World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture

Vincent Robert-Nicoud, D.Phil. (2016), University of Oxford, has published articles on various aspects of early modern French literature, especially on polemic and satire during the French wars of religion.

"Robert-Nicoud is to be applauded for introducing readers to a wealth of polemical treatises, emblems, and images that had significant contemporary importance, but many of which have fallen into near oblivion. [...] Overall, this is a fine book by a young scholar who brings to bear an impressive level of erudition to show his readers how the image of the world upside down evolves and becomes something much more menacing as the sixteenth century progressed." - Bruce Hyes, University of Kansas, in Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, vol. 3., 2019, pp. 331-333

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsAbbreviationsIntroduction: The Sixteenth-Century World Upside Down1 Adages, Paradoxes and Emblems1 Erasmus’s Adages of Inversion2 Paradoxes3 Moral Emblems4 Carnivalesque Emblems5 Emblems of the Religious Wars6 Conclusion2 Rabelais’s World Upside Down1 Carnivalesque Rituals2 Grotesque Body3 Wisdom and Folly4 Conclusion3 Religious Satire and Overturned Cooking Pots1 The Cooking Pot Trope2 Huguenot Satires3 Rabelais’s Posthumous Tradition4 Catholic Responses5 Conclusion4 Social and Cosmic Disorders1 France as a World Upside Down2 Millenarianism and Apocalypse3 Monsters and Polemic4 ConclusionGeneral ConclusionBibliographyPrimary SourcesSecondary SourcesIndex Nominum