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Papers by Katherine Maynard

Polemic and literature surrounding the French Wars of religion, 2019

Renaissance and Reformation, 2006

Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Cres... more Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans sa composition de deux textes martyrologiques, le premier étant son poème Les Tragiques, et le deuxième son Histoire universelle. Ces ouvrages révèlent dans une large mesure comment d'Aubigné a lu et récrit l'Histoire des martyrs. L'Histoire universelle démontre que la puissance du martyr se réalise seulement lorsque l'expérience des témoins confirme le texte. Dans Les Tragiques, d'Aubigné cherche à recréer ce cadre. Son poème comporte des vignettes qui accompagnent le texte de Crespin et qui visent à renouveler un lectorat pour lequel l'expérience du martyr n'appartient qu'au passé.

Romanic Review, 2009

In the "Avertissement au lecteur" of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Sal... more In the "Avertissement au lecteur" of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas states that he chose to write about the biblical figure Judith because he was asked to do so by Jeanne d'Albret, "ayant este commande, il y a environ quatorze ans, par feu tres illustre et tres vertueus Princesse Jane, royne de Navarre, de rediger l'histoire de Judit en forme d'un poeme epique ..." (1) At the same time that he wrote an epic poem for his patroness, Du Bartas wrote for her subjects in the sovereign territories she controlled in southwest France. (2) Threatened by Catholic forces from Spain and northern France, Jeanne's Huguenot subjects were in need of strong leadership, both spiritual and military. It does not seem unreasonable that, at a moment of crisis in the mid-1560's, Jeanne asked for an epic poem about Judith to serve as a guide. (3) Judith's story legitimizes the actions of an isolated group of Elect in their fight against an invading imperial power. In the context of its production, Du Bartas' poem invited readers to link the patroness and the heroine Judith and to link her people and the inhabitants of Judith's village Bethulia. For Jeanne d'Albret and her subjects, La Judit thus carried a message of solidarity and rebellion. Jeanne d'Albret died in 1572 and a new queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, succeeded her. Du Bartas responded to these events by proclaiming Marguerite the patroness of La Judit: Fille du grand HENRY, et compagne pudique D'un autre grand HENRY, o MARGUERITE unique, Qui decores la France, oy ce vers qui ne dit RIEN, si non ton beau los sous le nom de Judit. (J 1.5-8) (4) Such a move can easily be explained as opportunism on the part of the poet, but to dismiss the difference in patronesses too quickly would be to miss the complexities of the poem's second incarnation. The shift from Jeanne to Marguerite was not merely an exchange of one prominent noblewoman for another. The two women belonged to different sides of the religious and political controversies of the sixteenth century: Jeanne was an outspoken and at times militant Protestant, and Marguerite, whose marriage to Jeanne's son Henri had set the scene for the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, was firmly Catholic. Furthermore, whereas Jeanne d'Albret often found herself at odds with her Valois cousins ruling the north, Marguerite was the sister of the king of France and supported the interests of the French monarchy. For Du Bartas, a Protestant born in Jeanne d'Albret's territories, offering Marguerite de Valois a poem whose subject was originally conceived by her mother-in-law required a reconfiguration. (5) Interestingly enough, these changes rarely occur within the poem itself. (6) Although the poet made numerous revisions to the text between the first and second editions, his main concern seems to have been improving the language in the newer edition; few of the revisions grant a new meaning or message to the earlier edition. Instead, the re-orientation of the poem takes place on the level of the paratext. Within a letter addressed to Marguerite and in the second version of his "Avertissement au lecteur," Du Bartas manages to present his potentially divisive poem as a welcome gift that unifies north and south, Catholic and Protestant. In the course of this essay, I will examine La Judit in its original context and above all the political implications it held for Queen Jeanne d'Albret and for the adherents of the Reformed Church in southwest France. As a Protestant version of a classical epic commanded in the 1560s, La Judit was an expression of Jeanne d'Albret's political power and an iteration of the nation served by it, reinforcing the legitimacy of the Protestant cause in the face of the imperial (and Catholic) other. I will consider how Du Bartas edited his text for Marguerite de Valois by dissociating the new patroness from the more political content of the poem, adapting the poem's message to promote a peaceful coexistence for all of the citizens under Marguerite's influence. …

