Less Rightly Said

Less Rightly Said scandals and readers in sixteenth-century france

Antónia Szabari

stanford university press stanford, california Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Th is book has been published with the assistance of the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at the University of Southern California. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Szabari, Antónia. Less rightly said : scandals and readers in sixteenth-century France / Antónia Szabari. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6292-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. French literature—16th century—History and criticism. 2. Political satire, French—History and criticism. 3. Religious satire, French—History and criticism. 4. Books and reading—France—History—16th century. 5. Scandals in literature. 6. Invective in literature. I. Title. pq239.s95 2010 840.9′35844028—dc22 2009010154 Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 11/14 Adobe Garamond Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction  . Th e Heretic and the Book 23 . Clean and Dirty Words 44 . Scandalous Evidence 65 . Th e Kitchen and the Digest 96 . Priests, Poets, and Print 126 . Fabricated Worlds and the Menippean Satire 158 . Public Scandals, Withdrawn Readers 185 Conclusion 

Notes 221 Bibliography 267 Index 275

Figures

. Saturn as the revealer of Truth 3 . Badius’s printer’s mark from the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale 4 . Response aux quatres execrables articles contre la saincte Messe 5 . A crier and his wares in Paris 16 . Statua haereticorum 24 . Th e armorial bearings of the heretic 31 . A woman from the city reading a heretical book 38 . L’arbre des hereticques 41 . Complainte de la Paix 47 . Confession de Beda 70 . Christ teaching poverty 72 . Th e worldly power of the Pope 73 . “Christ desires that our treasure be in heaven; the other one asks for gold alone on earth” 74 . Ambrosius Holbein’s Calumny 85 . A detail from Ambrosius Holbein’s Calumny 86 . Lunar eclipse 108 . Th e moon “facing” the sun 109 . Th e drunkard’s barrel belly 117 . Bucolic scene on the title page of Plaisans et armonieux cantiques 138 . Discours des Miseres de ce Temps. Printed by Gabriel Buon (1562). 146 . Title page of a pirated edition of Ronsard’s Discours des Miseres de ce Temps printed in Troyes. 148 . Reformers destroy “idols,” while “papists” build the Rotunda from stumbling blocks 164 . Th e Province of Pilgrimage 165 . Th e court of the King of Free Will 165 . Th éodore Bèze fi ghting with a book 168 . Reformers defy embattled devils with books 168 . Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel 169 . A “papist” market of books 170 viii figures

. Charon steers his ferry toward the shores of hell 173 . Tableau de la Ligue 197 . “Bibliothèque de Madame de Montpensier” 199 . Correction in Pierre de l’Estoile’s manuscript Registre-Journal 202 . Th e effi gies of Henri and Louis de Guise, from Les belles Figures et Drolleries de la Ligue 205 . Madame de Montpensier, from Satyre Menippee (1709) 217 . Madame de Montpensier, from Memoires pour servir a l’histoire de France (1719) 218 Acknowledgments

Th is book owes its existence to the contributions of many. Well before the seeds of this project were sown, a graduate seminar on Montaigne of- fered by the late Gérard Defaux at the Johns Hopkins University in 2000 transformed me (at least in my hopes) into a student of sixteenth-century French literature and culture. To all those colleagues who off ered me their thoughts and comments in Baltimore, Cambridge, Paris, and Los Ange- les during the past three years, I would like to extend my warmest grati- tude: Tom Conley read the entire manuscript and has often contributed to the ideas presented in it; Jean-Claude Carron, David Laguardia, Frank Lestringant, and Kathleen P. Long have given me invaluable feedback on one or many aspects of this work. Exchanging ideas about theology and the “scandal” with Hent de Vries and Burcht Pranger has inspired me in many places in this book. Mihály Balázs, Iván Horváth, and Levente Seláf sug- gested parallels in an East-Central European context and have reminded me that the implications of this book do not stop at the borders of early modern France. I thank Stephen Nichols for his invitation that allowed me to present an early version of Chapter 2 at a conference at Stanford University in 2007, and I thank the audience for their useful comments. In addition, I am keenly aware of the support of my colleagues at the Univer- sity of Southern California. I thank in particular Peggy Kamuf, Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Rebecca Lemon, Peter Mancall, Claudia Moatti, Na- tania Meeker, Panivog Norindr, Karen Pinkus, Tita Rosenthal, and Bruce Smith for their collegial and professional generosity. Th e fi nal draft of this project was completed while in residence at the Radcliff e Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Th e Rad- cliff e Institute provided conditions for research and writing during the year of 2006–2007 that were nothing less than ideal, but the heart of the pro- gram was the people. Let me mention only a few names, for whose friend- x acknowledgments ship and conversations I am very thankful: Elizabeth Bradley, Giovanni Capoccia, Bridgit Doherty, Major Jackson, Ranjana Khanna, William McFeely, Nancy Shepherd-Hughes, Anna Schuleit, and Marie-France Vigneras. A grant from the Zumberge Research Fund at the University of South- ern California allowed me to carry out archival work in Paris. I also thank the College of Arts and Sciences at USC for its generous support of the publication of this book. I dedicate it to my mother, Éva Szabó, and father, István Szabari, for their truly boundless love, embracing the distance of continents. Introduction

Verbal violence is off ensive, but it can also, when it appears in printed books, appeal to readers. Th e religious, rhetorical, aff ective, and political possibilities of reception, appeal, and off ense are each negotiated diff er- ently in the satires disseminated in sixteenth-century France that I exam- ine in this study. I look at this literature of uncommon humor and violence side by side with humanist works by Erasmus, François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, the authors of the Satyre Menippee, and Pierre de l’Estoile, who provide refl exive accounts of the eff ect of off ensive words on the public and who also intervene in their own manner—to mitigate the eff ects of verbal violence or precisely to exploit them. My central concern in this book is to analyze how critical engagement or polemics is made to appeal to readers on a broader scale and thereby also to organize, imagine, and project communities of readers. I analyze the ways in which books appeal to a wider audience along three axes: (1) a generic one concerning the literary techniques used in the corpus of po- lemical texts and their relation to those humanistic or otherwise elite works that form part of our literary canon, (2) a rhetorical one about the diff er- 2 introduction ent ways in which authors of texts negotiate the paradox of the polemical genre, namely, that it is able to appeal to and even please some readers while off ending others, and (3) one relating to medium, design, and the dissemination of printed materials that leads to investigations about the modalities available to readers (and nonreaders) to access books and inhabit those communities of readers projected in them. Vituperation—along with the off ensive or satirical views that it spawns—appears in this book as a lit- erary, rhetorical, and imaginary exercise allowing readers to inhabit diff er- ent worlds that at times disturb or exceed the actual religious and political order of early modern France. a literature of vituperation?

