About this book

Narcisse Berchère was commissioned by Ferdinand de Lesseps to make a visual record of the first phase of the construction of the Suez Canal. To this end, he spent five months in the Isthmus, from November 1861 to March 1862. He is said, by his first biographer, Bernard Prost to have completed an ‘album’, containing 68 plans, drawings and watercolours.

This ‘album’ was given by Berchère to Ferdinand de Lesseps, who then presented it to Emperor Napoleon III, via the Duc de Bassano. It was held at the Palais des Tuileries in Paris, where it is believed to have perished, when the Palace was burned down in 1871, at the time of the Commune.

Fortunately, Narcisse Berchère also gave a verbal account of his experiences in a book, published by Jules Hetzel in 1863, Le Désert de Suez: cinq mois dans l’Isthme, of which this is the first new edition.

Connu surtout comme peintre orientaliste, Narcisse Berchère fut commandité par Ferdinand de Lesseps pour apporter un témoignage visuel de la première phase de la construction du canal de Suez. Au cours de sa mission, il passa cinq mois dans l’isthme de Suez en 1861 et 1862, et exécuta un album de 68 plans, dessins et aquarelles, qu’il remit à Lesseps, lequel l’offrit ensuite à l’empereur Napoléon III. Cet album aurait été détruit dans l’incendie du palais des Tuileries, sous la Commune en 1871. Heureusement, Berchère fit également de son séjour un témoignage écrit, dont le texte publié constitue la première réédition.

About the author

Professor Wright is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin.

About this book

A critical edition of the 1540 version of the Chastelaine de Vergi story. Like the original 13th-century text, this verse telling sets out to teach the lesson that love stories are best kept secret.

As well as having similarities with both the 13th-century version and the late prose version, the text also exhibits some interesting differences. The introduction to this edition will provide a comparative study of the different versions and an in-depth look at the section of the text that is based on extracts from the Roman de la Rose.

About the author

Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine works with fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French literature and is associate researcher at the Centre d’Etudes des Textes Médiévaux at Université de Rennes 2

About this book

A critical edition of Fougeret de Monbron’s Le Cosmopolite, ou le citoyen du monde (1750). The introductory notes focus on the links to Voltaire’s Candide and show how Monbron’s cynical memoirs combined with another important narrative source of Candide, La Place’s Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé (1750).

About the author

Édouard Langille is Professor of French Language and Literature at the St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada

About this book

A 100-page Gothic tale embedded in Genlis’s 1782 novel Adèle et Théodore, the Histoire de la duchesse de C*** tells the story of an Italian duchess secretly imprisoned by her husband for nine years in a dungeon under his palace after he drugs her, simulates her death, and buries a waxen figure in her place.

In a footnote to the 1804 edition of the novel, Genlis explains that the story is based on the experiences of the Italian Duchess of Cerifalco, whom Genlis met in Rome in 1776. The duchess’s tale quickly became so popular that Genlis published it in a separate edition in 1783; as Genlis’s fame as a writer and educator spread, both the novella and the novel from which it was drawn were reprinted numerous times and published in translation in England where they enjoyed considerable success as well.

The Histoire de la Duchesse de C*** is a masterful blend of the sentimental and the Gothic genres and, as such, provides students with an excellent introduction to both literary traditions. Genlis’s subtle analysis of the power relations between husband and wife shows keen psychological insight and constitutes the most compelling aspect of the duchess’s story.

This critical edition is accompanied by an introduction to the text and author, a selected bibliography, and an original modern English translation of the text.

About the author

Mary S. Trouille is Professor of French at Illinois State University

About this book

Evariste-Désiré de Parny, though largely forgotten now, was well known in the nineteenth century for his lyric poems, especially the Poésies Erotiques (1778-81), and the prose-poems in Chansons Madécasses (1787). He also wrote much humorous verse, including the anti-religious La Guerre des Dieux (1799) and Le Paradis perdu (1805). The latter is a parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost in four relatively short cantos. It gives a central place to the War in Heaven, casting Satan as a revolutionary. It is highly entertaining in itself, and also an important example of parody as critical response to an original text.

This edition also provides an accurate brief account of Parny’s life and works and the contemporary reception of the text; background material on the reception of Milton in France; and a critical account of how Parny’s parody engages with what have often been perceived as literary and theological weaknesses, or problem areas, in Milton’s text, with due reference to critical discussion of Milton in English.