Reveries of Community, 2017

Published in the series Rethinking the Early Modern, Reveries of Community contributes to the ree... more Published in the series Rethinking the Early Modern, Reveries of Community contributes to the reexamination of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature. Katherine Maynard supplements close reading with a comprehensive but concise consideration of previous scholarship to argue against the "discourse of epic failure" (5)-that is, the traditional view that French authors failed to produce an epic on par with either classical models or Italian and English contemporaries. Instead of seeing the French Wars of Religion as an explanation for the failure of the epic genre, Maynard uses this same historical context and the corresponding political need for national unity as a lens for rereading the works of Pierre de Ronsard, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, Sébastien Garnier, Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet, and Agrippa d'Aubigné, and argues that these works "demonstrate epic poetry's capacity to play a role in political realities, as well as the benefits of creating imagined communities at war and, most importantly, at peace" (12). The introductory chapter clearly explains the nation-building potential of the epic genre and situates the argument in both historical and literary contexts, setting up the following chapters, which treat chronologically the epic works of the five poets mentioned above. Chapter 1, "Empires of Erasure in Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade (1572)," considers the epic "a continuation" of the Discours des misères de ce temps, and, rather than focusing on the incompletion of the work, examines the poem that does exist within the context of the years of its composition, 1566-71. In these turbulent years, Ronsard imagined the establishment of a French nation with "erasures," particularly through a lack of geographical specificity, which omitted the spaces of recent violence with Protestants. Maynard argues that Ronsard's creation of "a space of epic fantasy" and the suppression of memory "reduces the communal possibilities of the imperial imaginary" (32). This attention to geographical representation returns in chapter 5, "Re-Forming Communities in Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques (1616)," when Maynard studies the re-inscription of memories of the Wars of Religion into specific sites of battle. The contrast between Ronsard and d'Aubigné highlights the difference between wartime poetic production aiming toward peace and peace-time composition that attempts to revive the solidarity and community experienced in war. In light of the religious persecution that reemerged over the course of the seventeenth century, Maynard reads d'Aubigné's work as a preemptive attempt to keep the French Protestant community from falling into complacency. While chapters 1 and 5 neatly bookend Maynard's argument and demonstrate the vast differences in these imagined communities, chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide other case studies in the use of the epic genre. Chapter 2 traces the changes from regional to RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 384 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1

Romance Notes, 2006

THE Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste du Bartas (1544-1590) wrote his epic La Judit at the request... more THE Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste du Bartas (1544-1590) wrote his epic La Judit at the request of his patroness Jeanne d'Albret who commanded a poem about Judith sometime in the mid-1560's. (1) True to the poet's own pledge to write only about sacred subjects, the poem's narrative rarely strays from the original Book of Judith. (2) One notable exception can be found in the poem's fourth book where the female protagonist's education and daily activities are described in detail by one of her neighbors. The neighbor Cambris sings the praises of Judith's father Merari for taking great care with his daughter's education: "Le prudent Merari met toute diligence/ A faconner les meurs de ceste mole enfance ..." (4.85-86). (3) He then describes Judith's life as a successful adult. The passage serves as a testament to the importance of Christian education for women and as a guide for female behavior during courtship, marriage, and widowhood. (4)...

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Renaissance Quarterly, 2013

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, 2000

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans... more Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans sa composition de deux textes martyrologiques, le premier étant son poème Les Tragiques, et le deuxième son Histoire universelle. Ces ouvrages révèlent dans une large mesure comment d'Aubigné a lu et récrit l'Histoire des martyrs. L'Histoire uni-verselle démontre que la puissance du martyr se réalise seulement lorsque l'expérience des témoins confirme le texte. Dans Les Tragiques, d'Aubigné cherche à recréer ce cadre. Son poème comporte des vignettes qui accompagnent le texte de Crespin et qui visent à renouveler un lectorat pour lequel l'expérience du martyr n'appartient qu'au passé.

Drafts by Katherine Maynard

DEADLINE EXTENDED! CFP: Biennial Conference of the Seiziémistes the MidAltantic The third bie... more DEADLINE EXTENDED!

CFP: Biennial Conference of the Seiziémistes the MidAltantic
The third biennial conference of Seiziémistes of the Mid-Atlantic will take place on Saturday, December 7, 2019. at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

The plenary speaker will be Julie Hardwick of the University of Texas at Austin.
We encourage scholars of early modern France from all disciplines to submit abstracts and would particularly welcome a panel on the creative agency of women in the early modern era and how they were “created” by others.

300-word abstracts of proposed twenty-minute papers should be submitted to Brooke Di Lauro, bdilauro@umw.edu by SEPT 15, 2019. Successful applicants will be notified by Oct 1, 2019.

