This collection is dedicated to John D. Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia and a preeminent scholar of early modern France and Italy. Lyons¿s long and influential academic career has been instrumental in shaping generations of undergraduates, postgraduates and early career researchers through his teaching, advising, mentorship and critical reading. Bringing together original chapters from leading scholars in North America, Great Britain and France in the fields of medieval and early modern literature and culture, this volume will build upon the breadth and depth of Lyons¿s wide-ranging corpus that spans a remarkable array of genres, including philosophy, the novel, theatre and history. The studies are organized around the key themes of Lyons¿s research throughout his illustrious career and engage with authors ranging from Saint Augustine, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli and María de Zayas to François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, Jean le Rond d¿Alembert and Voltaire.

Kelly Fender McConnell completed her PhD under the supervision of John D. Lyons at the University of Virginia. She is Senior Lecturer in French at Dartmouth College where she has been teaching French cultural studies and language since 2012. She specializes in seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on early modern understandings of emotions, reactions and the body. She has published articles on Pascal and Corneille and has presented papers on Racine, Descartes and Lafayette.
Michael Meere completed his PhD under the supervision of John D. Lyons at the University of Virginia and has taught at Wesleyan University since 2014. He is the author of Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy: Performance, Ethics, Poetics (2021) and the editor of French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory (2015).

CONTENTS: Corneille, Racine, Molière - Hélène Merlin-Kajman: Lire John Lyons : une chance - Églantine Morvant: La temporalité de la clémence d'Auguste : vers un pouvoir absolu à visage humain - Ellen R. Welch: Noises Off: Tragic Acousmatics in Corneille and Racine - Michael Hawcroft: Racine's Assistants: Non-speaking Roles in
Andromaque
and Its English Translations - John Campbell: Taste, Distaste and Criticism: Voltaire on Corneille's
Polyeucte
and Racine's
Athalie
- Georges Forestier: Des confidences de Molière mourant? Amorce d'une réflexion sur la « vérité » des textes - Noël Peacock: Molière's Parody of Tragedy - Scudéry, Lafayette and the Salons - Kathleen Wine: Chance, Astrology and Authorship in Scudéry's
Ibrahim ou l'illustre bassa
- Hélène Bilis: Reading Lafayette from the Outside: Character Interactions in the «Anti-imaginative Novel» - Harriet Stone: At Home with Nicolaes Maes's Eavesdropper and
La Princesse de Clèves
- Faith E. Beasley: Recovering Lost Conversations: The Case of François Bernier - Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal - George Hoffmann: The Devil in Descartes - Hall Bjørnstad: Of Angels and Beasts: The Exemplarity of Failure in Montaigne and Pascal - Erec R. Koch: Intertextuality and Citation: Montaigne in Pascal - Nicholas Hammond: The Ordinary Conversations of Life: Example and Education in Another
Entretien avec M. de Sacy
- Richard E. Goodkin: Temporality and the Birth of Calculus in Blaise Pascal's and Pierre de Fermat's Problem of Points and d'Alembert's Concept of Limits: A Humanistic Perspective - Renaissance, Baroque,
Classicisme
- Virginia Krause: « Composé par M. François Rabelais »: Author, Title, Page - Christopher Braider: Painting as Experiment in Rubens's
Four Philosophers
- Michael Moriarty: Love and Friendship: Jean-Pierre Camus and the Moralists - Michael Meere: Poliarque-Théocrine, or Pierre Du Ryer's Cross-Dressed King - Thomas Pavel: Marvellous Forgotten Works: The Story of Alcamène and Ménalippe by La Calprenède and
Timocrate
by Thomas Corneille - Emma Gilby: The Genre of the « Bouts Rimés » and Seventeenth-Century Satire - Anne Régent-Susini: Funeral Sermons in Seventeenth-Century French Letters and Diaries: The Building of a Genre - Guy Spielmann: The «French Baroque» from Self-Evidence to Oxymoron - and Back - Example, History, Imagination - Stephen G. Nichols: Castration as Exemplum: The Making of a Medieval Trope - Kevin Brownlee: Ekphrasis in Jean de Meun's Rose and Boccaccio's
Teseida
: The Erotic Statue and the Illustrated Building - Timothy Chesters: Face-Off: Communication and Countenance in Blaise de Monluc's
Commentaires
- Éric Méchoulan:
Lettre envoyee au Philosophe eloquent
: exemplarité d'une situation et construction du public dans la querelle de l'éloquence en 1627 - Malina Stefanovska: A Seventeenth-Century View of History: The Cardinal de Retz and the Example of Machiavelli - Marina S. Brownlee: Zayas's Diabolical Magic - Katherine Ibbett: A Clearing in the Woods: The Example of the Early Modern Beaver.