Seventeenth-Century France Research Articles

Elizabeth RAPLEY, The devotes: women and church in seventeenth-century France, McGill-Queens's University Press, Montreal 1990, 283 pp., 16 x 25,5.

Elizabeth RAPLEY, The devotes: women and church in seventeenth-century France, McGill-Queens's University Press, Montreal 1990, 283 pp., 16 x 25,5.

Ruling Women. Vol. 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France; vol. 2, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, by Derval Conroy

Ruling Women. Vol. 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France; vol. 2, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, by Derval Conroy

La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) by Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade

Reviewed by: La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) by Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade Esther Van Dyke Florence d'Artois et Anne Teulade, directeurs. La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) droz, 2017. 464 pp to explore the edges of a thing allows us to establish our understanding of its existence. This is the motivation for the contributing authors of La Tragédie et ses marges as they probe, question, and expand the edges of tragedy. The main intention of this book is to destabilize the definition of tragedy as it has historically been perceived in early modern Europe. As indicated in the introduction, the variety of approaches creates a cartography of the genre, exploring its uncharted margins and borders, thus questioning the traditional hierarchy between tragedy and comedy and placing tragedy into lively conversation with other historically "lesser" genres such as tragicomedy and the pastoral. Much in the vein of work by Paul Bénichou, Alain Viala, and John Lyons, this volume creates a scholarly perspective that shakes the rigidity that so often exemplifies the neoclassical tragedy of early modern Europe, with its rootedness in Aristotle's Poetics. As editors of and contributors to this volume, Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade use their backgrounds in Spanish and comparative literatures, respectively, to create a unique angle in the approach of the book, which includes a variety of scholars from a range of European universities. Almost all the contributing authors have this in common: they originate from or teach a different literature than their country of residence. Because of this cross-cultural lens, their interpretations of primary sources are rich and varied, covering a wide linguistic, academic, and literary perspective. The works explored in this book include selections from Spanish, Italian, German, British, and French literatures. However, it would have been useful to have representatives of non- European universities; there are many specialists from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, or other regions who could have contributed another angle to the complexities of rigidly defined tragedy. Nonetheless, the variety of [End Page 195] perspectives serves to create a cartography, mapping out how genre was defined through national literatures of similar eras. The biographical information on each author is limited (most likely due to the large number of contributors), but sufficient enough to enable further research for scholars looking to begin a preliminary study in the definition of genre in early modern European theater. The volume is separated into four main sections, dealing respectively with the subjects of theoretical and non-theoretical approaches, translations and imitations of ancient tragedy, hybridizations of genre, and confrontations between tragedy and its wider cultural context. These are subdivided into chapters, which in turn are each comprised of two to five articles. The first main section (chapters 1–2) provides an overview of theoretical, or academic, treatises versus a non-theoretical, or popular, definition of tragedy in early modern Europe. The articles in chapter 1, written by Florence d'Artois and Enrica Zanin, set the stage for how early modern tragedy was defined, examining its ethical, moral, or aesthetic purpose through the lens of various interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics in Italy and France. Zanin's article in particular examines the contested definition of tragedy in these different milieux. It is during this rebirth of the Poetics' critical authority that we begin to see the rigid crystallization of tragedy, resulting in the more ambiguous forms of theater (such as tragedies with a non-tragic end) being excised or suppressed from the category of tragedy. However, as Zanin's article reveals, there was often pushback (sometimes violent) that responded to this suppression. Chapter 2, with articles by François Lecercle and Lise Michel, juxtaposes the academic and popular perspective of tragedy. Both articles in this chapter look at definitions of genre: Lecercle's focuses on the ambiguity of the word comédie in seventeenth-century France, and Michel's examines the emergence of the spectator-as-critic to various kinds of tragedy. Lecercle's article in particular introduces two of the main...

Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century Spain and France. Nicole Reinhardt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xviii + 420 pp. $110.

Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century Spain and France. Nicole Reinhardt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xviii + 420 pp. $110.

Friendship and Rivalry in Science and Scholarship: Pierre-Daniel Huet and the Académies de Caen

An informed engagement in a wide variety of advanced intellectual pursuits was entirely normal in the early modern period; less predictable, though, were the crucial dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Uniquely in seventeenth-century France, Caen saw the foundation of two separate learned societies, the principal Académie de Caen and the smaller but distinct Académie de physique. The latter was also unique: inspired by the Royal Society of London and founded well before the Parisian Académie des sciences, it gained royal recognition and finance in 1668 before failing soon after 1672. In this essay, these remarkable events are reconsidered in the light of the individuals involved, especially the dominant personality of the strong-minded polymath Pierre-Daniel Huet, and their relationships. Based on primary documents that have been unstudied or misinterpreted, it serves as a case-study of the complex ways in which intellectual life in France operated in practice during the later seventeenth century.

How Do I Know Thee? Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France by Richard E. Goodkin

How Do I Know Thee? Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France by Richard E. Goodkin

Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy, 1640–1665. By Alistair Malcolm. Oxford University Press. 2017. xiii + 305pp. £65.00.Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth‐Century France and Spain. By Nicole Reinhardt. Oxford University Press. 2016. xviii + 419pp. £75.00.

HistoryVolume 102, Issue 352 p. 692-695 Reviews and Short Notices Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy, 1640–1665. By Alistair Malcolm. Oxford University Press. 2017. xiii + 305pp. £65.00. Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century France and Spain. By Nicole Reinhardt. Oxford University Press. 2016. xviii + 419pp. £75.00. JACQUELINE ROSE, JACQUELINE ROSE University of St AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author JACQUELINE ROSE, JACQUELINE ROSE University of St AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 October 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12483Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume102, Issue352October 2017Pages 692-695 RelatedInformation

“Mon cher ami”: Friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

Molière’s ideological position in regard to the nobility and bourgeoisie of his era is a hotly contested subject. This article contributes to this ongoing debate by offering a reading of friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. In particular, it analyses the relationship between the bourgeois protagonist, Monsieur Jourdain, and the count Dorante. It seeks to understand this relationship in terms of friendship by referring to the influential philosophical construction of friendship proposed by Cicero in Laelius de amicitia. It argues that both characters fall short of the conditions required for such a friendship, leaving them equally open to criticism. While there appears to be weightier judgment reserved for Dorante’s conduct, this is problematized by considering the cultural phenomenon of honnêteté in seventeenth-century France, which complicates the Ciceronian conception of friendship. The analysis suggests the need for a wider reading of Molière’s works to further explore this socio-cultural tension.

The Modal Equivalence Rules of the Port-Royal Logic

The Port-Royal Logic includes a brief discussion of modal propositions, containing several mnemonic devices for rules of equivalence governing the possibility, necessity, impossibility, and contingency of propositions. When the mnemonics are decoded, it can be seen that these rules treat possibility and contingency as formally equivalent modes. The aim of this paper is twofold: to show that this identification of possibility and contingency follows from the Logic’s formal treatment of those modes; and to show that such a treatment of these modes conflicts with claims the authors make in other contexts. In particular, the equivalence of possibility and contingency conflicts with the Cartesian principle that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceivable is possible—a principle that Arnauld and Nicole explicitly endorse elsewhere in the Logic. Why, then, would the authors adopt such equivalence rules? The paper concludes with a discussion of the historical precedents for these rules: they were a standard feature of Scholastic logic textbooks in seventeenth century France. It is likely that Arnauld and Nicole simply reproduced the rules for this reason, without recognizing that they were a poor fit for a Cartesian logic textbook like the Port-Royal Logic.

