'Liquid Empire': France Writes the River, 1530-1700

Katherine Ibbett works on French literature, religious and environmental history and culture. Her first book was on tragedy and political theory. Her next book, Compassion’s Edge, tackled the affective undertow of religious toleration, exploring the language of fellow-feeling – pity, compassion, charitable care – that flourished in the century or so after the Wars of Religion. She is finishing a very different third book on river writing in seventeenth-century France and its territories, taking in rivers from the Lignon to the Rhine, the Saint Laurent to the Senegal. It asks how the small scale of the riverbank paradoxically allows us to trace France’s expansionist politics, and argue that following the river allows us to build a different literary history of early modern France, a history that considers imperial projects and the loss that such projects entail.