Ch. 5: A Martial Muse: Words of War in the Quest for French Domination of Literature
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Description
This chapter appears in the book, Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion. Edited by Jeff Kendrick and Katherine S. Maynard.
Chapter abstract: For François Charbonnier, it is the combative nature of the poetry produced during the Wars of Religion that makes it uniquely French:“les qualités pure-ment françaises de notre poésie classique dérivent, pour une bonne part, desœuvres de combat.” Violence and war related themes are not, however, exclusive to the later stages of French Renaissance poetry. As early as 1549, Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoys represents the struggle for domination among a number of national literatures, both classical and con-temporary, as a war like any other. In the Deffence,recognized today as the manifesto for Renaissance literature in France, Du Bellay fires the opening volley in a cultural and linguistic war on the dominance of Latin as the lingua franca of learned discourse in favor of the vernacular, in particular French, which was already establishing itself as the language of bureaucracy. DuBellay’s extensive use of war-related vocabulary mirrors that of the oft-forgotten genre of the bella grammaticalia which had prospered across Europea generation or two earlier. Indeed, Du Bellay’s push for the dominance and glorification of the French vernacular intensifies those earlier representations of linguistic wars for the acceptance of a vernacular erudition and the creation of national literatures.
ISBN
9781501518034
Publication Date
2019
Publisher
De Gruyter Brill
City
Boston
Keywords
Literature, Polemic, France, Religious wars
Disciplines
European History | French and Francophone Literature | Political History
Recommended Citation
Di Lauro, Brooke, "Ch. 5: A Martial Muse: Words of War in the Quest for French Domination of Literature" (2019). Modern Languages & Literatures Books. 6.
https://scholar.umw.edu/modernlanguages_books/6