Hubert Languet monarchomaque

Depuis le XVIIe siècle, l’historiographie tente en vain de saisir l’identité de l’auteur des Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), l’un des principaux traités monarchomaques. Deux hypothèses sont traditionnellement retenues par les historiens : Hubert Languet et Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. L’historiographie francophone la plus récente tend à privilégier Mornay. Néanmoins, l’étude des deux versions de l’Arcadia de Philip Sidney, l’ami le plus proche de Languet, l’Old Arcadia (vers 1580) et la New Arcadia (1590), montre que Sidney présente des idées politiques très similaires à celles des Vindiciae et qu’il les attribue même à Languet. Un tel témoignage mériterait d’être pris en compte par les historiens. Bien qu’il ne prouve pas en lui-même que Languet soit le père des Vindiciae, il révèle que le huguenot en partageait la philosophie. De plus, cette source amène à penser que la piste Languet, trop souvent écartée par l’historiographie francophone, n’est cependant pas à exclure : une telle hypothèse apparaît même relativement pertinente.

Happiness in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

Sir Philip Sidney is not commonly associated with a search for happiness or the use he made of concepts of happiness in his works. Yet, as this article seeks to show, he employed a rhetoric of happiness throughout. In particular, Sidney’s Arcadias – the Old Arcadia, which he finished in 1581, and the New Arcadia, the substantial rewriting which remained unfinished – are markedly different in their representations of and their reflections on happiness. While happiness is associated with the Arcadian state as a – potentially fatal – aim in the Old Arcadia from its very beginning, it is subordinated to a sterner and more violent discourse in the New Arcadia, for which after Sidney’s death other writers wrote diverse happy endings. This different treatment of happiness in the Arcadias is also discussed with a view to different manuscripts and print editions as well as to the power play at the Elizabethan court.

Lancelot of the Laik and the Literary Manuscript Miscellany in 15th- and 16th-century Scotland

This chapter begins by introducing the most significant features of Scottish literary manuscript miscellanies, such as: their relatively late date, in comparison with surviving miscellanies from elsewhere in the British Isles; their copying by scribes who also functioned as notary publics, writers to the signet, and merchants; their links to some of Scotland’s most prominent book-owning families; and their inclusion of material derived from print and from south of the border. The remainder of the chapter offers a necessarily brief case study of one particular Older Scots literary manuscript miscellany (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5) in which the Older Scots romance, Lancelot of the Laik, is placed alongside a selection of Scottish courtesy texts and legal material, a series of English and Scottish prophecies, several acts of the Scottish parliament, an English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, and the only surviving manuscript copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia.