Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France. This book examines the reasons for their popularity and analyzes the way in which metaphors of the building were used by writers as a tools of persuasion. One such writer was Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515) who used architectural metaphor both to praise his patrons and to advertise his own talents, while drawing on and transforming a tradition of writing popularized by his rhetoriqueur predecessors.
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This collection of essays by ten leading British and French Renaissance specialists explores, for the first time, differing conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France. Four essays concentrate on problems of definition in ideological, chronological, geographical and linguistic terms; a further three address cultural exchange and political collaboration (and, inevitably, conflict) between France and England at the time of the Wars of Religion; the final three contributions focus on the construction of a European identity in the early modern period that defines itself in contrast to a...