Pierre de Ronsard

John Parkin (University of Bristol)

Ed. by Tim Unwin, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.02: French Writing and Culture in the Renaissance, 1400-1600.
Vol. editors: Robert J. Hudson (Brigham Young University), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), Phillip John Usher (New York University), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

Born 11 Sep 1524
Died Dec 1585
Activity 1550-1585

Places

Born in France
Active in France

Activities

Primary

Poet

Other

Hymnist/ Psalmist

Resources

A provincial of the minor nobility, Ronsard was born in 1524 at La Possonnière, near Vendôme and in the Loire valley. He went on to become incontestably France's finest poet prior to the nineteenth century, despite not being associated with any great individual work. Though he planned a major epic, the Franciade, that gesture of cultural patriotism remained uncompleted, his vast oeuvre comprising instead an enormous number of shorter pieces, to which he added and which he revised and reclassified endlessly during his life, creating, to quote one of his modern students, “an ordered chaos”.

His father, Louis de Ronsard, was soldier and courtier to both Louis XII and Francis I, and the …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3157 words

Citation: Parkin, John. "Pierre de Ronsard". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 November 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3838, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here