Monographs by Jennifer Oliver
Book chapters by Jennifer Oliver
Early Modern Écologies, 2020
In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned wit... more In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d'Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that 'intestine' conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed 'agrilogistic thought'; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.
Articles by Jennifer Oliver
Réforme, Humanisme et Renaissance, 2023
Au cours du xvi e siècle, le terme moyen français « nef » (du latin navis) tomba progressivement ... more Au cours du xvi e siècle, le terme moyen français « nef » (du latin navis) tomba progressivement en désuétude pour être remplacé par « navire 1 ». Nous proposons dans le présent article d'explorer une partie de cette évolution en suivant les traces d'une « nef » symbolique et littéraire depuis ses racines dans la tradition médiévale jusqu'à la première décennie du xvi e siècle 2. Les adaptations françaises du Narrenschiff de Sebastian Brant et les textes inspirés par cette oeuvre : (La Nef des folz, La Nef des folles du monde) ont déclenché un goût pour les Nefs, nom par lequel sont désignés des recueils traitant de toute une gamme de sujets, parmi lesquels la morale, la politique, la sexualité et la médecine. Ces différents textes ont été étudiés dans le contexte de leurs traditions littéraires respectives ; en particulier, l'importance de certaines des Nefs pour les traditions renaissantes de la satire et de la folie a été richement mise en évidence. Cependant, notre contribution cherche à combler une lacune en considérant les liens intertextuels, dont le plus important est bien sûr la métaphore organisatrice qui les unit : celle du navire. Au moyen d'un dialogue
Montaigne Studies, 2023
In the opening pages of “Du repentir”, Montaigne asks: “Est-ce pas faire une muraille sans pierre... more In the opening pages of “Du repentir”, Montaigne asks: “Est-ce pas faire une muraille sans pierre, […] que de bastir des livres sans science et sans art?”. This stony comparison echoes his assertion, found on the previous page in the “exemplaire de Bordeaux”, that “la terre, les rochers du Caucase, les pyramides d’Aegypte” (III, 2, 804) are all subject to the destabilising “branloire perenne” of the world, while reworking the familiar modest author topos in an unfamiliar way. If metaphor most often works by representing an abstract concept in material terms, Montaigne’s metaphor here seems an exemplary and fully realised one, not only extended, but strongly and strangely embedded in its context. This article maps the extent and nature of this
embedding, examining the language of building, buildings, and stone used in
the Essais to refer to and think through imaginative and intellectual processes. In so doing, it explores too the curious ways in which Montaigne interrogates and blurs, or makes porous, the boundary between the material and the metaphorical. This porosity has much in common with what theorists have recently termed “matterphorics”: an “aeseth-ethics” of thought that seeks to counter “the assumption that thought exists […] in the separate, human, sometimes perhaps divine, realm of consciousness, untouched by physical forces, molecular bonds, and other matter(s) of real alliances”. Matterphorics, then, considers thought, of which metaphor and analogy is treated as an especially potent part wielding real agency, as a collaborative process, radically open “not only [to] matter, but also [to] other possible meanings coming to matter”. As I will argue, Montaigne’s openness to the force of matter allows for the “mattering” of new meanings, even as he revisits the most well-worn of metaphors and commonplaces.
This article explores the ways in which war machines are elaborated within Rabelais’s narrative, ... more This article explores the ways in which war machines are elaborated within Rabelais’s narrative, and how they align with – or challenge – the moralising discourse surrounding technology in the mid-sixteenth century. Through close reading of the Gaster and Andouilles episodes, it argues that the ambiguity of the term engin, which is used to refer both to inventive ingenuity and its physical products, provides a rich seam in Rabelais’s fourth book for the exploration of the boundary between nature and artifice. As such antitheses come under strain, so on the other hand do analogous pairings prove to reveal significant differences. Engins are caught up, in Rabelais’s text, in a complex web of associations that includes poetic and technological invention, political leadership, religious worship, and, repeatedly, food. As this web of themes is mapped, it becomes apparent that tripe, in particular, plays a prominent role in mediating a series of symbolic relationships. From the stomach-god whose actions are described by the refrain ‘Et tout pour la trippe’, to the army of tripe sausages who worship a flying pig, the traditional epic association of battle and banquet is recast by Rabelais’s own extraordinary engin.
