As this is the final issue that I will be overseeing as Editor of the Journal, it is particularly gratifying to see the increasing geographical range of contributors, with articles here by scholars from Austria, Britain, China, Denmark, and the United States. If we add those contributions from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Poland, and Switzerland over the last three years, one of our main aims – to expand the global reach of this Journal and of early modern French studies more generally – is beginning to be fulfilled. Our next hope is to encourage more researchers from Africa and Asia to submit articles for consideration.
Another ambition for recent and future work in this Journal has been, not only to continue to engage in a scholarly and committed way with texts, histories, and cultures from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but also to show and to embrace the relevance, immediacy, and importance of the early modern to understand better many of the issues that confront and challenge us today. It is therefore particularly appropriate to open this issue with the reworked text of Louisa Mackenzie’s inspiring keynote address from the 2022 annual conference of the Society for Early Modern French Studies, held at St Andrew’s University in Scotland, where current issues such as the climate crisis and the challenges faced by the humanities today are deftly woven into exciting readings of ecological senses of place in early modern French poetry.
No less stimulating are the remaining articles in this issue, with a wonderful new interpretation of Rabelais’s Quart livre, two contrasting but equally fascinating reappraisals of La Rochefoucauld, a fresh rereading of a key fairy tale by Perrault, a striking consideration of cosmopolitanism in a work by Joseph Honoré Rémy, and concluding with the fruits of extraordinary archival research into eighteenth-century sodomitical subcultures in Paris.
It is a privilege to have served as Editor, and I am delighted and honoured to pass on the editorial baton to Michael Moriarty, whose knowledge, experience, and expertise will be hugely appreciated by all future contributors to this fine Journal.