Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History

During the Renaissance, very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. The Palace of Secrets explores the tension between these two views by examining specific areas such as theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Examples are drawn from numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts but focus particularly on the polymath Beroalde de Verville, whose work graphically illustrates these two competing conceptions of knowledge, since he gradually abandoned encyclopedism. Hitherto Beroalde has been mainly known for the extraordinary and notorious Moyen de parvenir; this is the first detailed study of the whole range of his work, both fictional and learned. The book straddles literary and intellectual history, and indeed it demonstrates that the division between the two has little meaning in Renaissance terms. The intellectual conflicts which it explores have significance for the history of thought right up to the Enlightenment.

Explores the entwinement of early modern text, knowledge and wonder, and their connections in France A triple nexus of text, knowledge, and wonder permeated much literary, learned, and ceremonial culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. There were endless variations on the combination, often with two of the three elements predominating. This volume tracks some of those variations as they appeared in collections of natural wonders, pedagogical situations, a family, an alchemical romance, a carnival festivity, a learned society, and poetry. Key Features Content written in English and French. The contributors to this volume are leading specialists in early modern French studies, from France and the UK. Considers the development of natural wonders, monsters and mythical animals, alchemical symbols and concepts of friendship and rivalry.

The age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Erasmus, Luther, and Machiavelli produced in France too some of Europe's greatest ever literature and thought: Montaigne's Essays, Rabelais' comic fictions, Ronsard's poetry, Calvin's theology. These and numerous other extraordinary writings emerged from and contributed to cultural upheavals: the movement usually known as the Renaissance, which sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman culture for present-day purposes; religious reform, including the previously unthinkable rejection of Catholicism by many in the Reformation, culminating in decades of civil war in France; the French language's transformation into an instrument for advanced abstract thought.Neil Kenny here introduces this vibrant literature and thought via an apparent paradox. Most writers were profoundly concerned to improve life in the here-and-now - socially, politically, morally, spiritually. Yet they often tried to do so by making detours, in their writing, to other times and places: antiquity; heaven and hell; the hidden recesses of Nature, the cosmos, or the future; the remote location of an absent loved one; the newly 'discovered' Americas. The point was to show readers that the only way to live in the here-and-now was to connect it to larger realities - cosmic, spiritual, and historical.

Terence Cave's work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practiced in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The book's epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that culture's ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter.