ABSTRACT
When thinking of the mapping of exile, every enthusiast of French literature shivers with pleasure in hearing the echo of Joachim Du Bellay's plaintive bleat in the ninth sonnet of the Regrets of 1558, the collection that qualifies the author as the first "modern" of its pantheon. Setting exile at the foundation of their form, Du Bellay's Regrets use an epistolary frame to mark a gap in time and geographical space between the sender, who is the implied author of the poems and the receiver, who is implied to be the reader. Before Alessandro Vellutello's Petrarch, the aptly named Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti composed his Isolario, departing from Cristoforo Buondelmonti's well known Liber insularum archipelagi, a fifteenth-century treatise on islands, describing the Aegean archipelago, for which about 60 manuscripts are extant. Guillaume Cavellat's text is worth comparing to the celebrated first edition of L'Olive.
