AGRELITA au 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Boston)

Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas participe à la 71e rencontre annuelle de la Renaissance Society of America, qui se déroule cette année à Boston !

Elle présentera une communication intitulée “Satyrs in French Renaissance: Contrasting Representations, between Fertility of Nature and Violence against Women” le jeudi 20 mars après-midi et participera à la table ronde consacrée aux “Portraits of Illustrious Men and Women: An Art of Building Collective Identities?” le lendemain (21 mars, 9h-10h30).

Le programme de l’événement est consultable sur le site de la RSA : https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0

We are delighted to announce that Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas will speak at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston, on Thursday, March 20, 2025: “Satyrs in French Renaissance: Contrasting Representations, between Fertility of Nature and Violence against Women”.

She will also take part in the session on “Portraits of Illustrious Men and Women: An Art of Building Collective Identities?”, on Friday, March 21, 2025 (9:00 AM – 10:30 AM).

The full program is available here : https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0

Communication de Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, “Satyrs in French Renaissance: Contrasting Representations, between Fertility of Nature and Violence against Women”

From the 16th century onwards, the image of ancient satyrs as lustful animalized beings dominates literature and arts. It appears through scenes of satyrs chasing nymphs or surprising them in their sleep and raping them. Although this image has existed since Antiquity, it coexists with other ancient representations, renewed in the French literature of 14th-15th centuries. Satyrs were also depicted as minor deities of nature, embodying concepts such as fertility and the renewal of nature: as part of Bacchus’s procession; as subjects of Diana, goddess of virginity; and in connection with artistic creation (Apollo; Pan). This paper will examine this dual image: on the one hand, a monstrous being who embodies unbridled sexuality and violence against women; on the other, a force of nature, embodying the power of life and sometimes creation. It will be based on adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Livre des échecs amoureux moralisés (1400), the Recueil Robertet (1515) and Marguerite de Navarre’s Histoire des satyres et nymphes de Dyane (1540). The goal is to analyze the manner in which these two disparate representations are interrelated or not, and to ascertain whether they contain any correlation between the Nature’s fecundity and creation, and sexual violence against women.

Table ronde consacrée aux “Portraits of Illustrious Men and Women: An Art of Building Collective Identities?”

Following Petrarch’s De uiris illustribus and Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, humanists throughout Europe multiplied catalogs of illustrious men and women in the 15th and 16th centuries. This corpus, mainly written in Latin and often accompanied by engravings, remains partly unknown. This discussion will not focus on the historical and ethical function of these parallel lives—teaching through great examples of the past—nor on the process of creating new illustrious individuals by glorifying contemporary figures modeled on ancient heroes. These topics were covered in a colloquium held in October 2023 in Paris, the publication of which is in preparation. Instead, we will examine the immediate and pragmatic ability of these catalogs to build relationship systems: serial biographies and portrait collections connect individuals and form communities. How do humanists manage to construct collective identities through the series of portraits, whether written or illustrated? This could involve a national identity (catalogs of heroes and heroines, kings and queens, or writers from Northern European countries, the New World, or the East), confessional identity (catalogs of reformed martyrs, Jesuit fathers), professional identity (academic system of the res publica litterarum, organization of corporations such as doctors, jurists, printers, or great travelers), or gender identity (establishment of a city of ladies). We will particularly examine the effects of structure and classification in the order of the portraits, the similarities, repetitions, and internal references, as well as the recurring topoi and symbols. Specialists who have recently studied Petrarch’s De uiris illustribus, the History of the First Destruction of Troy, Mario Equicola’s De mulieribus, Paolo Giovio’s Elogia uirorum illustrium, Heinrich Pantaleon’s Prosopographia heroum Germaniae, Theodore de Bèze’s Heroes, Heroinae et Icones, or portraits of illustrious women dressed as nuns in the Spanish Empire will compare their analyses.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
laurecebe (10 mars 2025). AGRELITA au 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Boston). AGRELITA Project ERC Advanced Grant. Consulté le 6 juin 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13fuw


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