Dexterous destriers : the literal and figurative horse as educator in Early Modern France, 1500-1625

This thesis assesses the role of the horse and horsemanship in the education of the nobility in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France through a parallel examination of didactic texts on the topic of horsemanship and its literary representations in contemporaneous canonical texts. Where most studies to date have focused either on actual practice or literary representations, this thesis brings these spheres into dialogue to reveal the extent to which they evolved in tandem, ultimately arguing that this interaction led to horsemanship being viewed as a practice with both physical and intellectual benefits. Chapter 1 focusses on childhood education, situating horsemanship as a fundamental part of noble education through the example of Rabelais’s Gargantua and his wooden horses, where Rabelais portrays horsemanship as a means of exploring physical and linguistic creativity. Chapter 2 transitions to adolescence as it examines Ronsard’s poetry in praise of his riding master, François de Carnavalet, in which the poet draws on the myth of Pegasus and Bellerophon to establish a connection between horsemanship and the poetic arts. Chapter 3 assesses how the same mythical pairing became a literal emblem of equestrian print culture as the printer’s mark of Charles Perier, an image which fuses a literary significance with the physical practice of horsemanship. Chapter 4 examines how the emergent genre of didactic riding manuals, specifically those of Federico Grisone, Salomon de La Broue and Antoine de Pluvinel, employs a narrative approach to riding that solidifies the development of horse and rider as a partnership and encourages self-improvement through discipline. Finally, Chapter 5 reflects on a lifetime of practice through the example of Montaigne, assessing his praise of horsemanship as an aid to improving physical mobility and proposing a kinesic reading of the Essais to explore his conception of riding as an aid to cognition and literary creation.