During the preparatory phase of the Sinergia project, Marije Osnabrugge had the opportunity to edit, together with Gerrit Verhoeven and Brecht Deseure, a special issue of Early Modern Low Countries (7.2., published 21 December 2023) on the theme of the perception of time in the early modern Low Countries.
Besides editing the various contributions by scholars from a range of disciplines (incl. political history, cartography, cultural history, literary history, art history)) and with different original approaches to this topic, the editors of the special issue co-wrote the introduction. The volume also includes a collective publication by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Jan Blanc, Thalia Brero and Marije Osnabrugge.
Table of contents
Introduction, Gerrit Verhoeven, Brecht Deseure and Marije Osnabrugge
[top image: David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, in the album amicorum of Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges, 16 July 1624, pen on paper, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek.]
Book of Miracles of Augsburg, Five Suns over Leipzig 1551, circa 1552, 6.322 × 4.561 cm, Mickey Cartin private collection, fol.169.
DESCRIPTION
This conference aims to renew the study of prodigies (15th–17th centuries) by placing them at the heart of a reflection on time — and, more specifically, on the present. Extraordinary and often ambiguous events, prodigies offer a lens through which to explore how societies represent their own present, caught between practices of memory and projections toward the future.
The conference will be structured around three main themes: 1. The forms of representation of prodigies (through text, image, rhythm, emotion) 2. Their political, religious, and social functions 3. The dynamics of scholarly theorization and knowledge production that they generate
We particularly welcome contributions on learned and popular uses of prodigies, the interplay between text and image in their narrative construction, debates over their legibility, their circulation in printed media, and their interpretative or mobilizing effects. The aim is to explore how prodigies — through their suddenness and their symbolic potency — contribute to the construction of a present saturated with meaning: a present that is at once unstable and fertile, charged with signs, emotions, and open possibilities.
Livre des Miracles d’Augsbourg, Cinq soleils au-dessus de Leipzig 1551, circa 1552, 6,322 × 4,561 cm, collection privée Mickey Cartin, fol.169.
DESCRIPTIF
Ce colloque invite à renouveler l’étude des prodiges (XVe–XVIIe siècles) en les replaçant au cœur d’une réflexion sur le temps — et plus particulièrement sur le présent. Événements extraordinaires, souvent ambigus, les prodiges permettent d’interroger la manière dont une société se représente son actualité, entre pratiques mémorielles et projection vers l’avenir.
Trois axes structureront les échanges : 1. Les formes de représentation du prodige (texte, image, rythme, émotion) 2. Les fonctions politiques, religieuses et sociales qu’il remplit 3. Les dynamiques de théorisation érudite et de production de savoirs qu’il suscite
On s’intéressera aux usages savants ou populaires du prodige, aux rapports entre texte et image dans sa mise en récit, aux débats sur sa lisibilité, à ses circulations dans les médias imprimés, à ses effets d’interprétation ou de mobilisation. Il s’agira ainsi d’explorer la manière dont le prodige, par sa soudaineté et sa puissance de signification, participe à la construction d’un présent saturé de sens — un présent à la fois instable et fécond, traversé de signes, d’émotions et de possibles.
Anonymous french artist, Illuminated initial “K”, 16th century, Alphabet book, ink and paint on parchment, 6 x 6 cm, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, inv. W.200.16R.
Karine Abiven is a senior lecturer at Sorbonne University, specialising in Early Modern texts and their links to the present. Her approach, at the crossroads of linguistics, literature and political history, has led her to study a wide range of documents, from private writings to printed pamphlets. She aims to make these texts accessible through digital humanities and is particularly interested in the notion of event. She also works on the circulation of political texts, particularly through song, in a book which is to be published: Sur l’air de Fronde. Chansons d’actualité et guerre civile, 1648-1661, Champ Vallon, tbp 2026.
For starters: what is the place of the notion of the present in your everyday life as a researcher?
