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This chapter studies the musical history of Ronsard’s Petrarchan sonnet collection, Les Amours (1552), beginning with the musical Supplément appended to the first edition and culminating in the nine books of Ronsard settings issued in Paris between 1575 and 1578 and featuring sonnets from Les Amours. Analysis of format, book design, organization, and paratexts shows how the Ronsard chansonniers presented the vernacular chanson in more highly authorized forms. Special attention is paid to Anthoine de Bertrand, Les Amours de P. de Ronsard (1576) and Guillaume Boni, Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (1576). An important precursor is Guillaume Costeley, Musique (1570). Finally, the success of these auto-canonizing music books is assessed by tracking their reception in two massive bibliographies: the Bibliotheques of François de La Croix du Maine (1584) and Antoine Du Verdier (1585).

This chapter traces the story of the creation and early reception of Pierre de Ronsard’s much-maligned epic poem, the Franciade (1572). It is postulated that the birth of the epic project can be seen in line with the ways in which poets of a previous generation worked with artists to celebrate the royal entry of Henri II in 1549. Subsequent sections detail how, even before publication, the Franciade was made public (a) on the new Louvre façade of Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon (in the early 1550s) and (b) in the streets of Paris for the royal entry of Charles IX (in 1571). The chapter then analyses pictorial aspects of the poem itself and concludes with an extended discussion of Toussaint Dubreuil’s series of Franciade paintings executed for Henri IV. Viewed through its close relationship to the sister arts, the Franciade here appears in a new light.

This chapter examines cornucopian text problems in French Renaissance writing in the context of Pierre de Ronsard's works. It outlines the recurrence of non-integration as a problem in Ronsard's writing and indicates the way in which it emerges as a theme. It analyses several poems of Ronsard in order to illustrate the more extreme consequences of the dialogue between integration and fragmentation in his works. This chapter attempts to show what is possible in a 16th-century poetic text rather than provide a description of its characteristics.

This chapter explores two dynastic epics that take up national origin myths: Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade (1572) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Ronsard's unfinished epic embarks on a restless search for ever-older historical models to undergird its fiction, a quest that finally leads to the Orphic Hymns. Spenser's epic draws instead on the poet's encounters with the Irish bardic tradition, which force him to confront the primitive oral origins of both British chronicle history and the European epic tradition: a confrontation expressed in The Faerie Queene through fictions of primordial strife and Hesiodic theomachy.

By working through problems of missing and conflicting attribution, this chapter begins by questioning the status of chansons as works. Musical analysis suggests that the simple and formulaic style of polyphony that Claudin de Sermisy, Pierre Sandrin, and others used to set the lyric poetry of Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais argues that the genre badly supported any authorial ambitions that might be held by the composer. Part of this is due to the status of lyric poetry itself, which often circulated orally in musical settings (without attribution to the poet) or in small poetic anthologies. A turning point came with the career of Pierre de Ronsard, who promoted lyric poetry as the foremost vernacular genre in France and published his own poetry in highly authorized printed editions.

This chapter examines the fifth and newly revised edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres (1578), which includes a new sonnet sequence written for one of the queen mother’s maids of honor, Hélène de Surgères. It consists of two parts with no overt distinguishing features between them, offering sixty poems in Le premiere livre des sonnets pour Hélène and fifty-five poems in Le second livre des sonnets pour Hélène. To this two-part collection the poet attached fifty-one Amours diverses, thirty-nine of which he integrated into his Sonnets pour Hélène in the sixth edition of his Oeuvres (1584). These years mark Ronsard’s return to Petrarchism, building upon observations about himself and others, spun from experience and fused with a smart, sophisticated use of Petrarchan topoi.

This chapter analyzes the investments Ronsard had made to his volume of poetry, Les Amours (1552). Previously published as Les Quatre Premiers Livres des Odes (1550), Les Amours is a reissue of the original with several deletions and minor revisions as well as thirty-nine new sonnets and a commentary by Marc Antoine Muret. Submitting his published texts to further revision over decades, sometimes rewriting them so completely as to generate wholly new poems, the formerly self-styled poet of sublime aspiration and divine fureur became a technician of style, a painstaking maker—and master—of polished artifacts. And to this investment Ronsard would also attach an economic valuation.

