News and Events

British Academy Fellowship Honour for SEMFS member

We are delighted to share that Professor Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Centre de recherche CERCLL) has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests are comparative literature; early modern cultural studies; the history of knowledge and epistemology; theory and philosophy of fiction and fictionality in literature, and cinema and series. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/profiles/anne-duprat-fba/

New SEMFS monograph

Congratulations to Dr Vittoria.Fallanca (University of Warwick) on the publication of her monograph The Design of Montaigne’s “Essais” (OUP, 2026).

The book reads Montaigne through the lens of the term dessein, with all the semantic baggage—both intentional and visual—of that term in the sixteenth century. The four chapters, in order of appearance: re-explore the metaphor of self-portraiture in light of Renaissance drawing; outline some sixteenth-century uses of dessein and analyse the role that the term plays in key passage of the Essais; conduct a comparison between Montaigne and mannerist theories and practices of drawing; reveal and scrutinise Montaigne’s attitudes to three categories of designed objects. In following the vagaries of dessein as it operates in Montaigne, the book also offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between design and literary studies, with a focus on the text as an object of use. Far from an end-oriented practice of self- or artistic control, design emerges in this book as a chancy, experimental encounter between mind and world.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-design-of-montaignes-essais-9780198985488. The code AUFLY30 will generate 30% off the website price. A small book launch to celebrate the publication will be held at the Maison Française d’Oxford on Wednesday, 22^nd April at 12.30 pm.

Bill Brooks (20 May 1947 – 4 December 2025)

SEMFS was very saddened to learn of the death of Emeritus Professor, William Sydney Brooks, who was chair of the Society from 2009 to 2012. Born in Northampton, Bill graduated from Newcastle University and spent his academic career in the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, later the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath (1973-2012), where he also served as Head of Department and an elected member of Senate. Bill had an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, and, as was attested at the funeral, had read some 2800 books. But Bill wore his erudition lightly, possessed of a delightfully ironic, often self-deprecatory, sense of humour.

His editorial contribution to French studies added considerable value to the manuscripts submitted: he launched, with colleagues from the University of Bath, Quinquereme (11 vols 1977 ff); he served as General Editor of Seventeenth Century French Studies; with Rainer Zaiser, he edited two volumes of conference papers, Religion, Ethics, and History in the French Long Seventeenth Century and Theatre, Fiction, and Poetry in the French Long Seventeenth Century (MEMFS, 2007); and was always willing to read manuscripts sent by publishers and journal editors.

His authored output included a bio-bibliographical monograph on François Boscheron, ami de Challe (MEMFS, 2020, 491pp) and, with Philip Yarrow, the seven-year project on the life and writings of Madame Palatine, the second wife of Monsieur, the brother of Louis XIV (The Dramatic Criticism of Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans (EMP, 1996, 372pp)). He and Buford Norman together produced a specialised digital database for CMBV, Base opéra Baroque. However, Bill will probably be most remembered for his work on Philippe Quinault, which has been regarded as an essential reference for future studies on the author: Philippe Quinault, Dramatist (MEMFS, 2009, 512pp); and, with Catherine Marchal-Weyl and Buford Norman, the critical edition of Quinault’s tragicomedies, Théâtre complet (Classiques Garnier, Tome III, 2020, 583pp, and Tome IV, 2022, 613pp).

Bill acknowledged the indispensable contribution to his career and achievement to his close-knit family, and particularly to the unstinting support for 52 years of his wife, Margaret, who survives him.

SEMFS has lost a loyal friend, warm, self-effacing, convivial, who epitomised, as one of his colleagues from the University of Bath expressed, a ‘scholar and a gentleman’.

(Noël Peacock)

New SEMFS edited volume

Congratulations to Profs Nicholas Hammond (Cambridge), Paul Hammond (Leeds) and Joe Harris (Royal Holloway), on the publication of their co-edited volume Racine’s Late Greek Tragedies: Essays on ‘Iphigénie’ and ‘Phèdre’ (Brill, 2026).

Following three volumes devoted to Jean Racine’s earlier theatre, this volume examines his two late tragedies inspired by Greek myth, Iphigénie (1674) and Phèdre (1677). This international collection of essays by experts in the field covers a wide range of themes and approaches, including mythological, literary and environmental contexts, interpretation of the characters, staging, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation. With Phèdre traditionally having garnered more attention than Iphigénie, this sustained consideration of the two works in tandem with each other throws exciting new light upon a dramatist at the height of his theatrical powers.

https://brill.com/display/title/74120

New SEMFS monograph and critical edition

Congratulations to Dr Annalisa Nicholson (King’s College London) on the publication of her monograph – A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London (Bloomsbury, 2025) and her critical edition of Mancini’s letters (Iter Press, 2025). 

During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646–99), became an icon of women’s emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir—one of the first to appear in French by a woman—and was later magnified by her stint as the royal mistress of Charles II of England and by her establishment of a freethinking salon in London. A Salon-in-Exile investigates that salon, analysing its relationship to the French salon tradition as well as its cultural activities, while the edition of Mancini’s Letters offers her perspective on some of the most important moments of her life.

New SEMFS monograph

Congratulations to Dr Marina Perkins (The Queen’s College, University of Oxford) on the publication of her monograph Communication, Relevance, and Power in Montaigne’s Essais (Legenda, 2025).

