Sheepships: Robin Mouton Goes to Sea (Rabelais, Choisy, Voltaire).

The article reports that the political history of the expansion of European power involves, crucially, not only the story of the sheepfold, but also of the sheepship. It notes that the pastoral mode from its origins always told a story of a kind of mobility. It adds that pastoral's dual perspective has always lent a real socio-political edge to its literary.