This chapter looks at how Ronsard devised alternative approaches to the production and distribution of his poetry, opening new market opportunities through a “creative destruction” of older strategies and techniques. The model that he fastened upon was to advertise his poetic development in a series of collected editions that offered both new and revised texts for public consumption. Each enlarged edition supplanted previous ones with an improved text. In practice, Ronsard was combining and recombining his poetic materials to generate a superior product. Instead of responding to readers’ demands, he was himself creating a new demand and educating a readership in his preferred modes and styles.

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 during the political storm of the late sixteenth century—ways that, ethically speaking, variously implicate or exonerate the politician, poet or author. This chapter poses a series of questions concerning the difference between public and private spheres, the unique moral implications of civil war, and the author or poet’s own position, be it personal, political, or philosophical—or all three—with relation to what Montaigne calls ‘cet universel naufrage du monde’.

This chapter looks into Ronsard’s inspiration from the career of Ludovico Ariosto, an Italian poet, in tracing the evolution of Ronsard’s early style from the forced antiquarianism of his odes to the self-conscious stylization of Les Amours. Ronsard’s obsessive habits of revision attest to his commitment as a writer, revealing second thoughts about his earlier inspired verse, the aspirations of subsequent verse in relation to his evolving aesthetic, his efforts to please new patrons and a changing readership, and his canny attempts to cash in on a growing reputation. Ariosto’s career impressed Ronsard for several reasons, but two stand out. Ariosto’s lyric and epic poetry challenged Ronsard by accommodating normative Petrarchan elegance to sturdier qualities of classical form, but it also alerted him to possibilities of style embedded in both, and especially to a demanding exercise of craftsmanship and skill that would compromise the Neoplatonic doctrine of furor.

This chapter determines some spatial and topical modes of creation through the works of Pierre de Ronsard, a sixteenth-century French poet who established a world map and a territory of his own signature. In his poems Les Odes and Oeuvres completes, explosive invention is both tied to topographical imagery and appealing to the recent memory of the emblem of the woodcut images. During the Renaissance, innovation and experiment with the printed and illustrated book appear to give reason to the spatial force of poetry. Lyrical verse is hieroglyphic, and as they had been affiliated with ancient Egypt were said to belong to a latent or manifest language of geography. The creative drive of poetry of the moment is so often likened to engraved images that verbal material, much as it is in contemporary maps, acquires specific spatial and iconic densities.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the cornucopian text problems of French Renaissance writings. It suggests that the four 16th-century writers considered in this study, Desiderius Erasmus, Francois Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, all worked both within and against the predominant conventions of their period and in the processed created new conventions, constraints, and possibilities. It concludes that the French vernacular text of this period was overtly reflexive and that that Rabelais, Ronsard, and Montaigne were preoccupied with the problems of language.

This chapter examines the cornucopian text problems in the works of several French Renaissance writers including Francois Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne. It explores the corpus in the works of these writers to determine how problems of writing occur in practice. It suggests that while Rabelais and Ronsard allowed theoretical issues to emerge from writing in action, Montaigne provides a context in which theory and practice are in a more explicit and continuous relationship with one another.

An examination of the semantic field of the term ‘oubliance’ in 16th-century France that contextualizes the 1598 Edict of Nantes’s call to erase memories of the wars of Religion in France. André de Nesmond’s 1600 parlementary address on amnesty reveals the complexity of cultural discourses surrounding memory and forgetting in the period, and introduces tragedy and tragic affect as key points of reference for the politics and the historiography of the civil wars.

This chapter describes ‘scenic violence’; that is, violence that is undertaken from within and against a scene, in keeping with Burke’s third category of motivation. The most outstanding example of scenic violence comes in the case of the massacre. The idea of the ‘massacre’, and the very word for it, came into being in response to the Wars of Religion. This chapter describes responses to a number of massacres and would-be massacres in the period, with particular attention to Vassy, Saint Bartholomew, and the Gunpowder Plot. The English tragedy Gorboduc is discussed as a play about a feared massacre to come. D’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques is featured as a response to Saint Bartholomew, as well as to Ronsard’s Considérations, and the writings of the priests John Gerard and Oswald Tesimond as responses to the Gunpowder Plot.