Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes

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Spider from Africa, Loki from Norse mythology,

and Reynard the Fox from France.

Through an anonymous narrator named “N,”

the tales of Till Eulenspiegel relate Till’s life and

how he uses his tricks to get by in medieval Ger-

many. In many of these tales, Till points out the

silliness of people’s words by following directions

literally. In the 11th tale, for example, he is hired by

a rich merchant who tells him to cook a roast

“coolly and slowly” so as not to burn it. Instead,

Till puts the roast on a spit over two barrels of beer

to keep it cool. When the merchant fires Till and

tells him to “clear out,” Till obediently takes all the

furniture out of the house and puts it in the street.

Typical of Till, these incidents “hold a mirror”back

at the speaker, reflecting their words.

Till Eulenspiegel supposedly died in 1350, but

there is no evidence that proves he ever truly ex-

isted. According to legend, he was buried beneath a

gravestone marked by a carving of an owl holding a

mirror. Nevertheless, the legend of Till Eulenspiegel

and his antics lives on. The first publication of the

tales appeared in 1519, and was followed by

William Copland’s translation, titled A merye jest

of a man that was called Howleglas, in 1555 or 1560.

In Germany, there are statues, restaurants, and a

museum honoring Till Eulenspiegel. There also has

been a Till Eulenspiegel ballet and an EPIC poem

based on his life. The most famous Eulenspiegel-in-

spired work of art is composer Richard Strauss’s

1895 tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.

An English Version of Till Eulenspiegel

Till Eulenspiegel. Introduction by Paul Oppenheimer.

London: Routledge, 2001.

Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Téllez)

(ca. 1580–1648) dramatist

Tirso de Molina was the pseudonym of Gabriel

Téllez, who was born in Madrid and educated at

the University of Alcalá. He joined the Order of

Mercy in 1601 and was made the superior of the

monasteries in Trujillo in 1626 and Soria in 1645.

Despite his religious profession, Tirso de

Molina was very active in the literary circles that

flourished during the Spanish Golden Age. He

wrote between 300 and 400 plays during the course

of his life, of which about 86 survive. The plays

range from historical and religious dramas to

palace comedies and romantic tragedies. Tirso de

Molina was greatly influenced by the Golden Age

dramatist L

OPE DE VEGA

, particularly in his princi-

ples of dramatic composition. However, Tirso de

Molina’s plays are individualized by his own theo-

logical interests, which often surface in themes of

the human will in conflict with the divine, and by

his geographical and historical knowledge, gath-

ered from the trips he took throughout Spain, Por-

tugal, and even the West Indies.

Tirso de Molina also tried his hand at short

prose, releasing a collection of stories called The

Gardens of Toledo in 1621 and in 1635 Pleasure

with Profit, a collection of stories, plays, and verse.

Tirso de Molina’s real skill, however, emerged in

his plays, which were made remarkable by the

vivid characters he created, whose psychological

torments he portrayed with accuracy and depth.

Some of his more memorable dramas were Pru-

dence in Woman (1634) and The Rape of Tamar

(1634), which were both chillingly realistic in their

portrayal of human agony. In contrast, in The

Bashful Man in the Palace (1621) and Don Gil of

the Green Stockings (1635), events unfold with a

merry and light-hearted rapidity.

Tirso de Molina is most celebrated for his two

most sophisticated and mature plays, El condenado

por desconfiado (The Doubted Damned, 1635) and El

burlador de Sevilla (The Seducer of Seville, also trans-

lated as Don Juan and the Stone Guest, 1634). In the

second of these, the infamous character Don Juan

makes his first appearance in dramatic literature.

Drawing on popular legends of the wily seducer,

Tirso de Molina created a literary figure that would

Tirso de Molina 287

inspire several later writers and dramatists, includ-

ing MOLIÈRE, Byron, and George Bernard Shaw, as

well as move Mozart to compose Don Giovanni.