To defi ne the corpus that is examined here, the modern reader has at her disposal a handful of generic categories, with which authors and observers, critics and readers, and editors and scholars have previously labeled these materials. Th e most common one among these categories is “satire,” but in- stead of rushing to Renaissance debates, inherited from Roman commen- taries on the moral function of satire, we need to bear in mind the preva- lence and popularity of what we can call “low” satire, a form that inspired Cotgrave to defi ne “satire” as an “invective” and “a vice-rebuking poem” in his early-seventeenth-century French-English dictionary. Th is defi nition takes us right to the heart of the matter. Th e words “satyr” and “satire” were believed to be etymologically linked until the philologist Casaubon disentangled them in the early seventeenth century, and the unruly fi gure of the “satyr” enjoyed a symbolic prominence in print culture, especially in books associated with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as the enunciator of the truths that books, authors, and printers were promot- ing. Frequently, winged Saturn, who was the emblem of “truth revealed” (Figure 1), is transformed into a satyr, as in the mark of the Genevan printer Conrad Badius from the title page of a Calvinist satire (Figure 2). Th e same fi gure appears also in the mark of a printer specializing in Catholic books (Figure 3). Satire in this sense is not tied to any particular literary form but is instead associated with a mode of speaking: satire voices, harshly and directly, the truth that is recognized by an individual and (almost al- ways) by a group. Th e coarse and lewd fi gure of the satyr embodies the Figure 1. Saturn as the revealer of Truth. Emblem LIII, Hadriani Ivnii medici Emblemata (Antwerp, 1565). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 520.65.469. 4 introduction

Figure 2. Conrad Badius’s mark, Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale (Geneva, 1560). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.V8174.560s.

rhetorical force of the assertions (that the printing press only amplifi es) and also the unrestraint and even pleasure that are permitted in asserting those truths.¹ Charles Lenient, a nineteenth-century bibliophile who wrote the only comprehensive study on the subject, implemented the term “militant lit- erature.”² His book—predictably from a scholar who sees the signifi cance of his work as on par with that of the archaeologist and the geologist who “dig up” fossils and broken ceramics from past centuries buried deep in the ground—is no more than a mix of textual scraps and anecdotes. Th e tex- tual fragments that he cites are supposed to convey to the modern reader the hostility and violence implied in mockery and derision, in which Le- introduction 5 nient sees the common trait of an otherwise undiff erentiated mass of words and images. He describes satires as “scrap metal” (mitraille) that the print- ing press, like a cannon, spews forth. Lenient’s powerful and graphic meta- phor not only implies the violence inherent in words but also a devaluation of the material. Carelessly manipulating texts and forms, putting them in the service of specifi c goals, this corpus seems paraliterary, rather than lit- erary—mere propelled waste from the viewpoint of the nineteenth-century literary scholar. Nonetheless, the intimate relation of vituperation in print to a wide range of literary forms is a noteworthy feature of the material in question. More recent scholarship has turned to a specifi c body of texts within the

Figure 3. Title page, René des Freuz, Response aux quatres execrables articles contre la saincte Messe . . . (1566). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français. 6 introduction polemical corpus, which it defi nes through the term “engaged literature.”³ But can Sartre’s distinction between a bourgeois literature and another type of literature that willfully resists the bourgeois literary institution be at all meaningful in the context of the sixteenth century? If anything, polemi- cal works that avail themselves of satirical and literary techniques bear the traces, in a historical sense, of a rising bourgeoisie and of the growing pres- tige of printed books, booklets (libelles), one-sided printed sheets (placards), and various other occasional publications, and of a culture of literacy, of reading and handling printed materials, outside those groups from which readers were traditionally drawn, to wit, the church, the university, the ar- istocracy, courtly culture, and the ever-expanding networks of humanists. Nor is the force of vituperation entirely formless and arbitrary like the one- directional violence of projectiles, but it takes on defi nite modalities, and this is what allows it to enter into an exchange with audiences, buyers, and collectors. If we are searching for a generic unity for this corpus, abundant and protean, it is not its form but its function that can guide us. Rather than sheer violence, we see the rise of a political genre that is shaped by dominant trends in French society as it also shapes that society, and not simply in negative ways. Th is literature of vituperation does, however, challenge our notions of early modern literary culture. Our sense of sixteenth-century literature is the product of canon formation, and it has been defi ned by what has been read by readers and taught in schools over the centuries. Certainly, our canon has to do with certain properties of these texts themselves—by stel- lar authors like Clément Marot, Rabelais, the Pléiade poets, and Michel de Montaigne—principally with their indebtedness either to a late-medieval literary culture or to a humanistic culture. Both these cultures represent adaptations, albeit diff erent ones, of the classical tradition and form elitist, dynamic practices based on emulative exercises of imitation and contrib- ute to canon formation. Many of the texts considered in this study do not engage in these practices, and they have not been part of a canon (either sixteenth-century or modern); nonetheless, a historical look at the literary culture and institutions of the sixteenth century reveals that our sense of what is literary is largely anachronistic with respect to the period, in which, for example, authors like Calvin and Rabelais vied for the patronage of the same aristocrats and in part probably also for the same readers. It is true that these two authors made vastly diff erent uses of their respective humanist cultures. However, the poet and Genevan theologian Th éodore introduction 7 de Bèze (to whom we attribute the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale) cannot be diametrically opposed to authors such as Marot, Erasmus, and Rabelais, whom he imitates in his own fashion. If polemical works can challenge our view of sixteenth-century French literature and, indeed, of early modern culture, it is because they maintained very strong ties to this culture. While historians of the French Reformation designate the literature of invectives as propagandistic, albeit witty, tools for the dissemination of certain ideas or ideologies,⁴ my analysis focuses in- stead on the literary and humanistic techniques (verbal, literary, and print) that polemicists use and manipulate to awaken and arouse, and sometimes to enervate, a changing audience. Catholic and Protestant polemicists rely, in part, on the same techniques as elite courtly poets and humanist schol- ars do in their rivalry for prominence. But the polemical genres inherited from scholastic and humanistic traditions are modifi ed, manipulated, and served up to a (relatively) broad audience. Polemical works reference each other, creating a network of citations, and vie with each other for authority and reputation. Th ey partake in the culture of praise and blame that social and cultural historians, in the footsteps of Jacob Burckhardt, have ascribed to Renaissance culture, which instrumentalizes literary (rhetorical) educa- tion with a view to social self-promotion and advancement. Th ey also often remember the Renaissance commonplace about the superiority of the au- thor over his purported “slanderer.” However, if, in their works, humanist culture (along with an older poetic culture of “second rhetoric”) is widely exploited, it is also seriously put under pressure from the expectation that these texts will circulate at large, that they will reach a broader audience. After all, through their stylistically skillful satirical representations of the adversary, polemical works not only want to gain patronage, but also to convert readers, to bring them around to their camp (religious or political), and recruit them for the book. In this eff ort, they strive to establish com- munities of readers. Th e relation of polemical literature to literary culture has formed the ob- ject of scholarly investigations on many accounts; scholars also often note the poverty or careless composition that characterizes polemical works.⁵ Admittedly, these texts bespeak a cruder construction than those in our canon, but they forcefully engage with literary forms, both poetic and prose, both late medieval and Renaissance, with favored humanistic forms such as dialogue, and with common rhetorical practices, especially imita- tion (imitatio), variety (varietas), and abundance (copia). Th is corpus reveals 8 introduction that the boundaries between imitation (a humanist practice that required respect and painstaking transformation and distinguished the poet who stood in rivalry with an illustrious author, usually from the past) and cita- tion, parody, and plagiarism (the appropriation of another’s writing or its manipulation) can be soft. Ronsard’s Genevan adversaries, who retort to the Pléiade poet’s anti-Protestant Discours with full-scale parodies, also ac- cuse him of “imitating” Artus Desiré, the popular polemicist and bad poet, and in this accusation they not only ridicule Ronsard but also reinterpret the practice of “imitation.” Even though I forgo a separation between Catholic and Protestant po- lemical works on ideological grounds, we can distinguish between them rhetorically. Catholic polemicists availed themselves of traditional theologi- cal notions and images that had been handed down from the church fathers to create a discourse attacking heresy. In France, they quickly learned to justify writing and publishing books in the vernacular (although tradition- ally, theological works were published in Latin and the Sorbonne banned translations of the Bible into French in 1525 to avoid “scandal”), and enjoyed the permission of the Sorbonne to do so.⁶ Th ey also learned, notably in the case of the Parisian priest Artus Desiré and the anonymous authors of countless anti-Lutheran and anti-Huguenot poems, to make use of literary culture, albeit in a hasty way. What distinguishes radical reformed (Zwing- lian and Calvinist) polemical literature from Catholic polemics stems from the former group’s theological contempt for everything “fabricated,” that is, man-made. In their theological universe, scripture is the sole text with authority. Signifi cantly, Calvin denies that natural revelation could give access to divine reason, and this rigorous exclusion disqualifi es all forms of knowledge that do not stem from one’s looking through the “spectacles” of scripture.⁷ Calvin is especially unforgiving about what he calls “poetry” or “fi ction”—terms with which he disqualifi es not only the corpus of classi- cal and modern poetry but also human knowledge in general.⁸ However, although all these discourses are disqualifi ed on the epistemological plane, they return in Genevan polemical print as rhetorical means for advocating biblical “science” or doctrine. Th e eff ect of the literary phenomenon that results from this theological position goes beyond (without going against) Calvin’s “rhetorical theology.”⁹ Contempt for “poetry” gives Genevan po- lemicists like Pierre Viret, Th éodore de Bèze, Conrad Badius, and the au- thor of the Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique considerable latitude in adopting, creating, and manipulating texts to engage in literary adventures introduction 9 in search of an audience. In some cases, it makes them strangely more, not less, “literary.”¹⁰ Th is phenomenon did not necessarily grant greater success to Calvinist polemicists in propagating their ideas, especially in France. Only a small portion of the French population (even in the cities most in favor of the Reformation, only one-third or one-half )¹¹ converted during the Reforma- tion (the situation in this respect is very diff erent from that of Germany). Luc Racaut’s observation that Catholic polemicists were ultimately more successful in winning over the population because they adopted a rheto- ric of “exclusion” and “hatred” is right on target. However, propagandistic success does not equal cultural prominence. Th e techniques of organization and citation honed by Calvinist authors—including their use of a broad culture of reading—distinguish their eff orts to appeal to readers and create imaginary worlds, negative ontologies, and negative poetics for a circle of readers who both share a religious identity and remain fi ctional—insofar as the reading public of these books never fully coincides with people who profess the theology they promote. One can argue that “Menippean sat- ire,”¹² a literary genre that arose at the end of the century in the hands of a group of political moderates, owes much to these endeavors, and so do the journals and albums of the lawyer Pierre de l’Estoile, which resort to similar techniques of organization and citation, although his goals diff er considerably and his journals aim at mitigating the violence of vitupera- tion. Literary techniques and innovations thus ultimately do not bear ideo- logical labels in the literature of vituperation. early modern scandals

Th is abundant and protean literature of vituperation can be read (and even enjoyed) today with the help of a category, that of the “scandal.” Th e word “scandal” has a specifi c meaning in the sixteenth century, which is not carried by its modern, secular usage. Its rhetorical force originates in bibli- cal passages (in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) concern- ing the “stumbling block” that are subject to interpretation and become invested with specifi c theological and legal signifi cance in the course of the centuries.¹³ First and foremost, “scandal” is a theological term, and if it nonetheless suits my analysis of the rhetoric of polemics better than any single rhetorical term, it is because it best sums up, beyond the reli- 10 introduction gious signifi cance deployed in the polemics, its social and political eff ect of mobilizing and dividing. Th is eff ect is not so much avoided (as moralists and censors recommend) as it is welcomed and subtly manipulated by the authors and books that concern us. From the confounding mass of words that have been spent on this term “scandal” (the biblical “stumbling block” and the “off ense” of moral theology and canon law) from the church fa- thers through medieval theologians to Reformers and Counter-Reformers, we can single out Th omas Aquinas’s succinct and elegant formulation: “something less rightly said or done that occasions [one’s own or another’s] downfall.”¹⁴ Although satires fi rst poke fun at the adversary’s theologi- cal “errors,” their readers fi nd themselves in an “us-versus-them” situation where the stakes are political, not simply theological. Aquinas’s “scandal” postulates that what is said or done has consequences in the context of a society whose prevalent logic is Christian (that is, it can cause spiritual “harm” to others), while in the context of the Reformation and of the civil war in France, what is said (and disseminated via sermons or print) can have consequences in the political arena. Th e implication of the “scandal” in the rhetorical and political domain of polemical satires is that readers get “taken in”—in other words, have a strong favorable or unfavorable response to them. Th e fi rst remarkable text to arouse a massive response from diff erent audiences was Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium or Stultitiae laus), fi rst published anony- mously in Paris, in 1511. Th e Encomium is a sharp satirical and theological treatise whose enunciator hides behind the playful mask of “Folly.” Any reader who is able to enjoy the playful text is able to discern the satire of corrupt literary, political, and religious authorities (including the “supersti- tious” character of the rites, the corruption of the prelates of the church, the hairsplitting debates of theology, and the tedium of monastic life) in the second part and a separate “ecstatic” theology of grace in the third part bringing the book to a powerful and rather astounding closure.¹⁵ In his re- sponse to the theologian Martin Dorp, Erasmus claims that it was princi- pally his concern with the dangers of his utterances and an eff ort to speak with prudence and decorum dictated by Christian morality that drove him to the exercise of speaking indirectly, mimetically, not as himself but by adopting the voice of “Folly”:

in the “Folly,” under the appearance of a joke, my purpose is just the same as in “Th e Enchiridion.” I intended to admonish, not to sting; to help, not introduction 11

to hurt; to promote morality, not to hinder it. Even such a grave philoso- pher as Plato approves of drinking rather freely at parties because he thinks that the merriment generated by wine can dispel certain vices which could not be corrected by sternness.¹⁶

Th e Dutch humanist maintains that the mimetic lowering of the tone is merely a corrective device that also serves as a mask to mitigate the of- fensive potential of an utterance that is doing the necessary service of cor- recting vices that have cropped up: the device keeps the message out of the reach of the masses, who cannot read Folly’s witty, paradoxical self-praise in Latin, and helps Erasmus steer clear of a meaner and more personal sort of criticism, the “dangerous outburst of passion” that he condemns.¹⁷ In Erasmus’s self-defense drinking is a salutary form of liberty that still re- mains corrective, one that ultimately should be permitted, just as banquets in the Platonic tradition create a convivial atmosphere in which the partici- pants can discuss and learn. It is signifi cant that more than a decade after fi rst publishing the En- comium, Erasmus took Luther to task for failing precisely in these neces- sary acts of self-limitation, by imprudently divulging matters of faith to the masses and thus “scandalizing” them and by indecorously and rather crudely criticizing those who disagreed with him (including the speaker himself ). Reconsidering the Encomium from the vantage point of the Erasmus-Luther debate, Victoria Kahn points to the fact that, as the trea- tise progresses from a praise of skeptical moderation to the satire and, even more so, as it transitions into an ecstatic theology of grace, Folly’s function of maintaining prudence and decorum comes into confl ict with the Truth she is carried away into enunciating. For the reader, this rhetorical instabil- ity creates a “paradox between prudence and faith” that cannot be resolved (one cannot both enunciate a theology of grace and continue to speak pru- dently) unless he (or, rarely, she) agrees to stay on a “skeptical suspension bridge.”¹⁸ Erasmus’s paradox of prudence and faith provides important clues for the rhetorical analyses that I perform in the chapters that follow. Signifi - cantly, the Dutch humanist’s ethical considerations of speech, his endeav- ors to preclude the violent consequences of speaking on behalf of one’s convictions, of speaking critically and in the corrective mode, could not ultimately prevent his writing from causing “off ense” among its readers. In the context of the French Reformation, one of the notable scandals of 12 introduction

