In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. He then moves from a close analysis of the rhetorical factor in the Querelle des femmes to consider ways in which writing, as a textual phenomenon, inscribes its own, sometimes ambiguous, meaning. Gray offers richly detailed readings of writing by Rabelais, Jean Flore, Montaigne, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet and Marie de Gournay among others, challenging the inherent anachronism of those forms of criticism that fail to take account of the rhetorical and cultural conditions of the period.

Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected by rhetorical conventions and the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues--misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical--Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. His new readings of Rabelais, Montaigne, Louise Labé and others, challenge the inherent anachronism of criticism that fails to take account of the cultural context of the period.

Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature brings together a full score of essays by established and rising American-based scholars of the early modern. Arranged according to five themes or genres: Tales and their Tellers, Poets and Poetry, Religious Controversy, Montaigne, and Knowledge Networks, they offer both fresh perspectives on canonical authors such as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labé, and Hélisenne de Crenne, as well as original interpretations of less familiar works of sixteenth-century moment: confessional polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, epigraphy, bibliophilism and even ichthyology. Inspired by and gathered together here to honor the eclectic career of Mary B. McKinley, this anthology integrates many of the most pertinent topics and contemporary approaches of early modern French scholarly inquiry. Contributors are: Pascale Barthe, Leah L. Chang, Edwin M. Duval, Gary Ferguson, George Hoffmann, Robert J. Hudson, Karen Simroth James, Scott D. Juall, Virginia Krause, Kathleen Long, Stephen Murphy, Corinne Noirot, Jeff Persels, Bernd Renner, Nicolas Russell, Nicholas Shangler, Cynthia Skenazi, Kendall Tarte, Cara Welch, and Cathy Yandell.

Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature is an in-depth analysis of normative masculinity in a specific corpus from pre-modern Europe: narrative literature devoted to the subject of adultery and cuckoldry. The text begins with a set of general questions that serve as a conceptual framework for the literary analyses that follow: why were early modern readers so fascinated by the figure of the cuckold? What was his relation to the real world of sexual behavior and gender relations? What effect did he have on the construction of actual masculinities? To respond to these questions, David LaGuardia develops a theoretical approach that is based both on modern critical theory and on close readings of records and documents from the period. Reading early modern legal texts, penance manuals, criminal registers, and exempla collections in relation to the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais's Tiers Livre, and Brantôme's Dames galantes, LaGuardia formulates a definition of masculinity in this historical context as a set of intertextual practices that men used to relay and to reinforce their gender identities. By examining legal and literary artifacts from this particular period and culture, this study highlights the extent to which this supposedly normative masculinity was historically contingent and materially conditioned by generic practices.

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière's famous comedy, L'Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice — but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, Jonathan Patterson shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Molière's L'Avare. As such, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates in the 1500s over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man. Analysing these writings side by side, Lyndan Warner reveals the extent to which Renaissance authors borrowed commonplaces from both traditions as they praised or blamed man or woman and habitually considered opposite and contrary points of view. In the law courts reflections on the virtues and vices of man and woman had a practical application-to win cases-and as Warner demonstrates, Parisian lawyers employed this developing rhetoric in family disputes over inheritance and marriage, and amplified it in the published versions of their pleadings. Tracing these ideas and modes of thinking from the writer's quill to the workshops and boutiques of printers and booksellers, Warner uses probate inventories to follow the books to the households of their potential male and female readers. Warner reveals the shifts in printed discussions of human nature from the 1500s to the early 1600s and shows how booksellers adapted the ways they marketed and sold new genres such as essays and lawyers' pleadings.

This work is a revealing combination of biographies and topical essays that describe the outstanding and often-overlooked contributions of women to the science, politics, and culture of the Renaissance. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England is the first first comprehensive reference devoted exclusively to the contributions of women to European culture in the period between 1350 and 1700. Focusing principally on early modern women in England, France, and Italy, it offers over 135 biographies of the extraordinary women of those times. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance provides vivid portraits of well known women such as Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, and Christine de Pizan. Also included are less familiar but equally important women like Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate; the renowned Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi; and the acclaimed author of medical textbooks and midwife to a French queen, Louise Boursier. Based on the latest research and enhanced with thematic essays, this groundbreaking work casts our understanding of women's lives and roles in Renaissance history and culture in a provocative new light.