Mobile Monarchs: Movement and Nation-Building in Sixteenth-Century French Literature

• In Event: Perpetuum Mobile: Movement and Mobility in French Renaissance Literature

Abstract

This paper uses a mobility studies approach to analyze literary representations of princely movement during the French Renaissance. Its central question is the type of mobility that is associated with good governance. As French sovereignty evolved from a notion of power over people to power over place, the French monarch’s movement attained significance as a symbolic assertion of national space. In both real and fictional settings, authors such as Jean Marot, Rabelais and Barthelémy Aneau feature princely protagonists with a privileged relationship to space that derives from a singular capacity for movement. In these authors’ works, geographical realities are aligned with mythological commonplaces in order to refine a notion of what France is. Princely movement takes on a different character in each author’s work to reflect the changing political climate in France and Europe over the course of the sixteenth century, in addition to new possibilities for spatial visualization.

Author

• Jenny Meyer, Fordham University