Attacking the Monarchy’s Sacrality in Late Seventeenth-Century France: The Underground Literature against Louis XIV, Jansenism and the Dauphin’s Court Faction

Attacking the Monarchy’s Sacrality in Late Seventeenth-Century France: The Underground Literature against Louis XIV, Jansenism and the Dauphin’s Court Faction

Les Guerrières de Dieu in the French Ursuline Missionary Archives

Marie de l’Incarnation’s letters and mission reports advanced a particular ideotype of the Ursuline missionary as “warrior of God” and were received and disseminated as exempla in several seventeenth-century French religious texts. One of these was an anthology entitled La Gloire de Ste. Ursule (The Glory of St. Ursula) (1656), a collection of summaries of French Ursuline spiritual biographies, including those from New France, authored by an unknown Jesuit. Like other biographical texts on the continent, La Gloire promoted a revised narrative of the Ursuline lineage from contemplatives in action to “guerrières de Dieu (warriors of God)”: saintly warriors armed with heroic virtues in their combined mission of interior contemplation and active apostolate at the frontiers of local, national, and Atlantic catholicity. According to La Gloire, these femmes fortes, Amazons, Canadoises, and spiritual warriors were both mystics devoted to their interior spiritual battles and monastic discipline and christianizing and civilizing teachers, preachers, missionaries and defenders of a reformed, united, transnational Catholicism, as counterparts to their Jesuit associates. This article reveals how narratives created or revised in the French Atlantic World were received and disseminated for religio-political purposes on the continent. It illuminates the communication network between metropole and periphery and demonstrates how narratives from New France functioned in the historical context of mid-to-late seventeenth-century France.

Ruling Women. Vol. 1. Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France. Vol. 2. Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama. Derval Conroy.

<i><i>Ruling Women</i>. Vol. 1. <i>Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France</i>. Vol. 2. <i>Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama</i></i>. Derval Conroy.

Review of John S. Powell. 2000. Music and Theatre in France, 1600-1680 . Oxford: Oxford University Press

The seventeenth century in France, an era in which French dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development, has inspired tomes of writing, both in French and in English, on the literature and theater of the period. But despite the importance of music and dance in this time, and particularly despite their prominence in the theater, there remain relatively few books available to the English reader on the subject. Major English monographs on the music are few and can be listed easily: James R. Anthony’S comprehensive French Barqoue Music (1978), Robert Isherwood’s Music in the Service of the King (1973), Louis Auld’s The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin (1986), Norman Demuth’s French Opera (1963), and Caroline Wood’s Music and Drama in the Tragedie en musique, 1673-1715 (1996). Scholars have recently contributed to several significant collections of essays, and a growing number of tools for research and critical editions have been published, but few book-length works serve the English reader. John S. Powell’s Music and Theatre in France, 1600-1680, the most recent installment of Oxford’s Monographs on Music, presents a significant new contribution to this small bibliography. Powell’s impressive 582-page book, which addresses the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama during the period, offers the first major work in English to thoroughly investigate these rich and momentous topics, all of which contributed significantly to the development of French opera.

How Do I Know Thee? Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France

How Do I Know Thee? Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France

Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique: querelles, disputes et controverses au siècle des Lumières par by Ourida Mostefai

Reviews 243 literature is highly suggestive. However, her shifts between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries can lead to confusion and, as in many books based on French theses, her exhaustive research sometimes overshadows her conclusions. More foregrounding of the basic lines of argument and an expanded conclusion would have been helpful. Nevertheless, this book repays readers’attention, demonstrating that the interactions between book and pulpit can shed new light both on seventeenth-century France and on the larger literary field. Dartmouth College Kathleen Wine Mostefai, Ourida. Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique: querelles, disputes et controverses au siècle des Lumières. Leiden: Brill, 2015. ISBN 978-90-030862-6. Pp. 202. 60 a. Mostefai’s book is a clear and enlightening study of Rousseau’s lifelong career as a polemicist. She analyzes the deliberately polemical nature of Rousseau’s writings and personal life. She uses Kant’s later definition of the categories of polemics: dispute, conflict, and quarrel. The first is a disagreement based on general metaphysical principles, the second is more narrowly ideological, while the third is a more personal confrontation. She emphasizes the idea that in Rousseau’s conflicts with contemporary thinkers and writers, as well as religious and political authorities, it is impossible to separate the different strands of the Kantian categories since they constantly overlap. In her study of Rousseau’s works and the controversies they provoked, she follows a chronological progression from the first Discours to the Confessions. She employs this schema in time as a frame for her studies of Rousseau’s confrontations with Diderot and other former associates among the philosophes, as well as Voltaire, Malesherbes, the Archbishop of Paris, and David Hume. What emerges is an awareness of the brilliant and, to his contemporaries, astounding success of Rousseau’s published works. One masterpiece after another flowed from his pen, and this succession of triumphs aroused a great deal of resentment and jealousy. The often petty and nasty persecutions unleashed by Voltaire against someone he had once looked condescendingly upon as a disciple were largely inspired by such envy toward another writer whose fame was eclipsing his own. Another aspect of Rousseau’s genius that is brought to light is his sagacity in responding to his critics. Mostefai plays down the accusation of paranoia commonly directed against Rousseau. Instead she demonstrates the rational control and logic he consistently displayed, perhaps most eloquently in his published Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, the French prelate who had condemned Émile as a pernicious work of impiety. She also points out Rousseau’s clever restraint in not responding to the public attacks made against him by fellow intellectual Hume. The most perennial criticism against Rousseau was the alleged inconsistency between the philosophy expounded in his works and his personal existence. His critics drew attention to the contradiction they saw between his life in society and his preaching of a return to nature and decrial of the corruption of modern civilization. They accused him of adopting a bogus persona before the public in an insincere attempt to reconcile his life with his ideas. Rousseau’s affirmation of the continuity between his professed ideals and his way of living is a running theme in his self-apologias. In the final two chapters, Mostefai studies the iconography of Rousseau during the eighteenth century and the differing interpretations of his legacy during the French Revolution. She analyzes the dual portraits of Rousseau and Hume painted by the Scottish artist Allan Ramsay. She thinks that the one of Rousseau, in his Armenian costume, slanderously presents him as an antisocial misanthrope while that of Hume portrays him as an optimistic contributor to the progress of human society. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Nollez, Juliette. Rhétorique des Mémoires du duc de Saint-Simon. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3140-1. Pp. 656. 69 a. Saint-Simon’s energetic, idiosyncratic style has long interested literary critics, and thus Nollez explores issues that have been addressed elsewhere, most recently by Delphine de Garidel, Guy Rooryck, and Isabelle Rouffiange-Darotchetche. Equipped with a meticulous array of rhetorical and linguistic terms that occasionally get in the way of clarity, Nollez pursues her study...

Ruling Women, Volume 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France. Derval Conroy. Queenship and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xii + 230 pp. $100. - Ruling Women, Volume 2: Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama. Derval Conroy. Queenship and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x + 214 pp. $100.

Ruling Women, Volume 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France. Derval Conroy. Queenship and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xii + 230 pp. $100. - Ruling Women, Volume 2: Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama. Derval Conroy. Queenship and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x + 214 pp. $100.

Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe by Kate van Orden

Reviewed by: Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe by Kate van Orden Huub van der Linden Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe. By Kate van Orden. (New Cultural History of Music.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. [xviii, 320 p. ISBN: 978-0-199-36064-2. $55.] Materialities—a title drawn from a phrase by Fernand Braudel—combines book-history and the history of learning to take a fresh look at the sixteenth-century French chanson. The book consists of seven chapters, divided between two parts on, respectively, 'a material history of the chanson' (chapters 1–3) and 'Learning to read' (chapters 4–7). Kate van Orden centres the first part of the book around the chanson, perhaps the central musical genre in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, and beloved in much of the rest of Europe as well. Rather than focusing on a specific composer or printer (approaches that would have been the obvious choices until not so long ago), she takes a more 'fuzzy' but eventually more fruitful approach, in an effort to write 'a cultural history geared to the consumption end of the producer-consumer equation' (p. 28). The first two chapters explore the format, circulation, and preservation of chanson and motet publications. The very nature of the partbook format of publication already sets it apart from almost all other types of print and has implications about their use, and although we habitually speak of 'reading music', the literacy that musical partbooks require(d) is of a particular kind, 'as close to numbers, calendars, horoscopes, and maps as it is to letters' (p. 7). As material that, just like modern sheet music, is meant to be used, its survival rates are particularly poor. Van Orden shows how the commercial underpinnings and profitability, or lack thereof, of certain genres influenced publications and their survival, including how the form and format of the editions inform us about their purpose and audience. Copies that do survive often do so bound as part of tract-volumes together with other editions. By analysing surviving sales records and prices, different kinds of early bindings (and what they imply about the status and use of its contents for that particular owner), this part of the book provides an overview of what is nonetheless knowable. The third chapter, on 'early collectors and modern libraries', goes into the issue of the survival of chanson editions in more detail. Owning books was still more the exception than the rule, as Van Orden points out: even wealthy or educated men (merchants and priests) 'often did not own any books at all' (p. 70). She draws attention to the fact that 'most of the printed music books we work with today survive thanks to a very limited number of collectors' (p. 68). The direct lines that connect Renaissance bibliophiles to major European libraries were known before, but Van Orden lays out the evidence more systematically and in more detail than has been done so far for this repertoire, and, what is more important, she underlines the important consequences of this skewed survival for our view of the music, its use, and any 'averages' and [End Page 319] generalisations we may be tempted to construct. She rightly points out, for example, how arguments about whether the printed partbooks themselves rather than manuscript copies from them were used in performance, are shaped by the surviving 'clean' copies of those partbooks, which are precisely the ones that are not representative of how the lost ninety-nine percent was probably used: 'messy, visibly used music books stand to tell us most about music-making in the sixteenth century, but they are few in number' (p. 103). She ends chapter 3 with examples of exchange across a border that nowadays still often separates printed music (i.e., printed notes) from printed poetry (that could be sung to familiar tunes and chansons), an exchange, as she underlines, that went in both directions: music prints were at times pillaged for the verse they contained. This sets up the argument for the second part of the book on 'learning to read'. This second part, of which...

Memorializing the Wars of Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century French Picture Galleries: Protestants and Catholics Painting the Contested Past

AbstractThis article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.

Ruling Women, i: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France; ii: Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama . By Derval Conroy

<i>Ruling Women, i: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France; ii: Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama</i> . By Derval Conroy

Dream and Sensory Illusions in Seventeenth-century France

What does the apparently simple phrase “sensorial illusion” mean in the case of dreams? What forms did the century of Calderon, Shakespeare and Descartes give to this illusion ? This essay offers a typology of the kinds of relations between dreams and sensory information that can be derived from the most widely-held conceptions in seventeenth century theoretical texts and literature. I will limit myself to four distinct cases : 1) the mirror relationship of reversibility between waking and dreaming, a sceptical motif which is powerfully illustrated in the history of philosophy by what has come to be known as « the argument of the dream »; this argument allows for a paradigmatic shift of all the sensations felt waking into a potential dream, and thus a shift from a feeling that « all is true » to « all is illusion ». 2) The second case deals, on the contrary, with a belief that there is a partial continuity between waking and dreaming, through the transference of the sensorial information garnered by the passions into the dream. This can be illustrated with the poet Gombauld, a member of the Academie francaise, who offers with L’Endimion (1624) an original interpretation of the myth of Endymion, the « perpetual sleeper » who derives from this continuity a lesson in the intrinsically imaginary nature of love. 3) The third case is again about a movement of transference, this time between daytime sensations marked by distortions induced by sensorial stimuli and night-time sensations through which the latter stimuli are amplified and « translated » into oneiric images. This hypothesis, first put forth by Aristotle, was repeatedly taken up when dealing with the issue of the integration of external sensations and the transformations of internal impressions. 4) The fourth one is the particular case of what the seventeenth century considers as « the active dreamer », or, under a coinage new in French in the seventeenth century, in English in the eighteenth century, the « somnabulist », who allows the observer to attend, as it were, an illusion of the dream projected outward and made visible through the somnambulist’s actions. This case will be illustrated by an anecdote retold by Bonaventure d’Argonne at the end of the century.