You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
During the Renaissance, different conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopaedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. This study explores the tension between these two views, examining the theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Drawing on examples from sixteenth and seventeenth- century texts, and particularly focusing on the polymath Béroalde de Verville, Kenny provides an in-depth study of the two competing conceptions of knowledge.
description not available right now.
Drawing on the classical concept of rhetorical dispositio, this study gives new interpretations of a number of literary texts of the French Renaissance, some of them well-known (by Rabelais, Du Bellay and Montaigne), others less-known (the Pierres précieuses by Remy Belleau and the anonymous collections of emblematic fables). All these texts are organized according to an often problematic and disruptive dispositio that dissociates itself from the prescribed and preexisting models. This study not only seeks to approach the problem of literary ordering from a historical and theoretical perspective, it also intends to frame this topic in a more general context: grotesque bodiliness in Rabelais’s novels; historiography, gender and travelogue in Montaigne’s Essays; imitation and intermediality in the case of the poets and the fabulists.
description not available right now.