Ronsard's Eutrapelian Gaillardise

Thanks in no small measure to the sixteenth-century French poet laureate Pierre de Ronsard, the adjective "gaillard" and its derivatives ("gaillardise" and "gaillardement") emerged to join the most semantically loaded and etymologically enigmatic words of the early modern French language. To the various meanings traceable to the term's Gallo-Roman and Celtic origins and faithfully recorded in the near-contemporary dictionaries, the Pléiade leader adds the ideas of nimble-wittedness, civility, and playfulness inspired by the Aristotelian moral concept of "eutrapelia." The present study not only exposes previously undetected yet copious textual evidence for this association, but it also reveals how Ronsard's eutrapelia-enhanced gaillardise shapes the rhetorical strategies at work in his polemical poetry and, further, contributes to his career-long ambition to bring definition to the "French" identity

The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature (Review)

This article is a review of the book The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature by Eric Macphail

Tyards Graphic Metamorphoses: Figuring the Semiosic Drift in the Douze Fables de fleuves ou fontaines

Pontus de Tyard, a lesser-known member of the Pleiade poets of mid-sixteenth-century France, was deeply influenced by the concerns of his comrades and contemporaries about the elemental remoteness of all "reality" and the resulting "semiosic drift" undermining any attempt to denote it. He expresses this preoccupation during the mid 1550s, in the Douze Fables de fleuves ou fontaines, his long underrated collection of twelve mythological fables, each accompanied by directions for a fable-based painting and an explanatory sonnet. Like the author's more highly regarded Discours du temps from the same years, the Douze Fables registers traces of not only the "strong" hermeneutic paradigm of the hermetic Neoplatonic tradition, but also the anxiety-ridden mannerist aesthetic of the period

Review of Le Jardin et la nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance, by Danièle Duport

This article is a review of Le Jardin et la nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance by Danièle Duport

Françoise Joukovsky. Le Bel objet: les paradis artificiels de la Pléiade.

This article is a book review of Le Bel objet: les paradis artificiels de la Pléiade by Françoise Joukovsky

Review of Le Vif du sens: Corps et poésie selon Maurice Scève, by Thomas Hunkeler

This article is a review of the book Le Vif du sens”: Corps et poésie selon Maurice Scève by Thomas Hunkeler

Review of Jean Tagaut. Les Odes à Pasithée, ed. Franco Giacone

This article is a review of Odes à Pasithée by Jean Tagaut and edited by Franco Giacone