Project: Completion of a book-length exploration of the relationships between the poetry of Jean de Sponde (1557-1595) and didactic literature, which reads Sponde in the context of classical moralists, emblem literature, sixteenth-century sermons and Renaissance moralizing verse. A principal conclusion of the study is that the poet's "aesthetic of moralizing" gives a strong emblematic bias to his sonnets and is conflated with the poetic lessons taught by Ronsard and his successors to produce the characteristically strong effects of Sponde's work. The poetry is seen as outer—rather than inner—directed, generalizing rather than individual and conventional rather than surprising.