Papers by Jennifer Oliver
Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship b... more Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues betwe...
Early Modern Écologies, 2020
In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned wit... more In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.
Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing
This chapter tackles perhaps the most salient near-shipwreck in Renaissance French literature to ... more This chapter tackles perhaps the most salient near-shipwreck in Renaissance French literature to the modern reader: Rabelais’s storm scene of the Quart Livre, situating it between two of its closest relatives within the broader family of Renaissance shipwreck texts: one of them familiar, the other perhaps less so. First, some important features of one of Rabelais’s major sources (Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’ dialogue) are set out, both in order to show how the latter responds to the ship of fools tradition, and to establish the ways in which it too establishes conventions for writing about shipwreck. The reading of the famous Rabelaisian storm scene itself is focussed on the figure of Panurge, arguing that it is this character more than any other element that sets Rabelais’s (near-)shipwreck scene apart from its Renaissance relatives. Staying with Panurge, we then turn to what may be thought of as a rewriting or re-imagining of the Quart Livre storm scene: the beaching of the Thalamège in...
Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing, 2019
This chapter marks the transition from portent to actuality, addressing the prospect of political... more This chapter marks the transition from portent to actuality, addressing the prospect of political shipwreck in the troubled latter part of the sixteenth century by considering not only incarnations and reconfigurations of the suave mari magno commonplace but also shipwrecks that are narrated from the inside. It explores the distinction between the struggling ship in Lucretius and the eagerly spectated shipwreck of a political enemy in Cicero’s letters, taking account of the model of the ship of state as elaborated in Plato, Cicero, and medieval sources. It argues that the role of the spectator is most often not at a safe distance, and that the ethical relationship between the spectator and those on board is significantly developed from that in Lucretius. Through the work of three writers (Michel de L’Hospital, Pierre de Ronsard and Michel de Montaigne), it shows that the powerful metaphor of the ship of state struggling on troubled waters is itself articulated in a variety of ways d...
Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing, 2019
Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Old French word for ship—‘nef’—gradually fell out o... more Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Old French word for ship—‘nef’—gradually fell out of use, being replaced by ‘navire’ and ‘vaisseau’. This chapter explores an important strand of this story; the persistence of a symbolic, literary ‘nef’, whose origins can be traced from medieval tradition through to the first decade of the sixteenth century. A mini-genre, the Nef book, capitalized on the popularity of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, and over the course of just a few years, this genre developed and changed, generating de-nauticalized compendia on a range of subjects. These compendia are significant with respect to (among other things) the beginnings of the commonplace book; two of the authors examined in this chapter (Jodocus Badius and Symphorien Champier), played important roles in the emergence of this tradition. Shipwreck often represents the fate of the sinner’s soul, but as the concerns of the Nef books become more worldly, and less spiritual, partly by contact wit...
From the midst of France’s civil wars, and in their aftermath, the constellation of shipwreck, it... more From the midst of France’s civil wars, and in their aftermath, the constellation of shipwreck, its victims, and its spectators is re-imagined in theatrical terms. Famously employed by Agrippa d’Aubigné in his Tragiques to disabuse complacent speculators of their illusion of distance from the disaster of civil catastrophe, the dramatic potential of earlier shipwreck texts is more fully realised in theatrical and meta-theatrical terms, as explored in this Conclusion. But whereas the shipwreck of Shakespeare’s Tempest demonstrates the power of compassion to produce embodied affect in its spectator, conversely a French tragedy that dramatizes a real-life tale of Portuguese shipwreck explores the troubling possibility of the spectacle failing to touch its intended audience. Drawing together the study’s thematic strands of corporality and narrative with this theatrical aspect, and pointing to questions of compassion and ethical responsibility that hold new weight in the light of Europe’s twenty-first-century refugee crisis, the Conclusion points to the new narrative position of shipwreck in the early decades of the seventeenth century: it lies at the beginning of the story, and begs the question of how readers, spectators, and their communities will respond.
In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, la... more In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when ships – both real and symbolic – are threatened with disaster. The Direful Spectacle argues that, in the French Renaissance, shipwreck functions not only as an emblem or motif within writing, but as a part, or the whole, of a narrative, in which the dynamics of spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. The possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck – imagined through the Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace – is constantly undermined, not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. This book examines the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous in Renaissance shipwreck writing; bodies are described and allegorized in nautical terms, and, conversely, ships themselves become animalized ...
Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing, 2019
In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, la... more In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when ships – both real and symbolic – are threatened with disaster. The Direful Spectacle argues that, in the French Renaissance, shipwreck functions not only as an emblem or motif within writing, but as a part, or the whole, of a narrative, in which the dynamics of spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. The possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck – imagined through the Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace – is constantly undermined, not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. This book examines the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous in Renaissance shipwreck writing; bodies are described and allegorized in nautical terms, and, conversely, ships themselves become animalized ...
Early Modern French Studies, 2016
This article explores the ways in which war machines are elaborated within Rabelais's narrati... more This article explores the ways in which war machines are elaborated within Rabelais's narrative, and how they align with – or challenge – the moralising discourse surrounding technology in the mid-sixteenth century. Through close reading of the Gaster and Andouilles episodes, it argues that the ambiguity of the term engin, which is used to refer both to inventive ingenuity and its physical products, provides a rich seam in Rabelais's fourth book for the exploration of the boundary between nature and artifice. As such antitheses come under strain, so on the other hand do analogous pairings prove to reveal significant differences. Engins are caught up, in Rabelais's text, in a complex web of associations that includes poetic and technological invention, political leadership, religious worship, and, repeatedly, food. As this web of themes is mapped, it becomes apparent that tripe, in particular, plays a prominent role in mediating a series of symbolic relationships. From the stomach-god whose actions are described by the refrain ‘Et tout pour la trippe’, to the army of tripe sausages who worship a flying pig, the traditional epic association of battle and banquet is recast by Rabelais's own extraordinary engin.
Lorsque, dans le Quart Livre, Rabelais qualifie le redoutable Messere Gaster de « grand maitre i... more Lorsque, dans le Quart Livre, Rabelais qualifie le redoutable Messere Gaster de « grand maitre ingenieux « (p. 674 ), il laisse une certaine place à l’ambiguïté. Comme l’a noté Michael Screech dans sa traduction anglaise du texte, cette locution peut indiquer soit l’ingéniosité de Gaster, soit son métier d’ingénieur. Cette multiplicité de sens se manifeste encore une fois, peu après, dans la liste – d’où provient la citation de mon titre – qui décrit les inventions de Ventre: « il faict ce bien au monde, qu’il luy invente toutes ars, toutes machines, tous mestiers, tous engins, et subtilitez » (p. 673). Ce glissement continu entre capacités intellectuelles et les produits physiques de telles capacités, qui se conclut par une paire de termes qui pourraient faire partie de l’une ou de l’autre catégorie, fait preuve de l’élasticité de ces mots clés, aussi bien que des domaines créateurs évoqués [...]
Talks by Jennifer Oliver
In the fourteenth book of his encyclopaedic treatise on subtlety (De subtilitate, 1550), the Ital... more In the fourteenth book of his encyclopaedic treatise on subtlety (De subtilitate, 1550), the Italian physician and philosopher Girolamo Cardano identifies a certain kind of smug satisfaction to be drawn from exclusive or elite knowledge: ‘il n’est rien plus delectable à l’homme que le devis des choses grandes et secretes. Car ce qui est cogneu à chacun, est vil, quoy qu’il soit precieux de soymesme’ (from the French translation by Richard Le Blanc, 1556). This kind of discrimination and delimitation, which itself seems to reflect on the very nature of libido sciendi, may be seen to take more concrete form in the walls of the abbaye de Thélème, upon whose gates the inscription entreats ‘Compaignons gentilz,| Serains et subtilz’ to enter a space marked out as ‘Hors de vilité’ (Gargantua 54). Those welcomed include ‘nobles chevaliers’ and ‘dames de hault paraige’, along with those having ‘sens agile’. This paper will examine the ways in which ‘subtle’ persons (and in particular readers) are constructed in opposition to that which is vile in texts of varying genres, asking how elite audiences are defined and restricted, and how this distinction may (or may not) be aligned with markers of social status. A subject of particular interest will be the slippage of the status of subtlety itself: in moments when intellectual snobbery is undermined and ‘subtilitez’ seem to be dismissed as ‘vaines’, what, I will ask, becomes of the vile?
