Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought

The age of Shakespeare Cervantes Erasmus Luther and Machiavelli produced in France too some of Europe's greatest ever literature and thought: Montaigne's <i>Essays</i> Rabelais' comic fictions Ronsard's poetry Calvin's theology. These and numerous other extraordinary writings emerged from and contributed to cultural upheavals: the movement usually known as the Renaissance which sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman culture for present-day purposes; religious reform including the previously unthinkable rejection of Catholicism by many in the Reformation culminating in decades of civil war in France; the French language's transformation into an instrument for advanced abstract thought. <br/><br/>This book introduces this vibrant literature and thought via an apparent paradox. Most writers were profoundly concerned to improve life in the here-and-now - socially politically morally spiritually. Yet they often tried to do so by making detours in their writing to other times and places: antiquity; heaven and hell; the hidden recesses of Nature the cosmos or the future; the remote location of an absent loved one; the newly 'discovered' Americas.The point was to show readers that the only way to live in the here-and-now was to connect it to larger realities - cosmic spiritual and historical.