Less Rightly Said

Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France

Antonia Szabari

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804773546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that "corrected vices" but "spared the person"—yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas. By focusing on popular pamphlets along with more canonical works, Less Rightly Said shows that the satirists did not simply renounce the moral ideal of elite, humanist scholarship but rather transmitted and manipulated that scholarship according to their ideological needs. Szabari identifies the emergence of a political genre that provides us with a more thorough understanding of the culture of printing and reading, of the political function of invectives, and of the general role of dissensus in early modern French society.

Notes

I did not modernize the orthography of sixteenth-century titles either here or in the bibliography. I standardized and modernized the names of authors when necessary. Works whose authorship is unknown appear as anonymous, except in cases where there exists a strong consensus in the academic community about the author’s identity. I listed these titles under the probable or conjectured name in brackets.

Introduction

1

The simplest form of this verbal pleasure consists in neologisms, linguistic innovation, and verbal wit. Claude Postel’s recent historical overview of polemical works in sixteenth-century France provides a glossary of useful terms from abominable (“abominable”) to vulpin (“foxlike”). See Claude Postel, Traité des invectives au temps de la Réforme (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2004). The first reader to draw attention to verbal wit in polemical literature was Lazare Sainéan, the Romanian Romance philologist with a special interest in linguistic creativity in French (his adopted culture). Sainéan “discovered” the influence of Rabelaisian vocabulary in works by Henri Estienne, Calvin, Guillaume Postel, and in works such as the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, L’Isle des hermaphrodites, and the journals of Pierre de l’Estoile. See L’influence et la réputation de Rabelais (Paris: J. Gamber, 1930), 186–212.

2

Charles Lenient, La satire en France. La littérature militante au XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1877).

3

This expression has been chosen by students of Gérard Defaux to designate authors who, to a smaller or greater extent, risked their social status and life for their unorthodox convictions, used the printing press to put forth their convictions, and, in a sociopolitical engagement, solicited the support of rich and powerful patrons for their causes. This model holds best for those in favor of the Reformation in the early decades of the sixteenth century, who experienced the change in royal policy from support and encouragement of the Reformation to the persecution of “heresy.” These authors are Marot, Rabelais, and the victims of persecution like Étienne Dolet and Louis de Berquin. The present study does not aim at describing the personal engagement of individual authors against the “establishment.” See Samuel Junod, Florian Preisig, and Frédéric Tinguely, “Le problème de l’engagement au seuil de la modernité,” in “La littérature engagée aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Études en l’honneur de Gérard Defaux (1937–2004),” special issue, MLN 120: 1 (January 2005): S8–S14.

4

Mark U. Edwards’s monograph about the German Reformation is an exemplary study of Reformation “propaganda” and of the use of print to propagate ideas. Edwards remarks that by translating and printing the scriptures with prefaces that guide the reader, Luther enlists the Bible in the service of his particular theology. See Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

5

Among the contributions to the analysis of polemical literature, satire, and invectives that have been invaluable for this study, especially noteworthy are works by Frank Lestringant (on the images of cannibalism and theophagy in Huguenot polemics, on the Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique, on the accompanying satirical map, the Mappe-monde nouvelle papistique, and on the Satyre Menippee); Claude-Gilbert Dubois (on Pierre Viret, on Pierre de L’Estoile, and on L’Isle des hermaphrodites); Daniel Ménager (on Ronsard’s Discours and on the Satyre Menippee ); as well as the editors of critical editions: Nicole Cazauran (Discours merveilleux de la vie . . . de Catherine de Médicis), Charles-Antoine Chamay (Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale), Claude Longeon (Farce des Theologastres), and Martial Martin (Satyre Menippee).

6

On the favorable situation of Catholic polemicists in France, where two of the three institutions (the Sorbonne and the Parliament) were predominantly “orthodox” Catholic, see Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity During the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).

7

Famously, Calvin compares scripture to spectacles whose function is to correct failing eye-sight: “as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any book, however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written, are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in their minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly.” Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , trans. Henry Beveridge (1845; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 1: 64. According to this metaphor, the Bible allows the entire created world to be seen sub specie aeternitatis.

8

“This far, indeed, we all differ from each other, in that everyone appropriates to himself some peculiar error; but we are all alike in this that we substitute some monstrous fictions for the one living and true God—a disease not confined to obtuse and vulgar minds, but affecting the noblest, and those who, in other aspects, are singularly acute.” Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1: 59.

9

Calvin’s “rhetorical theology,” which originates in the Erasmian view that scripture possesses its own rhetoric by means of which it “accommodates” its message stemming from divine reason to “weaker” human reason, has been much studied. Two noteworthy accounts of Calvin’s indebtedness to humanist rhetoric are Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Étude de la rhétorique réformée (Geneva: Slatkine, 1992); and Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).

10

Literary critics often think differently. For example, Jacques Pineaux, the editor of the polemical poems launched by Huguenot pastors Antoine de la Roche-Chandieu, Bernard de Montméja, and others, against Ronsard’s Discours, admits his embarrassment about the “blindness” of these authors to “beauty.” Even the most “succulent” myths and stories “dry out” under their pens, he complains. In the same vein, he criticizes the careless accumulation of comparisons, the “lyricism of filth,” the “explosion of satire,” and the “verbal delirium” that characterize these poems. See introduction to La polémique protestante contre Ronsard, ed. Jacques Pineaux (Paris: Marce...