This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of the different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. Early modern reading of the "Book of Nature" comprised, among others, the description of species in the literary tradition of antiquity, as well as empirical observations, vivisection, and modern eyewitness accounts; the "translation" of zoological species into visual art for devotion, prayer, and religious education, but also scientific and scholarly curiosity; theoretical, philosophical, and theological thinking regarding God's creation, the Flood, and the...

Since its invention by Andrea Alciato, the emblem is inextricably connected to the natural world. Alciato and his followers drew massively their inspiration from it. For their information about nature, the emblem authors were greatly indebted to ancient natural history, the medieval bestiaries, and the 15th- and 16th-century proto-emblematics, especially the imprese. The natural world became the main topic of, for instance, Camerarius’s botanical and zoological emblem books, and also of the ‘applied’ emblematics in drawings and decorative arts. Animal emblems are frequently quoted by...

Jeux de mots célèbre le pouvoir créateur des jeux de langage dans la littérature de Rabelais à Richard Millet. Calembour, mot-valise, bon mot, néologisme, mot-fétiche : ce volume collectif explore la productivité des mots en prose et en poésie. Jeux de mots celebrates the creative power of wordplay from Rabelais to present times. Puns, portmanteaus, ‘bon mots’, neologisms, fetish-words: this collective volume explores the productivity of words in prose and poetry.

Natural History in Early Modern France offers a longue durée account of recurring poetic structures of the genre through case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the eve of the nineteenth century. These case studies reveal the lasting epistemic importance of bookish knowledge and commonplacing in the natural-historical description from Belon to Buffon. They also highlight the French reception of Baconianism. Natural History in Early Modern France makes a case for the literary status of the genre by attending to the permanence of its 'Plinian' features, such as wonders. Natural...

For this bilingual (English-French) anthology of early modern fictitious catalogues, selections were made from a multitude of texts, from the genre’s beginnings (Rabelais’s satirical catalogue of the Library of St.-Victor (1532)) to its French and Dutch specimens from around 1700. In thirteen chapters, written by specialists in the field, diverse texts containing fictitious booklists are presented and contextualized. Several of these texts are well known (by authors such as Fischart, Doni, and Le Noble), others – undeservedly – are less known, or even unrecorded. The anthology is...

The sixteenth-century French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Guillaume Du Bartas enjoyed a wide, immediate and long-lasting, but varied and mixed reception throughout early modern Europe. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe is the first book-length volume to explore the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other. It takes into account the great variety of their readerships, including translators, imitating poets, poetical theorists, illustrators and painters, both male and female (Marie de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet), some of them illustrious (Tasso,...

Après le nombre impressionnant d'études depuis les années cinquante consacrées à la poésie de Francis Ponge, la parution récente de l’oeuvre du poète en Pléiade marque une étape décisive de la critique pongienne. Pourtant, tout n'est pas encore dit sur Ponge.
La présente étude veut combler quelques lacunes en utilisant certaines approches méthodologiques pour l'analyse minutieuse de plusieurs textes, afin de mettre en lumière des aspects essentiels de l'oeuvre pongienne. Notre microlecture interprétative de huit textes, étayée par des concepts théoriques provenant de...