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This volume offers a multidimensional exploration of the theme of time in early modern France: of time past, time present and time future, in literature and in life.
In poetry, the importance of past and future perspectives was studied by Maynard and La Fontaine. The dynamics of tragic drama were haunted by the past, driven by the urgency of the present and pervasively aware of the alternative futures that could be created, while in imaginative fiction there was a perennial fascination with possible future societies, Utopian or otherwise.
The awareness of transience and mortality gave urgency to the right ordering of life. The Church offered guidance to the pious for their days to be passed in disciplined devotion, while the moralists urged their worldly readers to redeem their misspent time and look to things eternal. At the end, the right ordering of death was both a social and a religious preoccupation.
The essays gathered here aim to stimulate an imaginative engagement with this important theme and open up avenues for future research.
List of contents
CONTENTS: Michael Moriarty: Introduction - Joanna M. Barker: Time Sanctified: French Influence on Vernacular Prayer - Mette Birkedal Bruun: Time Well Spent: Scheduling Private Devotion in Early Modern France - Lars Cyril Nørgaard: Time Materialized: Mme de Maintenon's Petits Livres Secrets as Instruments of Devotion - Thomas Worcester, S. J.: Jesuit Time in Early Seventeenth-Century France - Adam Horsley: The Good Times and the Bad: François Maynard's Reflections on his Past and Future - Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard: Entre prophétie et prospective : Michel de Pure, de La Pretieuse (1656-1658) à Épigone, histoire du siecle futur (1659) - John D. Lyons: Tragedy and the Weight of Time - Joseph Harris: Out of Time? Untimeliness in Corneille's Pulchérie (1672) - Allen Wood: Anticipation, the Future and La Fontaine's Fables - Richard Maber: Time: For Amendment of Life, or Gathering Rosebuds? A Jesuit Moralist and the Paradoxes of Mortality - Philippa Woodcock: Time, Death and Burial in the ancien diocese of Le Mans.
About the author
Richard Maber is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University and former director of the university¿s interdisciplinary Research Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies. He is also the founder and General Editor of the journal The Seventeenth Century. His principal research interests are seventeenth-century French poetry and early modern intellectual history, especially the networks of learned correspondence of the European Republic of Letters. He is currently editing the extensive complete correspondence of Gilles Ménage (1613¿1692).
Joanna Barker is an honorary research fellow of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University. Her interests include writing by early modern women and issues related to translation.
