Previous research

Prophetic poetry in 16th century France: A study of a marginalized literature. The Pléiade and the concepts of poetry and prophecy. These projects have been carried out in close cooperation between the Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, University of Stockholm, and the French Department of Sorbonne (Université de Paris IV), Paris, France. Our projects have shed light on a hitherto often neglected aspect of the enigmatic oeuvre of Michel de Notredame 1503-66 (Nostradamus), i.e. the fact that he inspired several of the Pléiade poets, whose group that in many ways explored the oracular genre in the 1550s and 1560s. The studies have included the poetic work of Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), Maurice Scève (1501-1560) and Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532-1589).

Current research

I propose in my current research to link the concept of cosmopolitanism to renaissance neoplatonism or, to be more precise, to neoplatonic poetry. I am concentrating on Elizabethan England and late Renaissance France. Quoting Robert E. Stillman, I examine the “Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism”. For instance, Stillman refers to Philip Sidney (1554-86), who describes how his entire creative writing changed after he had travelled to France and experienced the killing of thousands of Protestants during the so-called St. Bartolomei Massacre in Paris 1572. In England, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and other poets explored a kind of neoplatonism that was tolerant, cosmopolitan and open-minded. They shared this thinking across boarders with French neoplatonic poets such as Ronsard, Du Bellay and Pontus de Tyard but also with humanists all over Europe.

Categories

Early modern literature