Erasmus’s mimetic modus loquendi is that it proves to be eff ective in con- verting French humanists to anti-Catholic, reformed ideas.¹⁹ Moreover, with the subsequent publications of the book that allowed readers to adopt it as an anti-Catholic polemical weapon, the off ense continued to resonate with increased harshness against those implied in the satire, even though Erasmus was careful to avoid naming names and assigned the utterances to a foolish and ranting female persona. Erasmus’s mode of speaking is in the realm of the paradox. By donning the mask of Folly, Erasmus avoids making assertions; however, he does not avoid making utterances that can please or off end. His satirical and theological utterances are performative utterances—in particular what in modern rhetorical analyses are called, after Austin, “perlocutionary performative utterances,” whose eff ects are not contained by social institutions and conventions, nor are they contain- able; they depend in each case on the situation and circumstances of the utterance.²⁰ To gain readers, Erasmus must negotiate between the ethical demand for making polemical utterances and his desire to avoid scandal. Th is might be seen as a general symptom of the issues faced by authors who wished to make critical utterances in print in the sixteenth century. Th e literature of vituperation radicalizes and politicizes some of Erasmus’s rhetorical and moral concerns. All authors of polemical works wanted to avoid off ending their ideal public. Th eir books, often judged “scandalous” by authorities, aim instead at channeling and mediating the “scandal” in the social and, more often than not, political arena: they make their readers “off ended” (theologically and aff ectively) about others. To understand the term “scandal” (and the specifi c use I am making of it in this book), some of its early modern senses merit a brief review. In the moral and theological language of Catholicism, “scandal” meant the propagation of religious unorthodoxies among people at large including the undesired consequence of people being seduced by these ideas—a sense that reaches back to the church fathers. “Scandal” in the sixteenth century was a word of censorship of a much harsher kind than the Christian skep- tic Erasmus favors. Authorities burnt books they labeled as “scandalous” and punished those in possession of them as well as the books’ printers (more often than their authors)—when they could.²¹ Th e historian Lucien Febvre goes so far as describing the culture of sixteenth-century France as one of mutual insulting and censoring.²² In Middle French, according to Randle Cotgrave, “scandal” is not only a theological notion but also a introduction 13 word designating quarrel, disagreement, contention, and riot.²³ Separate from theological, moral, and political discourses—although not altogether unrelated to them—the word “scandal” (MF escladre) also acquires an af- fective meaning during the Middle Ages, and it is this meaning that is attested in the sixteenth century by Rabelais’s use of the pronominal verb se scandaliser (“to be scandalized”) in the sense of “becoming angry,” or “off ended”—in the aff ective sense. Nor did reformers exempt themselves from censoring the spiritual fail- ings of others—from the Catholic Church to those who professed unor- thodox beliefs or led “immoral” lives. In the period of the Reformation, “scandal” is reinterpreted into a polemical notion by Reformers, who re- turn to its biblical meaning—the “stumbling block” (Gr. skandalon, Lat. scandalum)—to bear out the subversive potential of religion and especially of religious (biblical) rhetoric. Elsewhere, I analyze Luther’s rhetoric, which rejects altogether the Erasmian concerns for prudence in favor of a bibli- cally inspired rhetorical performance of the scandal.²⁴ Calvin’s treatise De scandalis (1550) warns the faithful against several diff erent “scandals,” from religious errors to fl inching in the face of the hardships of persecution. Protestant polemicists develop a rhetoric for making their faith public and for decrying the “scandals” of the Catholic Church. Just by defending their theological position, Catholic polemicists take a daring step and disregard the Catholic Church’s ban on theological debating in the vernacular (as it could lead to “scandal”).²⁵ Using the vernacular to debate is already a con- siderable lowering of the register; responding to Protestant placards and to satire is yet another step down the slippery slope of polemics. More careful and refl ective authors also exploit the off ensive potential inherent in Erasmus’s playful rhetorical exercise in order to draw in their readers. Many imitate Folly, who addresses her audience thus: “[I]f you will be so good as to give me your attention—not the kind you give to godly preachers, but rather the kind you give to pitchmen, low comedians, and jokesters—in short, lend me your ears, just as my protégé Midas did long ago to Pan.”²⁶ Th e suggestion that readers have “ears of Midas” and prefer the sound of Pan’s fl ute to that of Apollo’s lyre is a way of saying that a lower register and a cruder, less controlled language pleases them better. Th e French humanist Rabelais, for example, puts considerable pressure on Erasmus’s concerns for prudence and decorum by exploiting the scandal- ous potential of language (for example, of blasphemies), in order to create a text that is laughable—and thereby to open up a space of personal and 14 introduction collective enjoyment and refl ection allowing the reader to abstain from an- ger and off ense—if he chooses to. Protestant polemical authors who repeat Erasmus’s gesture in expressing their faith through a form of serio ludere (notably, the Farce des Th eologastres and the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale) choose to forgo the Dutch humanist’s concern with prudence and also his commitment to moderation and decorum. Or rather, they shift prudence elsewhere, to the careful avoidance of off ending a religious com- munity whose members have accepted scripture as the sole source of faith. Such writers as Rabelais, Pierre de l’Estoile, the authors of the Satyre Me- nippee and the libelle L’Isle des hermaphrodites “politicize” the scandal; that is, as partisans of the monarchy fi rst and foremost (rather than of one or the other religious party), they retranslate religious scandals into political dangers.²⁷ Th ey adopt satire, or, in the case of l’Estoile, adapt their lan- guage to the discourse of denigration, while allowing through such rhetori- cal procedures for the reader to refl ect, learn, and enjoy. Th e paradox in all these rhetorical practices—the paradox of scandal—is precisely that what enervates their adversaries can arouse their enthusiastic readers—and vice versa. readers and books

