An early modern keyword in migration: The case of caprice

Abstract

This paper offers one specific case of the correspondences that exist between verbal and visual figurations. It concerns a single word - caprice - that established itself as a keyword in French and English alike. Seventeenth-century writers of French adapted to their own purposes a language and culture of capriciousness shaped by Italian and Spanish artists and scientists. The discussions surrounding caprice made of it a semantically active term and a complex and contested one, that is, a keyword. Caprice then entered English. It figures among the wave of French imports that Charles II brought back with him to England when, in 1660, he ‘restored' its Stuart monarchy after spending many of the Civil War and Commonwealth years in exile in France along with many displaced English Royalists. Caprice remained, in this period, an untranslated French term in English. It thus brought into English the semantic energy it had gained in French literary and visual culture by acting as a problematic and contested element in that culture's accounts of what a line could be and do. This investigation of caprice is set in a broader methodological context, provided by some remarks about the study of a culture and society from the perspective of language and, in particular, the keywords that occasion debate within the culture and society in question.