Edwin Duval is the Henri Peyre Professor Emeritus of French. His research is devoted to the long French Renaissance (late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries), focusing primarily on two distinctive ways Renaissance literature generates meaning and guides interpretation: intertextually, through networks of classical and biblical echoes and allusions, and contextually, by means of intrinsic literary form. His publications include three books on the formal and ideological “design” of Rabelais’s books of Pantagruel, a book on the evolving relationship between musical forms and poetic genres in French lyric from the late Middle Ages to the mid-seventeenth century, and articles on sixteenth-century authors ranging from Marot and Marguerite de Navarre to Montaigne and Agrippa d’Aubigné. He is currently researching a book on intertextual echoes of the Aeneid in French Renaissance poetry, prose, and theater, tentatively titled Renaissance de l’Énéide : Résonances virgiliennes dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle.
Duval’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and was recently recognized by the Académie Française.
Until his retirement in 2020, Duval taught graduate and undergraduate courses on various aspects and genres of Renaissance literature and on lyric poetry from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. He was also a pillar of the literature course of Yale’s Program in Directed Studies.