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Speaker: Andreas Mayer (I Tatti / CNRS)
As is well known, the category of the Renaissance designating a distinct epoch emerged in the early 19th century alongside a number of historical novels and plays mostly produced by French writers. This moment has also been identified as the creation of a ‘’romantic Renaissance’’ whose curious mingling of fact and fiction provided ideological responses to contemporary political events. However, we should take into account the techniques with which some of these works of fiction move effectively beyond the myth of the Renaissance. In this respect, Balzac’s studies on Catherine de’ Medici (Sur Cathérine de Médicis), one of the lesser known works of The Human Comedy (begun in the 1820s and finished only in the 1840s), stand out, not only for their attempt to destroy the black legend of the ‘wicked Italian Queen’ of France, but also for their singular combination of historical documents, fictional accounts and theoretical discussions. The presentation will demonstrate to what extent these studies interrogate the paradoxical nature of absolute power in its relationship to knowledge.
Andreas Mayer is CNRS Senior Research Professor at the EHESS in Paris. His research focuses on the history of the human sciences and their relations to literature and the arts. He is the author of several monographs on the history of psychoanalysis, notably Dreaming by the Book. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (with L. Marinelli, Other Press, 2003), and Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013). His latest monograph is The Science of Walking. Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century (Chicago UP, 2020). Among other projects, he is currently publishing a new French and German annontated edition of Balzac’s ‘Analytical Studies’.
Image: Édouard Debat-Ponsan: Un matin devant la porte du Louvre (1880). Catherine de Medici gazing at Protestants massacred in the aftermath of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
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