Canadian Society For Renaissance Studies
Société Canadienne D'Études de la Renaissance


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Members | Membres

 

To join the society / pour adhérer à l'association:

2010 Membership form / formulaire d'adhésion 2010 (PDF)

 

Members' Publications / Publications de nos membres

 

carnaval

2009

Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture

Donald Beecher & Grant Williams , Editors

440 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-2048-1

The Art of Memory in Renaissance scholarship was, for many years, confined to a footnote in classical rhetoric, until Francis Yates's groundbreaking study of 1966 argues for its considerable influence on hermetic philosophy and literature. Over the last few decades, another shft in scholarship has occurred that goes well beyond Yates's conceptualization of memory as an occult and occulted phenomenon in the history of ideas. Recent studies suggest memory to be less a theme or idea than the prevailing episteme, whose discourses, practices, and mentations produce and reproduce Renaissance culture. Humanism's project of recovering the past by retrieving and reconstructing textuality privileges recollection as a mode of epistemological engagement with the world, as a means of subjective and collective identity formation, and as an organ for achieving ethical goals. For that reason, memory finds itself involved in the passage to modernity, when its ascendancy is challenged by the rise of seventeenth-century science and fall of rhetoric, the emergence of the European nation state, and the explorsion of the printing press and book technologies. Acknowledging this new direction in scholarship, this volume seeks to trace the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural work throughout the English and Continental Renaissance. Among the thinkers and writers to receive attention are Thomas Hoby, Conrad Gesner, Erasmus, Conrad Celtis, Johann Sturm, Machiavelli, Jehan du Pré, Spenser, Robert Hooke, Milton, Sebastian Münster, and Shakespeare. A long critical and historical afterword extends the historical contexts around the contributions and provides an overview of the materials central to the field, as well as a sense of the field's future development.


To order: http://www.crrs.ca/publications/bookpages/es19.htm

 

Dix ans de recherche sur les femmes écrivains de l'Ancien Régime : influences et confluences. Mélanges offerts à Hannah Fournier

Pour commander: http://www.pulaval.com/catalogue/dix-ans-recherche-sur-les-femmes-9281.html

 

2008

 

Don Beecher recently published the Vol. I of his two volume
anthology entitled Renaissance Comedy: The Italian Masters, available from the
University of Toronto Press in both paper and casebound format. Straparola’s book
is considered by specialists to be the best gathering of Italian novelle after
Boccaccio’s Decameron. Straparola’s remarkable collection of 75 stories and
fables, published in 1550, is barely known to English readers, even though among
its many fine stories are the original versions of “Puss ‘n Boots” and “Beauty
and the Beast.” Regarding the project, Don says, “My project is to translate,
study, and historically contextualize this collection for the delectation of readers
everywhere.

Helen Ostovich has just published a book,  with co-editors Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck, called The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England (University of Delaware Press, 1 May 2008) ISBN 0874139546.  This collection of original essays, by such scholars as Patricia Parker, Mathew Martin, and Jonathan Gil Harris, explores the great quests and questions into the unknown that occupied and troubled the early modern world. The topics addressed are in many cases hitherto untouched by modern scholarship. Writings examined include canonical texts of Renaissance literature and others engaged in the transcultural exchanges of their times. Themes range from mathematics to confessional exile, to the potency of goods and commerce, to imaginings of the most remote, exotic, and dangerous locations: topics of ever-increasing interest.The overarching construction of the collection is provided by a full, historical, and critical introduction, and by a tripartite division of essays into travel, commerce, and the domestication of the foreign. Strikingly illustrated with Renaissance art and woodcuts, it is rounded out with a full index of names, ideas, and themes, making it accessible to scholars and readers with a thirst for the real mysteries of our past.

Olga Pugliese announces the publication of Castiglione's 'The Book of the
Courtier') ('Il libro del cortegiano'): A Classic in the Making (Naples (Italy):
Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2008. Pp.380. It may be purchased by sending
an e-mail request to acquisti@edizioniesi.it). The composition and revision of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano are traced diachronically through a collation of the five manuscripts, including the Mantua fragments. A philological analysis and interpretation of the variants throws light on the making of this classic work, especially in relation to the development of the dialogic structure, Castiglione’s views on Italian and other national cultures, the formulation of his theory of humour and revisions to the witticisms (some of which remain unpublished), and the evolution of the ideas expressed about women. The study reveals how Castiglione handled controversial topics and created a highly sophisticated and readable dialogue, what factors were at work in the revision process, and why some of the anomalies remain.

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