"The French vision of Rome was initially determined by travel journals, guide books and a rapidly developing trade in antiquities. Against this background, Margaret McGowan examines work by writers such as Du Bellay, Grevin, Montaigne and Garnier, and by architects and artists such as Philibert de L'Orme and Jean Cousin, showing how they drew upon classical ruins and reconstructions not only to re-enact past meanings and achievements but also, more dynamically, to interpret the present. She explains how Renaissance Rome, enhanced by the presence of so many signs of ancient grandeur, provided a fertile source of artistic creativity. Study of the fragments of the past tempted writers to an imaginative reconstruction of whole forms, while the new structures they created in France revealed the artistic potency of the incomplete and the fragmentary.

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Moliere'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 Moliere'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.

Making use of new and original material based on firsthand sources, this book interrogates the vogue for collecting, discussing, depicting, and putting to political and cultural use Roman antiquities in the French Renaissance. It surveys a range of activity from the labours of collectors and patrons to royal entries, considers attacks on the craze for the antique, and sets literary instances among a much wider spectrum of artistic endeavour. While Renaissance collecting and antiquarianism have certainly been the object of critical scrutiny, this study brings disparate fields into a single focus; and it examines not only areas of antiquarian expertise and interest (such as statues, coins, and books), but also important individual historical figures. The opening chapters deal with the role played in Rome by French ambassadors, who sent back antiques to collectors at court, who in the person of Jean Du Bellay, undertook excavations, and assembled a major personal collection, which was housed in a new villa in the ruined Baths of Diocletian. The volume includes a valuable appendix, which presents in transcription catalogues of the collections of Cardinal Jean du Bellay.

The Renaissance was a diverse phenomenon, marked by innovation and economic expansion, the rise of powerful rulers, religious reforms, and social change. Encompassing the entire continent, Renaissance Architecture examines the rich variety of buildings that emerged during these seminal centuries of European history. Although marked by the rise of powerful individuals, both patrons and architects, the Renaissance was equally a time of growing group identities and communities - and architecture provided the public face to these new identities . Religious reforms in northern Europe, spurred on by Martin Luther, rejected traditional church function and decoration, and proposed new models. Political ambitions required new buildings to satisfy court rituals. Territory, nature, and art intersected to shape new landscapes and building types. Classicism came to be the international language of an educated architect and an ambitious patron, drawing on the legacy of ancient Rome. Yet the richness of the medieval tradition continued to be used throughout Europe, often alongside classical buildings. Examining each of these areas by turn, this book offers a broad cultural history of the period as well as a completely new approach to the history of Renaissance architecture. The work of well-known architects such as Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio is examined alongside lesser known though no less innovative designers such as Juan Guas in Portugal and Benedikt Ried in Prague and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the latest research, it also covers more recent areas of interest such as the story of women as patrons and the emotional effect of Renaissance buildings, as well as the impact of architectural publications and travel on the emerging new architectural culture across Europe. As such, it provides a compelling introduction to the subject for all those interested in the history of architecture, society, and culture in the Renaissance, and European culture in general.

Through a construct she calls urban poetics, Elisabeth Hodges draws out the relationship between the city and the self in early modern French literature and culture, showing the impact of the city in human history and cultural production to be so profound that it cannot be extricated from what we know by the name of subjectivity. Charting a course between cartography, literary studies, and cultural history, this study opens new vistas on some of the period's defining problems.

The articles in this volume use a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine texts and archival documents recording sixteenth-century French ceremonial entries. By their very nature, ceremonial entries require such an approach: they bring together a number of artistic media, including music, architecture, and literature, and a range of political concerns, like international diplomacy and the relations between urban and royal power. Few cultural constructs offer such rich and varied terrain to the student of sixteenth-century France. The primary purpose of this collection is, therefore, to reflect upon salient aspects of ceremonial entries that may help us to understand how this ritual performed its complex and multidimensional cultural, intellectual, historical, and political work in order to cast a new light on French society in the early modern period.

The perception that the early sixteenth century saw a culmination of the Renaissance classical revival - only to degrade into mannerism shortly after Raphael's death in 1520 - has been extremely tenacious; but many scholars agree that this tidy narrative is deeply problematic. Exploring how we can reconceptualize the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume complicates and deepens our understanding of artistic change. Focusing on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, each essay presents a case study of a particular aspect of the culture of the city in the early sixteenth century, including new analyses of Raphael's stanze, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and the architectural designs of Bramante. The contributors question notions of periodization, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.