Readers of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) have long dissected how the text communicates with its audience, devoting particular attention to its digressive style and the extent to which it operates as a dynamic portrait of the author. But how does Montaigne conceive of human communi­cation in the world beyond the author and his audience, in settings where it influenced the social and political structures of France during a period rife with sectarian conflict? Taking up this question, Perkins makes use of a theoretical framework rooted in relevance theory, a cognitively-inflected account of utterance interpretation in the field of pragmatics, to trace patterns in Montaigne’s portrayals of communication across four domains: conversation, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and exegesis and prayer. Contextualizing Montaigne’s views within the broader landscape of Renaissance intellectual history, this study represents the intersection of cognitive approaches to literary criticism and analysis attentive to dynamics of power and politics in early modern Europe.

New SEMFS edited volume

Congratulations to Professor Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie-Jules Verne / Institut Universitaire de France) on the publication of her edited volume Le Hasard: Littérature, arts, sciences, philosophie (CNRS: 2025).

Pourquoi aimons-nous le hasard, et quel rôle joue cette attirance dans notre compréhension du monde ? Depuis la Renaissance, l’Occident ne cesse de redécouvrir l’aléatoire ; chaque époque annonce une nouvelle ère de la contingence. À l’émerveillement ou l’inquiétude succèdent alors le doute (n’est-il que le produit de notre ignorance ?) puis la résignation : il n’y a, au fond, pas de hasard. L’intérêt qu’il suscite s’explique donc par le gain de connaissance que l’on peut en attendre. Un phénomène inexplicable montre l’insuffisance de nos descriptions du monde et nous donne ainsi une chance d’accéder à un nouveau paradigme scientifique, où le hasard n’a plus de place – jusqu’à l’apparition de l’irrégularité suivante. Mais dans cette transition entre deux certitudes, nous prenons le temps de reconnaître l’importance unique de ce qui n’a pas de cause, et la beauté de ce qui n’est apparemment produit par rien. Ce livre est consacré à l’exploration de ce moment suspendu entre l’ignorance et le savoir, que nous remplissons d’images, d’histoires, de jeux et de théories qui modélisent notre rapport essentiel à la contingence.

SEMFS members on the BBC

Professors Jan Clarke, Joe Harris, and Noel Peacock have all appeared as expert guests on an episode of the BBC’s In Our Time to speak about Molière. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002b701 

New SEMFS monograph

Congratulations to Professor Emma Gilby (Cambridge) on the publication of Descartes and the Non-Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Elements, 2025).

Descartes features heavily in ecocritical literature. He is often said to dismiss the non-human world as irrelevant and inanimate, and to espouse a harmfully instrumental attitude towards it. This Element goes into detail on the standard picture in circulation, while also outlining an alternative approach that it terms ecohistorical. It aims to offer insights into the seventeenth-century context; and to explain in clear terms what Descartes said, what problems emerge with his account, and why a more precise understanding of these problems can be useful today. Reconsidering Descartes in this light involves extending prior arguments about his treatment of animals to a study of the natural world in general. Early modern narratives about the world’s living networks are complex and interesting. When locally salient artefacts, attitudes, ideas, and vocabulary are highlighted, a more nuanced picture emerges, changing the relevance of Descartes for environmental thinking.

SEMFS monograph shortlisted for prestigious book prize

Congratulations to Professor Joseph Harris (Royal Holloway), whose monograph Misanthropy in the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to Schiller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) was recently shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2023

In order to trace the contours of the period’s evolving attitudes towards misanthropy, this study takes a combined thematic and historical approach. After two chapters offering close readings of the period’s key icons of misanthropy–Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Molière’s Alceste–the remaining six chapters each explore different thematic issues of misanthropy as they surface across the period. Drawing on works by Shakespeare, Molière, Hobbes, Pascal, Rochester, Swift, Rousseau, Kotzebue, Schiller, Wollstonecraft, and Leopardi, as well as countless less canonical writers, this study demonstrates that the misanthrope is not a fixed, stable figure in early modern literature. Rather, he–or very occasionally she–emerges in many guises, from philosopher to comic grouch, from tragic hero to moral censor, from cynical villain to disappointed idealist, from quasi-bestial outsider to worldly satirist. As both critic of humanity and object of critical scrutiny, the misanthrope challenges straightforward oppositions between individual and society, virtue and vice, reason and folly, human and animal. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/misanthropy-in-the-age-of-reason-9780192867575?cc=us&lang=en&#

New SEMFS edited volume

Congratulations to Professors Paul Hammond (Leeds) and Nick Hammond (Cambridge) on the publication of their edited volume Racine’s Tragedies of Tyranny: Essays on Bajazet and Mithridate (Leiden: Brill, 2024): https://brill.com/display/title/62131?rskey=2URIQv&result=5

In Bajazet and Mithridate Racine depicts the tragedies of characters who either wield tyrannic power or are subjected to tyranny. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts. The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.

New SEMFS monograph

Congratulations to Dr Anton Bruder (Utrecht) on the publication of his monograph Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Veilles ou Observations (Geneva: Droz, 2024): https://www.droz.org/france/product/9782600064873.

Focusing on a little studied miscellany by Claude Fauchet (1530-1602), this book reveals the role of the medieval in crafting an image of French modernity during the Renaissance. Designed to confront the Pléiade with the rich legacy of medieval French, the Veilles argued that an illustrious vernacular had to be rooted in native traditions, richer by far than generally credited. From meter in the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre to the emendation of Philippe de Commynes’s Mémoires, and from dueling etiquette to the tomb of Jean de Meun, Fauchet’s observations even reach into his present moment, with essays on Lemaire de Belges, Marot, and Ronsard. Here is an echo of a very different French Renaissance, in which the Burghers of Calais are more important than Francion, and a knowledge of Old French more desirable than classical erudition. Furthermore, as a response to rupture and loss, the Veilles are perhaps the earliest snapshot of a primary stage in the reception of medieval French literature.

Perry Gethner (1947 – 2023)