What is the Renaissance if not the period of Love? From around 1400 to 1600 French writing was rife with texts dedicated to love and friendship taking the form of sonnets, odes, romances, treatises and essays.
Yet by the mid-sixteenth century, many French writers have had enough of Love. Rather than praising or conforming to the ideal of Love expounded by lyric poetry throughout western Europe from the Middle Ages, in France a counter-love narrative begins to take hold. Running parallel to the classic paeans to mutuality and reciprocity is a very different story, one in which struggle, competition, and strife reign supreme.
This course will revisit key French texts from the Renaissance as well as explore less canonical authors in order to reimagine the role of Love in this period, teasing out intriguing counter-narratives to the dominant love story. Exploring the fraught territory of Love and its opposites in French Renaissance poetry and prose, students will analyse and probe the modes, forms and symptoms of a tradition at odds with itself.