Description
Book SynopsisExamines how French Renaissance travelers consumed and represented Italian space through writing and the imagination. Includes writings by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Du Bellay as well as lesser-known French travelers, illustrating how the material and imaginative aspects of travel joined to form a space of desire in the French imagination.
Trade Review“Textual Spaces is the product of patient, sound, and thorough scholarship that mobilizes a wealth of source material to paint a vivid picture of the careerism, culture, and curiosity of early modern French travelers to Italy. Keatley has made an original and important contribution to the field of Renaissance studies and to the subfield of travel studies.”
—Eric M. MacPhail,author of Dancing Around the Well: The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism
“This study illuminates early French travels to Italy from a myriad of angles: linguistic, political, historical, biographical, medical, and architectural. At the same time, it explores outward, linking historical materials to questions of leisure, militarism, and global tourism. Advancing the notion of ‘performed leisure,’ Keatley smartly situates French travel within a rich context of political, social, economic, and learned textual impulses. His study of Montaigne’s voyage, in particular, proves a tour de force.”
—George Hoffmann,author of Reforming French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers
“Textual Spaces is a valuable resource for readers interested in a wide variety of aspects of the Renaissance—literary, art historical, and broadly cultural. It will surely stimulate and facilitate further research in its field.”
—John D. Lyons Modern Philology
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Montaigne Inside and Out
2. Textuality, Sexuality, and Political Geography: André de la Vigne and the French Conquest of Naples
3. Space, Travel, and Work
4. The Topographical Narrative
5. Spaces and Places of the Voyage d’Italie
6. Mapping Montaigne’s Rome
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