Political and environmental discourses of the Renaissance were triangulated through the corporeal... more Political and environmental discourses of the Renaissance were triangulated through the corporeal imagery used to describe both state and landscape in technical and poetic texts. Pierre de Ronsard depicts nature as a pregnant or labouring woman, and, lamenting the advances of agriculture, describes newly cleared farmland as ‘feeling’ the plough. By contrast, in De re metallica (1556), Georgius Agricola defends mining against a plethora of Classical poetic and philosophical invectives, arguing that it is natural for man to plunder the ‘bowels of the earth’. Later in the sixteenth century, the ‘body’ of the French landscape, like the body politic, suffers the ravages of the Wars of Religion, as described by Ronsard’s Reformist counterpart Agrippa d’Aubigné. This paper will explore the shifting debates over the interactions between human, political and environmental bodies, asking how corporeal metaphors enrich and shape such discourses as civil war transforms the physical and political landscape.
Lorsque, dans le Quart Livre, Rabelais qualifie le redoutable Messere Gaster de « grand maitre in... more Lorsque, dans le Quart Livre, Rabelais qualifie le redoutable Messere Gaster de « grand maitre ingenieux « (p. 674 ), il laisse une certaine place à l’ambiguïté. Comme l’a noté Michael Screech dans sa traduction anglaise du texte, cette locution peut indiquer soit l’ingéniosité de Gaster, soit son métier d’ingénieur. Cette multiplicité de sens se manifeste encore une fois, peu après, dans la liste – d’où provient la citation de mon titre – qui décrit les inventions de Ventre: « il faict ce bien au monde, qu’il luy invente toutes ars, toutes machines, tous mestiers, tous engins, et subtilitez » (p. 673). Ce glissement continu entre capacités intellectuelles et les produits physiques de telles capacités, qui se conclut par une paire de termes qui pourraient faire partie de l’une ou de l’autre catégorie, fait preuve de l’élasticité de ces mots clés, aussi bien que des domaines créateurs évoqués. Les commentaires critiques sur cet épisode ont remarqué son caractère fort ambigu et sa qualité onirique : l’on passe sans avertissement de Gaster au Ventre, du haut du Rocher de Vertu jusqu’au fond de la « pyramide gastronomique », avec la « prognostication » ou divination par inspection de la « matiere fecale » de Gaster. Je propose d’examiner ici le rôle du jeu sur « engins » et « subtilitez » dans cette ambiguïté universelle et irréductible de l’épisode de Gaster, après avoir considéré la signification de ces termes en d’autres contextes, à d’autres moments rabelaisiens où il est question d’ingéniosité et d’invention. Il semble que, en règle générale, les deux termes (« engin » et « subtilité ») soient utilisés au singulier pour traiter des facultés intellectuelles, alors qu’au pluriel ils deviennent plus concrets. Mais, comme pour toutes les meilleures règles, il existe des exceptions, et plusieurs moments d’ailleurs où, comme dans la citation de mon titre, la certitude nous échappe. Est-ce que cette occurrence – unique dans toute l’œuvre rabelaisienne – de « subtilitez » au pluriel, constituerait la concrétisation d’un concept abstrait? Et que serait le statut d’un tel objet? Cette enquête s’avérera double ; en parallèle de la multiplicité ou ambiguïté lexicale constatée se révèle une certaine ambivalence morale. Les « subtilitez » sont-elles condamnées comme vaines (ou pires), quelles sont donc les relations entre « engin » et « subtilité », et que peuvent apporter ces questions à nos lectures de cet autre inextinguible « grand maitre de toutes ars »?
The problem of narrating shipwrecks has captivated authors from Lucretius to Shakespeare. In the ... more The problem of narrating shipwrecks has captivated authors from Lucretius to Shakespeare. In the sixteenth century the proliferation of Atlantic crossings and of written accounts of such voyages meant that shipwrecks – as experienced from the inside – became narratable in new ways; one such way was to turn to and adapt the genre of histoire. Late in the century, two Reformist writers published vernacular accounts of sea voyages that present shipwreck as the archetypal educational or transformative experience. Their shared choice of title evokes both Pliny’s Natural History and Lucian’s self-proclaimed tall tale, the True History. This paper will demonstrate the variety of textual practices and affective strategies employed by this pair in the telling of their histoires.
