Abstract: More than a simple polemical essay, La Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse proposes a system of aesthetic and rhetorical categories, the result of reading Quintilian and Cicero. The original text, illuminated by scholarly annotations, is followed by an analysis of the development of this poetics.
Keyword: Sperone Speroni, Clément Marot, Great rhetoricians, Maurice Scève, Pierre de Ronsard, Latin poetry, imitation, the Pléiade, Humanism, sixteenth-century literature
