Affiliated scholar Adam Horsley awarded the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Literature Prize 2021
Adam Horsley has been awarded the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Literature Prize 2021 for his article ‘Secret Cabinets, Scribal Publication, and the Satyrique: François Maynard and Libertine Poetry in Public and Private Spaces’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 51: 1 (2020), 55-78.
The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Literature Prize is given for the best literature paper published in the Sixteenth Century Journal.
The prize-winning article is selected by a committee of three conference members appointed by the president who shall designate one of the members as chair.
Prize winners are determined by the quality and originality of research, methodological skill and/or innovation, development of fresh and stimulating interpretations or insights, and literary quality.
Adam Horsley has used the unique Privacy research method in his work with his prize-winning article. We have interviewed Adam about his article and adaptation of the Privacy angle:
Could you give our readers a summary of your article?
My article offers a contribution to our understanding of the circulation of manuscript poetry, through the lens of public-private distinctions evinced by François Maynard’s poetry and letters. Rather than focusing on a fixed location of poetic or epistolary composition or readership, it instead explores the journeys of such texts from, and sometimes back into, a private sphere. After an initial example of Maynard’s poems as physical objects of devotion, stored privately within Marguerite de Valois’ clothing for her private contemplation, the article goes on to explore examples of both physical and conceptual notions of the cabinet (a private office or small room) as a private sphere of literary production, circulation, readership, and revision.
How/What does the privacy angle add to your research?
We can analyse poetic variants across printed sources, manuscripts, and letters by focusing on a dichotomy between the individual (the writer) and the collective (readers as well as critical commentators and editors of a poem). The privacy angle has however allowed me not only to focus on the journeys of these texts as material objects, but also on the poet’s own concerns for the processes through which his texts migrated outside of his conceptions of private spheres – e.g. the cabinet – and into spheres which he considered to be public; repeatedly referred to, for example, as le théâtre, or as polite society. My findings show that for Maynard and those whom he trusted to read and offer critical comment on his verse, the division between public and private readership did not predominantly depend on the factors that we might expect, such as the number of readers of a text or the ease with which a text could be purchased. Rather, Maynard’s anxieties pertain more to the control that he was able to maintain over the text as a physical object and the identity of its individual readers.
How/What does the privacy angle add to the field?
Maynard has largely been remembered for his increasingly desperate, yet consistently futile, attempts to obtain material reward and patronage for his poetry, to the extent that his modern reputation is somewhat tainted with arrogance. Yet such an image is perhaps inevitable when viewing the misfortunes of an impoverished poet through the lens of his very public attempts to consolidate his financial and commercial positions. Behind this concern for public and aristocratic opinion, however, there is a much more humble, anxious, and self-critical side to Maynard which can only be appreciated by venturing ‘behind the scenes’ (or to labour the metaphor, behind the printed page) into the poet’s corpus of personal notebooks and private letters. Beyond my findings on the concepts of private spheres in the writing and sharing libertine poetry, I have also proposed my own critical framework for distinguishing between public and private with regards to such texts, as a proto-corrective to Jürgen Habermas’s oft-critiqued work on these divisions. By concentrating on the thresholds between public and private in Maynard, I have also been able to shed new light on broader aspects of his character and his art in other published studies.
Could you say a little about how The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies has influenced your research?
It was after listening to research papers presented by members of PRIVACY, at the annual conferences of the Society for Early Modern French Studies (SEMFS), that I became aware of the potential for Privacy Studies as a nascent research field in its own right. As a result of this, I sent my preliminary ideas on Maynard’s conceptions of privacy to the Centre’s director, Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun, who was kind enough to offer not only initial encouragement, but a critical pair of eyes over the final draft. I have since collaborated with the Centre on a number of initiatives; ranging from reciprocal institutional visits and presentations, to funding bids and conference organisation.
Are you going to continue seeing your research topic through a Privacy looking glass?
My work on aspects of privacy in Maynard’s texts has led me to explore how other forms of subversive literature – including printed texts, letters, and even legal records – can be better understood as cultural artifacts existing in and moving between private spheres, rather than focusing predominantly on the place of their inception or their final destination as fixed loci for textual production or engagement. I am particularly interested in mapping how early-modern criminal trials produced texts which, rather than existing on the public-private threshold as with Maynard’s poems, made more complete and repeated journeys between public and private spheres. Most recently, the Centre invited me to present at one of its interdisciplinary seminar days on the author trial of Jean Fontanier, who was executed for teaching Judaism in his private lodgings in 1621. My talk harnessed Privacy Studies, and the Centre’s critical framework of holistic zones of privacy, to analyse the role of privacy in Fontanier’s case from literary, commercial, and legal perspectives. The feedback I received from my ever collegial audience at the Centre undoubtedly added an innovative layer to my analysis of Fontanier’s trial in my recent book.
I am currently awaiting the outcome of a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship application to study how legal, architectural, social, and mental private spaces were exploited to disseminate controversial ideas in seventeenth century France. My proposed host for this project is, quite naturally, the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Privacy Studies.[1]
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[1] For Horsley’s other work on the public and private faces of Maynard and his texts, see ‘Mon livre, je ne peux m’empescher de te plaindre’: Reflections on the compilation of François Maynard’s 1646 Œuvres’, in “A qui lira”: Littérature, livre et librairie en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. by Mathilde Bombart and others (Tübingen: Nar – Biblio 17, 2020), pp. 633-642; ‘The Good Times and the Bad: François Maynard’s Reflections on his Past and Future’, in Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France, ed. by Richard Maber and Joanna Barker (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), pp. 107-131; and ‘Le Président libertin: The Poetry of François Maynard after the Trial of Théophile de Viau’, Early Modern French Studies, 37: 2 (2015), 93-107. On Jean Fontanier see Adam Horsley, Libertines and the Law: Subversive Authors and Criminal Justice in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 177-250.