In an article about the largely ineff ective nature of censorship in early mod- ern France, the cultural historian Alfred Soman points out that “public book-burning was a literal punishment designed to erase the misdeed. But to obliterate a scandal completely it was not suffi cient to destroy just a few symbolic copies. Every last trace would have to be eliminated. Herein lies the great (and only important) distinction between an oral and a written scandal, for the latter left behind a tangible object which, unless annihi- lated, would perpetuate the off ense; and the printing press compounded the diffi culties, since it provided an easy and inexpensive means of achiev- ing mass circulation for harmful ideas.”²⁸ Today, we read the traces that survived the fi re of the censors in Paris, Lyon, and other French cities, as well as Geneva. While reading them, we ask what uses their readers possibly made of them. To read the literature of vituperation requires us also to read the editions of antiquarians and bibliophiles who practically stood alone in appreciating (with some exceptions, to which I return in my conclusion) these texts until the mid-twentieth century, when the An- introduction 15 nales school kindled interest in both print culture and religious culture as essential for understanding the “mentality” of the sixteenth century.²⁹ We may also ask what uses we can make of them for understanding sixteenth- century French literature, early modern political culture, or the social and literary signifi cances of verbal violence. My investigations build on studies of print culture and the culture of reading.³⁰ Th e books and other (largely) printed materials analyzed in this study represent diff erent levels of erudition and skill. In each case, their “ideal” readers are not the same—varying from the barely literate to the erudite, with many texts aiming at the emerging social class of literate or semi-literate entrepreneurs, the bourgeoisie. Instead of separating the “er- udite” from the “popular” in my analyses, however, I take into account the “fl uidity” that characterizes, according to Roger Chartier, the recep- tion of “typographic materials” in the early period of the printed book, the fact that they cross social boundaries because their readers make diff erent “uses” of them and also because their authors and printers design them, wittingly or unwittingly, in view of such uses.³¹ Th e print medium requires that we consider specifi c aspects of the rhet- oric of vituperation, such as incorporating the oral dimension of language (the oral scandal) into the written one and into the printed text, the tech- niques of deploying texts in books, the relation between the text and the vi- sual aspects of the book (typography and images), and the relation between books and reading publics. In urban spaces, the materials destined for a larger circulation could be vocalized and shouted out by a “crier,” who was also a peddler, which allowed them to enter into circulation for a number of audiences (Figure 4). Many authors discussed in this study wrote either verse or a kind of prose that anticipates a return to the oral dimension of language. Such is the purpose of Artus Desiré’s libelles composed in verse, however poor their poetic construction. Rabelais’s texts in general, and the litany of curses in Gargantua that I shall turn to in Chapter 2 in particular, lend themselves to oral reinterpretation, and all of Rabelais’s imitators de- serve our attention in this respect. Truth was generally believed to be a property of Time. Th e satyr in Con- rad Badius’s printer’s mark (Figure 2) replaces Saturn, who in turn stands for Chronos or Time, through a process of symbolic substitutions. Polemi- cal satire challenges the supremacy of Chronos, insisting on a spatial rather than temporal unfolding of truth. Th e printed literature of polemics and invectives exploits the visual and textual tools of spatialization that were Figure 4. Beaulx abc belles heures. A “crier” and his wares in Paris. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. introduction 17 common in the Renaissance culture of the book and that have been ana- lyzed by Walter Ong in his study of Ramism.³² A look at the typography, page design, and the integration of images allows us to make guesses about what creative uses readers and nonreaders may have made of them. Textual and rhetorical tools such as inventories (appearing typographically as lists or, in images, as graphs), the techniques of citing other works or “digest- ing” (collecting citations or “commonplaces” from classical literature or elsewhere), show that the authors and creators of polemical books make creative uses of the information overfl ow that print culture created. Claude- Gilbert Dubois suggests that the early modern scientist went about his task of describing the world by making an inventory of it.³³ Th e lists of heretics taken over from theological treatises in order to be expanded and reprinted by Catholic polemicists are ways of coping with and controlling the over- fl ow of information judged as dangerous, even pernicious. Th e Genevan works of Viret, the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, the cosmography of the papist world Histoire du mappe-monde papistique, and the Satyre Me- nippee undertake similarly to create a science of the other, by making the inventory of the false world that s/he occupies. Th e goal of these techniques is to allow readers quicker and easier access to the text or, to speak with Marshall McLuhan, to render the medium of print “hotter.”³⁴ Adversely, modern critical editions reveal best the “cooling off ” of the medium of polemical print. Th e footnotes that appear in modern critical editions may appear to reproduce (in a more precise fashion) the marginal references in some of these books (in the form of a genealogy of scholarly apparatuses), but in fact their function could not be more diff erent. Footnotes make comprehension possible for the modern reader by situating the body of the text in a set of historical and lexical materials and corpuses, whereas the marginal notes and other scholarly apparatuses that were fi rst invented in manuscripts, then intensely improved and exploited in the sixteenth cen- tury, and fi nally put to use in polemical books, served as instant connec- tions that gave the reader a sense of mastery over an abundance of both textual and social-political references and consequently of belonging to a group that knows. His aff ective participation in this group, rather than his scholarly work, was being solicited. What is traced in these analyses is a series of attempts to solicit, create, appeal to, and empower groups and communities of readers manifest in these publications regardless of the vastly diff erent ideological and political ambitions behind them. Of course, these communities called into being 18 introduction by books are very diff erent from one another. We can trace the emergence of a community of urban Catholics whose sense of piety and identity is based on the exclusion of so-called heretics, a diff use mass ridiculed by Rabelais and l’Estoile that can be mobilized by the Catholic party in its ef- forts to seize the monarchy. We also witness the gradual detachment of the reformed self from the French monarchy, as it is projected and imagined in Genevan books, which do not accept the monarchy’s predominantly Cath- olic political basis; we can also see that their detachment produces ambigu- ous identities that remain tied to a French literary culture by citing authors whose ideological commitments they reject. Th ese communities or reading publics (who in the sixteenth century also include nonreaders) are uncer- tain, changing, and, as they materialize out of the appeal made to them by books, also imaginary. Th e historical proof of this is, for example, that the people of Paris convert almost overnight from supporting the Catholic party to supporting Henri de Navarre, and that Henri’s media campaign plays a crucial role in this sea change. All the documents analyzed in this book, their violences, the scandals they stage, and the readers they are able to appeal to, together make up the contentious political space shared by books off ering diff erent theologies and ideologies, religious and political subjects, and last but not least scandals and readers. Mutual insulting and censoring does not by defi nition create an oppressive society. It can also lead to the diff erentiation of voices. Th is diff erentiation, in a nonpluralistic society such as early modern France, could only have led to the imagina- tive act of inhabiting diff erent (invented) worlds, as I show, and vitupera- tion, especially satire, became a privileged means of crafting them.³⁵ Th e fi nal paradox of scandal is attempted by the authors of the Satyre Menippee, whose later additions imagine the motley literary form of the “menippean satire” as the model for a social debate involving the diff erent groups of a fractured and hostile, post– civil war French society. Th e manipulations of the “scandalous” and “off ensive” potential of words that these authors perform are of special signifi cance in this study. Although utopias do not exist, and the fragmentation of voices and worlds that we witness in this literary corpus is attended by much actual violence, these voices also trace the early origins of a secular political culture in France, before the consolidation of the absolutist monarchy, that is, before a political system could vigorously attempt to gain control over every as- pect of social life. Th e chapters that follow do not so much provide the liter- introduction 19 ary history of the political and cultural events of sixteenth-century France (from the breaking up of a unifi ed Christian society to the emergence of a new political unity in the absolutist monarchy, or, alternately, from the early Reformation through the emergence of Calvinism and the Counter- Reformation) as much as they concern a mode of discourse: speaking po- lemically, uttering one’s conviction, with vituperation as the rhetorical marker of this diff erence—the speaker’s as much as his adversary’s. Even if the political institutions of sixteenth-century France did not allow for the emergence of a political genre, the ineff ectiveness of censorship and the protection off ered by literary institutions (prestige and patronage) made this emergence and the genre’s brief glory possible.³⁶ Chapter 1 (“Th e Heretic and the Book”) opens the book by showing how Catholic polemicists undertook to defend a conservative conception of piety with books. I look at Gringore’s Blazon des heretiques (1524), the fi rst vernacular poem printed in the sixteenth century against “Lutheran heresy,” to show how the poem represents the shift from “internal” spaces (the monastery and the heart) associated with traditional images of piety to external spaces, especially the social space where the “heretic” allegedly wields his unruly power. Th rough these images, the Blazon both performs and justifi es a new form of Catholic literature, the militant book whose goal is to reach those susceptible to “heresy.” Print both continues the tradition of preaching—“emblazoning” faith upon people’s hearts—and multiplies “external” inscriptions that lead to the transformation of the so- cial function of religion and of those communities partaking in it. A brief excursus on Artus Desiré’s Batailles (1567), which castigates women who “theologize” and yet reaches out to an audience that includes women and the semi-literate, and another digression on the reuses of Gringore’s poem in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), serve as indications that Catholic propaganda proliferates because of its reliance on simple, catchy verse forms, visceral images, the printers’ skillful deploy- ment of visual images, and techniques of spatialization such as lists and “trees.” In Chapter 2 (“Clean and Dirty Words”), against the backdrop of the Catholic “rhetoric of exclusion,” I look at the humanistic tradition of serio ludere, with which reform-minded authors sought to challenge the power- ful Sorbonne. Th e two texts under examination, the anonymous Farce des Th eologastres (ca. 1523) and an enigmatic chapter in Rabelais’s Gargantua 20 introduction