My research over the last 15 years has focused on the ways in which the present is told, firstly through the short stories that circulated in the world of Belles-Lettres in 17th-18th century France, and then through more public news texts, with my more recent research on pamphlets from the early modern period. I’m especially interested in the question of ‘who’: who circulated a particular piece of news, who could have received it, and through which medium ? The present is obviously not the same for everyone: this psychological banality has important (and already well-documented) epistemological repercussions. This means that we still need to find out whether this or that utterance was circulated in printed or handwritten form, and in what spheres it was received, and so on. And this despite the many gaps in the documentation. In short, my relationship with the question of the present is marked by a form of hypervigilance, or a critical obsession, towards the sources.
Moreover, the state of the planet also makes me think every day about how anthropocentric the present can be.
What is your expertise and in what way does your research engage with the notions of time, temporality and/or the present?
I work at the intersection of literary studies, linguistics and history.
The history of the forms taken by discourse give insight into the various ways in which the present has been considered. The form of the anecdote, for example – which was the subject of my thesis — made it possible to observe a shift, between the 17th and 18th centuries, from an old regime of rhetorical exemplarity to a more individual approach, marked by contingency, in the way of recounting recent history, literary history, or even the experiences of emerging experimental science. I think it is very useful to combine the history of books and prints and linguistic knowledge for this type of study. It allows us to be aware of the singularity of each utterance, while also considering the recurrences at work in discourse, which bring out sociohistorical trends in these discourses.
What kind of sources do you use in your research on time, temporality and/or the present?
My recent research focuses on political songs and pamphlets, particularly during the Fronde (1648-1653). It is a goldmine for approaching both the written and oral dimensions of current affairs discourse. These songs and pamphlets were printed on broadside, printed as pamphlets, or handwritten on single-sheets. In the semi-literate society of the early modern period, songs were a frequent medium used to inform, entertain, amuse, manipulate, spread rumors, and had a remarkable dynamism and flexibility in circulation. After the Ligue, the Fronde was a time when the printing press largely took over this practical role : they spread texts that are less narrative testimonies of events, than partisan ways of interpreting them. Since these songs were often set to well-known tunes, it is possible to identify enunciative communities, which used which tunes, and thus to better understand who might have been aware of what, and from what point of view.
That is why I have chosen an engraving depicting peddlers of news, sung or spoken. We can see that the street singer (« Le Savoyard, ou l’Orphée du Pont-Neuf ») is blind, as those in this profession often were. These blind street singers have sometimes been considered as ‘mass media’ vectors of their time (see Jean-François Botrel on spanish pliegos de cordel).
Recueil general, de toutes les chansons mazarinistes. Et avec plusieurs qui n’ont point estées chantées, 1649, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, YE-4117. Collection of song lyrics reissued and expanded during the Fronde. The woodcut reuses the motifs of an “occasionnel” called “The comet that appeared in 1527 in Westrie” (All my thanks to Marion Pouspin for her help in finding this print which is otherwise unobtainable. See this illustration on the title page of her book “Publier la nouvelle“).
Whose ‘present’ or ‘temporality’ are you particularly interested in, in your research?
I dream of knowing how ordinary people relate to the present. I’m well aware that the degree of literacy of the early modern age makes this a complex task. So most of the time I find myself browsing through the literate archive! My hope is to combine the writings of less literate people (the memoirs or household books of craftsmen, for example) with the study of chapbooks that they might have known. It is this public part of private writings that gives me hope of knowing the shared linguistic material of current affairs.
Are there any specific theorists about time that you are particularly drawn to? And/or: Have you recently encountered another project or researcher who is of particular interest regarding this topic?
I have been influenced by the German semantics of historical times since the beginning of my research, in particular Reinhart Koselleck (Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 1979, translated into French in 1990). His critical vision of regimes of historicity taught me to construct the relationship to time as a datum that is itself historicizable. This school of thought is very attentive to words themselves, and to the history of rhetorical forms, and for this reason their work has been welcomed by French linguists such as Régine Robin, Denise Maldidier and Jacques Guilhaumou, who worked on the words of the event during the French Revolution.
