French studies scholars have long treated the sixteenth century as an era saturated with words. But the boom in writing that accompanied the early development of the printing industry, involving no less than the deliberate creation of a national literature that would rival that of neighboring countries, was also replete with explorations of sensory experience. In addition to the masculinist description of the female body that the new genre of the blason entailed, another new genre, the love sonnet, depicted a range of passions, usually from a masculine but also sometimes from a feminine point of view. Frequent reference to voice in many poetic texts indicates a heavy emphasis on the phonic dimension of the written word. Emblem books proliferated, inviting readers to reflect on the relationship of word and image. The religious wars that tore France apart during the second half of the century yielded condemnations marked by exacting accounts of gore and brutality, regarded as all the more powerful if the author could claim to have seen the events in question. In the setting of the expanding French empire, eyewitness accounts were also the stock in trade of travel narratives.

The three papers in this special session each reflect an important aspect of this broadened understanding of the relationship between written word and sensory experience in sixteenth-century France. Dora Polachek examines archival documents from the Brienne collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale, focusing on depositions made by two eyewitnesses of the murder of the French aristocrat the Duke of Guise, thought to be commissioned by the French monarchy, on December 23, 1588. Besides including voices that had largely been unexamined in the discussion of the tumultuous events of the French wars of religion, Polachek’s paper also proposes to present an intriguing methodological discussion of the sixteenth century understanding of eye-witness accounts and the challenges that their emphasis on the sense of sight present to modern readers. Next, Christine McCall Probes offers a foray into sound studies, through the various appeals that the Calvinist female author Georgette de Montenay’s sixteenth-century emblem book makes to hearing. Apart from cataloguing the various sounds evoked including those from the natural world, of living beings, God, and man-made sounds like the trumpet, Probes discusses the ability of these multi-nodal references to sound, in which one sound may evoke different contexts in which it could be heard, to create communities of readers in the context of a society divided over faith. Finally, Elizaveta Lyulekina examines poet Maurice Scève’s contribution to the genre of the blason, the short verse form in which male poets celebrated female body parts. In literary history, Scève is in the ambiguous position of having contributed to the highly corporeal descriptions of the blason and, in his widely read Delie (1544), for having developed the image of the highly idealized, spiritual woman deriving from Petrarch’s Laura. Because scholars have focused on the Petrarchan tradition as the major current in French Renaissance poetry, Lyulekina argues, they have perceived Scève’s blasons as less important. She demonstrates that in Scève’s work these two disparate images of woman bear striking similarities, that for a complete understanding of the idealization of Délie scholars must also understand the sensual descriptions of Scève’s blasons.

After each presenter speaks for seventeen minutes, the presider will open the session to questions from the audience.