The Don Juan of Tirso’s play is very different

from later versions of the character. He is not the

middle-aged Casanova but rather a very young

and inexperienced man. In The Seducer of Seville,

he searches for his own limits and explores the lim-

its of the society in which he lives in order to trans-

gress them. His character, in essence, is a reflection

of the aristocratic young Spaniards of Tirso de

Molina’s day. In her introduction to Don Juan of

Seville, Lynne Alvarez writes:

It is the blind thoughtlessness, the youthful ar-

rogance of this famous character that ulti-

mately destroys him. Because it never occurs to

Don Juan he will encounter a situation which

he cannot somehow talk his way out of. Aristo-

cratic Spaniards could talk their way out of just

about anything....Just as one could travel

from wealth to rags at the snap of an imperial

finger, so one could transform oneself from

great sinner to great saint via a well-spoken

confession.

Tirso de Molina’s portrayal of Don Juan did not

meet with absolute approval; the council of Castile

denounced him as a “corrupter of public morals”

in 1625. Later, however, Tirso de Molina’s General

History of the Order of Mercy (1637), a work he un-

dertook as part of his role as the order’s official his-

torian, established him as a respectable theologian.

As a playwright, he was for a long time eclipsed by

the popularity of

CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA,but Tirso

de Molina is now considered an outstanding figure

of 17th-century Spanish literature. His ability to

scale the heights and depths of human experience

has caused some critics to compare him to William

SHAKESPEARE, and his mastery of a number of gen-

res ranging from prose and poetry to drama and

fiction has established him permanently in the his-

tory of Spanish letters.

English Versions of Works by

Tirso de Molina

Damned for Despair. Translated by Lawrence Boswell.

Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos Press, 1992.

Don Juan of Seville. Translated by Lynne Alvarez. New

York: Playwright’s Press, 1989.

Don Juan: The Beguiler of Seville and The Stone Guest.

Translated by Max Oppenheimer. Lawrence,

Kans.: Coronado Press, 1976.

The Rape of Tamar. Translated by Paul Whitworth.

New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999.

Works about Tirso de Molina

Albrecht, Jane White. Playgoing Public of Madrid in

the Time of Tirso de Molina. New Orleans: Univer-

sity Press of the South, 2001.

Galoppe, Raul. Tirso de Molina: His Originality Then

and Now. Edited by Henry Sullivan. Toronto:

Dovehouse Editions, 1996.

Sola-Sole, Josep M. Tirso’s Don Juan: The Metamor-

phosis of a Theme. Edited by Georges E. Gingras.

Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of Amer-

ica Press, 1989.

tragedy

The word tragedy derives from the Greek word

tragoida, meaning “goat song.” Originally, it re-

ferred to the ancient act of sacrificing a goat to the

Greek god, Dionysus, and later came to be associ-

ated with the dramas performed as festivals hon-

oring the god. In his Poetics, Aristotle defined the

critical components of a tragedy as “Plot, Charac-

ter, Language, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody,” of

which character and plot are the most important.

According to Aristotle, tragedies depict “an action

that is serious, complete, and possessing magni-

tude” and arouses emotions of “pity and fear.”

The “tragic hero”is typically of high stature and

encounters a reversal of fortune through a fault of

character or an uncontrollable accident. Happy at

the outset, a tragic hero experiences a succession of

hardships resulting from his or her hamartia or

288 tragedy

“tragic flaw.” The narrative movement plunges

from an elevated state of happiness to one of sad-

ness and misery, and the impact on the audience

is a catharsis, a purgation that releases individuals

from the grip of a powerful emotion. Tragedies of

the present day more or less still meet Aristotle’s

criteria, though the term may be loosely applied

to any story that ends unhappily.

The revenge tragedy developed in England in

the mid-to-late 1500s and was heavily influenced

by the works of the Roman playwright Seneca. Be-

sides the revenge theme, these tragedies contain

lurid, ritualistic action and have ornate and bom-

bastic dialogue, multiple plotlines (both serious

and comic), and vengeful ghosts. Unlike conven-

tional tragic heroes, the hero of the revenge

tragedy begins as, rather than developing into, a

malcontent. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy

functioned as a model for subsequent revenge

tragedies.

Tragedies have always worked best on the stage,

and some of the greatest examples are Aeschylus’s

Oresteia, Christopher

MARLOWE’s Dr. Faustus,

William SHAKESPEARE’s Macbeth, Jean RACINE’s An-

dromaque, Pedro CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA’s The

Painter of His Own Dishonour, TIRSO DE MOLINA’s

The Seducer of Seville, and LOPE DE VEGA’s The

Knight from Olmeda.

