Jean Thenaud, traveler, poet, and cabalist. Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Writer, traveler, and courtier, a close associate of Louise of Savoy and Francis I who commissioned his works, the Franciscan Jean Thenaud (c. 1480–1542) is a pivotal figure due to the innovations he brought to French Renaissance culture. Known for his only printed book, Voyage d’Oultremer, which recounts his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, he is also the author of an important poetic and mythographic synthesis inspired by Boccaccio. He is also credited with the first French adaptations of Lucian and Erasmus. His masterpiece, the four volumes of Triumphs of Virtue, is the last great allegorical dream that extends the medieval tradition and foreshadows Rabelais’s Third and Fourth Books, with whom the author was acquainted. Finally, his treatise on “Christian Kabbalah” inaugurated the genre in French, and its talismanic motifs informed the iconographic program at Chambord. This collection of studies, written by specialists in medieval and Renaissance literature, is the first to be entirely devoted to him.

Publisher’s website: https://www.droz.org/product/9782600060042