Contact Details

Dr Hugh Roberts
	Senior Lecturer in French
	Department(s): Modern Languages (French)
	Room: 117 (Queen's Building)
	Telephone: +44 (0)1392 264226 (Internal Ext. 4226)	This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Research Specialisms

Dr Hugh Roberts welcomes enquiries about postgraduate supervision (for MRes and PhD degrees) in any field of French Renaissance literary and intellectual culture.

Research interests: obscenity, nonsense, early seveenteenth-century comic texts, especially Bruscambille, the recueils satyriques, the reception of ancient Cynicism.

Current Research Projects

Obscenity in Renaissance France

Between 2007-2009, I co-ordinated an international research network funded by the AHRC on the notion of obscenity in Renaissance France. Two major publications of the network, which included some thirty researchers from the UK, USA, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are forthcoming (see under ‘Publications').

Critical edition of Bruscambille

I am co-editor, with Dr Annette Tomarken (Miami University of Ohio, retired), of what will be the first ever critical edition of the works of the early seventeenth-century comedian known as Bruscambille.

The essence of these works consists in 115 printed speeches or ‘prologues' performed before the main event, to get the audience in the right mood. Ranging from nonsense to mock encomia - i.e. speeches in praise of typically under-valued things, including cuckolds, nothing, matches, farts, the numbers 3 and 4, etc. - they are delivered with a rhetorical verve and encyclopedic frame of reference that are strongly reminiscent of Rabelais. A bestseller of their day, the prologues provide an unparalleled insight into what made French people laugh 400 years ago.

I was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust and and two Small Research Grants by the British Academy to pursue work on the edition; we plan to submit a manuscript to the publishers, Honoré Champion, in 2010.

Nonsense in the French Renaissance/the recueils satyriques

My current and future research focuses on nonsense writing in the French Renaissance, on which I plan to write a monograph. I am also exploring, with Professor Guillaume Peureux of the University of California, Davis, the possibility of working towards a series of critical editions of the collections of outrageous, pornographic and occasionally nonsensical poetry, known as the recueils satyriques.

Publications

Publications in Print

Authored Book

• Dogs' Tales: Representations of Ancient Cynicism in French Renaissance Texts, Faux Titre 279 (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006) (x + 308 pp. ISBN: 90-420-2004-0).

Edited Book

• Reading and Writing The Forbidden: Essays in French Studies, ed. by Bénédicte Facques, Helen Roberts and Hugh Roberts (Reading: 2001 Group, 2003) (vi + 166 pp. ISBN: 0-9546254-0-4).

Articles in Refereed Journals

• ‘Cynic Shamelessness in Late Sixteenth-Century French Texts', Modern Language Review 99.3 (2004), 595-607.
• ‘Too Paradoxical for Paradoxes: The Role of the Cynics in Two Mid-Sixteenth-Century French Texts, Charles Estienne's Paradoxes and Philibert de Vienne's Le Philosophe de court', French Studies 58.4 (2004), 459-70.
• ‘La tête de Bruscambille et les métaphores mentales au début du XVII^e siècle', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 107.3 (2007), 541-57. Joint winner of the 2007 Malcolm Bowie Prize for the best article published by an early-career researcher in French studies.
• ‘Medicine and Nonsense in French Renaissance Mock Prescriptions', Sixteenth Century Journal 40.3 (2009), 721-44

Chapters in Books

• ‘"Leur bouche est en paroles aussi honnête que le trou de mon cul": Cynic Freedom of Speech in French Texts, 1581-1615', Reading and Writing The Forbidden: Essays in French Studies, ed. by Bénédicte Facques, Helen Roberts and Hugh Roberts (Reading: 2001 Group, 2003), pp. 59-70.
• ‘Du lieu-commun au bon mot: l'exemple des sentences cyniques dans les recueils du XVI^e siècle', Bonnes lettres / belles lettres. Actes des colloques du centre d'études et de recherche éditer/interpréter, Université de Rouen, 26 et 27 avril 2000 - 6 et 7 février 2003, ed. by Jean-Claude Arnould and Claudine Poulouin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), pp. 49-63.
• ‘Bruscambille's Head and the Location of Early Modernity', in Religion, Ethics, and History in the French Long Seventeenth Century / La Religion, la morale, et l'histoire à l'âge classique, ed. by William Brooks and Rainer Zaiser, 2 vols (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 279-93.
• ‘Performing Nonsense in Early-Seventeenth-Century France: Bruscambille's Galimatias', in Nonsense and Other Senses: Dysfunctional Communication and Regulated Absurdity in Literature, ed. by Elisabetta Tarantino (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 127-45.
• ‘Mocking the Future in French Renaissance Mock-Prognostications', The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 198-214.

