Nicholas Hammond is Reader in French at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610-1715) (2011) and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of French Literature (2011). His edition of Saint-Pavin's Poésies is forthcoming.
Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His most recent book is Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (2011). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Contents: Nicholas Hammond/Michael Moriarty: Introduction - John D. Lyons: Bossuet and the Tragic - Anne Régent-Susini: Religious Discourse and Legal Discourse in Seventeenth-Century France: The Example of Bossuet - Emma Gilby: Having the Last Word: Authority in Bossuet's Funeral Orations - Henry Phillips: Secular and Religious Cultures in Seventeenth-Century France - Richard Parish: Chantons l'Auteur de la lumière,/ Jusqu'au jour où son ordre a marqué notre fin. Corneille and Racine: The Hymnes traduites du bréviaire romain - David Wetsel: Self-Annihilation, Self-Hatred and Original Sin in Pascal's Pensées - Michael Moriarty: Pascal: The Wager and Problems of Order - Olivier Tonneau: The Science of the Cross: The Jansenist Doctrine of Predestination and Their Pedagogy of Conversion - Edward James: Pierre Bayle on Reason, 'Sentiment' and God - Richard Maber: No Miracles Please, We're English - Nicholas Hammond: The Child's Voice: Knowledge and Inexperience in Seventeenth-Century France - Michael Hawcroft: Racine's Rhetorical Questions - Noël Peacock: The Gods from the Machine: Reconfiguring Retribution in Molière's Dom Juan - John O'Brien: Stilts; Or, a Not So Tall Story - Philip Ford: Of Lions, Bears and Pigs: Political Allegories of Homer in Renaissance France - Pierre Zoberman: Topoi of (the) Renaissance in Seventeenth-Century France: The Ambiguity of the Reference to the Past - Emmanuel Bury : Guez de Balzac critique de l'éloquence sacrée, entre philologie et rhétorique - John Leigh: Voltaire's Little Oraisons funèbres? Catalogue and Canon in the Siècle de Louis XIV - Jenny Mander: Politeness to Strangers: The Mark or Mask of Civility? - Nicholas White: Fidelity and Invention: Jules Lemaître and Action française Revisit La Princesse de Clèves - Neil Kenny: 'Je ne me réputerai totalement mourir': Tense, Death, Survival in Rabelais's Pantagruel.

This collection of essays by leading scholars from France, Great Britain and North America is published in honour of Peter Bayley, former Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and a leading scholar of early modern France. The volume reflects his scholarly interest in the interface between religion, rhetoric and literature in the period 1500-1800. The first three sections of the book are concerned with the early modern period. The contributors consider subjects including the eloquence of oration from the pulpit, the relationship between religion, culture and belief, and the role of theatre and ceremony during the seventeenth century. They engage with individuals such as the theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the dramatists Molière, Racine and Corneille, and the philosophers Bayle and Pascal. The volume concludes with a section that is concerned with critical influences and contexts from the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout, the authors offer stimulating new perspectives on an age that never ceases to intrigue and fascinate.