Le Savoyard, Orphée du Pont-neuf et le Seigneur Riraille, illustration of the proverbs of Jacques Lagniet, Albert Pomme de Mirimonde Fund, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, VM PHOT MIRI-17 (87).
Do you think it is possible to speak of a shared perception of time or of the present at a specific historic moment (one of our research questions)?
I look forward to hearing that from you!
Which three terms come to mind when you think about the ‘present’ of people in Northwestern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth century?
Famine and War (I am going to look for a third one that is a bit more positive, I promise!)
Finally, what would be your ‘research utopia’ if finances and time were not an issue?
To compile a database of songs and tunes in use from 1500 to 1848 (date not only of a revolution in France, but also of an extraordinary repertoire of melodies by the chansonnier Pierre Capelle). The project has already been started on the 16th century by Alice Tacaille (musicologist who has worked on the time of François 1er and the Italian Wars) and Tatiana Debbagi Baranova (on the Wars of Religion). It’s a very costly work, because the tunes change names very often, and it is difficult to keep track of them. However, it would be very useful to know how tunes move from one place to another in Europe, whether through the traditional channels of scholarly communication, or through other channels, such as printed communication. In my view, this would be an essential complement to a study of discourses on the present’s forms, complementing what the history of books and prints has been able to do for chapbooks, for example (Chartier, Lüsebrink). Knowing the music that conveys words does not solve all the gaps in our knowledge of the ephemeral utterances of the past, nor does the study of the materiality of texts: but combining the two together would contribute to an oral history of discourses on the present.
But above all, if I really had the financial resources, I would give tenure to non-titular researchers. The sustainability of databases and other research projects is often compromised by funding that is not forthcoming. And above all, knowledge should be able to be produced by individuals who do not sacrifice their professional stability to it.
Title page of the website: Antonomaz – Mazarinades, designed by Jean-Marie Troullier, based on a Fronde placard: Récit véritable du duel arrivé entre deux sœurs proche de Bordeaux, l’une pour avoir pris le parti et défendu la Fronde et l’autre l’Épée, dont l’avantage a été remporté par la belle frondeuse, 1650, Illustrated folio placard, 33,3×42,9cm, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, M 15043.
The ideas ‘tested’ in the session formed the inspiration for the doctoral project undertaken by Sebastian Hackbarth in the context of the Capturing the Present project. Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Marije Osnabrugge are currently preparing a publication containing a selection of papers from this session, with additional contributions.
DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION
The way people in the past experienced their individual and shared present was interrelated with the space they inhabited. In recent decades, reflections on the perception of time in pre-modern and early-modern periods have multiplied. As a result, the static and univocal image of the Middle Ages and early modernity as eras rooted in a perfect biblical past or as a revival of a mythical past, obstructing any interpretation of an active present and of a future free of its eschatological dimension, is being revised. One of the possible ways to reconsider the relation of pre-modern and early-modern people with time, and in particular with the(ir) present, is to investigate what Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘chronotope’. Within this literary theory, the perception of the world results from a specific experience of time and space, which are considered inseparable and in constant interaction. Examples of such chronotopes include the daily or weekly collective rhythms of market day or the fair on the town square, the accelerated frenzy of celebrations in the city hall or church, the reflective hours spent alone waking at a deathbed. The people inhabiting a chronotope were perfectly aware of the order imposed by well-defined temporalities, yet historical studies have too often disconnected this temporal dimension from their analysis of the use of a place or space.
