Inhabiting in the Renaissance

Undergraduate / Graduate

In a seventeenth-century manuscript map of Brazilian coast, the cartographer wrote, in the middle of an empty space, "pays inhabitué que par des sauvages," emphasizing-among other things-the phonetic and semiotic confusion between inhabiting, habituating or settling, and the uninhabitable as a concept. This seminar will look at the French Renaissance through the lens of inhabiting, in a wide sense of the term, whether it is the house, a plot of land, your local zone or the earth. As a time that is confronted with narratives of other, distant ways of making a home, the French Renaissance deserves to be reframed as a critical moment in defining how the humans of Humanism approached and apprehended their environment and their way of life, as well as their dependence on resources and on other beings. Students will read canonical texts such as Montaigne's "Essais," Rabelais's "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel," Jean de Léry's "Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil," Marguerite de Navarre's "Heptaméron," as well as the rustic manuals of Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault and of Olivier de Serres. Aside from recent scholarship on early modern French literature and ecocriticism, we will turn to an interdisciplinary corpus of thinkers of ecology (from theory to psychology and nonfiction) to give new depth to the primary sources, as well as dive into the vibrant and recent French ecological thought of Bruno Latour, Emanuele Coccia, Isabelle Stengers, and Emilie Hache.