This collection is dedicated to John D. Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia and a preeminent scholar of early modern France and Italy. Lyons's long and influential academic career has been instrumental in shaping generations of undergraduates, postgraduates and early career researchers through his teaching, advising, mentorship and critical reading. Bringing together original chapters from leading scholars in North America, Great Britain and France in the fields of medieval and early modern literature and culture, this volume will build upon the breadth and depth of Lyons's wide-ranging corpus that spans a remarkable array of genres, including philosophy, the novel, theatre and history. The studies are organized around the key themes of Lyons's research throughout his illustrious career and engage with authors ranging from Saint Augustine, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolo Machiavelli and Maria de Zayas to Francois Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Madeleine and Georges de Scudery, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Moliere, Jean Racine, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Voltaire.

The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and para-theatrical writings of the period from 1485 to 1640, French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory seeks to deepen and problematize our knowledge of texts, co-texts, and performances of drama from literary-historical, artistic, political, social, and religious perspectives. Moreover, many of the articles engage with contemporary theory and other disciplines to study this drama, including but not limited to psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and performance theory. The diversity of the essays in their methodologies and objects of study, none of which is privileged over any other, bespeaks the various types of drama and the numerous ways we can study them.

The performance of violence on the stage has played an integral role in French tragedy since its inception. Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy is the first book to tell this story. It traces and examines the ethical and poetic stakes of violence, as playwrights were experimenting with the newly discovered genre during decades of religious and civil war (c. 1550-1598). The study begins with an overview of the origins of French vernacular tragedy and the complex relationships between violence, performance, ethics, and poetics. The volume focuses on specific plays and analyzes biblical, mythological, historical, and politically topical tragedies-including the stories of Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Medea, the Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, the Roman general Regulus, and the assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1588-to show how the multifarious uses of violence on stage shed light on a range of pressing issues during that turbulent time, such as religion, gender, politics, and militantism.

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subsequent apparitions of ghosts that haunt the household unite “high� and “low� cultural traditions. This book questions the traditional separation between the highly honored genre of tragedy and the less respected and generally less well-known genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.