Dignified Retreat

Dignified Retreat is a panoramic study of the vibrant literary and intellectual culture that emerged in early seventeenth-century France following the devastating Wars of Religion. This was a period that not only witnessed the recovery of the country following these wars, and the emergence of a strong, 'absolutist' monarchy under the Bourbons, but also the rise and refinement of the French language and the development of a literary culture that would soon beknown as French classicism. Casting his net over a wide range of writers and intellectuals, Robert A. Schneider has assembled a roster of more than 100 men and women of letters, those constituting what he calls the 'generation of 1630'. While diverse, and indeed divided between those who hewed to traditionalhumanism and others more attuned to 'modern' linguistic and literary developments, this cohort largely shared a commitment to a cultural renewal of France, its rise to prominence in the geopolitical arena of Europe, and the emergence of a strong centralized monarchy. They depended on both the traditional aristocracy and the king's powerful minister, Cardinal Richelieu. But despite this dependency, these writers and intellectuals maintained a degree of independence and, more significantly, werethe prime movers in crucial cultural developments that are too often identified with royal initiatives. For example, the author demonstrates that the Académie française, founded in 1635 by Richelieu, often considered formative in French cultural history, was actually more the result of the creativeinitiatives of these men of letters, which the savvy Cardinal only managed to co-opt and turn to the purposes of the crown.

The book contains seven thematic chapters that portray in loving detail the literary landscape by stressing an inherent tension between participation in and withdrawal from public life., Robert Schneider's wide-ranging study of how embracing withdrawal from public life led to new ways of thinking, reading, and writing forms a modern parallel with the COVID-19 pandemic., This is a book that is beautifully modulated, gradually piecing together the different, varied and inevitably contrasting viewpoints and engagements of the literati. It focuses our attention on the interlocutors of the literary world - its readers, debaters, translators, and aficionados., This book is essential reading for historians and literary scholars interested in seventeenth-century France, who will find in it a newly expanded range of writers and intellectuals who mattered at this time, and fresh ways to approach their diverse and fascinating works.

Robert A. Schneider received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his PhD from the University of Michigan. He has taught at Brandeis University, the Catholic University of American, and, since 2005, at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has been a visiting professor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Bristol University, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He has received fellowships from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, theNational Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the French Government (the Chateaubriand fellowship), and he has been a visiting scholar at All Souls College and Oriel College in Oxford. He has published several books on early modern French history, and was the editor of the AmericanHistorical Review from 2005 to 2015.