Advertising the Self in Renaissance France

Authorial Personae and Ideal Readers in Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais

Scott Francis

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644530078, 9781644530061
• eBook ISBN: 9781644530085
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France is a study of how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures of the French Renaissance: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and unpredictable readerships in the sixteenth century. To allay this anxiety, authors, as well as editors and printers, turned to self-fashioning in order to sell not only their books, but also particular ways of reading. They advertised correct modes of reading as transformative experiences that helped the actual reader attain the image of the ideal reader held up by the text and paratext, experiences provided by selfless authors. Thus, authorial personae were constructed around the self-fashioning offered to readers, creating an interdependent relationship that anticipated modern advertising.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Part I

“Ung petit tableau de mon industrie”

Jean Lemaire de Belges and Gratitude for Historiography

On peut comme l’argent trafiquer la louange. [As with money, one can traffic in praise.]

—Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets, 152

CHAPTER 1

The Judgment of the Reader in the Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye

JEAN LEMAIRE DE BELGES has long enjoyed a privileged status among the poets of his generation, as critics have tended to see an anticipation of Renaissance evangelical humanism in his engagement with classical authors and scathing denunciation of ecclesiastical abuse, often pointing to the fact that Rabelais and Marot both acknowledge his influence. Even Henri Guy, the Third Republic critic whose sweeping disdain for the Rhétoriqueurs is manifest, calls Lemaire their corypheus.¹ Where Lemaire truly stands apart from his peers, though, is with respect to how he crafts the relationship between writer and reader. How that relationship is altered by print is a question that critics have tended to approach from the perspective of the poet/patron relationship, and with good reason. In the early years of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), patrons on all sides relied on writers to justify their policies to the public, a process made easier by printing. Writers’ literary power thus became inextricably linked with the political power of their protectors, so as they used print culture to shape how others would perceive their current or potential patrons, they learned to promote their own identity and authority.² Lemaire himself was no stranger to producing works in verse and prose meant to justify his patrons’ policies: the Concorde du genre humain praises Margaret of Austria, the Duchess of Savoy and regent of the Netherlands, for her role in negotiating the League of Cambrai against Venice in December 1508; the Légende des Vénitiens praises France’s participation in the ensuing war; and the Traicté de la différence des schismes et des conciles de l’Eglise defends the Council of Pisa, convened by Louis XII in May 1511 with the aim of deposing his nemesis, Pope Julius II.

What is perhaps less obvious than Lemaire’s eagerness to participate in these propaganda campaigns is how he justified his participation by insisting on his capacity as a writer of history. Michael Sherman underscores this metadiscursive element in Lemaire by showing how the Légende des Vénitiens makes a case for the importance of historiographers in explaining and publicizing the actions of kings to the world outside the court.³ Reflection on historiography is a common trait across the different generations of Rhétoriqueurs, especially Georges Chastelain and Jean Molinet, who preceded Lemaire as indiciaire at the Burgundian court, a position that comprised the duties of chronicler, poet, advisor, and delegate. In a 1508 letter to Charles Le Clerc, Lemaire reflects upon the etymology of the title, equating it with “demonstrator” and asserting that an indiciaire’s duty is not only to record events, but also to discern their significance for the past, present, and future, which makes the position so demanding that it may only be given to someone who most convincingly proves the power of his wit [“au mieulx monstrant la force de son engin”].⁴ An indiciaire must therefore attest to his own abilities as he recounts and interprets historical events: the writing of history necessarily entails self-representation.