Works of Tragedy

Classical Tragedy. Edited by Robert Corrigan. New

York: Applause Books, 1991.

Four Revenge Tragedies. Edited by Katharine Maus.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedies. New York: Mod-

ern Library, 1994.

Sophocles. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Edited by

David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Works about Tragedy

Frye, Prosser H. Romance and Tragedy. Norman: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 1980.

Kitto, H. D. F. Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study. New

York: Routledge, 2002.

Spencer, Theodore. Death and Elizabethan Tragedy.

St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1985.

travel narrative (travel log)

Travel, due to military, merchant, religious, or per-

sonal reasons, has always been a part of human ac-

tivity, and the retelling of adventures experienced

during traveling is one of the earliest forms of oral

literature. Travelers’ diaries, letters home, and

memoirs of exploration are all examples of travel

narratives, from the Tosa Diary of Ki no Tsurayuki

to the journals kept by world explorer Amerigo

VESPUCCI

. Travel as part of the human quest

emerges at the very beginnings of literature, in the

journey of Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh and

in the adventures of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.

Even the rituals described in the Egyptian Book of

the Dead entail travel from this world to the next.

As a literary genre, the travel narrative began to

grow in popularity in the West during the 15th-

century Age of Exploration. The spirit of the

REN-

AISSANCE and its accompanying belief of HUMANISM,

which valued the power and inventiveness of

human abilities, inspired the desire for discovery

and a readiness to explore the wide world and make

it familiar. Travel literature provided people with a

chance to learn about the world without actually

having to undertake a risky journey. In the 18th-

century, travel narratives abounded as Europeans

became more curious about cultures beyond their

own borders. Women as well as men kept diaries,

travel logs, and correspondence; two popular ex-

amples are The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (1697) and

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy

Letters (1717).

Travel narratives might be accounts of actual

travel, such as adventures inside colonial America

or travels taken to the Old World from the New, for

instance, the autobiographical account of Olaudah

EQUIANO. Some popular narratives were descrip-

travel narrative 289

290 typology

tions of imaginary journeys, like Gulliver’s Travels

by Jonathan SWIFT. Travel narratives also varied in

their function. They could be purely entertaining,

like the later adventure fiction of Jules Verne, or

they could recount a spiritual journey or pilgrim-

age. These narratives were as frequently written by

disappointed high society dandies as they were by

devoted missionaries.

Travel narratives could also be highly political:

A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alek-

sandr RADISHCHEV was considered so dangerous

from a political point of view that czarist censor-

ship prohibited its publication. The lead character

of the Journey, a young, conscientious nobleman,

travels between two major Russian cities. He

makes subtle and revealing observations of the

common people’s life, which boil down to harsh

criticism of czarist Russia.

The popularity of the travel narrative as a

genre has endured over the last several centuries.

The works belonging to this vast field provide not

only entertaining reading full of adventure, exoti-

cism, and the spirit of discovery, allowing readers

to explore the distant places and peoples of the

world, but also a comparative perspective, help-

ing readers to better understand their own cul-

ture and identity.

English Versions of Travel Narratives

Fish, Cheryl J. Black and White Women’s Travel Narra-

tives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville: Uni-

versity Press of Florida, 2004.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Rodney Merrill.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s

Travel Narratives of the 1790s. London: Cassell

Academic, 1999.

Martin, Wendy, ed. Colonial American Travel Narra-

tives. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Vivies, Jean, ed. English Travel Narratives in the Eigh-

teenth Century. Translated by Claire Davison.

Aldershot, Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing,

2002.

Works about Travel Narratives

Brown, Christopher. Encyclopedia of Travel Literature.

Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

Brown, Sharon Rogers. American Travel Narratives as

a Literary Genre from 1542 to 1832. Lewiston, N.Y.:

Edwin Mellen Press, 1993.

Gilroy, Amanda, ed. Romantic Geographies: Discourses

of Travel, 1775–1844. New York: St. Martin’s Press,

2000.