Polemic and literature surrounding the French Wars of religion, 2019

Renaissance and Reformation, 2006

Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Cres... more Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans sa composition de deux textes martyrologiques, le premier étant son poème Les Tragiques, et le deuxième son Histoire universelle. Ces ouvrages révèlent dans une large mesure comment d'Aubigné a lu et récrit l'Histoire des martyrs. L'Histoire universelle démontre que la puissance du martyr se réalise seulement lorsque l'expérience des témoins confirme le texte. Dans Les Tragiques, d'Aubigné cherche à recréer ce cadre. Son poème comporte des vignettes qui accompagnent le texte de Crespin et qui visent à renouveler un lectorat pour lequel l'expérience du martyr n'appartient qu'au passé.

Romanic Review, 2009

In the "Avertissement au lecteur" of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Sal... more In the "Avertissement au lecteur" of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas states that he chose to write about the biblical figure Judith because he was asked to do so by Jeanne d'Albret, "ayant este commande, il y a environ quatorze ans, par feu tres illustre et tres vertueus Princesse Jane, royne de Navarre, de rediger l'histoire de Judit en forme d'un poeme epique ..." (1) At the same time that he wrote an epic poem for his patroness, Du Bartas wrote for her subjects in the sovereign territories she controlled in southwest France. (2) Threatened by Catholic forces from Spain and northern France, Jeanne's Huguenot subjects were in need of strong leadership, both spiritual and military. It does not seem unreasonable that, at a moment of crisis in the mid-1560's, Jeanne asked for an epic poem about Judith to serve as a guide. (3) Judith's story legitimizes the actions of an isolated group of Elect in their fight against an invading imperial power. In the context of its production, Du Bartas' poem invited readers to link the patroness and the heroine Judith and to link her people and the inhabitants of Judith's village Bethulia. For Jeanne d'Albret and her subjects, La Judit thus carried a message of solidarity and rebellion. Jeanne d'Albret died in 1572 and a new queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, succeeded her. Du Bartas responded to these events by proclaiming Marguerite the patroness of La Judit: Fille du grand HENRY, et compagne pudique D'un autre grand HENRY, o MARGUERITE unique, Qui decores la France, oy ce vers qui ne dit RIEN, si non ton beau los sous le nom de Judit. (J 1.5-8) (4) Such a move can easily be explained as opportunism on the part of the poet, but to dismiss the difference in patronesses too quickly would be to miss the complexities of the poem's second incarnation. The shift from Jeanne to Marguerite was not merely an exchange of one prominent noblewoman for another. The two women belonged to different sides of the religious and political controversies of the sixteenth century: Jeanne was an outspoken and at times militant Protestant, and Marguerite, whose marriage to Jeanne's son Henri had set the scene for the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, was firmly Catholic. Furthermore, whereas Jeanne d'Albret often found herself at odds with her Valois cousins ruling the north, Marguerite was the sister of the king of France and supported the interests of the French monarchy. For Du Bartas, a Protestant born in Jeanne d'Albret's territories, offering Marguerite de Valois a poem whose subject was originally conceived by her mother-in-law required a reconfiguration. (5) Interestingly enough, these changes rarely occur within the poem itself. (6) Although the poet made numerous revisions to the text between the first and second editions, his main concern seems to have been improving the language in the newer edition; few of the revisions grant a new meaning or message to the earlier edition. Instead, the re-orientation of the poem takes place on the level of the paratext. Within a letter addressed to Marguerite and in the second version of his "Avertissement au lecteur," Du Bartas manages to present his potentially divisive poem as a welcome gift that unifies north and south, Catholic and Protestant. In the course of this essay, I will examine La Judit in its original context and above all the political implications it held for Queen Jeanne d'Albret and for the adherents of the Reformed Church in southwest France. As a Protestant version of a classical epic commanded in the 1560s, La Judit was an expression of Jeanne d'Albret's political power and an iteration of the nation served by it, reinforcing the legitimacy of the Protestant cause in the face of the imperial (and Catholic) other. I will consider how Du Bartas edited his text for Marguerite de Valois by dissociating the new patroness from the more political content of the poem, adapting the poem's message to promote a peaceful coexistence for all of the citizens under Marguerite's influence. …

