Slander and satire were contentious practices in early seventeenth-century France. Seeking to wound, ridicule, destroy or reform, they occupied either side of a dangerous border zone between legitimate and illegitimate criticism. In the first monograph on the subject, Emily Butterworth explores the literary and historical contexts that enabled language to become poisoned and words to wound. The legal background, the many seventeenth-century treatises on slander, early modern linguistic theory, and the satirical, moral, and polemical works of FranCois BEroalde de Verville, Marie de Gournay and...
Slander and satire were contentious practices in early seventeenth-century France. Seeking to wound, ridicule, destroy or reform, they occupied either...