Westrem, Scott D. Broader Horizons: A Study of Jo-

hannes Witte de Hese’s Itinerarius and Medieval

Travel Narratives. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval

Academy of America, 2001.

typology

Typology is a form of interpretation. It originated

as a branch of hermeneutics, which originally re-

ferred to principles for interpreting the Bible and

has since become the term used for the general in-

terpretation of texts. Typology established rela-

tionships between the people and events in the Old

and New Testaments and was originally aimed at

making both Testaments into one cohesive work.

St. Augustine, an early medieval theologian, ex-

plained in a letter that “In the Old Testament the

New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament

the Old Testament is revealed.”

Typology supports the idea that the events of

the New Testament fulfilled the prophecies of the

Old Testament. Often, Old Testament figures are

called types, and the New Testament characters

they prefigure are called anti-types. One example is

reading Adam as a prefigure of Christ. Another ex-

ample is the idea that the manna provided to the

children of Israel wandering in the wilderness pre-

figures the bread used in the sacrament of Com-

munion. St. Paul and the early church founders

were the first to use this sort of biblical interpreta-

tion in order to give their new religion a sense of

tradition. Typology became a literary device used

in much of the Christian literature that followed,

including John

MILTON’s Paradise lost.

See also

CLASSICISM

Works about the Unities

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art.

Translated by S. H. Butcher. New York: Dover,

1955.

Corneille, Pierre. “Of the Three Unities,” in The Con-

tinental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of

the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Scott Elledge

and Donald Schier. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1960.

Dryden, John. “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Crit-

ical Theory Since Plato. Edited by Hazard Adams.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College

Publishers, 1992.

utopia

Utopia, meaning an imaginary ideal world, comes

from the Greek words for “no place.” The term was

first used by Thomas MORE in his satirical Utopia

(1516), in which a man named Raphael Hythloday,

who had sailed with Amerigo

VESPUCCI, gives a de-

tailed description of the island of Utopia, where

there is no private property.

More was not the first to come up with a plan

for an ideal society. Plato described his ideal of the

state in his Republic, but More was the first to give

a detailed narrative about a society that was sup-

posed to exist in the present or future. Such narra-

tives have been called “Utopias” ever since.

According to Krishna Kumar in Utopianism,

“Utopia was born with modernity.” During the

RENAISSANCE, the period when the New World was

discovered, curiosity began to grow about un-

known societies. At the same time, people began to

believe that humankind could be perfected by use

of reason, and that an ideal society might be es-

tablished. Many people began to write about such

societies.

In Francis BACON’s The New Atlantis (1627), the

most important institution of the island of Ben-

salem is Salomon’s House, or the College of the

Six Days’ Works, made up of scientists who seek to

“enlarge the bounds of Human Empire, to the ef-

fecting of all things possible.” In Tommaso

CAM-

PANELLA’s, The City of the Sun (1623), the perfect

society is devoted to the life of the mind, especially

the arts and sciences. Other utopias were political.

The ideal government in James Harrington’s

Oceana (1656) has a series of checks and balances

to prevent too much power being invested in any

one body. His work may have influenced John

Adams, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution

(1787). In 1770 Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote the

first utopia to be set in the definitive future: The

Year 2440, in which government is based on sci-

ence and reason.

Early 19th-century utopianism was largely de-

voted not to literary works, but to social theory

and experiments in utopian communal living,

such as those of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

Literary utopias revived again in the late 19th and

20th centuries.

Works of Utopia

Bruce, Susan, ed. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia,

New Atlantis, the Isle of Pines. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999.

A Work about Utopia

Kumar, Krishna. Utopianism. Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1991.

utopia 293

294



Vesalius, Andreas (1514–1564) nonfiction

writer

Vesalius’s voluminous medical text, De Humanis

Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (Seven Books on the

Construction of the Human Body, 1543), challenged

long-held concepts about the anatomy of the

human body that were based largely upon the

writings of Galen, who was the recognized author-

ity on the human body until the time of Vesalius.

Born in Brussels, Vesalius was the son of An-

dreas Vesalius, the court apothecary to Holy

Roman Emperor Charles IV. Vesalius attended the

University of Louvain and later studied at Padua,

where he received a doctor of medicine degree and

taught as professor of anatomy and surgery. Fol-

lowing the publication of De Humanis Corporis

Fabrica, Vesalius was appointed court physician to

Emperor Charles V. Not long after he became

physician to Philip II, Vesalius died while on a pil-

grimage to Jerusalem and Mount Sinai.

Composed in Latin, the language of scholarly

discourse during the period, De Humanis Corporis

Fabrica is a lengthy prose work detailing human

anatomy. Vesalius modeled his writing upon classi-

cal Latin rhetoric, most notably that of Marcus Tul-

lius Cicero. Such an antiquated style was unusual

for medical texts of the period, but Vesalius wished

to model his sentences upon the great stylists of an-

tiquity; he considered his work to fit within the

context of the spirit of great texts written by

anatomists and physicians from the classical past.

De Humanis Corporis Fabrica’s seven books are

divided according to major components of the

body, each of which is discussed at length: bones,

muscles, blood vessels, nerves, abdominal organs,

chest and neck, and brain. Each section contains

many intelligent, detailed, and graphic renderings of

the human body that are keyed to textual descrip-

tions. These illustrations were executed by skilled

artisans, one of whom is believed to be artist Jan

Stephan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian. Vesalius’s

work was deemed superior to earlier works by

scholars of his day, in part because his book resulted

from firsthand experience dissecting the body.

De Humanis Corporis, while strikingly innova-

tive and highly valuable to physicians and students of

anatomy and surgery, was believed controversial and

remained under constant scrutiny. Nevertheless, the

publication marked the birth of modern medicine.

A Work about Andreas Vesalius

O’Malley, Charles Donald. Andreas Vesalius:

1514–1564. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1964.

Vespucci, Amerigo (ca. 1451–1512)

cosmographer, navigator, explorer

Amerigo Vespucci was a clerk in the commercial of-

fice of the rich and powerful rulers of Florence, the

House of Medici, when word of Colombus’s success-

ful crossing of the ocean reached Italy. Although

Vespucci had a successful career as a Florentine mer-

chant, in his student days he acquired an interest in

the natural sciences, cosmography, and navigation.

The news about Columbus’s crossing aroused his cu-

riosity of the newly found lands and inspired him to

immediately set off for Spain in search of a contract

to furnish supplies for Columbus’s next voyage.

Little reliable information exists on the number

of voyages Vespucci made to the New World. Tradi-

tional accounts place the number at four, but later

scholarship suggests that there may have been as few

as two voyages. This information is largely based on

cartographic information and three handwritten

letters by Vespucci discovered in Florentine archives

during the last half of the 18th century. In one ac-

count of doubtful authenticity, Vespucci was pur-

ported to have sailed between 1497 and 1498 on his

first voyage to Paria. This information is based on a

“Letter to Soderini,” first printed in 1505, and at-

tributed to Vespucci.

By 1499 Vespucci was reported to have inter-

ested the court in his own expedition to the lands

across the Atlantic. He sailed from southern Spain

to South America under the command of Alonzo

de Ojeda as the representative of the financial in-

terests backing the voyage. The report of this voy-

age is believed to be authentic.

In 1502 his second or third voyage landed on

the coast of Brazil. A short account of this 1501–02

voyage down the coast of South America was de-

tailed by Vespucci in a 1503 letter he sent to former

Florentine employer, Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’

Medici. The account was later popularized in a

pamphlet as Mundus novas. The manuscript expe-

rienced a large circulation in Italian before being

published in Latin in 1504. The work was widely

popular and may have been the most influential of

all the early New World travel writings.

Mundus novas and a second pamphlet, Let-

tera . . . quattri ...viaggi,circulating between

1504 and 1506, are characterized by vivid and

fantastic descriptions of the New World and its

inhabitants. The prose style of both works is very

readable. Detailed descriptions of exotic places as

well as lurid accounts of cannibalism, naked sav-

ages, and sexual practices made the pamphlets a

popular success.

A copy of Mundus novas was acquired by the

German geographer Martin

WALDSEEMÜLLER.In a

1507 treatise entitled Cosmographiae Introductio,

Waldseemüller comments: “A fourth part of the

earth has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci....

I see no reason why anyone could justly object to

naming this part Amerige, that is, the land of

Amerigo, or America, after its discoverer.” Wald-

seemüller’s comment is credited, in large part, to

the naming of the American continents.

