The Gargantuan Polity

The Gargantuan Polity
Author: Michael Randall
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802098142

The Gargantuan Polity examines political, legal, theological, and literary texts in the late Middle Ages, to show how individuals were defined by contracts of mutual obligation, which allowed rulers to hold power due to approval of their subjects.

Montesquieu's Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics

Montesquieu's Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics
Author: Keegan Callanan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108552692

Snowflakes, a series of eight readers for students of classes 1 to 8, is meant primarily to inculcate in children a love for reading as well as appropriate reading skills. Just as each individual snowflake is unique, the content of the series is unique in terms of its literary linguistic and pedagogical merit. The selections include a wide range of stories, poems, prose pieces, plays and excerpts which have been collated from both classic and contemporary sources. Care has been to taken to ensure that they expose students to diverse genres and socio-cultural contexts.

French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510-1560

French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510-1560
Author: Pascale Barthe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317132661

Focusing on early Renaissance Franco-Ottoman relations, this book fills a gap in studies of Ottoman representations by early modern European powers by addressing the Franco-Ottoman bond. In French Encounters with the Ottomans, Pascale Barthe examines the birth of the Franco-Ottoman rapprochement and the enthusiasm with which, before the age of absolutism, French kings and their subjects pursued exchanges-real or imagined-with those they referred to as the 'Turks.' Barthe calls into question the existence of an Orientalist discourse in the Renaissance, and examines early cross-cultural relations through the lenses of sixteenth-century French literary and cultural production. Informed by insights from historians, literary scholars, and art historians from around the world, this study underscores and challenges long-standing dichotomies (Christians vs. Muslims, West vs. East) as well as reductive periodizations (Middle Ages vs. Renaissance) and compartmentalization of disciplines. Grounded in close readings, it includes discussions of cultural production, specifically visual representations of space and customs. Barthe showcases diplomatic envoys, courtly poets, 'bourgeois', prominent fiction writers, and chroniclers, who all engaged eagerly with the 'Turks' and developed a multiplicity of responses to the Ottomans before the latter became both fashionable and neutralized, and their representation fixed.

A Companion to François Rabelais

A Companion to François Rabelais
Author: Bernd Renner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 639
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004460233

Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.

Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Périgord

Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Périgord
Author: Steven G. Reinhardt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580465838

Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Périgord region in prerevolutionary France.

The Unbridled Tongue

The Unbridled Tongue
Author: Emily Butterworth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191639370

The Unbridled Tongue looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France in order to uncover what was specific about these practices in the period. Taking its cue from Erasmus's Lingua, in which both the subjective and political consequences of an idle and unbridled tongue are emphasised, the book investigates the impact of gossip and rumour on contemporary conceptions of identity and political engagement. Emily Butterworth discusses prescriptive literature on the tongue and theological discussions of Pentecost and prophecy, and then covers nearly a century in chapters focused on a single text: Rabelais's Tiers Livre, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, Ronsard's Discours des misères de ce temps, Montaigne's 'Des boyteux', Brantôme's Dames galantes and the anonymous Caquets de l'accouchée. In covering the 'long sixteenth century', the book is able to investigate the impact of the French Wars of Religion on perceptions of gossip and rumour, and place them in the context of an emerging public sphere of political critique and discussion, principally through the figure of the 'public voice' which, although it was associated with unruly utterance, was nevertheless a powerful rhetorical tool for the expression of grievances. The Cynic virtue of parrhesia, or free speech, is similarly ambivalent in many accounts, oscillating between bold truth-telling (liberté) and disordered babble (licence). Drawing on modern and pre-modern theories of the uses and function of gossip, the book argues that, despite this ambivalence in descriptions of the tongue, gossip and idle talk were finally excluded from the public sphere by being associated with the feminine and the irrational.

Agents without Empire

Agents without Empire
Author: Antónia Szabari
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1531506682

It is well known that Renaissance culture gave an empowering role to the individual and thereby to agency. But how does race factor into this culture of empowerment? Canonical French authors like Rabelais and Montaigne have been celebrated for their flexible worldviews and interest in the difference of non-French cultures both inside and outside of Europe. As a result, this period in French cultural history has come to be valued as an exceptional era of cultural opening toward others. Agents without Empire shows that such a celebration is, at the very least, problematic. Szabari argues that before the rise of the French colonial empire, medieval categories of race based on the redemption story were recast through accounts of the Ottoman Empire that were made accessible, in a sudden and unprecedented manner, to agents of the French crown. Spying performed by Frenchmen in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century permeated French culture in large part because those who spied also worked as knowledge producers, propagandists, and artists. The practice changed what it meant to be cultured and elite by creating new avenues of race- and gender-specific consumption for French and European men that affected all areas of sophisticated culture including literature, politics, prints, dressing, personal hygiene, and leisure. Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in whiteness studies, race theory, theories of agency and matter, and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.

Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue

Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue
Author: Jan Miernowski
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319322761

This book employs perspectives from continental philosophy, intellectual history, and literary and cultural studies to breach the divide between early modernist and modernist thinkers. It turns to early modern humanism in order to challenge late 20th-century thought and present-day posthumanism. This book addresses contemporary concerns such as the moral responsibility of the artist, the place of religious beliefs in our secular societies, legal rights extended to nonhuman species, the sense of ‘normality’ applied to the human body, the politics of migration, individual political freedom and international terrorism. It demonstrates how early modern humanism can bring new perspectives to postmodern antihumanism and even invite us to envision a humanism of the future.

Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought

Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought
Author: Daniel Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2016-02-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191062456

Popular sovereignty - the doctrine that the public powers of state originate in a concessive grant of power from "the people" - is the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory, placing full constitutional authority in the people at large, rather than in the hands of judges, kings, or a political elite. This book explores the intellectual origins of this influential doctrine and investigates its chief source in late medieval and early modern thought - the legal science of Roman law. Long regarded the principal source for modern legal reasoning, Roman law had a profound impact on the major architects of popular sovereignty such as François Hotman, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius. Adopting the juridical language of obligations, property, and personality as well as the classical model of the Roman constitution, these jurists crafted a uniform theory that located the right of sovereignty in the people at large as the legal owners of state authority. In recovering the origins of popular sovereignty, the book demonstrates the importance of the Roman law as a chief source of modern constitutional thought.