V. Robert-Nicoud, The World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture - Other Literary Studies

French Literature Reviews - 2026

V. Robert-Nicoud, The World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture
Other Literary Studies

Review published in Acta Fabula (September 2019, vol. 20, no. 7): Natalia Wawrzyniak, "A Good Old Topsy-Turvy World"

Vincent Robert-Nicoud

The World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture

Brill | Rodopi, "Faux Titre 426" series, 2018

EAN13: 9789004381834

110 €

284 p.

OVERVIEW

In The World Upside Down in 16th Century French Literature and Visual Culture Vincent Robert-Nicoud offers an interdisciplinary account of the topos of the world upside down in early modern France. To call something ‘topsy-turvy’ in the sixteenth century is to label it as abnormal. The topos of the world upside down evokes a world in which everything is inside-out and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, and rivers flow back to their source.

The world upside down proves to be key in understanding how the social, political, and religious turmoil of sixteenth-century France was represented and conceptualised, and allows us to explore the dark side of the Renaissance by unpacking one of its most prevalent metaphors.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Sixteenth-Century World Upside Down

I Adages, Paradoxes and Emblems

Erasmus’s Adages of Inversion

Paradoxes

Moral Emblems

Carnivalesque Emblems

Emblems of the Religious Wars

II Rabelais’s World Upside Down

Carnivalesque Rituals

Grotesque Body

Wisdom and Folly

III Religious Satire and Overturned Cooking Pots

The Cooking Pot Trope

Huguenot Satires

Rabelais’s Posthumous Tradition

Catholic Responses

IV Social and Cosmic Disorders

France as a World Upside Down

Millenarianism and Apocalypse

Monsters and Polemic

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index Nominum

The motif of the world upside down has a long history in European culture, frequently drawing on classical antiquity and medieval folklore to signal a temporary or symbolic suspension of established norms. During the early modern period, this imaginative inversion became a potent vehicle for addressing profound cultural anxieties, providing writers and artists with a flexible vocabulary to interrogate existing hierarchies. Within sixteenth-century France, characterized by intense religious conflict and shifting political authorities, such tropes offered a mediated space where contemporaries could articulate the destabilization of their familiar cosmos and the breakdown of traditional order, while also allowing us to explore the dark side of the Renaissance by unpacking one of its most prevalent metaphors.

Readers interested in Renaissance studies and the intersection of visual and literary culture may find this volume relevant to their inquiries. The page notes that Vincent Robert-Nicoud offers an interdisciplinary account of the topos of the world upside down in early modern France, examining how diverse cultural materials engaged with this imagery. By surveying aspects associated with adages, emblems, Rabelais, religious satire, and social and cosmic disorders, the work highlights the pervasive nature of this metaphor in early modern representation.