This dissertation by Kathryn Anne Chenoweth is accepted in its present form by the Department of French Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date________ _________________________________ Réda Bensmaïa, Advisor Date________ _________________________________ Virginia Krause, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date________ _________________________________ Tom Conley, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date________ _________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School Writing in French et non autrement, 1529-1592 By Kathryn Anne Chenoweth A.A., Bard College at Simon’s Rock, 2000 B.A., Wesleyan University, 2002 A.M., Brown University 2005 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 - ii - © Copyright 2010 by Kathryn Anne Chenoweth - iii - CURRICULUM VITAE Kathryn Anne Chenoweth was born December 3, 1980 in Dayton, Ohio. She attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock and Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, graduating from Wesleyan with High Honors in the College of Letters Program in 2002. She received her Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown in 2010. Her teaching appointments have included a lectureship at the University of Massachussets, Boston and a position as Collegiate Assitant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. - iv - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been my privilege to write this dissertation under the co-direction of Professors Virginia Krause and Réda Bensmaïa. I thank them for all their generosity and confidence, careful reading and guidance, their prodding and trust over these past years. I could not have asked for better models of intellectual sensitivity and academic rigor to follow. Thank you for encouraging me to take decisive risks—including that of writing about the sixteenth century—but also, especially, for not hesitating to rein me in or push me when I needed it. I am grateful, too, to Professor Lewis Seifert for his terrific support and good example. Many thanks as well to Professor Tom Conley for graciously agreeing to read and comment on this dissertation. I extend my gratitude to the Department of French Studies at Brown for these excellent years of graduate education. It has been a privilege to study with Professors Sanda Golopentia, Michel-André Bossy, Pierre Saint-Amand, Gretchen Schultz, and Inge Wimmers. I am grateful to Annie Wiart and Shoggy Waryn for their pedagogical training, and for exposing me to their own dynamic and enthusiastic teaching. I also thank Professors Kenneth Haynes, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Timothy Bewes, and Esther Whitfield for their instructive seminars in Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown, as well as Professor Samuel Weber for allowing me to audit Northwestern’s Paris Program in Critical Theory. I remain grateful to my undergraduate advisors, Professor Pim Higginson and the late Professor Hope Weissman, as well as to everyone in Wesleyan’s College of Letters, which has continued to shape how I research, think, teach, and write. As solitary as the dissertation-writing process can be, I know that mine would never have come to fruition without the friends, family, and colleagues who have accompanied and supported me. So many thanks to my parents—you somehow knew I could do this when I thought I couldn’t (and made me laugh!)—and my sister, for keeping me creative and on my toes. For good friendship and good commiserating, I thank especially Teresa, Ghenwa, Ariane, Codruta, and the Cambridge mardistes; the graduate students in French Studies at Brown, past and present; the Paris seminar and BNF camarades; and Amy, la moitié de mon âme, for going first. Thanks, of course, to Kathy Kirshenbaum for getting me through it, in the end. And to Jon Roberts for the chair, dinner, and the rest. - v - CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv List of Figures vi Introduction: Writing (in) French 1 Chapter One: “Jen veulx escrire en François” 18 Geoffroy Tory’s call for French Chapter Two: The Monolingual Project 69 Vernacular grammatization and the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts Chapter Three: Another Affection 147 Vernacular advocacy and poetic authorship Chapter Four: Turning the Propre 201 The resistance of style in Du Bellay’s Regrets Chapter Five: “Un langage aucunement autre” 242 On the institution of Montaigne’s Essais Notes 294 - vi - LIST OF FIGURES 1.1. The Gallic Hercules. Geoffroy Tory, Champ Fleury (1529) 65 1.2. Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior. Andrea Alciato, Livret des emblemes (1536) 67 - vii - Introduction Writing (in) French No doubt all language refers to something other than itself or to language as something other.i (Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”) La proposition qui, comme on dit, fait autorité est, en même temps, la plus incertaine qui soit.ii (Alain de Libera, La Querelle des Universaux) This dissertation, as its title indicates, is about writing in French. More exactly, it is about the French-language discourse about French vernacular writing that took shape during the sixteenth century in France. Around the year 1500, Europe witnessed what linguist Daniel Baggioni has called a major “ecolinguistic revolution”: a broad reconfiguration of the geographies, technologies, habits, and social institutions of language.iii No doubt the most significant aspect of this “revolution” is what many historians refer to as the “rise” of the European vernacular languages. What this “rise” implies is the crystallization—and in some cases, the institutionalization—of what would eventually become the national languages of Europe (Italian, Spanish, French, English, etc.). As Benedict Anderson has famously argued, these languages are the written vernaculars that took hold with the advent of print culture, forming “unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.”iv Whether viewed as an “ecolinguistic revolution” or a proto-national “rise,” it is clear that this major shift brings with it a new form of language-of-writing in Europe, different in some fundamental way from both the Latin and vernacular writing cultures that had come before. What’s more, these new languages-of-writing mobilize—and are mobilized by— - 1 - new kinds of writers and textual communities who approach the activity of writing in a different way. The premise of the present work is that, in France, the textual discourses concerned with the question of vernacular writing played no small part in determining the shape this “revolution” would take. Which is also to say that the new French vernacular language writes itself into being and into power in a very literal sense—through the writers, communities, authorities who textually appropriate and form it. For a culture in which the Babel myth held a prominent place in the cultural imaginary—as it does, again, in ours today—we might see the sixteenth-century French language, like the mythical Tower itself, becoming a site of activity, ambition, and (self-)investment. A neo-Babel of print culture and the early modern state, French writing will offer its writers the possibility—an audacious, often precarious one—to make a name for themselves. Before the seventeenth century’s more “standardizing” and “purifying” approach to French—before the Académie française and the Port Royal grammarians, before Descartes, Racine, or Malherbe came along—there was this first, more uncertain period that undertook to set its own terms of French writing. In order to understand why and how French—and one French in particular—gained cultural authority through writing, I have looked to the texts that helped write it into being on the page. These are the texts that seek to define, name, and map their language; the texts that reconfigure and appropriate the symbolic and affective terrain of writing; those that ask—either “out loud” or more implicitly—what it might mean to write in French; those that defend their own language-of-writing as—or against—this French. The corpus of this dissertation thus stretches across the interconnected range of disciplines and discourses engaged in such questioning. In Chapter One, I look to the writing of a printer and typographer - 2 - (Geoffroy Tory); in Chapter Two, to the first vernacular grammarians (Louis Meigret, Robert Estienne, and Ramus) and to a seminal law of language (the Edict of Villers- Cotterêts); in Chapters Three and Four to poets (Clément Marot, Jacques Peletier, Pierre de Ronsard, and Joachim Du Bellay); and in Chapter Five to a singular writer- philosopher (Michel de Montaigne). Their modes of engagement are understandably diverse: some texts wish or promise, others observe and order, still others interrogate or resist. What links them all, however, is a common desire to relate their own writing to this emergent cultural form that they themselves are contributing to re- or de-construct: the French language. “The French language” in question throughout the dissertation is one whose status—specifically, its status as langue—is therefore not self-evident. “Au XVIe siècle,” observe Simone Delesalle and Francine Mazière, “‘la’ langue française n’existe pas exactement au sens où nous l’entendons aujourd’hui.”v Something about the expression “la langue française,” suggest Delasalle and Mazière, is in need of qualification when speaking of sixteenth-century French. Although we could of course gloss over