(1534), challenge the moral stakes of the prudent and decorous Erasmian practice of “imitating folly.” More than just rhetorical games, these two publications reveal a great deal about the fate of those who embrace a re- formed conception of religion in the increasingly politicized world of reli- gious diff erences. Th e ambiguous laughter that appears in Rabelais’s fi ction, where it calls into being a utopian community of readers, is an important fi rst appearance of the ideal of reserved, individual judgment as it is also an anti-model that subsequently inspires many of Rabelais’s Catholic and Protestant imitators, who hijack the power of Rabelaisian satire, originally aimed at an open, yet select community of ideal readers, for their own ideological goals. In Chapter 3 (“Scandalous Evidence”), I analyze the rhetoric of vitu- peration in the service of the Word in Zwinglian books and in Calvin’s polemical treatises. Th e libelles of the Neuchâtel press are thin on wit, but they make wholesale use of the techniques of organization and spatializa- tion that give the reader a sense of mastery of the theological issues as well as of the adversary whose image is traced in disparaging terms. I compare their strategies to draw readers into an exchange that promises spiritual profi t in exchange for the reader’s money, time, and conviction with Cal- vin’s rhetorical use of accusation (“pointing the fi nger”) and description, both of which have humanist and biblical rhetorical roots. Chapter 4 (“Th e Kitchen and the Digest”) looks at the Genevan experi- ment in the polemical use of humanist culture, at the intensifi ed techniques of citation whose aim is to develop a form of verbal iconoclasm. Viret re- vives the term “poetic theology” invented by the Renaissance philosopher Ficino only to parody Catholicism as a syncretic mix of pagan myths and false theologizing. I compare his instrumentalization of a culture of learn- ing with the turn to poetics as a polemical tool in the libelle titled Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale (printed in Geneva in 1560) and show that the author’s condemnation of poetry as “materialist” allows him to pursue the poetic project, the construction of an imaginary edifi ce, with all the more vehemence. Th e Satyres chrestiennes also provides quick references, in a digestlike fashion—or more precisely, in the form of a poetic ragout—to a vast literary culture. We have to see it as a new form, an attempt to ap- peal to an audience aspiring to a culture of reading whose members also subscribe to Calvinist doctrine in its strictest form (including its devalua- tion of literature and human knowledge of all sorts). I briefl y contrast this introduction 21 attempt with a diff erent poetic enterprise: the poems disseminated in Lyon in 1562 that bespeak a less erudite and far more volatile Huguenot self. Chapter 5 (“Poets, Priests, and Print”) revisits the Catholic rhetoric of vituperation and the polemical book by examining the works of the po- lemicist Artus Desiré. Luc Racaut has called Catholic polemical literature “hatred in print” because of its goal to foster hatred against Protestants. Desiré’s copious polemical work exploits and manipulates the print me- dium in order to reach out to urban audiences eager to be among the well informed; he supplies this urban crowd with theological teachings and defamatory stories about the “heretics.” In the second part of this chap- ter, I explore what happens when, in the years between the conspiracy of Amboise and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Ronsard turns anti- Protestant polemics into a poetic project (“with books, disputing, to con- found them / with books to assail them, / with books to respond to them”). Apart from Ronsard’s poetics in the Discours, my analysis centers on the format in which the individual poems are printed, on the poet’s polemi- cal engagement with his Protestant adversaries, and on Catholic printed editions of his poems in order to ask whether they succeed in assimilat- ing the Pléiade poet’s distinctive voice (despite his authorial eff orts to dis- tinguish himself) to the nondescript voice of the militant Catholic camp trademarked by Artus Desiré’s name. Chapter 6 (“Fabricated Worlds and the Menippean Satire”) is a long look at spatial imagination in three satirical works: the puzzling Cin- quiesme livre, an apocryphal publication that presents itself as a work by the late Rabelais; a Genevan mock cosmography of the “papist world” titled Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique (1566 and 1567) and the ac- companying satirical map La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique (1566); and the Satyre Menippee. In each of these texts, I analyze the sharpening of the techniques (much infl uenced, in each case, by the Rabelaisian model) to create, or “fabricate,” disparate satirical geographies and, along with them, separate ideological and political worlds. Th e indebtedness of all three texts to the technique of compiling disjoint pieces and citations suggests that literary forms can acquire new political signifi cance with the Satyre Menip- pee, which sees in this technique the possibility of adding new accounts to the past, new satires, to its growing body of texts, a model for reconcilia- tion in post–civil war French society. Chapter 7 (“Public Scandals, Withdrawn Readers”) explores Pierre de 22 introduction l’Estoile’s art of containing the verbal violence that reigns on the streets of Paris in the tumultuous years of the Catholic League in his manuscript Journals. Examining l’Estoile’s montages that record signifi cant events along with the era’s satires, pasquinades, polemical works, and attacks on the politiques (the moderate party) and on Henri de Navarre made from the preacher’s pulpit, and extending this analysis to one of l’Estoile’s fa- vorite satires, L’Isle des hermaphrodites (fi rst printed in 1605 but probably written in the previous decade), I discuss the emergence of a space of semi- private readership, not unlike the model imagined by Montaigne for his Essays, in which public matters are represented and, most importantly, can be judged from some distance. I show that both these works insist on a corrective, refl exive regard that is only possible if one withdraws from the public realm (dominated, during a crisis of the political order, by the politi- cal parties and their voices that are published and hence public) and un- dertakes to construct semi-private realms that value satire for its ability to foster individual judgment. Both l’Estoile’s manuscript Journal of the reign of Henri III, which circulated in one single handwritten copy, and L’Isle des hermaphrodites, which was printed and sold, but whose elaborate narrative frame allows the satire to recede into a now concluded past (the reign of Henri III) and onto a remote, fi ctional island, invent new social spaces of withdrawal, which help secure their place in the new absolutist monarchy. one Th e Heretic and the Book

