Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron (Faux Titre, 281)

This collection of essays by ten leading British and French Renaissance specialists explores, for the first time, differing conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France. Four essays concentrate on problems of definition in ideological, chronological, geographical and linguistic terms, concentrating on the relationship between Christendom and Europe, Antiquity and its Renaissance heirs, and Latin and the vernacular languages of south-western France. A further three essays address cultural exchange and political collaboration (and, inevitably, conflict) between France and England at the time of the Wars of Religion,exploring Catholic and Protestant reactions to the battle of Lepanto, Anglo-French Protestant espionage and pragmatic conceptions of the state based on geography rather than religion. The final three contributions focus on the construction of a European identity in the early modern period that defines itself in contrast to a significant other, be it Islamic or ‘Atlantic’, with particular reference to the presentation of Turkish characters in the work of Christian writers, exotic travel in the work of François Rabelais and the genre of the Livre des contrariétés. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of French Renaissance literature and to those interested in the prehistory of our contemporary conception of Europe.

David Cowling is Professor of French at Durham University and specialises in French literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He is the author of Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (OUP, 1998) and the editor of George Chastelain et al., Les Douze Dames de Rhétorique (Droz, 2002). Between 1993 and 2001 he was a colleague of Keith Cameron in the Department of French at the University of Exeter.