Neil Kenny

During the Renaissance, different conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopaedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. This study explores the tension between these two views, examining the theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Drawing on examples from sixteenth and seventeenth- century texts, and particularly focusing on the polymath Béroalde de Verville, Kenny provides an in-depth study of the two competing conceptions of knowledge.

Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge

The Palace of Secrets

Richard Scholar

Wes Williams

This volume tracks a Montaigne 'in transit' all the way from the genesis and production of his Essais and travel journal in the 1570s-90s to their diffusion and reception from the 1580s up till the present day, in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere. The contributors take those key terms - genesis, production, diffusion, reception - as their starting-point, but show that the boundaries between them are blurred. How does embodied thought move through space and time between the author and reader of the Essais? Can the role of the ancient writers whom Montaigne quotes be assessed without consideration of the differences he knew there would be between readers' capacities to recognise and contextualise those quotations? Where does Montaigne's punctuation end and that of his compositors, editors, and translators begin? This volume asks such questions by exploring transit as a critical concept cutting across different languages, places, and times. Its authors include leading specialists in early modern French and English studies. It is a tribute to Ian Maclean, whose own trailblazing work has moved through and across numerous fields of early modern learned culture.

Essays in Honour of Ian MacLean

Montaigne in Transit

Why did people argue about curiosity in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, so much more than today? Why was curiosity a fashionable topic in early modern conduct manuals, university dissertations, scientific treatises, sermons, newspapers, novellas, plays, operas, ballets, poems, from Corneille to Diderot, from Johann Valentin Andreae to Gottlieb Spizel? Universities, churches, and other institutions invoked curiosity in order to regulate knowledge or behaviour, to establish who should try to know or do what, and under what circumstances. As well as investigating a crucial episode in the history of knowledge, this study makes a distinctive contribution to historiographical debates about the nature of 'concepts'. Curiosity was constantly reshaped by the uses of it. And yet, strangely, however much people contested what curiosity was, they often agreed that what they were disagreeing about was one and the same thing.

The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes. Answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, even distress that can be caused by the 'wrong' tense suggests that more may be at stake—our very relation to the dead. This book, the first to test that hypothesis, investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, kings and queens of recent times, but also to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais's prose fiction to Montaigne's Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of 'tense'), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.

Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France

Death and Tenses

"Terence Cave's work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practised in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The book's epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that culture's ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter."

Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History

Retrospectives

Philip Ford

These papers identify four main themes: the impact of individual authors or groups of authors and books on Montaigne; his annotations and commentaries on his reading; textual variations in the different editions of the Essais; and the material conditions of the library.

Proceedings of the Tenth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium 2-4 September 2008

La Librairie de Montaigne

This book is probably the first to explore a question that can crop up in everyday situations and that has a long history: in what tense should we refer to the dead? That question relates both to the recently deceased and also to those who died long ago, for example in antiquity. The book explores it through many kinds of texts, mainly in French but also in Latin, produced in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, including by celebrated authors(Rabelais, Montaigne). Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate something about posthumous presence (andabsence) that could not easily be communicated by other means? This is primarily a work of literary and cultural history, but it also draws on linguistics. It compares its early modern examples with modern French and English, asking whether changes in more recent beliefs in posthumous survival have led to different tense usage.

Neil Kenny

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