David Cowling is Professor of French at Durham University and specialises in French literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He is the author of Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (OUP, 1998) and the editor of George Chastelain et al., Les Douze Dames de Rhétorique (Droz, 2002). Between 1993 and 2001 he was a colleague of Keith Cameron in the Department of French at the University of Exeter.

• David COWLING: IntroductionNotes on contributors1. Problems of definition: ideological, chronological, linguisticJean BALSAMO: ‘Voici venir d’Europe tout l’honneur’: identité aristocratique et conscience européenne au XVIe siècleIan MORRISON: Rabelais: Christendom and EuropeMargaret M. MCGOWAN: Interpreting the past: the Commentaries of Blaise de Vigenèreand ‘l’enrichissement de nostre parler’David TROTTER: ‘Si le français n’y peut aller’: Villers-Cotterêts and mixed-language documents from the Pyrenees2. Cultural exchange and political collaboration between France and England at the time of the Wars of ReligionYvonne BELLENGER: Sur La Lepanthe de Du BartasMarie-Madeleine FRAGONARD: Aubigné et l’Angleterre, après Elizabeth: esquisse de rencontres problématiquesYvonne ROBERTS: Towards a pragmatic recognition of religious diversity: the struggle to form a royalist consensus in the early poems of Jean-Antoine de Baïf3. Alterity and the construction of a European identity Michael HEATH: Foolish or fearsome Franks? The supposed Ottoman view of European Christians in the sixteenth centuryFrançoise CHARPENTIER: Le périple des Pantagruéliens, ou l’ancien et le nouveauFrank LESTRINGANT: Le Livre des Contrariétés: l’Occident, le Turc et les autres