Vespucci may have taken two subsequent voy-

ages (1501–02 and 1503–04) under the service of

Portugal. The authenticity of reports of these voy-

ages, however, remains unsubstantiated. In 1506

Vespucci was appointed first piloto mayor of Spain

by Queen Juana, a position he retained until his

death. He provided instruction for individuals

headed for the Indies, as well as elaborated and

updated the official nautical chart.

An English Version of Works by

Amerigo Vespucci

Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Il-

lustrative of His Career. Edited by Clements R.

Markham. New York: Burt Franklin, 1994.

Works about Amerigo Vespucci

Fitzpatrick, Ann. Forgotten Voyager: The Story of

Amerigo Vespucci. Minneapolis, Minn.: Lerner

Publishing Group, 1991.

Marsh, David. “Letters from a New World: Amerigo

Vespucci’s Discovery of America,” Renaissance

Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 398(3).

Ray, Kurt. Amerigo Vespucci: Italian Explorer of the

Americas. New York: Rosen Publishing, 2003.

Vespucci, Amerigo 295

Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744)

philosopher

Giambattista Vico was born into a world transi-

tioning from the RENAISSANCE to the ENLIGHTEN-

MENT. The son of a Neapolitan bookseller, Vico’s

passion for learning led him from a career in law to

a position as tutor to the nephews of his mentor,

the bishop of Ischia. Later he returned to Naples

and in 1695 married Teresa Destito. In 1699 he be-

came a professor of rhetoric at the University of

Naples. Before his death, he briefly served as royal

historiographer for Charles III.

Vico’s lifework, New Science, was first published

in 1725. In it he introduced new theories about the

nature of human knowledge and the formation of

history. Though Peter Burke calls it “a book stuffed

so full of ideas that it almost bursts at the seams,”

Vico’s “new critical art” was so little understood by

his peers that he found it necessary to print a sec-

ond and fuller edition in 1730. He continued re-

vising throughout his life.

Among many original ideas in New Science was

Vico’s pattern of the history of nations, where the

age of gods led to the age of heroes, and then to the

age of humans. He believed that mythology is the

first science. Imagination, the power by which hu-

mans understand and order the world, eventually

gives way to logic and reason. To Vico, knowledge

was “made” or invented, and fields like mathemat-

ics or history were simply human inventions. Since

the physical sciences required experimentation

with nature, they could not be fully understood.

Truth, Vico claimed, was knowable only to who-

ever created the truth.

In addition, he believed the purpose of educa-

tion was to cultivate the divine within the human

mind through self-knowledge and the pursuit of

wisdom. Vico’s disagreements with the theories of

René

DESCARTES, which he regarded as too narrow

and misinformed about the nature of scientific

knowledge, led to unpopularity in his own lifetime

and the neglect of his works after his death.

Many modern scholars think that Vico was sim-

ply ahead of his time. His ideas influenced such

later writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James

Joyce.

An English Version of a Work by

Giambattista Vico

The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 2nd ed. Trans-

lated by Thomas Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Works about Giambattista Vico

Burke, Peter. Vico. New York: Oxford University Press,

1985.

Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the ‘New Science’. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Villon, François (1431–after 1463) poet

François de Montcorbier was born in Paris and

later took his name from the guardian who raised

and educated him, Guillaume de Villon. Aside

from the existence of certain scholastic and crimi-

nal records, what is known of Villon’s biography

comes from his poetry. He received his B.A. in

1449 and his M.A. in 1452 from the University of

Paris. He had a restless mind, was often in trouble

for brawling, and was a notorious prankster. While

at university he angered officials by being part of a

squad of reckless youths who stole street signs and

performed mock marriages with them. As he ma-

tured, however, his crimes grew serious; in 1455

Villon was charged with killing a priest but was

pardoned because the death was proved accidental.

A year later he and four conspirators robbed the

College of Navarre, and to avoid capture Villon left

Paris. Records from 1461 list him as a prisoner in

Orléans, but he was freed with the other city pris-

oners, as was custom, when the newly crowned

Louis XI passed through the town. In 1462 an ar-

rest for petty theft in Paris brought him to the at-

tention of authorities from the College of Navarre

who begrudged the earlier loss and had him im-

prisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death.

Through eloquent pleading he managed to get the

sentence commuted to banishment for 10 years.

296 Vico, Giambattista