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Francois Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animation explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais' Gargantua and, mostly,in his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais's 'lowly' laughter and his 'high', erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art. Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais's poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion, in line with the Bakhtinian grotesque, or of satirical degradation: in both instances, the 'lowly' is opposed to the 'high', the belly to the head. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the 'head' or the brain as the site of cognition is not opposed to what is below it: the chest as the site of breathing, the belly and its nether regions as sites of nutrition and generation. In Renaissance medicine, these are integrated physiological systems whose products fuel each other's operations, including cognition. Read through this lens and alongside his diagnosis of the healthy or diseased culture of his time (rotting scholasticism, the humanist digestion of the classical heritage, or the schismatic convulsions shaking Christianity) Rabelais's fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from physiological processes fuelling the inventive ability of the human animal, made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual 'inventions'. They display the life (rather than the truth) of culture stemming from human ingenia, that is, wits conditioned by biological natures. While these might be idiosyncratic, their animation is fuelled and shaped by the food one eats, the air one breathes, the places one inhabits, the company one keeps. In this respect Rabelaisian fiction is grotesque in a period sense. With its emphasis on hybrid forms capturing the metamorphic powers of animation, grotesque ornament reflexively commented on the embodied inventive processes underpinning Renaissance mimesis. Rabelais's fictions display a similar logic: they foreground the inventive powers of ingenious animation and articulate reflexive, often ironic alternatives to the humanist views they alter: a thoroughly embodied anthropology, a naturalist genealogy of cultural production and transmission, a phantastical account of artistic invention as uncanny liveliness.

Francois Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animation explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais' Gargantua and, mostly,in his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais's 'lowly' laughter and his 'high', erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art. Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais's poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion, in line with the Bakhtinian grotesque, or of satirical degradation: in both instances, the 'lowly' is opposed to the 'high', the belly to the head. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the 'head' or the brain as the site of cognition is not opposed to what is below it: the chest as the site of breathing, the belly and its nether regions as sites of nutrition and generation. In Renaissance medicine, these are integrated physiological systems whose products fuel each other's operations, including cognition. Read through this lens and alongside his diagnosis of the healthy or diseased culture of his time (rotting scholasticism, the humanist digestion of the classical heritage, or the schismatic convulsions shaking Christianity) Rabelais's fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from physiological processes fuelling the inventive ability of the human animal, made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual 'inventions'. They display the life (rather than the truth) of culture stemming from human ingenia, that is, wits conditioned by biological natures. While these might be idiosyncratic, their animation is fuelled and shaped by the food one eats, the air one breathes, the places one inhabits, the company one keeps. In this respect Rabelaisian fiction is grotesque in a period sense. With its emphasis on hybrid forms capturing the metamorphic powers of animation, grotesque ornament reflexively commented on the embodied inventive processes underpinning Renaissance mimesis. Rabelais's fictions display a similar logic: they foreground the inventive powers of ingenious animation and articulate reflexive, often ironic alternatives to the humanist views they alter: a thoroughly embodied anthropology, a naturalist genealogy of cultural production and transmission, a phantastical account of artistic invention as uncanny liveliness.

François Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animation explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais' Gargantua and, mostly,in his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais's 'lowly' laughter and his 'high', erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art.Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais's poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion, in line with the Bakhtinian grotesque, or of satirical degradation: in both instances, the 'lowly' is opposed to the 'high', the belly to the head. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the 'head' or the brain as the site of cognition is not opposed to what is below it: the chest as the site of breathing, the belly and its nether regions as sites of nutrition and generation. In Renaissance medicine, these are integrated physiological systems whose products fuel each other's operations, including cognition. Read through this lens and alongside his diagnosis of the healthy or diseased culture of his time (rotting scholasticism, the humanist digestion of the classical heritage, or the schismatic convulsions shaking Christianity) Rabelais's fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from physiological processes fuelling the inventive ability of the human animal, made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual 'inventions'. They display the life (rather than the truth) of culture stemming from human ingenia, that is, wits conditioned by biological natures. While these might be idiosyncratic, their animation is fuelled and shaped by the food one eats, the air one breathes, the places one inhabits, the company one keeps.In this respect Rabelaisian fiction is grotesque in a period sense. With its emphasis on hybrid forms capturing the metamorphic powers of animation, grotesque ornament reflexively commented on the embodied inventive processes underpinning Renaissance mimesis. Rabelais's fictions display a similar logic: they foreground the inventive powers of ingenious animation and articulate reflexive, often ironic alternatives to the humanist views they alter: a thoroughly embodied anthropology, a naturalist genealogy of cultural production and transmission, a phantastical account of artistic invention as uncanny liveliness.

Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity defined every person—not just exceptional individuals—as having their own attributes and talents, stemming from an “inborn nature” that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign professions that were best suited to one’s abilities. Logodaedalus, a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, and Dutch—the authors reveal the ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics, and artistic theory.

This volume of essays contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the Jesuits employed emotions to “change hearts”—that is, convert or reform—both in Europe and in the overseas missions. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art, and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and ‘accommodated’ to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. The early modern Jesuits conducted, in all senses of the word, much of the emotional energy of their times. As such, they provide a compelling focus for research into the links between rhetoric and emotion, performance and devotion, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Natural History in Early Modern France offers a longue durée account of recurring poetic structures of the genre through case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the eve of the nineteenth century. These case studies reveal the lasting epistemic importance of bookish knowledge and commonplacing in the natural-historical description from Belon to Buffon. They also highlight the French reception of Baconianism.Natural History in Early Modern France makes a case for the literary status of the genre by attending to the permanence of its 'Plinian' features, such as wonders. Natural history was not only concerned with increasingly rational modes of ordering natural particulars: this book reveals its enduring social, affective, spiritual, and aesthetic underpinnings.Contributors are: Peter Anstey, Susan Broomhall, Isabelle Charmantier, Arlette Fruet, Raphaële Garrod, Paul Gibbard, Dana Jalobeanu, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Stéphane Schmitt, Paul J. Smith, and Stéphane Van Damme.