Project description
The role of literature in shaping a peaceful society
The pursuit of civility remains a timeless aspiration. From the Renaissance era, with its captivating blend of virtue and cruelty, emerges a unique perspective on manners and societal harmony. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CIVILITY project embarks on a journey to uncover the origins of civility, challenging the conventional timeline. This research explores the notion that mature civility existed in Renaissance France, a century before the commonly recognised birth of ‘politesse française.’ By studying literary dialogues, short stories, and texts from the 15th and 16th centuries, the project will identify key models of civility. Using modern tools of historical pragmatics, it seeks to unveil the evolution of verbal and nonverbal behaviours during the era of the Valois dynasty.
Objective
Renaissance men and women had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. Can they really teach us something about civility? I think they can: they were made of contradictions and so are we. And both, we and they, dream of a society where politeness and respect reduce tensions and allow a peaceful and pleasant cohabitation for all.
The goal of this research project, executed at the University of Lille under the supervision of Marie-Claire Thomine, is to prove that the roots of civility go back to the 16th century and that there was a mature form of civility in the Renaissance France a century before what is usually considered to be the beginning of the 'politesse française'. I will identify its main models and situate them in relation to the previous (medieval) ones and those from the century of Louis XIV. I will argue that Renaissance authors used the literature as the principal means of wide diffusion of this new civility, and this is precisely what makes this century a turning point in the history of manners in France and a part of the cultural reform initiated by the kings and queens of France to build a more cohesive and peaceful society. Furthermore, I want also to prove that this evolution can be observed using the modern tools of historical pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics that had developed strongly over the last twenty years but was not yet used to study the phenomenon of (im)politeness in France during the Renaissance. I will accomplish those goals through a program of close reading of prose texts (essentially literary dialogues and collections of short stories) of the 15th and 16th centuries, informed by the literature of civility, and through corpus-based research to detect and define evolution in verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the time of the last kings of the Valois dynasty.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
59000 Lille
France