Metalinguistic Strategies in Early Modern Language Controversies

All over early modern Europe, philologists and grammarians expressed patriotic pride in their native vernaculars and traced impressive derivations from prestigious ancient languages. While Hebrew generally held pride of place, claims of the greatest antiquity and prestige were also made for the Celtic and Germanic languages, and elaborate theories constructed to justify them. In all of this, rhetorical strategies were employed: heavily loaded language was used when writing about languages themselves, to weaponise them as instruments of national prestige and sneer at inferior rivals. After discussing the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theorists, this article focuses on the claims made for the unique, unchangeable superiority of French, before concluding with an extended consideration of the work of Gilles Ménage, the most distinguished linguistic scholar of the age, who is unique in eschewing such emotive terms

‘« Les hommes inspirés ont droit d’aller par tout » : esthétique de la « poésie morale » chez Pierre Le Moyne’

La poésie fortement distinctive de Pierre Le Moyne s’inspire d’un complexe de convictions religieuses, morales et esthétiques, qu’il expose dans ses écrits théoriques et qu’il illustre dans ses vers et dans ses devises. Les intentions didactiques et moralisantes, omniprésentes dans tout son œuvre, sont inextricablement liées à son idéal d’un « feu poétique » divin, qui s’exprime par moyen de la « hardiesse » du poète, de la richesse des images, et par la vigueur imaginative de son inspiration

‘« Sans estre bien malheureux, on ne peut estre qu’un Héros [ou : une Héroïne] fort médiocre »: les femmes fortes du Père Le Moyne et l’idéal de l’héroïsme dans la souffrance’

Cet article trace l’évolution de l’idéal de l’héroïsme dans l’œuvre poétique et théorique de Le Moyne. Pour Le Moyne, l’héroïsme n’a pas de sexe. Les femmes partagent également avec les hommes la capacité de l’héroïsme actif et martial ; mais, plus important encore, l’héroïsme passif du courage dans l’adversité, généralement considéré comme la vertu caractéristique des femmes, est non seulement proposé comme l’idéal masculin autant que féminin, mais présenté explicitement comme supérieur à l’autre

‘Guiding Light: the early modern lighthouse as image and emblem’

What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole ‘family’ of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds

‘I have become all things to all men [and women] that I might by all means save some’ (I Corinthians 9:22, KJV). Theatricality and conversion in the poetry of Pierre Le Moyne

The exceptionally diverse and extensive literary output of the Jesuit poet Pierre Le Moyne is full of apparent paradoxes and ambiguities which have always proved a challenge to commentators, from his own contemporaries to the present day. This article takes as its starting point the recent recovery of a detailed account of Le Moyne’s first known creation, a spectacular dramatic production put on by the Jesuit college in Reims, to consider a pervasive, but relatively unstudied, feature of his works: the poet’s frequent allusions to the theatre, and, beyond this, the relationship between his strikingly original imagination and the creative techniques of dramatists and actors. It is argued that these are crucial to the ways in which he sets out to engage his worldly readers, and to encourage a receptive response to the moral and spiritual ideals which he seeks to transmit