Reveries of Community, 2017

Published in the series Rethinking the Early Modern, Reveries of Community contributes to the ree... more Published in the series Rethinking the Early Modern, Reveries of Community contributes to the reexamination of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature. Katherine Maynard supplements close reading with a comprehensive but concise consideration of previous scholarship to argue against the "discourse of epic failure" (5)-that is, the traditional view that French authors failed to produce an epic on par with either classical models or Italian and English contemporaries. Instead of seeing the French Wars of Religion as an explanation for the failure of the epic genre, Maynard uses this same historical context and the corresponding political need for national unity as a lens for rereading the works of Pierre de Ronsard, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, Sébastien Garnier, Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet, and Agrippa d'Aubigné, and argues that these works "demonstrate epic poetry's capacity to play a role in political realities, as well as the benefits of creating imagined communities at war and, most importantly, at peace" (12). The introductory chapter clearly explains the nation-building potential of the epic genre and situates the argument in both historical and literary contexts, setting up the following chapters, which treat chronologically the epic works of the five poets mentioned above. Chapter 1, "Empires of Erasure in Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade (1572)," considers the epic "a continuation" of the Discours des misères de ce temps, and, rather than focusing on the incompletion of the work, examines the poem that does exist within the context of the years of its composition, 1566-71. In these turbulent years, Ronsard imagined the establishment of a French nation with "erasures," particularly through a lack of geographical specificity, which omitted the spaces of recent violence with Protestants. Maynard argues that Ronsard's creation of "a space of epic fantasy" and the suppression of memory "reduces the communal possibilities of the imperial imaginary" (32). This attention to geographical representation returns in chapter 5, "Re-Forming Communities in Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques (1616)," when Maynard studies the re-inscription of memories of the Wars of Religion into specific sites of battle. The contrast between Ronsard and d'Aubigné highlights the difference between wartime poetic production aiming toward peace and peace-time composition that attempts to revive the solidarity and community experienced in war. In light of the religious persecution that reemerged over the course of the seventeenth century, Maynard reads d'Aubigné's work as a preemptive attempt to keep the French Protestant community from falling into complacency. While chapters 1 and 5 neatly bookend Maynard's argument and demonstrate the vast differences in these imagined communities, chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide other case studies in the use of the epic genre. Chapter 2 traces the changes from regional to RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 384 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1

Romance Notes, 2006

THE Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste du Bartas (1544-1590) wrote his epic La Judit at the request... more THE Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste du Bartas (1544-1590) wrote his epic La Judit at the request of his patroness Jeanne d'Albret who commanded a poem about Judith sometime in the mid-1560's. (1) True to the poet's own pledge to write only about sacred subjects, the poem's narrative rarely strays from the original Book of Judith. (2) One notable exception can be found in the poem's fourth book where the female protagonist's education and daily activities are described in detail by one of her neighbors. The neighbor Cambris sings the praises of Judith's father Merari for taking great care with his daughter's education: "Le prudent Merari met toute diligence/ A faconner les meurs de ceste mole enfance ..." (4.85-86). (3) He then describes Judith's life as a successful adult. The passage serves as a testament to the importance of Christian education for women and as a guide for female behavior during courtship, marriage, and widowhood. (4)...

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion, 2019

Renaissance Quarterly, 2013

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, 2000

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans... more Cet article examine comment Agrippa d'Aubigné utilise l'Histoire des martyrs de Jean Crespin dans sa composition de deux textes martyrologiques, le premier étant son poème Les Tragiques, et le deuxième son Histoire universelle. Ces ouvrages révèlent dans une large mesure comment d'Aubigné a lu et récrit l'Histoire des martyrs. L'Histoire uni-verselle démontre que la puissance du martyr se réalise seulement lorsque l'expérience des témoins confirme le texte. Dans Les Tragiques, d'Aubigné cherche à recréer ce cadre. Son poème comporte des vignettes qui accompagnent le texte de Crespin et qui visent à renouveler un lectorat pour lequel l'expérience du martyr n'appartient qu'au passé.

DEADLINE EXTENDED! CFP: Biennial Conference of the Seiziémistes the MidAltantic The third bie... more DEADLINE EXTENDED!

CFP: Biennial Conference of the Seiziémistes the MidAltantic
The third biennial conference of Seiziémistes of the Mid-Atlantic will take place on Saturday, December 7, 2019. at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

The plenary speaker will be Julie Hardwick of the University of Texas at Austin.
We encourage scholars of early modern France from all disciplines to submit abstracts and would particularly welcome a panel on the creative agency of women in the early modern era and how they were “created” by others.

300-word abstracts of proposed twenty-minute papers should be submitted to Brooke Di Lauro, bdilauro@umw.edu by SEPT 15, 2019. Successful applicants will be notified by Oct 1, 2019.