An illustration (statua haereticorum) in Bernard of Luxemburg’s Catalogus haereticorum (1522) shows a man standing on a pillar with his feet tied with chains held fi rmly by two infernal creatures at the foot of the pillar (Fig- ure 5). A third, winged devil hovers by his head holding a blower to his ear. He is blowing, as the viewer understands, “hellish” doctrines into it. Th e man thus enchained and indoctrinated with “windy” ideas is the “heretic,” and the pillar upon which he stands both symbolizes the height to which his deluded imagination elevates him and causes him to stray from ortho- doxy and serves as his pillory. Th e blazing fi re whose fl ames embrace the bottom of the column call to mind both hell and the actual fl ames that burned those condemned as heretics to be executed (alive or after being hanged) at the stake and often elevated above a pyre. Th e “heretic” in the image is poised with his right hand raised and his index fi nger pointing— the gesture of teaching—but his downward gaze and the direction of his index fi nger pointing toward the infernal bottom reveals the sacrilegious nature of his doctrines. In his left hand, he is holding a book, the deposi- tory of his false teachings. Figure 5. Th e pillar of heretics. Bernard Luxemburgus, Catalogus haereti- corum . . . (Cologne, 1522). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *NC5.B4567.522c. the heretic and the book 25

Th e downward-pointing index fi nger and the book are emblems that recall the offi cial view of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and during the Reformation that heresies sprang up and became resuscitated over large intervals of time and even over considerable geographic distances because of heretical books. Th e idea was that Hus read Wycliff e and Lu- ther read Hus. Th e book was an important symbol, as polemical reasoning sought to establish continuities and analogies even among widely diff erent ideas of religious dissent. Although heresy was defi ned as a form of false teaching, as sheer untruth, from the time of the church fathers onward it represented, not only an object of attack and refutation, but also that of record keeping, enumeration, and knowledge. Describing, inventory- ing, and classifying “heretical” teachings obliged polemicists to discern, paradoxically, a “logic” in it. Th e goal was not to understand the doctrines of religious dissenters in their own right, but much rather to render them knowable, known, and even notorious through analogies with earlier and already known heretical teachings, that is, teachings that have already been condemned as heretical. Th eologians assumed (and often created) such analogies between teachings separated by large spaces and long time peri- ods, sometimes by many centuries. Often-cited sources were the polemical writings of Augustine on heresies, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, the Summa contra gentiles of Th omas Aquinas, and decrees of church coun- cils. Th e lists established by theologians rendered “heresies” and “heretics” known by imposing a certain set of correspondences on their various doc- trines rather than granting them a unique voice. Although Catholic the- ology refuses to grant a positive being to evil, false knowledge existed in the church as a shadow of true knowledge, as its internal perversion, and the possibility of naming and systematizing and extending these acts into taxonomic lists lent it an objective existence. Th is objective existence was cemented through an onomastics. Th e con- demnation of one “heretic” could turn his name into a general term with which to classify his real or purported “followers,” or the members of a “sect.” Because Luther’s ideas made the deepest impact upon the Catholic Church, in the fi rst third of the sixteenth century, all “new” doctrines were labeled “Lutheran.” Th us Luther’s name was no longer a simple proper name after January 3, 1521, when Pope Leo X excommunicated him and condemned all his followers to bearing the title “Lutheran” and the punish- ments this name incurs. Excommunication, the speech act that performs the exclusion, is not an act of arbitrary violence but that which Austin calls 26 the heretic and the book an “illocutionary performative utterance” corresponding to the necessary conventions: as the incipit of the bull Decet Romanam pontifi cem (“It be- hooves the Roman Pontiff ”) makes clear, the Pope is duly authorized to pronounce the excommunication and anathema of heretics and of their fol- lowers; Martin Luther and his followers are subject to his religious author- ity; and Pope Leo X follows liturgical formulas established well before him in the church for the excommunication of heretics.¹ Noël Béda, who served as the syndic of the Sorbonne till his disgrace in 1534,² dipped his pen into his signature vituperative ink to follow suit to the papal excommunication and condemn “these [pejorative] heretics” in the faculty’s Determinatio is- sued on April 15, 1521. He accused Luther of reviving the doctrines of a “race of vipers that poison the Church with their pestilent venom” such as Her- mogenes, Philetus, Hymenaeus, Ebion, Marcion, Apelles, Sabellius, Mani, Arius, Peter Waldes, John Wycliff e, and Jan Hus.³ Although Béda does not discuss any single concrete detail of Luther’s theology, he still vaguely evokes some of Luther’s arguments through these names of former her- etics. For example, Philetus and Hymenaeus denied the resurrection of the body.⁴ While Luther never did so, Béda’s analogy refers to Luther’s attack on the doctrine of purgatory. Because the idea of purgatory was more viv- idly implanted in people’s imagination than that of heaven, Luther indeed dealt a formidable blow to the medieval understanding of life after death.⁵ Moreover, the name Hymenaeus (Greek “belonging to marriage”) evokes another one of Luther’s “eff ronteries”: the marriage of priests, monks, and nuns. Even though no concrete system of dogma arises out of these analo- gies (and to see a system or organization in unorthodox ideas was far from being Béda’s goal), a continuity between past and present emerges. Th e syndic of the Sorbonne applies the same iron logic to his adversaries as that with which he condemns Berquin’s translations of Erasmus and the books of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, accusing both of “Lutheran heresy.”⁶ Bernard of Luxemburg’s alphabetical catalogue of heretics and heresies was an innovation that converted the old art of drawing correspondences between past and present attacks on orthodoxy into a short yet rich ency- clopedic source. Printed in 1522, it was conceived as a weapon against the spread of Luther’s doctrines and his infl uence among students, profession- als, and the clergy, all of whom could easily read and understand the sim- ple Latin in the book. Th e book presents centuries of errors in an ordered fashion, thus providing the reader with a system of correspondences and, the heretic and the book 27 before Pierre Bayle’s Dictionaire historique et critique, indeed, with a whole world of references to error. Each name in the catalogue is given an objec- tive being through specifi cation of the time, the place, and the “errors” associated with the name. Genealogies can be traced by those browsing in the Catalogus through correspondences and similarities that are indicated in some of the entries. Often, the reader does not even need to read the entries, for the titles already provide suffi cient information about a given individual and place him in a web of correspondences. Notably, “Luther- ans” are placed in the catalogue between “Luciferans” and “Mahomet,” where the similarity of the names “Luciferans” (a medieval sect rumored to worship the devil) and “Lutherans” reinforces Bernard’s claim that Luther is one of Lucifer’s “satellites.” Th e Catalogus is a more elaborate form of the earlier lists of names of heretics, and it is a powerful tool of spatialization that serves not only to help memorize or look up various heresies and her- etics, but also constructs the imaginary identity of each “heresy” and each “heretic” in the multiplicity of its relations to others right on the page.⁷ Even before lists of heretics evolved into indexes issued from time to time by authorities anxious to control and suppress unorthodoxies, poetic and visual representations of heretics crop up in Catholic polemical litera- ture. Th e Sorbonne published its fi rst index of forbidden books in 1540, by which time polemical print was in full swing.⁸ Indexes have notoriously lit- tle eff ect in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the most powerful attack against new teachings and their purported followers is not made from within the dominant discourse of theology, not even when appeal is made to emo- tions such as fear. Luc Racaut argues that the stereotypical descriptions of heresy and heretics that dominate the works of Catholic polemicists are more powerful than inherently religious, eschatological visions that warn the faithful that the end of time is nearing and bid him or her to return to the right path.⁹ Instead of simply intimidating the faithful, Catholic pamphlets exploit their readers’ hunger for knowledge—which had already been whetted by the Reformation—about matters of faith, and they also off er them other sorts of “knowledge,” notably, deprecating information about those who have “fallen away” from faith, shaping thus the portrait of the religious other. In the course of the sixteenth century, French Cath- olic polemicists give many faces to the “heretic,” exploiting the political implications of the ambiguous place occupied by this fi gure, both outside Catholicism and inside it as its ever-threatening corruption. As persecu- 28 the heretic and the book tion forces many into hiding in France or into exile abroad, religious dissi- dence indeed appears both inside and outside the geographic and political boundaries of the French kingdom. In traditional Catholic polemics, the image of the heretical book em- blematized the continuous spread of both theological and moral corrup- tion, and for this reason it is not surprising that this emblem underwent a signifi cant transformation with the Reformation. Catholics began to see in the heretical book an object of mechanical reproduction that was capable of spreading heresy not only to individual people or to small communities but also to the masses. Catholic polemicists published books not simply with pious readers in mind (as a medieval pious book such as a book of hours assumed a pious reader) but also for an audience susceptible to be- ing converted to or “seduced” by “heresy.”¹⁰ Th ey followed the example of medieval preachers who took advantage of the imputed “malleability” of the minds of simple people: using simple language, proverbial expres- sions, vivid and visceral examples, shocking images, and even obscenities to instruct them.¹¹ Th eir books contributed to the transformation of piety, to the practice and experience of religion, and to the ways in which reli- gion was able to organize communities. Faith in these rhetorical models becomes dependent upon external tools, edifying and, more and more, blaming discourses that functioned also as artifi cial memory. Catholic polemicists took up the challenge presented by the “heretical book,” with its real and imaginary power to transmit ideas and appeal to individuals and communities, even as they made their career out of loathing it. Pierre Gringore’s Blazon des heretiques (1524) reveals most cogently this transfor- mation of faith and religion and, along with it, the rise of a literature of Catholic ideology intended for the educated circles of clerics and students but also for the broader urban crowd, the consumers of almanacs, broad- sheets, and pious books, and the avid audience of sermons. Th e Blazon is the fi rst poetic eff ort that incorporates the list of heretics into a more elabo- rate textual body deploying a rich alloy of visceral and religious images. gringore’s heretic and what makes catholic piety