Internet Papers

• ‘Les opérateurs en France au XVII^e siècle : la médecine populaire et les spectacles de rue', Acts of the CESAR Conference, Oxford, June 2006,
• ‘"Baste, la Comedie est une vie sans soucy & quelquefois sans six sols": Bruscambille on the Theatre', Acts of the CESAR Conference, Oxford, June 2004,

Forthcoming Publications

Edited Refereed Journal

·        Obscenity in Late Medieval and Renaissance France/L'Obscénité en France fin Moyen-Âge et Renaissance, EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 14 (2011) ed. by Russell Ganim and Hugh Roberts. [to be printed by Autumn 2010]

Edited Book

·        Obscenity in Renaissance France/L'Obscénité en France à la Renaissance, ed. by Guillaume Peureux, Hugh Roberts and Lise Wajeman, manuscript accepted for publication by Droz.

Chapters in Books

• ‘"Obscène" in French Renaissance Texts' (co-authored with Dr Emily Butterworth); ‘Emblem Books', ‘Erasmus on Obscenity' and ‘L'euphémisme comique et les limites de l'obscénité au début du XVII^e siècle', Obscenity in Renaissance France.

Article in Refereed Journal

• ‘A Devils' Banquet: Apologies for Obscenity in Late Renaissance French Texts', EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 14 (2011) [10,000-word article]

Conferences

Conferences Organised (since 2001)

• 20-21 July 2007 Symposium on ‘The Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France' at Clare College, Cambridge.
• 3-5 July 2008 Symposium and Publication Workshop for Research Network on the Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France at University of Exeter
• 12-14 March 2009 Publication Workshop and Future Research Strategy and Collaborations for Research Network on the Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

Conference Papers Given (since 2001)

• ‘Du lieu-commun au bon mot: l'exemple des sentences cyniques dans les recueils du XVI^e siècle'
  February 2003 at the Université de Rouen, conference on ‘Bonnes Lettres/Belles Lettres'
• ‘The Old Ones Are Always the Best: Ancient Cynic Jokes in Early Modern Texts'
  April 2004 at the University of Cambridge, Migration of Ideas Workshop, CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities)
• ‘"Baste, la Comedie est une vie sans soucy & quelquefois sans six sols": Bruscambille on the Theatre'
  June 2004 at Oxford, CESAR Conference
• ‘Charlatans in the Long Seventeenth Century'
  July 2005 at the University of Leeds, Society for French Studies Annual Conference
• '"One Hundred Marvellous Drugs from the Undiscovered Islands": Folk Medicine and Nonsense in Early-Seventeenth-Century France'
  12-13 May 2006 at the University of Warwick, conference on ‘"Between Peterborough and Pentecost": Nonsense Literature across Space and Time'
• ‘Les opérateurs en France au XVII^e siècle: la médecine populaire et les spectacles de rue'
  21-23 June 2006 at Oxford, CESAR Conference, Maison Française
• 'La tête de Bruscambille et les métaphores mentales au début du XVII^e siècle'
  28-30 June 2006 at St Catherine's College, Oxford, Modernities Conference
• ‘Medicine and Nonsense in French Renaissance Mock-Prescriptions'
  2-4 July 2007 at Birmingham, Society for French Studies Annual Conference
• ‘Obscenity in Le Moyen de parvenir‘
  20-21 July 2007 at Clare College, Cambridge, Symposium on the Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France
• ‘A Devils' Banquet: Apologies for Obscenity in Late Renaissance French Texts'
  3-5 April 2008 at Chicago, Annual Meeting of Renaissance Society of America (organizer of panel on ‘The Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France', with Russell Ganim, Grégoire Holtz and Rebecca Zorach)
• ‘L'obscène en scène dans la farce du début du XVII^e siècle?'
  3-5 July 2008 at University of Exeter, Symposium and Publication Workshop for Research Network on the Notion of Obscenity in Renaissance France
• ‘What is Obscene? Erasmus's Definitions of Obscenity and Some Examples of Their Realization in French Renaissance Culture'
  28-30 May 2009 at Geneva, Sixteeenth Century Society and Conference (organizer of panel on ‘Obscenity in Renaissance France', with Dominique Brancher (chair), Pollie Bromilow and Emma Herdman)
• (with Dr Annette Tomarken) ‘Stereotypes on Stage: The Comedy of Gender in Bruscambille', 10-12 September 2009, ‘The Gendered Century', The Society for Seventeenth-century French Studies Annual Conference, London
• 3 papers at research seminars outside of Exeter (at the University of Oxford, Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London)

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching in 2009-10

Term 2:

• MLF1105: Reason and Existence: An Introduction to French Thought (convenor, team-taught)
• MLF2054: Love in the French Renaissance (convenor, sole teacher)
• MLF2056: Provoking Thoughts: French Literature and Philosophy from the Renaissance to the 20th Century (convenor, team-taught)
• MLF3053: Looking Awry: Exploring the Unorthodox in Early Modern France (convenor, sole teacher)

Postgraduate Supervision since 2001

• PhD, "More faces than Proteus": The Genesis and evolution of the French Court Ballet 1581-1669, Alice King, 2005-06 (supervised final year of PhD, following supervision from Dr Elizabeth Woodrough); awarded PhD November 2006.
• MRes, Zara Green (co-supervised with Dr Sara Smart), 2009-2010.