The Roots of Civility. French Renaissance literature as a laboratory of modern civility

Renaissance men and women had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. Can they really teach us something about civility? I think they can: they were made of contradictions and so are we.

And both, we and they, dream of a society where politeness and respect reduce tensions and allow a peaceful and pleasant cohabitation for all.

The goal of this research project, executed at the University of Lille under the supervision of Marie-Claire Thomine, is to prove that the roots of civility go back to the 16th century and that there was a mature form of civility in the Renaissance France a century before what is usually considered to be the beginning of the 'politesse française'.

I will identify its main models and situate them in relation to the previous (medieval) ones and those from the century of Louis XIV.

I will argue that Renaissance authors used the literature as the principal means of wide diffusion of this new civility, and this is precisely what makes this century a turning point in the history of manners in France and a part of the cultural reform initiated by the kings and queens of France to build a more cohesive and peaceful society.

Furthermore, I want also to prove that this evolution can be observed using the modern tools of historical pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics that had developed strongly over the last twenty years but was not yet used to study the phenomenon of (im)politeness in France during the Renaissance.

I will accomplish those goals through a program of close reading of prose texts (essentially literary dialogues and collections of short stories) of the 15th and 16th centuries, informed by the literature of civility, and through corpus-based research to detect and define evolution in verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the time of the last kings of the Valois dynasty.