What Binds the Dead and the Living beyond Affect? Material and Symbolic Inheritance in Early Modern French Funerary Poetry

In some funerary poems, the grief-stricken tone clashes with self-serving encomia, undermining the commemorative purpose of the poems. This is the case in the lyric poems of French sixteenth-century authors Geoffroy Tory (In filiam charissimam epitaphia et dialogi, 1522), Olivier de Magny (“L'Umbre de Salel,” 1554) and Pierre de Ronsard (“Elegie à Loïs des Masures,” 1560). Funerary lyric thus destabilizes the socio-affective models of the relationships between the living and the dead by instrumentalizing the tools of the lyric address — through ironic prosopopoeia for example, or dramatized dialogues. To better understand these paradoxical dynamics, it is useful to revisit traditional commemorative practices and their role in fostering communal bonds by giving more prominence to the material concerns that bind communities of poets together.