Welcome to our research project on gossip and nonsense in Renaissance France.

As Montaigne remarked:

Le monde n’est que babil (The world is nothing but babble)

We are studying such babil (or Bable, tatle, pratle, chat; babling, jangling, chattering, over-much talking, as Randle Cotgrave puts it in his 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues) and nonsense literature as twin aspects of a culture of excessive language in Renaissance France.

We are also working on artistic interpretations of this disreputable Renaissance language.

This is the place to find out more about what we are doing on the project.