The conventions of print, especially of the paratext, facilitate this sort of self-representation, uniting a vast and varied body of work through the presence of the author.⁵ Lemaire was the first of the Rhétoriqueurs to take full advantage of this possibility, and an examination of his publication history reveals one of the key differences between manuscript and print culture: in manuscripts, writers make their work apparent to the reader through formal virtuosity, whereas in print, they do so through paratextual discourse.⁶ Yet, authorial self-representation is only half the story in Lemaire’s printed works. The other half is the way in which Lemaire constructs his readers and guides their reception, and scholars dealing with this aspect have tended to ground it in his relationship with patrons like Margaret of Austria or Anne of Brittany, or with other prominent readers like Claude of France or the future Charles V. While Lemaire does address these specific readers, he also envisions a broader public to which he tailors both his own image as an author and the reader’s image. In Cynthia Brown’s words, Lemaire realized that “he had to sell ‘himself’—his genius or his vision—as a way of selling his work, that he had to satisfy a public (and not simply a patron) by guiding its reading.”⁷

This interdependence between Lemaire’s and the reader’s image comes to the fore in Lemaire’s magnum opus, the Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye, a three-part historical treatise that details how European rulers descended from Noah through Hercules of Libya and the House of Troy. Most modern scholars have preferred to focus on Lemaire’s poetry or polemics rather than on a work as ponderous and plodding as the Illustrations often are, especially Book Three with its dry Merovingian genealogy, but they were by far the most influential and well known of Lemaire’s works in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the Pléiade, usually so disdainful of previous generations of French poets, saw in the Illustrations a welcome contribution to the illustration of the French language: Jacques Peletier du Mans and Joachim du Bellay praised them, while Pierre de Ronsard drew on them for the Franciade. No fewer than nineteen editions of the Illustrations were published between 1511 and 1549, though their fortunes declined sharply in the second half of the century after Lemaire’s works were put on the Index in 1549 on account of their pro-conciliar stance.

Part of the Illustrations’ success may be attributed to the felicity with which Lemaire advertises his own use of first (prose) and second (verse) rhetoric and their salubrious effects on the reader. All three books of the Illustrations are strewn with examples of orations and the effects they produce in their listeners for good or for ill, so much so that the Illustrations are an account of rhetoric and its efficacy as much as of the genealogy of Europe’s ruling houses.⁸ This is most readily apparent in Book One’s account of the Judgment of Paris. After insisting upon Paris’s freedom to forge his own path despite his youth and Venereal disposition, Lemaire shows how Venus clouds the young prince’s judgment with a display of rhetorical virtuosity. In so doing, he invites readers to identify with Paris and realize that in order to avoid repeating the prince’s mistake, they must embrace the historical truth and exemplarity that only a writer like him can provide, a service for which they should display gratitude through favorable reception and eagerness for further works by him. In a word, Lemaire uses the Judgment of Paris to advertise for the Illustrations and his work as a historiographer.

As Tom Conley has shown in his analysis of the Illustrations’ paratext, Lemaire is an effect of his own writing, and it falls to readers to decipher this creative personality who will accompany them as they read.⁹ I would add that readers are meant not only to discern Lemaire’s personality, or rather his persona, but also to realize how this persona and the writing for which it is responsible can help them fashion themselves for the better. This interaction between authorial persona and ideal readership defines the paratext of the Illustrations and the role of such accompanying works as the Épîtres de l’Amant Vert, included at the conclusion of Book One, and the Epistre du Roy a Hector de Troye, et aucunes aultres oeuvres assez dignes de veoir (or “recueil-Epistre” for short), a collection containing Lemaire’s most commented-upon work, the Concorde des deux langages. It is is crucial that the Illustrations be read alongside these works, as they were meant to be published and bound together in what is now called a composite volume, or Sammelband. In fact, between 1524 and 1549, Ambroise Girault was the only printer who did not combine these works into a single edition.¹⁰ Even more importantly, these works advertise for the Illustrations by situating them in the political and cultural landscape of France and Burgundy in the early 1510s.

