This collection of essays is the first to combine in depth both theory and practice and to offer close readings of French texts written in dialogue form between 1547 and 1630. It seeks to determine why dialogue was used so widely in the Renaissance, who the dominant authorities were for mid and late sixteenth-century France, how the dialogue related to other forms of discourse, what the rules of the genre were, and whether dialogue should even be regarded as a genre. Contributors: Donald Gilman; Colette H. Winn; Joan A. Buhlmann; Cathy Yandell; Ann Rosalind Jones; Paula Sommers; Eva Kushner

How writers respond to a cosmology in evolution in the sixteenth century and how literature and space implicate each other are the guiding issues of this volume in which sixteen authors explore the topic of space in its multiform incarnations and representations. The volume's first section features the early modern exploration and codification of urban and rural spaces as well as maritime and industrial expanses: "Space and Territory: Geographies in Texts" thus contributes to a history of spatial consciousness. The construction of local, national, political, public, and private places is highlighted in "Space and Politics: Literary Geographies"; the contributors in this segment show how built forms as architectural or literary constructions and spatial orientation are intertwined. "Space and Gender: Geopoetical Approaches" traces the experience of gender as political, territorial, and communicative exploration; the essays in this division deal with social organization and its symbolic analysis, resulting in literary texts featuring what could be called psychological production theories. The development of ethical approaches adapted to or critical of colonial expansion is analyzed in "Space and Ethics: Geocritical Ventures"; here we encounter early modern globalization where locals, explorers, immigrants, adventurers, and intellectuals remake themselves in new places, engage in or meet with resistance, or attempt to rework local sociopolitical systems while reassessing those they are familiar with. "The Space of the Book, the Book as Space: Printing, Reading, Publishing" analyzes the tactile object of the book as an arena for commerce, politics, and authorial experimentation.

The earliest scientific studies of Jewish messianism were conducted by the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, particularly Heinrich Graetz, the first great Jewish historian of the Jews since Josephus. These researches were invaluable because they utilized primary sources in print and manuscript which had been previously unknown or used only in polemics. The Wissenschaft studies themselves, however, prove to be polemics as well on closer inspection. Among the goals of this group was to demonstrate that Judaism is a rational and logical faith whose legitimacy and historical progress deserve recognition by the nations of Europe. Mystical and messianic beliefs which might undermine this image were presented as aberrations or the result of corrosive foreign influences on the Jews. Gershom Scholem took upon himself the task of returning mysticism and messianism to their rightful central place in the panorama of Jewish thought. Jewish messianism was, for Scholem, a central theme in the philosophy and life of the Jews throughout their history, shaped anew by each generation to fit its specific hopes and needs. Scholem emphasized that this phenomenon was essentially independent of messianic or millenarian trends among other peoples. For example, in discussing messianism in the early modern era Scholem describes a trunk of influence on the Jewish psyche set off by the expulsion from Spain in 1492.

Re-evaluating the dialogue’s place in the literary landscape of the Italian and French Renaissance, Speaking of Love presents the love dialogue at the intersection of a revival of the form and the period’s philosophies of love and desire. Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d’Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and discourses of love to be imitated by the reader and rival lyric poetry in conveying amorous experience, validating dialogue as an authentic literary form rather than a tool of philosophical thinking.

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

Much of our modern understanding of medieval society and cultures comes through the stories people told and the way they told them. Storytelling was, for this period, not only entertainment; it was central to the law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. The essays in this volume raise and discuss a number of questions concerning the strategies, contexts and narratalogical features of medieval storytelling. They look particularly at who tells the story; the audience; how a story is told and performed; and the manuscript and social context for such tales. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College; Kathryn Duys is Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French, Montclair State University.

The essays in this groundbreaking collection stage conversations between the thought of the controversial feminist philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and premodern writers, ranging from Empedocles and Homer, to Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne. They explore both the pre-Enlightenment roots of Luce Irigaray's thought, and the impact that her writings have had on our understanding of ancient, medieval and Renaissance culture. Luce Irigaray has been a major figure in Anglo-American literary theory, philosophy and gender studies ever since her germinal works, Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, were published in English translation in 1985. This collection is the first sustained examination of Irigaray's crucial relationship to premodern discourses underpinning Western culture, and of the transformative effect she has had on scholars working in pre-Enlightenment periods. Like Irigaray herself, the essays work at the intersections of gender, theory, historicism and language. This collection offers powerful ways of understanding premodern texts through Irigaray's theories that allow us to imagine our past and present relationship to economics, science, psychoanalysis, gender, ethics and social communities in new ways.

Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women’s experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women’s agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women’s experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

During the French Wars of Religion, the nature and identity of politics was the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Exploring early modern French uses of the word 'politique' and the statesman who practised this art, this book investigates questions of language and of power over the course of a tumultuous century.

Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness. Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn Poitiers, where a siege of the city, vandalism, and desecration of churches fueled their political and religious commentary. Members of an elite literary circle that would inspire salon culture during the next century, the Dames des Roches addressed the issues of the day, including the ravages of religious civil wars, the weak monarchy, education for women, marriage and the family, violence against women, and the status of women intellectuals. Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, both mother and daughter were models of moral, political, and literary agency.