Mary B. McKinley Douglas Huntly Gordon Professor  Department of French 304 Cabell Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 434/ 924-4632 mbm@virginia.edu Ph.D. Rutgers University

Research:  Early modern French and continental literature; rhetoric and poetics; Montaigne's Essais;  women writers,  particularly Marguerite de Navarre.   I am interested in the narrative innovations of the Heptaméron and the circumstances of its production, as well as its relationship to Marguerite's  mystical poetry.   I am completing an English translation of the polemical works of Marie Dentière.

Representative  publications:

• Les terrains vagues des «Essais»: Itinéraires et intertextes.  Etudes montaignistes # 25, Paris/Geneva: Champion/Slatkine, 1996.
• Critical Tales: New Studies of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and Early Modern Culture.  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. (co-editor with John Lyons and contributor)

•  "Parrots and Poets: Writing Alterities in Scève and Lemaire de Belges," Proceedings of the Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium: Alterities, Self and Other(s) in Sixteenth-Century France, July 2001, ed. Philip Ford, forthcoming.
•  "Lire les Essais: 1969-1997, lectures de la lecture," Lire les Essais de Montaigne, Actes du Colloque de Glasgow 1997, ed. Noël Peacock and James J. Supple, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2001, 15-26.
•  "Agony, Ecstasy, and the Mulekeeper's Wife: a Reading of Heptaméron 2," in A French Forum: Mélanges de littérature française offerts à Raymond C. et Virginia A. La Charité, ed. Gérard Defaux and Jerry Nash, Paris, Klincksieck, 2000, 129-142.
•  "L'Heptaméron: oeuvre composite," «D'une fantastique bigarrure»: le texte composite à la Renaissance. Etudes offertes à André Tournon, Paris, Honoré Champion,2000, 45-56.
•  "The Absent Ellipsis: the Edition and Suppression of Marie Dentière in the XVIth and the XIXth Centuries," in Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, ed. Colette Winn, New York, Garland Publishing Co., 1997, 85-99.
•  "Marot, Marguerite de Navarre et L'Epistre du despourveu," in Clément Marot. <Prince des poètes francoys> Actes du Colloque International Clément Marot, Cahors, 21-25 mai, 1996, éd. Gérard Defaux, Paris, H. Champion, 1997, 613-626.

UVA summer program in Lyon

Courses Fall 2002:

FREN 402: The French "Renaissance"

Sixteenth-century France witnessed the Protestant Reformation, the Copernican Revolution, and the discoveries of worlds both Ancient and New. The printed book was the innovation that announced change to a newly literate society. In Erasmus's Praise of Folly and Adages, Rabelais's Gargantua, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, and Montaigne's Essais, we will see how writers both recorded and shaped their turbulent times. We will appreciate their use of paradox, ambiguity, and irony as they create new genres and publish in perilous conditions. These books include stories about giants and cannibals, love and passion, the search for truth and the discovery of the self. Three short papers, a mid-semester and a final exam.

11:00 - 12:15 TR

Courses Fall 2001:

FREN 437: Une Ville à la Renaissance - Lyon

Crossroads of commercial and cultural traffic between Italy and Paris, Lyon enjoyed pride of place in sixteenth-century France.  This course will examine how Lyon's identity emerged and how it was shaped by people who lived or visited there between 1530 and 1550: merchants, printers, doctors, ambassadors, mapmakers, kings, poets and artists.  We will study printing and book production, market fairs, "rebeines" or workers' uprisings, famine and poverty relief, religious reform and suppression of heretics, the birth of urban cartography, musical performances and royal entries.  Visits to Alderman Library's Gordon Collection of sixteenth-century books and the use of web-based and other technological resources will allow us to view a revolution in media culture that occurred 450 years ago in the light of another one taking place today.  Mid-term and final exam, two short papers and a final project.

TR 12:30 - 1:45

FREN 820: Seminar - Montaigne

Montaigne's Essais records the birth of an Author at a time when history was recording the failure of humanism.  Writers struggled to defend and illustrate the French language -- and the ideal cultural identity that language supposedly proclaimed -- as civil war and aristocratic decadence devastated France.  In that context we will observe the Essais pondering the search for knowledge while constructing a literary self and an unprecedented form of prose writing .  We will consider the book's generic affinities with its near contemporaries: Erasmus's Adages, Estienne's Apologie pour Herodote, and Ariosto's Orlando furioso, for example.  Each student will define a research project in the first half of the semester which will be pursued and presented to the group in the second half and completed in a 20 - 25 page paper.

3:30-6:00 T