Literary Works

The Gordon Collection includes works by most of the major literary figures of the French Renaissance and encompasses sixteenth-century literary trends from the poetry of the Rhétoriqueurs to Montaigne's Essais. Jean and Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Louise Labé, Maurice Scève, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Bonaventure des Périers, Catherine and Madeleine des Roches, Marguerite de Navarre, Michel de Montaigne, all are represented, among others. The Gordon project will create digital facsimiles of a large number of these works, giving priority where possible to the rarest volumes, and to those not yet available in a print facsimile edition.

Literary works translated into French from another language and published in France are not included in this section. Some of those titles will be included in the categories of Books for Women and the French Language.

To view works that have been digitized, select an author from the menu to the left. Links to digitized versions of these authors’ works may appear in the ‘Index of Digitized Works’ page before they appear on a page dedicated to the author.