Dr Jean Braybrook

MA, DPhil (Oxon)

Lecturer in the Renaissance; Classicism and Remy Belleau

Jean Braybrook's teaching and research interests are in 16th and 17th century literature.

Contact details

Department of European Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
E-mail: j.braybrook@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6179 

Profile     

Jean Braybrook studied French and German (joint Honours) at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she was a Theodora Evans scholar.

At Oxford University level, she was awarded a prize for the best performance in the preliminary examinations; a Zaharoff scholarship in French and a Zaharoff scholarship in German; and a starred First. She studied for a DPhil under Terence Cave.

Before coming to Birkbeck, she taught French in various colleges of the University of Oxford before becoming a lecturer in French at the University of Durham.

Jean's teaching and research interests are in 16th and 17th-century literature. She teaches on the following degree programmes (this is not an exhaustive list):
•  BA French Studies (La Renaissance, Montaigne, Le Classicisme Français, Mémoire, translation)
•  MA Renaissance Studies (Montaigne, Love and Friendship in the French Renaissance, Poetry and Prose in the French Renaissance)
•  For the MPhil and PhD she currently supervises theses on Marguerite de Navarre; the figure of the widow in 16th century French literature; and the links between 17th century gardens and literature and the performing arts.

Jean’s research mainly concerns Pléiade poetry. She has published articles on the Renaissance epic in France and Portugal, on Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Joachim Du Bellay and Remy Belleau. She has edited Belleau’s comedy, La Reconnue, and collaborated with eminent French colleagues on a six-volume edition of his Œuvres poétiques. She is also completing a book in French on the notion of healing in Belleau’s works.

She was recently invited to write an extended essay for Cambridge University Press on representations of Troy in 16th century France.

Jean has given many invited papers, which include the following: in the UK (London, Oxford, Cambridge, Sheffield); in France (Paris, including two lectures at the Sorbonne, Reims, Tours, Joinville); in Italy (Florence); in the US (Pittsburgh, Beaumont (Texas), Houston); in Canada (Vancouver).

Principal publications (excluding reviews)

Critical editions

Remy Belleau: La Reconnue, fully annotated edition, Textes Littéraires Français, 375 (Geneva, Droz, 1989). 197 pp.

Remy Belleau: Œuvres poétiques, general editor Guy Demerson, vol. 5, with Guy Demerson and Maurice-F. Verdier (Paris, Champion, 2003). 480 pp.

Remy Belleau: Œuvres poétiques, general editor Guy Demerson, vol. 6, with Guy Demerson and Maurice-F. Verdier (Paris, Champion, 2003). 271pp.
Contributions to edited collections

'Etat présent des études ronsardiennes en Grande-Bretagne', in Ronsard en son IVe centenaire: I, Ronsard hier et aujourd'hui, edited by Y. Bellenger, J. Céard and D. Ménager (Geneva, Droz, 1988), pp. 169-75

'Les Sonnets pétrarquistes de Remy Belleau', in Le Sonnet à la Renaissance, edited by Yvonne Bellenger (Paris, Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988),  pp. 167-80

'Abondance et répétition dans La Franciade de Ronsard', in Ronsard en son IVe centenaire: II, L'Art de poésie (Geneva, Droz, 1989), pp. 101-10

'Le Thème du matin chez Remy Belleau', Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises, 45 (1993), pp. 23-35

'Les Divers Jeux rustiques et la critique anglo-saxonne', in a Festschrift in memory of V.L. Saulnier, edited by W. Leiner and Y. Bellenger (Tübingen, Gunter Narr, 1995), pp. 55-62

'Joinville, les Guises, et l’œuvre de Remy Belleau', in Le Mécénat et l'influence des Guises, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris, Champion, 1997), pp. 233-49

‘Language in Louise Labé’s Debat de Folie et d’Amour’, in Women’s Writing in the French Renaissance, ed. Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge, Cambridge French Colloquia, 1999), pp. 145-57

‘Remy Belleau’s Macaronic Poem, De Bello Huguenotico, and the French Wars of Religion’, in Poets and Teachers: Latin Didactic Poetry and the Didactic Authority of the Latin Poet from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Yasmin Haskell and Philip Hardie, Kleos (Bari, Levante, 1999), pp. 183-98  

‘La Représentation de la femme chez Remy Belleau’, in Female Saints and Sinners, Saintes et mondaines (France 1450-1650), ed. Jennifer Britnell and Ann Moss (Durham, University of Durham, 2002), pp. 219-32

‘Réflexions sur Les Amours de David et de Bersabée, de Remy Belleau’, in Renaissance Reflections : Essays in Memory of C.A. Mayer, edited by Pauline M. Smith and Trevor Peach (Paris, Champion, 2002)

‘The Epic in Sixteenth-Century France’, in The Classical Heritage in France, ed. Gerald Sandy (Brill, Leiden, Boston, Köln, 2002), pp. 351-91

‘Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia and Remy Belleau’s Bergerie’, in (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays in Honour of Ann Moss, ed. Gary Ferguson and Catherine Hampton (Durham, University of Durham, 2003), pp. 177-94

Refereed articles

'Remy Belleau and the Figure of the Artist', French Studies, 37 (1983), 1-16

'Obliquity in Baïf's Mythological Poems', Romance Quarterly (Kentucky), 33 (1986), 139-56

'Le cercle and le cygne in Ronsard's Sonnets pour Helene', La Chouette, 17 (1986), 14-31

'The Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Ronsard's Franciade', French Studies, 43 (1989), 1-11

'Remy Belleau et les pierres précieuses de l'Apocalypse', Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 51 (1989), 405-06

'Remy Belleau and the Pierres precieuses', Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 193-201

'The Curative Properties of Remy Belleau's Pierres precieuses', Explorations: A Journal in the Humanities (Levy Foundation, USA), 16 (1990), 111-28

'Science and Myth in the Poetry of Remy Belleau', Renaissance Studies, 5 (1991), 277-87

'Temporal Perspective in the Epics of Ronsard and Camões', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 2 (1993), 261-74

'Space and Time in Remy Belleau's Bergerie', Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 57 (1995), 369-80

'Ronsard's Franciade', in Poetry Criticism, ed. Jane Kelly Kosek (New York-London-Bonn, Gale Research, 1995), 283-87

'Remy Belleau and the "Seconde Journee de La Bergerie"', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 4 (1996), 123-134

‘Montaigne: le corps souffrant’, La Chouette, 29 (1998), 27-34

‘Identité et création dans La Franciade de Ronsard, Revue des Amis de Ronsard, 12 (1999), 47-69

‘Le Corps et la voix du désir chez Louise Labé’, La Chouette, 30 (1999), 129-38

‘Remy Belleau’s La Reconnue and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Clizia’, Renaissance Studies, 15 (2001), 1-16

‘Les Jardins de Remy Belleau: Quelques sources’, in La Poésie de la Pléiade: Héritage, Influences, Transmission, ed. Yvonne Bellenger, Jean Céard and Marie-Claire Thomine-Bichard (Paris, Garnier, 2009), pp. 43-62