In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes, and 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 granted 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.

Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France

Literature & Fiction

Kenny, Neil

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

It is easy to forget how deeply embedded in social hierarchy was the literature and learning that has come down to us from the early modern European world. From fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history, works of all kinds emerged from and through the social hierarchy that was a fundamental fact of everyday life. Paying attention to it changes how we might understand and interpret the works themselves, whether canonical and familiar or largely forgotten. But a second, related fact is much overlooked too: works also often emanated from families, not just from individuals. Families were driving forces in the production--that is, in the composing, editing, translating, or publishing--of countless works. Relatives collaborated with each other, edited each other, or continued the unfinished works of deceased family members; some imitated or were inspired by the works of long-dead relatives. The reason why this second fact (about families) is connected to the first (about social hierarchy) is that families were in the period a basic social medium through which social status was claimed, maintained, threatened, or lost. So producing literary works was one of the many ways in which families claimed their place in the social world. The process was however often fraught, difficult, or disappointing. If families created works as a form of socio-cultural legacy that might continue to benefit their future members, not all members benefited equally; women sometimes produced or claimed the legacy for themselves, but they were often sidelined from it. Relatives sometimes disagreed bitterly about family history, identity (not least religious), and so about the picture of themselves and their family that they wished to project more widely in society through their written works, whether printed or manuscript. So although family was a fundamental social medium out of which so many works emerged, that process could be conflictual as well as harmonious. The intertwined role of family and social hierarchy within literary production is explored in this book through the case of France, from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Some families are studied here in detail, such as that of the most widely read French poet of the age, Clément Marot. But the extent of this phenomenon is quantified too: some two hundred families are identified as each containing more than one literary producer, and in the case of one family an extraordinary twenty-seven.

Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France

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 behavior, 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

Retrospectives

Essays & Correspondence

Routledge

The age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Erasmus, Luther, and Machiavelli produced in France too some of Europe's greatest ever literature and thought: Montaigne's "Essays", Rabelais' comic fictions, Ronsard's poetry, Calvin's theology. These and numerous other extraordinary writings emerged from and contributed to cultural upheavals: the movement usually known as the Renaissance, which sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman culture for present-day purposes; religious reform, including the previously unthinkable rejection of Catholicism by many in the Reformation, culminating in decades of civil war in France; the French language's transformation into an instrument for advanced abstract thought. This book introduces this vibrant literature and thought via an apparent paradox. Most writers were profoundly concerned to improve life in the here-and-now - socially, politically, morally, spiritually. Yet they often tried to do so by making detours, in their writing, to other times and places: antiquity; heaven and hell; the hidden recesses of Nature, the cosmos, or the future; the remote location of an absent loved one; the newly 'discovered' Americas.The point was to show readers that the only way to live in the here-and-now was to connect it to larger realities - cosmic, spiritual, and historical.

Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought, An: Other Times, Other Places (New Readings)

Bristol Classical Press

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 practiced 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.

Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History (Legenda Main Series, 1)

This volume tracks a Montaigne ‘in transit’ all the way from the genesis and production of his Essais and travel journal in the 1570s–1590s 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.

Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean

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Books by Kenny, Neil

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kenny, Neil. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France

Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France

Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France

The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

Retrospectives

Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought, An: Other Times, Other Places (New Readings)

Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History (Legenda Main Series, 1)

Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean