Faut-il donner un sens philosophique au mot humanisme?

Contributor(s): Jacques Chomarat

Du quatorzième au seizième siècle, l'humanisme est souvent pris pour une doctrine qui tend à substituer l'homme à Dieu comme centre du monde. Mais Pic de la Mirandole se borne à affirmer le libre-arbitre de l'homme: il se rattache à la scolastique. De purs humanistes, tels que Pétrarque, Valla,...

Nouvelles lectures de Montaigne

Contributor(s): Jean Lafond

Differentiating Hamlet: Ophelia and the Problems of Subjectivity

Contributor(s): Richard Finkelstein

By considering the positions Hamlet explores with regards to the nature of intention, the nature and acquisition of knowledge, the effectiveness of reason, and their relation to psychological integrity, the author of this paper argues that Shakespeare evaluates the play's participation in the...

Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Dismemberment in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster

Contributor(s): Marie H. Loughlin

Critics often dismiss cross-dressing in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster as a meretricious dramatic trick. In reality, cross-dressing becomes a nexus for the play's pervasive anxieties concerning bodily and vestimentary codes, with major characters staking their conflicting claims to political...

Marie de Gournay cont(r)e la tradition: Du Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne aux versions de l'Éneide

Contributor(s): Martine Debaisieux

Cette étude considère le rapport entre le récit du Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne et la traduction du second livre de l'Énéide lui faisant suite dans le recueil qui marque les débuts littéraires de Marie de Gournay (1594). Au-delà des liens entre l'histoire tragique d'Alinda et celle de...

A Catholic Theologian Responds to Copernicanism: The Theological Judicium of Paolo Foscarini’s Lettera

Contributor(s): Irving A. Kelter

This paper is an in-depth analysis of the Carmelite Paolo Foscarini's role in the debate on Copernican cosmology in the early seventeenth century. Using as a point of departure the 1616 Judicium issued by the Catholic Church against Foscarini's pro-Copernican treatise, this analysis will lead to...

Speech Versus Spectacle: Autolycus, Class and Containment in The Winter's Tale

Contributor(s): Ronald W. Cooley

Shakespeare's Winter's Tale is a play in which theatrical spectacle triumphs over speech, as stage action obscures the incoherence of verbal representation. This paper identifies Autolycus as a composite of Jacobean anxieties about the sources of social instability, and explores his place in this...

Le procès de Montaigne par Malebranche. La véracité à l'aune de la vérité moderne

Contributor(s): Syliane Charles

L'analyse détaillée des critiques formulées par Malebranche à l'encontre de Montaigne nous sert à révéler le hiatus existant entre le cadre épistémologique de la Renaissance et celui de la modernité. L'éclairage de ces contextes nous conduit, sur le plan de l'histoire des idées, à soutenir...

Prodigious Births and Death in Childbirth in Le Palais des Nobles Dames, (Lyons, 1534)

Contributor(s): Brenda Dunn-Lardeau

In 1534 Pierre de Sainte Lucie published Jehan Du Pré's Le Palais des Nobles Dames in which the treatment of the theme of prodigious births and death in childbirth is of particular interest compared to that of his sixteenth century contemporaries. On the one hand, the author's religious faith...

Thomas More's Utopia: Preface to Reformation

Contributor(s): Walter M. Gordon

Recent studies have stressed the ambiguity of Thomas More's Utopia. Although the essay does not argue against this view, it does point to the clear and basic contention of the work which, if lost, makes it impossible to come to grips with the questions the book poses. Utopia criticizes the upper,...

Rethinking "Continuity": Erasmus' Ecclesiastes and the Artes Praedicandi

Contributor(s): Francis P. Kilcoyne, Margaret Jennings

Erasmus' "radical orientation towards continuities," coupled with a series of congruent physical and philosophical circumstances, suggests a possible relationship between certain medieval artes praedicandi and the Ecclesiastes sive de Ratione Concionandi. By exploring the parallels between these...

Thomas Phaer and the Assertion of Tudor English

Contributor(s): Rick Bowers

Thomas Phaer's many printed works, including legal and medical texts, occasional verses, and classical translations, all insist upon - even assert - English as a language suitable for learned consciousness. As a physician, legal theorist, man of letters, and member of Parliament, Phaer represents...

Le retour de Pologne d’Henri III: images alexandrines du roi au Bucentaure

Contributor(s): Guy Poirier

Si la véritable nature du roi Henri III, celui que Pierre Chevallier dénommait le roi shakespearien, demeure scellée pour l'éternité, les pièces de circonstance écrites pendant les premières années de son règne peuvent en revanche nous renseigner sur les tentatives parfois contradictoires de...

“Things Themselves”: Francis Bacon’s Epistemological Reform and the Maintenance of the State

Contributor(s): Andrew Barnaby

This essay attempts to provide a specific cultural context for Francis Bacon's project of natural philosophical reform. Documenting Bacon's earliest understanding of the link between the nature and uses of natural philosophy and what he would call the "care of the commonwealth," it moves from a...

Encyclopedism in Anatomy of Melancholy

Contributor(s): Samuel G. Wong

This paper considers the implications of Burton's "encyclopedism" defined here as the condition of a work where writing is a form of therapy compelled by disease. The notion of encyclopedism suggests the ways in which the encyclopedia serves as a compendious alter-ego to Burton's book. Reading...

"Inter inextricabiles... difficultatum tenebras": Ficino's Pimander and the Gendering of Cartesian Subjectivity

Contributor(s): Michael Keefer

After reviewing the evidence that Descartes' philosophical itinerary was to a significant degree shaped by a reading of the Hermetic writings translated by Ficino, this article proposes that, in the Cartesian and Hermetic texts alike, the body from which an emergent autonomous subjectivity seeks...

A défaut de dire tout: dire partout. Étude des modes énonciatifs dans Le mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort de Jean-Baptiste Chassignet

Contributor(s): Isabelle Lachance

Poésie maniériste? Baroque? Le mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort (1594) peut-être le résultat de multiples influences, et chaque situation d'énonciation de ce recueil comporte sa manière propre de structurer les courants idéologiques de l'époque à laquelle il a été écrit, et ce,...

"He took his religion by trust": The Matter of Ben Jonson's Conversion

Contributor(s): James P. Crowley

During his imprisonment for the murder of Gabriel Spencer in 1598, Ben Jonson converted to the outlawed Roman Catholic Church, and for the next 12 years made no attempt to conceal his recusant status. Jonson's biography and the historical documents treating conversion and recusancy offer evidence...

Crime and the Road: A Survey of Sixteenth-Century Travel Journals

Contributor(s): Luigi Monga

This article is a journey through the lesser known travel diaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its intent is to underline the occurence of violent images along the European roads, particularly in Italy, Spain, France, and England. Criminality, danger, and violence are all common...

Renaissance et Humanisme en Slovaquie

Contributor(s): Eva Frimmová

Cet article constitue un survol analytique de l'impact des idées nouvelles sur la culture et le monde intellectuel en Slovaquie durant le période renaissante. Les contacts sont nombreux entre les humanistes, les intellectuels et les scientifiques autant à Presbourg que dans les villes...