Completion of long-standing research project: a substantial book entitled: 'Mighty Magic': Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern French Culture.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Medieval & Modern Languages Fac
Abstract
The proposed research will allow me to complete a substantial book, the result of a long-standing interdisciplinary investigation into the place and significance of monsters in early modern (mid-C16th to late-C17th) culture. I have been working on this project for some time, exploring its central ideas at conferences and invited lectures in the UK, the US and in Europe; it is now time to complete, and publish my research.
The book will mark a significant intervention into ongoing debates in three major fields: French studies, Renaissance studies, and the less distinctly defined -- but potentially all the more exciting -- hybrid territory which lies between poetics, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and histories of science and of politics. My project concerns itself with the changing shapes of identity and belonging; with the transmission of knowledge and cultural forms, and the specifics of modern experience.
I am framing the work in such a way as to make it accessible to interested readers -- students, colleagues and others -- beyond French studies.The centre of the book's gravity will, unashamedly, be my specialism. Ours is an exciting field. But I will also be relating my findings to Shakespeare, to Italian, German and Latin, as well as to ways in which the monstrous tales and images of Antiquity were revived across the period, and survive into our own times.
The focus is on French literature (rather than political or religious history), and the book will conduct the reader through a series of close encounters with major texts and writers of the period, from (roughly) Rabelais in the mid-C16th through to Racine at the end of the C17th. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call 'thick descriptions' of context, and so I will be relating the questions and insights offered by literary writing to those produced by historians of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of philosophy and science (this was also a time in which natural history and 'natural philosophy' underwent significant change). Throughout, the story of Andromeda, tied to a rock and sacrificed to the monster, but rescued by the passing stranger, Perseus, in exchange for a promise of marriage, acts as a recurrent image, leitmotif, or theme. But more of Andromeda below...
The book will be entitled:
'Mighty Magic': Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern French Culture.
'Mighty Magic' is what Shakespeare's Othello, when accused of something like witchcraft, says he used to win the heart of Desdemona: the 'mighty magic' of monsters, as stories and as signs. The story of Desdemona (and Othello: both hero and monster) is itself a complex reworking of the ancient myth of Andromeda (and Perseus and the monster). My study explores a host of other such reworkings, sightings and revisions of ancient monsters in the new contexts of early modernity. In the particular context of the French vernacular, to call something 'monstrueux' in the mid-C16th is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale. By the late-C17th, 'monstrueux' is more likely to be a sign of hidden intentions, unspoken desires. My study narrates this word history as a kind of journey, charting the translation, or migration of the monstrous from natural history to moral philosophy, from descriptions of creatures found in the external world, to the drama of human motivation, of sexual, political and cultural identity.
An outline of the book's structure/chapters can be found elsewhere in this application.
I have been working on the book for over five years, and am now 'on a roll': After a term in Oxford and London in the spring, the 'AHRC' summer term would allow me both to conduct some final research in Paris libraries, and to complete the book. Two publishers -OUP and Princeton - have expressed strong interest in the manuscript.
The book will mark a significant intervention into ongoing debates in three major fields: French studies, Renaissance studies, and the less distinctly defined -- but potentially all the more exciting -- hybrid territory which lies between poetics, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and histories of science and of politics. My project concerns itself with the changing shapes of identity and belonging; with the transmission of knowledge and cultural forms, and the specifics of modern experience.
I am framing the work in such a way as to make it accessible to interested readers -- students, colleagues and others -- beyond French studies.The centre of the book's gravity will, unashamedly, be my specialism. Ours is an exciting field. But I will also be relating my findings to Shakespeare, to Italian, German and Latin, as well as to ways in which the monstrous tales and images of Antiquity were revived across the period, and survive into our own times.
The focus is on French literature (rather than political or religious history), and the book will conduct the reader through a series of close encounters with major texts and writers of the period, from (roughly) Rabelais in the mid-C16th through to Racine at the end of the C17th. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call 'thick descriptions' of context, and so I will be relating the questions and insights offered by literary writing to those produced by historians of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of philosophy and science (this was also a time in which natural history and 'natural philosophy' underwent significant change). Throughout, the story of Andromeda, tied to a rock and sacrificed to the monster, but rescued by the passing stranger, Perseus, in exchange for a promise of marriage, acts as a recurrent image, leitmotif, or theme. But more of Andromeda below...
The book will be entitled:
'Mighty Magic': Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern French Culture.
'Mighty Magic' is what Shakespeare's Othello, when accused of something like witchcraft, says he used to win the heart of Desdemona: the 'mighty magic' of monsters, as stories and as signs. The story of Desdemona (and Othello: both hero and monster) is itself a complex reworking of the ancient myth of Andromeda (and Perseus and the monster). My study explores a host of other such reworkings, sightings and revisions of ancient monsters in the new contexts of early modernity. In the particular context of the French vernacular, to call something 'monstrueux' in the mid-C16th is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale. By the late-C17th, 'monstrueux' is more likely to be a sign of hidden intentions, unspoken desires. My study narrates this word history as a kind of journey, charting the translation, or migration of the monstrous from natural history to moral philosophy, from descriptions of creatures found in the external world, to the drama of human motivation, of sexual, political and cultural identity.
An outline of the book's structure/chapters can be found elsewhere in this application.
I have been working on the book for over five years, and am now 'on a roll': After a term in Oxford and London in the spring, the 'AHRC' summer term would allow me both to conduct some final research in Paris libraries, and to complete the book. Two publishers -OUP and Princeton - have expressed strong interest in the manuscript.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Christopher Williams (Principal Investigator) |