Publications

“The Androgyne: Contexualizing Gender in Early-Modern France”. A monograph being considered for publication. An androgyne is described in Plato’s Symposium; another was discerned by certain Fathers of the Church and scholars thereafter in Genesis 1:26-27. Both sources see it as an originary form, a figure of completion, soon separated, resulting in a diminution of powers and explicitly or implicitly, a longing to return to the originary state. My study examines the means and effects of reclaiming access to those powers. First by examining commentaries on the founding texts available to scholars in Renaissance France: what did they believe, what did they know, how did they know it? A third explicit androgyne, the marriage figure of Genesis 2:24, is included in the analysis of explicit uses of the androgyne in literary texts of the period. In literary uses the androgyne is evoked for as great a variety of purposes as its sources are varied; all are examined. Further analysis of the androgyne depends on an understanding of gender, as functional rather than performative, drawn from evidence in the Hebrew Bible, Classical Greece, and Renaissance France. This becomes the groundwork for understanding how women (Anne de Bretagne, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis, Jeanne d’Albret) effectively created androgyne personae or imaginaries facilitating their exercise of power. The project traces the androgyne as it moves from theory and theology at the dawn of Western civilization to literary and political expression in early-modern France.
Books:
–Charting Change in Renaissance French Thought and Culture. Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. An interdisciplinary volume of essays. I edited and solicited these articles, wrote a substantial introduction and an article studying translations around 1540.
–Reading in the Renaissance: “Amadis de Gaule” and the Lessons of Memory. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999.
–Life in Renaissance France.  Selection, translation, and edition of. five essays by Lucien Febvre.  Harvard University Press, 1977 (Paperback, 1979). –Regicide and Revolution. (Editor, Translator.) Cambridge University Press, 1974.  Rpt., Columbia UP 1992.

Some Articles
-“Memory and Forgetting in Louis Le Roy’s Presentation of the Androgyne.” Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century French Literature. Ed. David Laguardia and Cathy Yandell. Burlington VT: Ashgate, forthcoming.
–  “Catherine de Médicis: la reine-veuve et le cœur du roi.” Imaginaires 16: Actes du Colloque : Corps héroïque, corps de chair. Ed. Christine Sukic. Presses de l’Université de Reims, 2013, 95-112.
– “L’Androgyne politique au seizième siècle.” L’Hermaphrodite de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Ed. Marianne Closson. Paris : Garnier, 2013, 169-183.
– “Topographie de la France, de la Bretagne : la carrière politique par le mariage d’Anne de Bretagne, orpheline, reine, duchesse souveraine”, Illustrations inconsicients: écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges en l’honneur de Tom Conley. Paris: Garnier 2014, 455-476.
– “Le lecteur, la langue et l’écoute d’Amadis de Gaule.” Le Roman à la Renaissance, Actes du colloque international dirigé par Michel Simonin (Université de Tours, Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, 1990), publiés par Christine de Buzon, Lyon, RHR, 2012. http://www.rhr16.fr/ressources/roman-renaissance
– “La Création de l’idée du Moyen Âge.” Accès aux textes médiévaux. Ed. Michèle Guéret-Laferté et Claudine Poulouin. Paris : Champion, Geneva: Slatkine, 2012, 91-104.
-“Translation and The Triumph of French.”  French Literature Series 36. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 17-34.
– ” La poésie française et le passé au seizième siècle.” Mémoire et découvertes: quels paradigmes. Ed. Mary-Nelly Fouligny & Marie Roig Miranda.  Nancy: University de Nancy, 2009,  389-402.
-“La Fertilité dans le roman au seizième siècle.” Special ed. Plaisance, Rivista quadrimestrale di letteratura francese. Ed. Nerina Clerici Balmas, 14, 5 (2008): 49-60.
-“Homer for the court of François  I,” Renaissance Quarterly 59.3( Fall 2006): 732-67.
-“Printing, Translation, and the Paradigm Shift of 1540.” Charting a Change in Renaissance French Thought and Culture. Ed. Marian Rothstein. Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna University Press,  2006, 141-185. – “Le Lecteur, le texte et la mémoire : lire le roman à la Renaissance.” Du roman courtois au roman baroque. Paris: les Belles-Lettres, 2005, 449-458.