Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

French

Supervisor

Nassichuk, John

Abstract

This thesis proposes an analysis of the theorization and practice of “Christian lyricism” in Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius, the second independently published collection by (and clearly attributed to) Anne de Marquets (1533?-1588), a French Dominican nun. Published in 1568 (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau) and reissued in a second edition in 1569 (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau), this volume includes not only translations of the Italian Neo-Latin poet Marcantonio Flaminio (1497/8-1550), some of whose works had already, by 1568, been put on the Vatican Index, but other translations by the Dominican nun, as well as original spiritual songs and sonnets.

At the end of this thesis, I provide an annotated transcription of this book, which I attempt to present and contextualize not only through the concept of “Christian lyricism,” but also by analyzing how its author uses translation and other dominant forms of her era, notably the song (“cantique” or “chanson”) and the Petrarchan sonnet. Perhaps the most striking innovation of this sixteenth-century woman writer is the collection of Sonets de l’amour divin that comes at the end of this book, one of the first (if not the first) Petrarchan canzonieres in French to be entirely dedicated to a spiritual message.

Between the medieval book of hours and the manuals on meditation that would come during the reign of Henri III (1551 – 1574 – 1589), Anne de Marquets delivers here her own take on a devotional manual, notably characterized by the humanist culture of Renaissance France.

Summary for Lay Audience

This thesis presents and analyses a book by the sixteenth-century French Dominican nun Anne de Marquets (1533-1588). The book is Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius, a collection of Anne de Marquets’s translations of Marcantonio Flaminio, a poet of the Italian Renaissance who wrote in Latin, and of Anne de Marquets’s own original songs and sonnets on religious themes. In this thesis, I argue that this book, published for the first time in Paris in 1568 and reissued in a second edition (with new poems and translations at the end) in 1569 is an example of Anne de Marquets’s interpretation of Renaissance Christian lyricism, which I define as a literary movement where the style and modes of Renaissance poetry are adapted to a spiritual Christian message.

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