Chronotopes of Waiting: Rethinking the Bakhtinian Threshold in Renaissance Dialogical Literature – Raphaëlle J Burns, University of California, Los Angeles
Chronicling Justice: The Space and Time of Executions during the Dutch Revolt (ca. 1560–90) – Isabel Casteels, KU Leuven
The Walker’s Perspective and the Senses – Dr. Mark Rosen, University of Texas at Dallas
“Comme si elles allaient au Calvaire”: Moral Time and Topography in Early Modern French Monasteries – Haley Elisabeth Bowen, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
An Armada as a “Chronotope?” Charles of Habsburg’s Fleet in the Chronicle of Rémi Dupuis– Jonathan Dumont, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Synchronized Timepieces, Diverging Temporality: Dialogues between the Clock and the Clepsydra at the Qing Court – Ms. Wenjie Su, Princeton University; CASVA, the National Gallery of Art
Biago di Antonio Tucci, Scene della storia degli Argonauti, ca. 1472–1516, tempera on panel, 49,8 x 142,2 cm, New York, Metropolitain Museum of Art.
Anonyme français XVIe siècle, Lettrine ‘A’, Livre d’alphabet, enluminure, 6 x 6 cm, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, inv. W.200.13V.
Adeline Desbois-Ientile est maîtresse de conférences à Sorbonne Université. Spécialiste de la langue et de la littérature françaises du XVIe siècle, elle a consacré de nombreux travaux à l’œuvre de Jean Lemaire de Belges et à ses contemporains, en croisant histoire littéraire et histoire linguistique. Ses recherches interrogent notamment les liens entre littérature, musique et arts visuels dans la culture de la première modernité. Elle est l’autrice de l’ouvrage Lemaire de Belges, Homère Belgeois (Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2019), récompensé par une médaille d’argent de l’Académie française. Elle a récemment codirigé le volume Lemaire de Belges, une écriture sous le signe de la concorde (Tours : PUFR, 2024), et a contribué à la Nouvelle anthologie des Rhétoriqueurs (Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2025). Le 12 mars 2025, Adeline Desbois-Ientile a donné une intervention dans le cadre de notre programme d’expert meetings.
En quelques mots, quelle place prend la notion de présent dans votre quotidien de chercheur.se ?
Travailler sur une période ancienne met en jeu deux présents : le présent de la recherche (le 21e s.) et celui de l’objet étudié (les 15e et 16e s. pour moi). Un premier enjeu de mon travail est d’essayer de reconstituer le présent du passé, c’est-à-dire de comprendre comment on pensait, écrivait, vivait, à cette époque. La distance temporelle facilite la perception des objets du passé, tout en rendant plus difficile leur appréhension en raison décalage temporel entre le sujet – en l’occurrence ma propre subjectivité de chercheuse – et son objet – le corpus sur lequel je travaille. Le temps étant consubstantiel à tout objet historiquement situé, cela implique de se décentrer pour essayer de retrouver les modes de pensée d’une époque donnée, tout en ayant conscience de son propre ancrage temporel. C’est là qu’on touche au second enjeu : inscrire la recherche sur le passé dans le présent actuel, en termes d’outils et aussi d’enjeux.
Quel est votre domaine d’expertise et de quelle manière vos recherches abordent-elles les notions de temps, de temporalité et/ou de présent ?
Mon domaine d’expertise couvre la langue et la littérature françaises des premières décennies du 16e s. Mes recherches de doctorat ont porté sur l’écriture de l’histoire dans Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye de Lemaire de Belges, et j’ai ensuite élargi ma réflexion à l’écriture d’actualité qui est également bien représentée chez les rhétoriqueurs. Ces deux types d’objet (le récit historique d’une part et le texte de circonstance de l’autre) mettent en jeu la temporalité à différents niveaux : comment le temps (passé ou contemporain) est-il représenté, et comment les auteurs inscrivent-ils leurs œuvres dans le temps ? De plus, le matériau du texte est la langue, qui est elle-même est traversée par le temps, en particulier au début du 16e s. : le français est alors perçu comme une langue en forte évolution, ce qu’il est de fait. Ce qui m’intéresse, de ce point de vue, est d’essayer à la fois de mieux comprendre l’articulation entre continuité et rupture, et de réfléchir au pouvoir de la parole littéraire dans le présent de son écriture et de sa réception.
