The Roots of Civility. French Renaissance literature as a laboratory of modern civility

Description du projet

Le rôle de la littérature dans la formation d’une société pacifique

La recherche de la civilité reste une aspiration intemporelle. De la Renaissance, avec son mélange captivant de vertu et de cruauté, émerge une perspective unique sur les manières et l’harmonie de la société. Avec le soutien du programme Actions Marie Skłodowska-Curie, le projet CIVILITY entreprend un voyage pour découvrir les origines de la civilité, en remettant en question la chronologie conventionnelle. Cette recherche explore l’idée que la civilité mature existait dans la France de la Renaissance, un siècle avant la naissance communément admise de la «politesse française». En étudiant des dialogues littéraires, des nouvelles et des textes des 15e et 16e siècles, le projet identifiera des modèles clés de civilité. En utilisant les outils modernes de la pragmatique historique, il cherche à dévoiler l’évolution des comportements verbaux et non verbaux à l’époque de la dynastie des Valois.

Objectif

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.