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Monographs by Jennifer Oliver
Book chapters by Jennifer Oliver
Articles by Jennifer Oliver
embedding, examining the language of building, buildings, and stone used in
the Essais to refer to and think through imaginative and intellectual processes. In so doing, it explores too the curious ways in which Montaigne interrogates and blurs, or makes porous, the boundary between the material and the metaphorical. This porosity has much in common with what theorists have recently termed “matterphorics”: an “aeseth-ethics” of thought that seeks to counter “the assumption that thought exists […] in the separate, human, sometimes perhaps divine, realm of consciousness, untouched by physical forces, molecular bonds, and other matter(s) of real alliances”. Matterphorics, then, considers thought, of which metaphor and analogy is treated as an especially potent part wielding real agency, as a collaborative process, radically open “not only [to] matter, but also [to] other possible meanings coming to matter”. As I will argue, Montaigne’s openness to the force of matter allows for the “mattering” of new meanings, even as he revisits the most well-worn of metaphors and commonplaces.
Papers by Jennifer Oliver
Talks by Jennifer Oliver
embedding, examining the language of building, buildings, and stone used in
the Essais to refer to and think through imaginative and intellectual processes. In so doing, it explores too the curious ways in which Montaigne interrogates and blurs, or makes porous, the boundary between the material and the metaphorical. This porosity has much in common with what theorists have recently termed “matterphorics”: an “aeseth-ethics” of thought that seeks to counter “the assumption that thought exists […] in the separate, human, sometimes perhaps divine, realm of consciousness, untouched by physical forces, molecular bonds, and other matter(s) of real alliances”. Matterphorics, then, considers thought, of which metaphor and analogy is treated as an especially potent part wielding real agency, as a collaborative process, radically open “not only [to] matter, but also [to] other possible meanings coming to matter”. As I will argue, Montaigne’s openness to the force of matter allows for the “mattering” of new meanings, even as he revisits the most well-worn of metaphors and commonplaces.
The ‘problem’ of seafaring is rather nicely summed up by Hans Blumenberg in Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a metaphor for existence: ‘The idea that here, on the boundary between land and sea, what may not have been the fall but was certainly a misstep into the inappropriate and immoderate was first taken, has the vividness that sustains leading topoi.’ And as Blumenberg shows in the book, the scene of ‘shipwreck with spectator’ represents the acme of this tension: it juxtaposes the seafarer with the landlubber, drawing out the moral or ethical implications of their positions in the most (literally) dramatic of circumstances.
The major model of shipwreck at the dawn of the renaissance was, of course, Lucretius’s suave mare magno, from the beginning of Book II of De Rerum natura. For Lucretius, the image of the spectator presents the ideal position of the philosopher, who gains pleasure from the knowledge that he is withdrawn from worldly concerns (the Epicureans called this freedom from worry ataraxia).
My work here is indebted to Blumenberg’s, and also to that of Frank Lestringant, a giant of the ‘French Renaissance travel writing scene’, who like Blumenberg has drawn fruitful comparison between the original Lucretian topos and its reincarnations in sixteenth-century French literature. But where I differ from both Blumenberg and Lestringant is in scope. Blumenberg’s book moves across centuries of European literature, whilst Lestringant’s articles on this topic tackle, variously, the ‘family’ of poetic tempêtes and the ‘political’ implications of the image of shipwreck in confessionally inflected poetry; neither really takes travel writing – or reading -- as their subject.
‘Spectatorship’, as far as my work is concerned, incorporates readership, and so the philosophical pleasure described by Lucretius in observing from afar the distress of another might serve as a model for narrative desire in these texts. The trio of ‘shipwreck’ narratives I’m going to talk about today offer a preliminary glimpse at the problems of reading shipwrecks. All three are concerned with a moral opposition between the seafarer and one who remains at home, grounded; the ways in which that opposition itself bears on the ethics and the pleasures of reading is one of the things I want to explore in this talk.