Jean Lemaire de Belges, Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye , vers 1512-1513, Genève, BM, fr. 74, fol. 1r.
Quel type de sources utilisez-vous dans vos recherches sur le temps, la temporalité et/ou le présent ?
Je travaille à partir de corpus de textes du 16e s. que je lis autant que possible dans la matérialité de leurs formes manuscrites ou imprimées d’origine. Je crois à la lecture comme méthode heuristique : lire beaucoup, de tout, pour essayer de percevoir ce qui est commun à une période et ce qui est singulier à un auteur. Mes sources sont donc des textes littéraires, mais aussi non littéraires, imprimés et manuscrits. De la même manière, pour le corpus critique, je lis des travaux émanant de chercheurs de différentes disciplines (lettres, histoire, linguistique, en particulier, mais aussi histoire des arts et musicologie) pour croiser les approches et mieux comprendre mes propres présupposés, parfois inconscients.
Le « présent » ou la « temporalité » de qui (quelle personne ou catégorie de personnes) vous intéresse particulièrement dans vos recherches ?
Je m’intéresse avant tout à ceux qu’on appelle aujourd’hui les auteurs, qui étaient à l’époque historiens, orateurs, ou poètes, parfois avec une charge officielle. Ces auteurs, par leurs écrits, s’inscrivent dans le temps en même temps qu’ils façonnent une certaine représentation du temps.
Jean Lemaire de Belges, La Couronne margaritique, texte de Jean Lemaire de Belges, enluminure de Guillaume II Leroy (attribution possible), 1505, Vienne, ÖNB, ms 3441, fol. 2v. La scène représente l’auteur (Lemaire de Belges) à sa table de travail.
Y a-t-il des théoriciens du temps qui vous attirent particulièrement ? Et/ou : Avez-vous récemment découvert un projet ou un chercheur dont le travail vous semble essentiel pour penser ces questions ?
Je suis particulièrement sensible, depuis longtemps, à la notion de « lieu de mémoire » forgée par Pierre Nora pour désigner des éléments matériels ou idéels jouant un rôle dans l’identité collective. La notion de mémoire est centrale à mon sens pour penser l’articulation entre le passé et le présent.
Pensez-vous qu’il soit possible de parler d’une perception partagée du temps ou du présent à un moment historique spécifique (une de nos questions de recherche) ?
Oui, il me semble que des savoirs partagés par une communauté, structurés dans un discours, peuvent forger une représentation commune. C’est clairement le cas avec les poètes de la Pléiade, qui tiennent un discours de rupture temporelle s’appuyant sur un savoir partagé de l’Antiquité.
Jean Marot, Le Voyage de Gênes, texte de Jean Marot, enluminure de Jean Bourdichon, vers 1508, BnF, Fr. 5091, fol. 1. La scène représente l’auteur (Jean Marot) offrant son livre à Anne de Bretagne.
Quels sont les trois termes qui vous viennent à l’esprit lorsque vous pensez au « présent » des habitants de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest entre le XIVe et le XVIIe siècle ?
Mythe – Politique – Histoire
Enfin, quelle serait votre ‘utopie de recherche’ si vous aviez un financement illimité ?
Je ferais une base de données qui rassemblerait et rendrait interopérables et interrogeables toutes les bases existantes contenant des textes en moyen français et français préclassique. Les mots étant la matière première des textes, c’est par un travail sur eux que j’initie tous mes travaux de recherche.
Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury : imprimé Paris, Geoffroy Tory et Gilles Gourmont, 1529, fol. 3v. Exemplaire de la BnF, RES-V-16. La gravure représente l’Hercule gaulois, incarnation de l’éloquence à la française : des chaînes relient sa langue aux oreilles des auditeurs, en signe de pouvoir de la parole oratoire.
“Jean Clopinel, dict de Meung”, engraving in A. Thevet. Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres. Paris: Veuve Kervert and Gilles Chaudière, 1584, 499r.
