I’m very pleased to see the swift progress of a collection on Algernon Sidney’s work in context I’m contributing to due to appear with Classiques Garnier later this year. It is edited by my colleagues Tom Ashby and Christopher Hamel and based on several workshops on Sidney they had organised with Gilles Olivo at the universities of Rouen and Caen in France in 2022.
The collection is not only the first on the writings and reception of Sidney’s work I’m aware of, it is also truly international in perspective with contributions by scholars from different continents. The publication itself is bilingual – French and English, which is very fitting as the republican Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) spent more than two decades in continental exile after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Sidney spent most of this time in France, first in Montpellier in the south and later in Nérac in the southwest, halfway between Bordeaux and Toulouse, with shorter spells in Paris.
Le Républicanisme d’Algernon Sidney covers various aspects of his thought from his refutation of Robert Filmer’s patriarchalism in his Discourses (1698) and his ideas on virtue, law and democracy, to his ideas on erotic love. The book also includes chapters engaging with Sidney’s rather haphazard use of classical citations as well as with the significance of genre and materiality in his work. Several chapters, including my own, also deal with the later reception of Sidney’s work in England, France and Germany.
I have a copy of the Table of Contents here (courtesy of Tom), but I haven’t heard all the papers as I attended only one of the workshops, nor have I seen the chapters which were contracted later. So I’m very much looking forward to the volume’s publication.
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