Agrippa d’Aubigné

Born in 1552, Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné was taken by his father, at the age of eight, to look upon the severed heads of Huguenots executed for their part in the failed Conspiracy of Amboise. The spectacle marked the child, stirring his devotion to the Protestant cause, which determined his whole life. His military career included serving in the first three Wars of Religion under the prince de Condé, and then in the army of Henri of Navarre. When wounded at the battle of Casteljaloux (1576), Aubigné experienced a religious vision, which, he claims, was the first inspiration for his epic poem Les Tragiques, written and revised over some forty years, before its publication in 1616. His best-known work for modern readers—monumental, and by turn dramatic, satirical, and deeply moving—it is above all imbued with his Calvinist faith in the ultimate triumph of divine purpose, despite the horrific scars wrought by the civil wars. Yet Aubigné’s personal relationship with other leading Protestants was often tense. When Henri IV converted to Catholicism in 1593, Aubigné felt bitterly betrayed and retreated for a while to his family and his provincial estates in Poitou, where he penned his Lettre à Madame, urging the king’s sister, Catherine de Bourbon, to hold firm to her Protestant faith. The need to make his voice heard and shape the Protestant cause impelled him, however, to return repeatedly to the political fray, albeit with increasing disappointment. The accession of Louis XIII and the Regency of Marie de’ Medici fueled his anger against those Protestants willing to appease the new regime. Never inclined to hide his views, he indulged his full satirical venom in his novel Les Aventures du baron de Fæneste (1617–1619), while the seditious views voiced in the first two volumes of his Histoire Universelle (1618–1619) saw this work condemned to be burned. In the last decade of his life, Aubigné took refuge in Geneva (1620–1630), where his marriage with Renée Burlamacchi brought companionship and literary support, not least in her role, after his death, of ensuring his many manuscripts were safely transmitted to the pastor Tronchin, his literary executor. Aubigné may appear as intransigent, and easily moved to anger and scorn, but he was also devoted to his family, as shown in his manuscript Sa Vie à ses enfants, and he had a striking regard for women who stood fast for their Protestant faith.

‘When is a meadow not a meadow?’ : Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry

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.

Conclusion

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.

Love's Wounds

This book takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, the book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped Petrarch's model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. The book argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new “countersovereignty” from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered. The book tracks the development of the counter-sovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, the text reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.