Clad in a flowing cloak and robe, the man gazes into the distance with a look that is curious, perhaps even ironic. His clothing offers few clues as to the era in which he might have lived, but it suggests the social status of a cleric, a hypothesis reinforced by the round cap he wears. In contrast, the figure’s age is emphasized: the wrinkles on his face and the hands supported by a staff evoke old age. They also metaphorically suggest a belonging to the past. This engraved portrait, which opens chapter 91 of Book VI of Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes Illustres by André Thevet (1516–1592), depicts Jean de Meun, the French writer active in the second half of the thirteenth century.
By the time Thevet published his final major work in 1584, the author of the Roman de la Rose had long been regarded as a founding father of French letters. This explains his inclusion among the few vernacular writers in the pantheon of great men assembled by the historian. Yet, as Thevet himself notes, “it is not easy to determine precisely” the dates of birth and death of a writer who had lived two centuries earlier. Only the references that Meun may have made to his own time could help locate his period of activity. However, if such references exist in certain dedications by the “old poet, ” they are inconsistent: Le Livre de confort Boece is dedicated to Philip IV of France (r. 1286–1314), whereas Dodechedron—a divinatory treatise falsely attributed to Meun in the sixteenth century—is addressed to Charles V (r. 1364–1380). To navigate these chronological uncertainties, Thevet resorts to a well-known historical parallel: Meun, he claims, “was a contemporary of Dante, the Italian poet.”
André Thevet was not the first literary historian to take an interest in the contemporaneity of two authors then regarded as the founding figures of French and Italian letters. The Burgundian Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) had already noted it in La Concorde des deux langages (1511): “the good master Jehan de Meun was contemporary—that is, of the same time and faculty—as Dante.” Yet reconstructing the present of a prestigious past served different purposes at the beginning and the end of the sixteenth century. For Lemaire, evoking the mythical journey that supposedly brought Dante to Paris around 1300—where he met Meun and became both his admirer and “emulator”—aimed to justify the ties uniting French- and Italian-speaking poets “in our time,” around 1500. The temporal community formed by the author of the Roman de la Rose and the writer of the Divine Comedy, bound by both complicity and rivalry, was imagined as extending seamlessly into the intercultural exchanges of the Italian Wars. By contrast, in 1584, Thevet drew on Dante’s chronology to more precisely delimit Meun’s period of activity. Les Vrais Pourtraicts presented their parallel lives in terms of a shared time of living and dying—what Jean Bouchet, another of Thevet’s sources, had defined in 1545 as vivre et mourir ensemble. In emphasizing their “ancientness,” Thevet deliberately distanced both Jean de Meun and Dante from his own time. They no longer appear as the “ancient sources” of a tradition still alive in the works of the “moderns,” to borrow Lemaire’s terms, but as “old poets” with “rusted pens,” whom the historian alone can rescue from the remnants of a decaying memory—that is, as authors of the ‘Middle Ages’.
These two contrasting ways of conceptualising the present of a past age illustrate the transformative power of shifting perceptions, representations, and reconstructions of cultural epochs throughout the sixteenth century. In French-speaking regions, the decades from 1500 to 1530 saw numerous writers assert, for various reasons, a certain continuity between their own practices and those of their predecessors—primarily, those of the fifteenth century. By around 1550, discontinuity had emerged as a new criterion for evaluating poetic production. Certain avant-gardes embraced a rhetoric of rupture. One thinks, for instance, of the young radicals of the Pléiade and their manifesto, La Deffence et illustration by du Bellay (1549). Other intellectual circles placed greater value on a reflective return to a past now conceived as “origins”—a literary and cultural past open to archaeological inquiry or to reinvention as a form of national antiquity. Fauchet, with his Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise (1581), Pasquier, with his Recherches de la France (also published in 1581), and Thevet, belong to such interpretive communities, which came to dominate the decades from 1570 to 1600.
Nevertheless, the combative tone with which André Thevet defended a Jean de Meun threatened by “the prison of oblivion” invites a more nuanced reading of this explanatory framework. From its earliest uses in French in the fifteenth century—particularly among writers of the Burgundian principality—the notion of contemporaneity carried a discriminating connotation: to share the same present did not necessarily mean to think alike or be valued equally.
Unlike Dante, Jean de Meun was not always regarded as a consensual founding figure. His “true portrait” thus became, for the polemicist Thevet, a weapon. On one hand, it served to target Thevet’s personal adversaries, such as the Anglican theologian John Bale (1495–1563), accused of having “Anglicised” the Roman de la Rose by overly praising Chaucer’s adaptations of Meun. On the other hand, it allowed him to attack those who refused to recognise in Jean de Meun the embodiment of the “French spirit” as Thevet imagined it: bawdy, witty, and Catholic. Among these “censors,” particular scorn is reserved for the “displeased” female readers. To ridicule them, Thevet inserted a facetious anecdote into the poet’s biography: Jean de Meun, he claims, was summoned by courtly ladies of his time to account for his scandalous romance. The boldest among them accused him of offending them with obscene verse and misogynistic fictions. Yet the witty poet reportedly escaped condemnation by inviting “the greatest whore” to punish him in public.
In reality—though Thevet does not acknowledge it—the accusation voiced by the “bold” lady reprises arguments first articulated by Christine de Pizan in her Debate on the Roman de la Rose (1401). It was, in fact, Christine de Pizan who first introduced the parallel between Jean de Meun and Dante. She argued in the Debate that the Divine Comedy was “a hundred times better composed” than the celebrated Roman de la Rose and more beneficial to its readers, leaving no justification, in her view, for lavishing praise upon Meun. Although Christine did not attempt to situate Dante and Jean chronologically, her argument had the effect of suggesting a simultaneity in their production while firmly denying any ethical or aesthetic equivalence between their works. Contemporary with Dante, Jean de Meun was nonetheless his inferior. For Christine, this meant his work no longer deserved to speak to the female readership of her own time.
By contrast, in the “life” crafted by Thevet, Dante appears merely as a historical counterpart to Meun. The anecdote mocking the “displeased” female readers further blurs temporal boundaries to achieve precisely what Thevet’s antiquarian method purported to resist: inviting readers at the end of the sixteenth century to see in the first “great French writer” a man of their own time.
To be published
Estelle Doudet, “Les communautés temporelles du XVIe siècle face au ‘Moyen Âge’. Penser, représenter et évaluer un passé littéraire”. In La Culture médiévale à la Renaissance, edited by Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Nicolas Le Cadet et Sandra Provini. Geneva: Droz, to be published.
Bouchet, Jean. Epistres morales et familieres du Traverseur. Paris: De Marnef, 1545. Book I, Epistle 14.
Christine de Pizan. Le Livre des epistres du debat sus le Rommant de la rose. Edited by Andrea Valentini. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016.
Lemaire de Belges, Jean. La Concorde des deux langages. Edited by Jean Frappier. Paris: Droz, 1947.
Thevet, André. Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres. Paris: Veuve Kervert and Gilles Chaudière, 1584. Vol. II, Book VI, chap. 91, “Jean Clopinel, dict de Meung,” 499r–502v.
Secondary Sources
Bruder, Anthony J. Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Veilles ou Observations. Geneva: Droz, 2024.
Lestringant, Frank. “Vrai portrait et vie de Jean Clopinel, dit de Meung.” In Sous la leçon des vents. Le Monde d’André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance, 101–13. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020.
Lombart, Nicolas. “Les nom et renom de Jean de Meun à la Renaissance: des ‘arts poétiques’ aux ‘vies’ des auteurs illustres.” In La Fortune de Jean de Meun dans les lettres françaises, edited by Nicolas Lombart and Silvère Menegaldo, 176–204. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020.
