This collection is dedicated to John D. Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia and a preeminent scholar of early modern France and Italy. Lyonss long and influential academic career has been instrumental in shaping generations of undergraduates, postgraduates and early career researchers through his teaching, advising, mentorship and critical reading. Bringing together original chapters from leading scholars in North America, Great Britain and France in the fields of medieval and early modern literature and culture, this volume will build upon the breadth and depth of Lyonss wide-ranging corpus that spans a remarkable array of genres, including philosophy, the novel, theatre and history. The studies are organized around the key themes of Lyonss research throughout his illustrious career and engage with authors ranging from Saint Augustine, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli and María de Zayas to François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, Jean le Rond dAlembert and Voltaire.

Kelly Fender McConnell completed her PhD under the supervision of John D. Lyons at the University of Virginia. She is Senior Lecturer in French at Dartmouth College where she has been teaching French cultural studies and language since 2012. She specializes in seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on early modern understandings of emotions, reactions and the body. She has published articles on Pascal and Corneille and has presented papers on Racine, Descartes and Lafayette. Michael Meere completed his PhD under the supervision of John D. Lyons at the University of Virginia and has taught at Wesleyan University since 2014. He is the author of Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy: Performance, Ethics, Poetics (2021) and the editor of French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory (2015).