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Andrea Marie Frisch

Andrea Marie Frisch on brown background

Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, French

3106 Jiménez Hall
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Education

Ph.D., Romance Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley

Research Expertise

Early Modern Studies
Historiography
Print Culture

Andrea Frisch received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley.  Her research on literary and historiographical works in the social, cultural, and political context of the Protestant Reformation has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study, and numerous research libraries in the US and Europe.

The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) is an examination of the links between the witness of the French law courts, the figure of the witness in theological writings, the eyewitness narrator of Francophone travel literature, and the witness-as-narrator in French literary and philosophical texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  The book’s analyses highlight the tense coexistence between traditional ethical models of witnessing inherited from medieval precedents, on the one hand, and an epistemic conception of witnessing, according to which eyewitnessing gained special prestige as a depersonalized, quasi-objective form of testimony, on the other.

Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) is a study of the rhetoric of reconciliation in the wake of France’s civil wars (1562-1598).  Taking contemporaneous juridical and theological conceptions of pardon, amnesty, and reconciliation as a point of departure, the book identifies parallels between historiographical method and tragic aesthetics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.  The tandem evolution of these discourses was centrally conditioned by the challenge of representing civil war in a way that would be perceived simultaneously as truthful and as non-polemical.

Current projects include Dispassionate Truths: The Rise of Unmemorable History, which tracks the relationship between the “memorable” and the “true” in the larger body of early modern European historiography, and The Library of the Enlightened Ethnographer, which examines the reception of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European travel literature in eighteenth-century anthropology and ethnography.

Recent and Upcoming talks

  • Invited speaker, “Das Paradox des Erschreckenden Bildes: Trauma und Gedächtnis um 1600,” Workshop Das abjekte Bild. Affektive Bildlichkeit zwischen den Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit.  Freie Universität Berlin, 22- 24 November 2023
  • “From Political Theater to History Play: The Tragedy of Mary Stuart in France, 1601-1691,” Historical Drama in Early Modern Europe. An Interdisciplinary Conference, Jesus College, University of Oxford, 8-9 September 2023

Recent and Forthcoming publications

  • Le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, ou la commémoration oublieuse,” forthcoming in Critique (Fall 2023)
  • At War with Oneself: Dalí and Montaigne,” forthcoming in Montaigne et ses Traductions.
  • Commemoration as Containment: The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Roman Practices of Commemorating Defeat,” forthcoming in Paris: A New Rome (eds. Michèle Lowrie and Barbara Vinken). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
  • “La représentation historiographique de la communauté protestante au 17e siècle: ‘L’historien astorge et véritable’ dans l’Histoire universelle d’Agrippa d’Aubigné,” Renaissance et Réforme/Renaissance and Reformation 46:1 (Winter 2023), 173-194.
  •  “Translating Jean de Léry’s Brazil: The Case of De Bry’s America III (1593),” Viatica HS 5, 2022.

More information available at umcp.academia.edu/AndreaFrisch 

Publications

Forgetting Differences. Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion

Through an examination of tragedy and of 'tragic' historiography, this book argues that the political process of forgetting internal differences after the French Wars of Religion led to fundamental shifts in conceptualizations of the past.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Author/Lead: Andrea Marie Frisch
Dates:

Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is a study of the role of conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in the rhetoric of reconciliation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French historiographical and theatrical works about France’s Wars of Religion. Taking account of the overlaps and disjunctions between juridical and theological conceptions of pardon, amnesty, and reconciliation, and opening up a broader inquiry into conceptions of memory and forgetting as they bore on representations of the Wars of Religion in historiography and theatrical tragedy from 1550–1630, the arguments in the book examine attitudes toward history in early modern Europe, provide an account of the emergence of the ideal of aesthetic distance as one of the foundations of French literary theory of the seventeenth century, and offer an analysis of the shifting conceptions of emotion that informed postwar reconciliation in early modern France.

Read More about Forgetting Differences. Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion