouèrent un grand rôle, leur licence permettant la modification des normes de l’individuation et l’apparition de nouvelles formes d’individualisation, issues d’une externalisation des normes dans une esthétique vestimentaire construite en regard de la précarité. Entre enjeux du masquer et enjeux de la précarité, s’ouvrit, au sein de ces sociétés de l’image, l’espace d’une nouvelle subjectivité, dans la tentative de résolution de différends culturels et religieux.

"New Music" in Late Renaissance France

"New Music" in Late Renaissance France

Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France. By Jonathan Patterson.

Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France. By Jonathan Patterson.

Patterson, Jonathan.Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France

Patterson, Jonathan.<i>Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France</i>

Unresolved debates on usury and greed in late Renaissance France: Guillaume Bouchet and others

This article studies competing and incompatible views on usury (moneylending at interest) in France, on the threshold of modernity. The figure of the fraudulent, greedy usurer was frequently condemned across many kinds of writing in sixteenth‐century France. Nevertheless, the relationship between greed and usurious practices was much more complex than many writers would admit. Modern scholars have identified three prevailing attitudes to usury in Renaissance France: outright condemnation, reluctant tolerance and a more neutral appraisal of calculating interest on loans. Going beyond previous scholarship, this article shows how these attitudes could unusually coexist in the same text. A case study of Guillaume Bouchet's Les Serées (1584–98) – an important example of sixteenth‐century merchant literature – reveals a new, unresolved way of writing about usury and greed in late Renaissance France. Bouchet tackles the problematic subject of usury neither from a normative perspective (as did lawyers and theologians) nor from a purely pragmatic standpoint (as did the writers of merchant arithmetic manuals). Instead, Bouchet integrates elements of both normative and pragmatic discourse on usury within a wider critique of riches and their abuse during the turbulent Wars of Religion and concomitant inflationary crisis that afflicted France in the late sixteenth century.

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night by Timothy Chesters

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night by Timothy Chesters

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

:The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

:<i>The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France</i>

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (review)

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (review)

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France

Reviews of Books:The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France Margaret M. McGowan

Reviews of Books:The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France Margaret M. McGowan

The vision of Rome in late Renaissance France

The richness of Ancient Rome was an inspiration to writers, artists, scholars and architects in 16th-century France. This work explores the ways in which the perception of Rome as a physical and symbolic entity stimulated intellectual endeavour across the disciplines.

:Montaigne's Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority

Perhaps as old as writing itself, the metaphor of the book as child has depicted textuality as an only son conceived to represent its father uniformly and to assure the integrity of his name. Richard L Regosin demonstrates how Montaigne's Essais both departs from and challenges this conventional figure of textuality. He argues that Montaigne's writing is best described as a corpus of siblings with multiple faces and competing voices, a hybrid textuality inclined both to truth and dissimulation, to faithfulness and betrayal, to form and deformation. And he analyzes how this unruly, mixed brood also discloses a sexuality and gender dynamic in the Essais that is more conflicted than the traditional metaphor of literary paternity allows.Regosin challenges traditional critics by showing how the 'logic' of a faithful filial text is disrupted and how the writing self displaces the author's desire for mastery and totalization. He approaches the Essais from diverse critical and theoretical perspectives that provide new ground for understanding both Montaigne's complex textuality and the obtrusive reading that it simultaneously invites and resists. His analysis is informed by poststructuralist criticism, by reception theory, and by gender and feminist studies, yet at the same time he treats the Essais as a child of sixteenth-century Humanism and late Renaissance France. Regosin also examines Montaigne's self-proclaimed taste for Ovid and the role played by the seminal texts of self-representation and aesthetic conception (Narcissus and Pygmalion) and the myth of sexual metamorphosis (Iphis).