Writing Places

"Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon examines the literary and cultural production of the provincial capital of Poitiers from the late 1560s through the early 1580s. During that time the city withstood a Protestant siege, hosted the French court, welcomed Parisian jurists for special court sessions, and fostered the writers of one of the first humanist salons. Local events and places inspired writers of poetry and prose, history and geography. This book explores the "writing places" - both the places that writers depict and the places that cultivate and influence them - of late sixteenth-century Poitiers." "This study of the literary city focuses on the circle of writers and jurists who gathered around the mother and daughter pair Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches. It also considers influences on the salon and the city such as contemporary codes of conduct, court sessions, and the religious wars.^ Reading cultural and literary works together, Kendall B. Tarte examines how these documents intersect in the various productions of Poitiers. This book incorporates material from diverse genres and disciplines, including conduct manuals, archival court documents, histories and memoirs, and the visual images and descriptions of the city that appeared in geographies of the period." "Several topics of investigation recur throughout this study and shape its analysis. The notion of community is central: this book asks what literary works can show us about communities of writers and reveals how those communities shape writers and writing. It looks at the many ways in which the religious conflicts affected artistic production in and about the city, and it examines the complex social and historical conditions of sixteenth-century women's writing. These themes are not individually isolated elements of the literary culture of Poitiers.^ Rather, they combine to create the unique circumstances that this book investigates. The interactions of a diverse body of sources complement this thematic interplay. Writing Places brings together works of literature, culture, history, politics, and geography to reveal the city of Poitiers in the late sixteenth century."--book jacket.