Professor Raphaële Garrod

Background

I was educated  in various state schools in the DOM-TOM, before reading French and English at Paris IV, Sorbonne. I then sat my agrégation in French literature and language and taught in secondary schools in France for two years. 

I  came to the UK for an M.Phil in European culture at Cambridge, and carried on with a PhD as the Knox scholar at Trinity college. I then took a junior research fellowship  at Newnham college, before heading for two years to Australia to work on Jesuits within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE). I came back to Cambridge in 2015 to join the ERC project ‘Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science’ at CRASSH.

I took the post of tutorial fellow in French at Magdalen in 2018.

In 2024, I was co-opted as a member to the Société d’Histoire Littéraire de la France and in 2025, I was elected to the European Academy. 

Research

I  work at the crossroads of French and European intellectual history and literature. My research explores the ways in which what we could call ‘scientific’ discourses of the period (natural philosophy, natural history, medicine) informed changing worldviews and conceptions of the human which translated into the often strange poetics of early modern texts.  

My first book, Cosmographical Novelties: Dialectic and Discovery in Early Modern French Prose (Brepols, 2016) highlights the ways in which the humanist retrieval of classical logic and rhetoric provided early modern thinkers with the discursive toolkit they needed in order to shape and disseminate in new vernacular genres the worldviews arising from the so-called Scientific Revolution and from the Great Voyages.

My second book François Rabelais and the Physiology of  Invention: Ingenious Animation (OUP 2025) explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais’s Gargantua and, mostly, his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais’ ‘lowly’ laughter and his ‘high’, erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art. Envisaged from a medical perspective, culture–whether high humanism or medieval farce–is the spirited outcome of our animation, our ensoulment. For Rabelais the writer-physician, our guts and brains are the labyrinthine crucibles where such animation was kindled: both, anatomical arabesques. This project was supported by a Leverhulme fellowship (2020-21).

I will spend some more time with Rabelais’s weird fictions for my next project, Rabelaisian Arts of Chance–The Uses of the Case in Sixteenth-Century France. His narratives register, and reflect on, the ways in which the Renaissance thematised both the chance event as what defies patterns and norms and our own responses to it.  In so doing, they promote a specific conception of experience, turn upside down what we take to be the didacticism of literature, and unsettled the so-called universality of poesis by foregrounding what is singular and contingent.

Teaching

I teach  undergraduates the first-year Prelims course in French. For Honours, I teach second and final years sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts (papers VII and X). I also teach translation into French and from early modern French.

I lecture across the period, on Rabelais, Pascal, Descartes, early modern travel narratives and visual cultures. I am committed to the close reading of texts and to actors category: the past may well be a foreign country, yet one way of making it familiar is to try to speak the language. I run the MsT seminar on early modern invention with Wes Williams. Whenever possible, and at every level, I try to teach with rare books in Magdalen library.

I have co-supervised with Wes Williams a D.Phil on the Toucan in early modern French culture (Alex Lawrence, 2018-2022), and, with Sophie Marnette a D.Phil on consumption from late medieval romance to Rabelais (Rob Ley, 2020-4); I am currently supervising a D.Phil on animal behaviour and the arts in seventeenth-century French thought (Sally Mullis, 2024).

I welcome applications from prospective postgraduate students working on early modern French and European (neo-Latin) texts, especially those interested in the interplay between scientific culture and literature, wanting to read travel narratives, to investigate diplomatic encounters, or to explore early modern translation.

Publications

Authored books

• Garrod, R., François Rabelais and the Physiology of  Invention: Ingenious Animation, Warburg Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). Reviewed in Intellectual History Review.
• Marr, A., R. Garrod, J. R. Marcaída and R. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus. Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019). Reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Isis, Centaurus, Calliope, CHOICE.
• Garrod, R., Cosmographical Novelties in French Renaissance Prose: Dialectic and Discovery, Early European Research 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016). Reviewed in French Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Dix-Septième Siècle, Chromohs, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Journal of the Northern Renaissance

Edited volumes

• Garrod, R., with A. Marr (eds),  Descartes and the Ingenium–The Embodied Soul in Cartesianism, Brill Series in Intellectual History 323 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). Reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly, Rivista di storia della filosofia, Sententiae.
• Garrod, R. with P. J. Smith (eds), Natural History in Early Modern France: The Poetics of an Epistemic Genre, Intersections 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Reviewed in Annales, Renaissance Quarterly, Isis, the Sixteenth Century Journal.
• Garrod, R. and Y. Haskell (eds), Changing Hearts. Performing Jesuit Emotions Across Asia, Europe and the Americas, Jesuit Studies 15 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, The Heythrop Journal, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Emotions

Recent Articles

• Garrod, R., ‘Malséance rabelaisienne. Le cul entre deux chaises en Papimanie’, special issue of Renaissance–Humanisme–Réforme on Une Renaissance dissidente?, ed. John O’Brien, forthcoming.
• Garrod R., ‘La Colère de Montaigne. Ingenium et mélancolie dans la rencontre avec Le Tasse (“Apologie de Raimond Sebond”, II.12)’, Bulletin de la Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne 74 (2022): 129-47
• Garrod R., ‘Rire jaune. L’Énigme du safran au final du Quart Livre. Du jeu philologique à la satire politique’, L’Année Rabelaisienne 6 (2022): 245-67
• Garrod, R., ‘Subtle Democritus. Natural Philosophy, Ethics and Poetics in Montaigne’s “De Democritus et Heraclitus” (I.50)’, Montaigne Studies 34 (2022): 59-72
• Garrod, R., “The Animal Outside”: Animal Ingenuity and Human Prudence in French Renaissance Political Thought.’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49 (2019): 521-540.
• Champion, M., R. Garrod, Y. Haskell and J. Feros Ruys ‘But Were They Talking about Emotions? Affectus, affectio and the History of Emotions’,  Rivista Storica Italiana, 2017: 2, 521-43

Recent Book Chapters

• Garrod, R., ‘Striving to see the unseen: Rabelais’s grotesque cosmography’ in The Making of Worlds in Classical Antiquity and Its Reception, vol II: Cosmography and the Classical Tradition, ed. Renaud Gagné and Aaron Kachuk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
• Garrod R.,‘‘Épée, aiguille, pointe. L’Énigme grotesque du couturier Groignet (Quart livre LII) in L’Écrit, le dit et le bâti dans la fratrie Du Bellay: Transmission et réception de la Renaissance européenne à nos jours, ed. Lionel Piettre and Carine Sebastien (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, forthcoming)
• Garrod R.,‘Rabelais et l’astronomie. Le Pseudo-Proclus de la collection Bodmer’ in Rabelais en Poitou: la jeunesse d’un géant, ed. Stephan Geonget, Romain Menini, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Études rabelaisiennes (Geneva: Droz, 2025), pp. 267-83.
• Garrod, R., ‘Introduction. Descartes Re-imagined. Ingenuity Before and Beyond Dualism’ in Descartes and the Ingenium–The Embodied Soul in Cartesianism, ed. Raphaële Garrod with Alexander Marr, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 323 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 1-15
• Garrod R., ‘La Politesse de l’esprit. Cartesian Pedagogy and the Ethics of Scholarly Exchange’ in Descartes and the Ingenium–The Embodied Soul in Cartesianism, ed. Raphaële Garrod with Alexander Marr, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 323 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 184-203