ABSTRACT
The Discours emerge as Ronsard's struggle for the preservation and expansion of a beleaguered French cultural memory while betraying the poet's anxiety that it has entered a phase of irreversible reshaping. The poet tightly relates his idea of cultural memory to pre-Reformation Christianity because he understands that is the most important realm that nurtures the self-imagination of Renaissance France. The necessity to remember one's ancestor's echoes throughout the Discours since one of Ronsard's most important claims against Huguenots is that they let them fall into oblivion. Ronsard responds to the subjacent fear of the Protestant's attack on parts of France's collective imagination by vehemently insisting on writing as an act of both militant engagement and memory preservation. To illustrate the difference between communicative and cultural memory, the historical context in which Assmann developed his theory provides a recent and poignant. According to Halbwachs's theory, Ronsard shared in the collective memories of Renaissance humanists, Catholic coreligionists, and French court, among others.
