Andrea Marie Frisch

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 Dissemination 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, “La Perception de la vicissitude au 16e siècle,” colloquium presented by the research group Archéo-Pol : la Bibliothèque des Monarchomaques, University of Geneva, 4-5 April, 2025
• “The Vicissitudes of Vicissitude: Louis Le Roy’s Philosophies of History,” Annual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, MA, 20-22 March, 2025
• “Oubliance and Transcendance: Jean Ricaut’s Discours du massacre de ceux de la religion réformée, fait à Lyon,” Fifth Biennial Conference of Seiziémistes of the Mid-Atlantic, Old Dominion University, 20-21 September 2024

Recent and Forthcoming publications

• “The Tragedy of Mary Stuart in France, 1601-1631: Tragedy and/as Historiography” in Historical Drama in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sofie Kluge. Brill, 2026.
• “De la généalogie à l’histoire comparée : Les martyrs de Lyon et la Saint Barthélemy,” Dix-septième  siècle, issue eds. Paul-Alexis Mellet and Delphine Reguig, 2025.
• “A Massacre at Lyon: The Abject Body, the Arts of Memory, and the French Wars of Religion,” in Das abjekte Bild. Affektive Bildlichkeit zwischen den Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Anita Traninger and Sergius Kodera. Munich: Fink Verlag, 2025.
• “A Strange Kind of New Light: Dalí and Montaigne,” Montaigne et ses Traductions, Classiques Garnier, 2024.
• “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).
• “Le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, ou la commémoration oublieuse,” Critique 919:11, December 2023.
•  “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