Between the publication of Book One of the Illustrations in May 1511 and the publication of Book Three and the recueil-Epistre in July–August 1513, France’s fortunes in the Italian Wars went from bad to worse. The Council of Pisa, convoked with a mind to deposing Julius II, met with such opposition from the city that it had to be moved to Milan, where attendance was poor. Not to be outdone, the Warrior Pope formed the so-called Holy League with Spain, England, Venice, and the Swiss cantons against France in November 1511. The French army lost one of its most charismatic and effective generals, Louis XII’s nephew Gaston of Foix, in a pyrrhic victory at Ravenna on Easter Sunday, 1512, and was subsequently driven out of Italy. In late 1512, the Spanish took Navarre and Emperor Maximilian I committed to the Holy League, leaving James IV of Scotland as France’s lone ally. The death of Julius II on February 21, 1513 brought little relief to Louis, as the new pope, Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), had little love for the French, who had helped oust his family from power in Florence, and initially showed every sign of continuing Julius’s policies.¹¹ Meanwhile, Henry VIII’s invasion of France from the north got underway in June 1513, and the English army laid siege to the French stronghold at Thérouanne in July, eventually taking it in August, while at the same time, a force of twenty thousand Swiss pikemen laid siege to Dijon. In short, it is no exaggeration to describe the period from 1511 to 1513 as a time of unremitting crisis for France and especially for Louis, and it was against this bleak political backdrop that the Illustrations and recueil-Epistre were printed.

The publication history of the Illustrations reflects Lemaire’s own precarious political situation and his literary response to the Gallican crisis. By the time Book One was published, Lemaire had already left Margaret of Austria’s service for Anne of Brittany’s, as reflected in the gradual substitution of Louis’s and Anne’s arms for Margaret’s in editions of the Illustrations. In his new job, Lemaire found himself obliged to defend the interests of a king whose aggressive foreign policy he had previously denounced in the Chroniques annales composed for Margaret. As tempting as it may be for modern scholars to chalk Lemaire’s shift in allegiance up to opportunism or resentment toward his former patron, it should be remembered that Lemaire’s overarching vision was one of European political unity, a vision that informs the Illustrations themselves. By showing the common descent of European rulers, especially those of France and the Holy Roman Empire, referred to as “France occidentale” and “France orientale” respectively in Book Three, Lemaire calls upon the European states to unite against the Ottoman Empire and reclaim Troy from its Turkish usurpers.¹²

The need for a crusade against the Turk is an idée fixe of Lemaire’s, not to mention a commonplace of European political discourse in the Renaissance, that he hammers home time and time again, even promising to devote a fourth volume of Illustrations to proving the illegitimacy of the Ottomans’ claim to Asia Minor. It also underpins the Légende des Vénitiens, in which he accuses Venice of preferring engagement in lucrative trade with the Ottomans to lending its redoubtable navy to the fight against them. Crusade even serves as the basis for Lemaire’s criticism of Julius II in the Traicté des schismes et des conciles, which contrasts Julius with Urban II, whose exhortation at the Council of Clermont (November 18–28, 1095) achieved unity of purpose among his listeners and provided the impetus for the First Crusade: “Tout le peuple assistent commença à s’écriier tout à une voix, comme se ce eust esté ung cop de tonnoire, ‘Dieu le veult’” [All the people in attendance began to cry out “Deus vult” in unison, as if in a thunderclap].¹³ Julius, however, prefers to defraud Louis XII of his rightful claims in Italy by fomenting war between France and its neighbors. The spiritual leader of Christendom works against the interests of his own religion, while even Muslim princes like Shah Ismail I of Persia or the Mamluk sultan Qansou Ghoury make war on the Ottomans and conclude treaties with the French. It is on account of this failing that Lemaire supports Louis’s call to reform the Church at the Council of Pisa.

The Illustrations and their accompanying published works oppose Roman political machinations, but they also express concern over what Lemaire sees as the undue influence of Italian letters in France. On ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part I. “Ung petit tableau de mon industrie”: Jean Lemaire de Belges and Gratitude for Historiography
• Part II. Clément Marot, or Proteus in Print
• Part III. The Cure Is the Disease: Self-Fashioning and Charlatanism in François Rabelais’s Prologues
• Afterword: The Triumph of Advertising
• Appendix: Marot Editions and Their Contents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index