French Literature and Thought in Credo: Pre-17th Century

French scholastic philosopher, teacher, and theologian. Born near Nantes, W France. He studied under Roscellinus and Guillaume de Champeaux (c.1070–1171). As lecturer in the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, he became tutor to Héloïse, the 17-year-old niece of the canon Fulbert. They fell passionately in love; his love affair with Héloïse is one of the famous romances of history.

From The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography
The most famous of her works are the Lais (which are thought to be written before 1180), short narrative poems inspired by the ancient lays of Breton harpists but treated in a very personal way: magical and fantastic elements are interwoven with both heroic and simple human deeds.

French romance writer Chrétien de Troyes elaborated upon earlier Arthurian legends in such an intriguing way as to create, change, and record the highly stylized customs of courtly love just beginning to flower in France at the time.

From The Classical Tradition
French author, though born in Venice, she was raised in Paris. As a woman writing in French, Christine offers a unique perspective on the reception of classical texts in the medieval vernacular.

French poet, b. Paris, whose original name was François de Montcorbier or François Des Loges. One of the earliest great poets of France, Villon was largely rediscovered in the 19th cent.

French scholar and humanist. He played a major role in developing classical scholarship in France.

French monk, physician and satirist.

From The Classical Tradition
Ronsard is the prime exponent in 16th-century France of a classically inspired form of poetry that was meant to rival the works of the Italian Renaissance as well as those of Greece and Rome.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
French judge and writer. He served with Montaigne in the Bordeaux parlement and is immortalized in Montaigne's essay on friendship. La Boétie's writings include a few sonnets, translations from the classics, and an essay attacking absolute monarchy,

French writer. He is regarded as the creator of the essay form.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Only in the early 19th c.did the term Pléiade become associated with a mythical school whose agenda was then viewed as exemplary and prefiguring the profound literary aspirations of romanticism.

Italian philosopher, b. Nola. The son of a professional soldier, he entered the Dominican order early in his youth and was ordained a priest in 1572, but was accused of heresy and fled (c.1576) to take up a career of study and travel. Bruno was the first to enunciate what is now called the cosmic theory, he pictured the world as composed of individual elements of being, governed by fixed laws of relationship. These elements, called monads, were in constant motion, ultimate, and irreducible and were based on a pantheistic infinite principle, or cause, or Deity, manifest in us and in all the world.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
I. Medieval to Early Modern
II. Early Modern to 20th Century

From Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
While the poems of the great medieval French author Francois Villon remain the most familiar of all the medieval French works, there was a great literary tradition that preceded him by centuries.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Names of the two principal groups of medieval French dialects. Langue d'oc (literally, “language of yes”) was spoken south of a line running, roughly, from Bordeaux to Grenoble, whereas langue d'oïl (literally, “language of yes”) was prevalent in central and N France.

In music, the pastorale is a piece imitating the simple music of shepherds. "He Shall Feed His Flock" from Handel's Messiah and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony are superb examples of the pastorale. In literature, a work in which the shepherd's life is presented in a conventionalized manner. In this convention the purity and simplicity of shepherd life is contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the court or the city. The pastoral is found in poetry, drama, and fiction, and many subjects. In France the pastourelle—a short poem in dialogue in which a minstrel courts a shepherdess—appeared as early as the 14th cent. and is exemplified in Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, a play by Adam de La Halle.

In literature, tales of love and chivalric adventure, in verse or prose, that became popular in France about 1200 and spread throughout Europe. It had antecedents in many works from classical antiquity, but developed as a distinctive genre in the context of the aristocratic court.

Satire is both a mode and a genre of verse and prose lit. that adopts a critical attitude toward its target with the goal of censuring human folly.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
A group of epic poems of medieval France written from the 11th through the 13th cent.

System of ethical ideals that arose from feudalism and had its highest development in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Middle Ages, chivalry was a synonym of knighthood, describing either the reality of being a knight or the virtues associated with idealized portrayals of knights in medieval literature and culture.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A literary and social construct of the Middle Ages that originated in the poetry of the troubadours in southern France in the late 11th c.

Series of wars undertaken by European Christians between the 11th and 14th cent. to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Crusades constituted a global event for their times and provided a term that continues to be applied to strident, zealous effort. The Crusades were a set of religiously motivated military campaigns that occurred primarily from the 11th to the 13th centuries.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics The term Petrarchism refers to the imitation—whether in verse or prose, directly or indirectly—of features in the It. poetry of Francesco Petrarca (in Eng., Francis Petrarch, 1304-74), who derived his style from cl. Lat. verse, Occitan troubadour poetry, the It. *Dolce stil nuovo, and his immediate predecessor Dante.

Religious and political movement in 16th-century Europe to reform the Roman Catholic Church, which led to the establishment of the Protestant churches.

Period in European cultural history that began in Italy around 1400 and lasted there until the end of the 1500s. Elsewhere in Europe it began later, and lasted until the 1600s. As increasingly urban, educated, and secular populations became dissatisfied with medieval values—first (circa 1350) in the Italian republics and principalities and then later north of the Alps—they sought to recover the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world. A new and remarkable self-confidence in human agency resulted, and it sparked an intellectual, cultural, and artistic revolution known as the Renaissance.

Philosophy and theology of Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.