About the author

Ritchie Robertson is Professor of German at the University of Oxford, and Catriona Seth is Professor of Eighteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Nancy

About this book

Giglan is an unusual prose rewriting of two important, entertaining medieval Arthurian verse romances, the late-twelfth century Le Bel inconnu of Renaut de Beaujeu, and the anonymous thirteenth-century Occitan Roman de Jaufre, one of only two full-length romans from the south. L’Hystoire was last published in Lyons in 1539, and went through at least five editions in the first three decades of the century. The text is most associated with the printer Claude Nourry, who was also one of Rabelais’s publishers, and so it is no accident that a rare allusion to Giglan is to be found in Pantagruel.

Giglan’s enigmatic author/translator, Claude Platin, was an Antonine Hospitaller, about whom little is known, except that he was widely-read, liked Boccaccio, and claimed proficiency in several languages: he also penned le Débat de l’homme et de l’argent (translated from the Italian Contrasto dell’uomo e del denaro), and whatis considered ‘the first arithmetical treatise to be published in the French vernacular’ (Kirsop 1980, 94), the Oeuure tressubtille & profitable de l’art & science de aristmeticque & geometrie translate nouuellement despaignol en francoys (from Juan de Ortega’s Sigue se una conpusicion de la arte dela arismetica y Juntamente de geometria; fecha y ordenada por fray Juan de Ortega de la orden de santo domingo de los predicatores).

About the author

Caroline A. Jewers is Associate Professor of French at the University of Kansas

About this book

As a student at the University of Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) became the outstanding English mediator of the revolution in German thought. For the first time, this volume collects his early writings, both published and unpublished. The contents include ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’ and notes from F. W. J. Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art. Further, Robinson’s private lectures for Madame de Staël are presented with her marginalia. In the intellectual history of Romanticism, Robinson emerges as a major figure whose lucid and entertaining essays can still guide the modern reader through the key German texts.

About the author

James Vigus is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department for English and American Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

About this book

This volume provides the first printed critical edition of a text which has recently attracted the attention of scholars working on early modern English literature. The Rewarde of Wickednesse (1574) is a univocal poem that imitates the de casibus form of A Mirror for Magistrates and makes a clear indication of the hellish position of the damned. The poem is a vehemently anti-Catholic poem that draws a distinct link between sinful behaviour on earth and Hell by locating both the consequences and the origin of sin in Hell.

Robinson stages the laments in the space of Hell, not simply as ghosts reporting back from the underworld. The importance of the text lies in the clues it provides as to how Elizabethans were working with a lingering Catholic heritage in a distinctly Protestant nation. The poem’s exploration of matters of sin and damnation in relation to Hell and Pluto acknowledge the relevance of these issues to an Elizabethan audience. Robinson’s application of the de casibus form to the examples places them in the Elizabethan mirror tradition by making them proffer warnings about the rewards for sin.

About the author

Allyna E Ward is Assistant Professor of English at Booth College in Winnipeg, Canada where she works on Tudor and Early Modern Literature.

About this book

This volume presents a full transcription of the three extant manuscripts of Angelo Beolco’s Prima oratione, delivered to Cardinal Marco Cornaro in 1521 at his villa in Asolo subsequent to his entrance as bishop of Padua.

Praising the new bishop on his accomplishment, the peasant orator expounds boisterously on the agricultural riches of the Paduan countryside and concludes with a request that the bishop enact a series of laws that will improve the lives of his fellow peasants, including allowing both men and women to take four spouses.

Masked by the humour, however, are serious considerations on contemporary issues.

Accompanying the transcription is an extensive historical-literary introduction and notes.

About the author

Linda L. Carroll is Professor of Italian at Tulane University

About this book

Given the outstanding popularity of Ovid in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, disappointingly few translations of his works into French have survived and even fewer have been carefully studied. This edition is an attempt to remedy this situation in two ways. First, it presents a hitherto unpublished version of the Remedia amoris, thus expanding the corpus of materials available to students of the transmission of Ovid in the Middle Ages. Second, it provides, for the first time, a detailed survey of the existing versions of the Remedia and their principal characteristics. Against this background the version published comes closest to what can be called a translation and is thus significant for understanding the techniques of translation in the medieval period.

About the author

Tony Hunt is Besse Fellow and Tutor in French at St Peter’s College, and Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford