ABSTRACT
there have been many attempts to describe, define and categorize the styles of French prose and poetry in the period which stretches from about 1570 to 1630. The discussion has ranged from arguments based on specific and recurring themes such as metamorphosis or inconstancy, 1 to the study of the influence of a single author such as Seneca. 2 Nearly all the critics who have worked on this period have noted the importance for literature of the spirit of that time, disturbed by scientific discoveries and Wars of Religion, and stimulated by the erudite productions of the late Renaissance. And yet, only very recently have they started to explore these problems in some detail. 3 The greater part of the literature published in the years 1570—1630 is principally concerned with moral, philosophical or spiritual matters, and it seems that before a satisfactory stylistic assessment of the period 140can be made a much more precise examination of these sources is needed. For by 1570 poets had turned for inspiration not so much to the Italian or Classical poetic examples as advocated in the manifestos of the Pléiade, not to the poetic practice of their French predecessors, but rather to prose sources in Latin or newly translated into French. In the works of the ancient Stoics made available by scholars like Lipsius, in the French versions of the Bible whose number increased almost daily, and in the moral and spiritual handbooks which proliferated throughout the sixteenth century, one finds both the themes listed by Rousset: ‘instabilité, vicissitude, le monde à l’envers, fragilité, inconstance’, and the detailed stylistic devices whose novelty has often puzzled literary historians. In this essay I wish to discuss some specific examples drawn from this vast corpus of moral and devotional works. 1 I hope to show how close they are, both thematically and stylistically, to poems of the period. My discussion will be illustrated throughout from the work of Chassignet.
