This book, written by eighteen specialists, deals with the reception of Greek and Latin culture in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is intended for those interested in classical influences on French belles-lettres and visual arts.
Readers will benefit from the comprehensive surveys provided by specialists on topics as diverse as the role of French travellers to classical lands in transforming perceptible reality into narrative textuality, Jacques Amyot's contribution to the reinvention of the novel in the West and the influence of ancient law in France.
Major literary genres and themes, philosophy, major writers, early French humanists and Hellenists and the visual arts all receive detailed, up-to-date treatment.

Contributors include: Olga Augustinos, Alain Billault, Jean Braybrook, Paola Cifarelli, Michèle Ducos, Sue Farquhar, Philip Ford, A. Trevor Hodge, George Huppert, Gillian Jondorf, John Parkin, Laurence Plazenet, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Ofelia Salgado, Gerald Sandy, Alison Saunders, Douglas Thomson, and Valerie Worth-Stylianou.