Gringore was the fi rst to emblazon, in vernacular verse, the imaginary fi g- ure of the heretic.¹² Th e poetic accomplishment of the Blazon is wrought the heretic and the book 29 with a paradox that will continue, after Gringore’s lifetime, to accompany conservative Catholic polemics. In order to understand the novelty of the Blazon, we need to know who the author, this great ideologue of the early sixteenth-century, was. Gringore was a court poet and the mouthpiece of the monarch whom he served.¹³ Well before the publication of the Bla- zon, he had acquired a reputation as the author of numerous satirical farces (originally comic interludes to serious mystery plays that evolved into in- dependent plays) and fool’s plays (sotties, or comic exchanges among two or more fools, sots and sottes). His most famous dramatic persona was Mere Sotte, a woman dressed half as the “Mother Church,” half as “Mother Fool,” the fool licensed to speak “foolishly” and freely:

I curse and anathemize, But beneath the habit, for insignia, I wear Mother Fool’s attire.¹⁴

Gringore exploits the medieval and Renaissance fad of licensed fools, women and men employed by princes and aristocrats and appearing in popular feasts (such as the Fasching and carnival in Germany and the Low Countries) and in the Sociétés joyeuses in France, especially Paris and Di- jon.¹⁵ “Th e number of fools is infi nite” was the motto of the Société joyeuse in Dijon, which Erasmus cites in the Praise of Folly.¹⁶ Although the satire at work in the fool’s play was generally universal in its target, because it decried the whole world as a multitude of “fools,” François Cornilliat notes that it could also lend itself to specifi c political aims.¹⁷ Gringore’s “Mother Fool,” who also became his poetic persona, pokes fun at the papacy of Julius II because the pope was the French king Louis XII’s (1462– 1515) rival in the wars of Italy, an ambitious military en- terprise that François I and Henri II continued after Louis XII’s death. Th e Blazon des heretiques was written for another patron. Th is patron was Antoine, the Duke of Lorraine, who belonged to a powerful dynasty that in the course of the sixteenth century became the main pillar of orthodox and militant Catholicism, and a formidable rival of the monarchy in con- trolling religion. At the time when the Blazon was published, François I conducted a tolerant policy that favored religious reform. Th e center of this reform was Meaux, the diocese of Guillaume Briçonnet, whose humanist circle involved Lefèvre d’Etaples and Guillaume Farel. Gringore’s Blazon may be the fi rst piece of a conservative Catholic propaganda campaign, 30 the heretic and the book one no longer tied to the Sorbonne’s theological orthodoxy, whose con- tours and political ambitions only become apparent later. Th e Blazon des heretiques includes a long and detailed list of heresies and heretics from Lucifer to Luther, recalling and reanimating the tradi- tional lists through which decrees and polemical books had been giving an existence to “heresies” and “heretics” for centuries. Th e title of the poem can be understood in two ways: as a description of armorial bearings (the sixteenth-century meaning of blazon) that give allegorical clues about the identity of the bearer and, for those familiar with the literal sense of this dead metaphor (“blazon” comes from the Greek word “shield”), also as a verbal shield against heresy and thus as a piece of militant poetry. Th e Bla- zon is a decasyllabic descriptive poem that draws an “effi gy” ( fi g u r e or effi - gie) of the fi ctive “heretic” ekphrastically in words. In addition, a woodcut image adorning the title page provides a visual representation that is no less powerful. In both text and image, the heretic is depicted through his “armorial bearings”: rats in his game bag (en gibiciere), serpents in the folds of his clothes, and a fi re in his bosom that enfl ames his “heart,” “body,” and “books” (Figure 6).¹⁸ Th ese attributes allegorically describe the harm that can be infl icted by the “heretic,” which is largely verbal: the rats that inhabit his bag stand for the heretic’s “slanderous bites” (mords diff amables); besides the serpent of temptation, the serpents hiding in his clothes recall the biblical “serpent that bites in silence,” the image of the slanderer in the book of Ecclesiastes (7: 21–22), and the fi re evokes the infl ammatory nature of “heretical” doctrines that attack and destroy the revered doctrines of the church. Besides and beyond these biblical and allegorical meanings, these images of vermin and fi re also carry a more direct and visceral evocation of danger, one that is capable of provoking rejection and repulsion. At the same time, a “very satirical” woodcut illustration on the title page suggests that the destruction carried by the heretic can spread throughout the entire social body.¹⁹ Th e image indeed shows the heretic’s body trans- formed into a disquieting representation of the social body. He wears a medley of garments: his right arm is clad in a knight’s armor and holds a banner; his left arm (which holds the insignia of the heretic, the blowers) is clothed in the sleeves of a city dweller’s short jacket; his left leg is dressed in the breeches that belong probably to a seigneur, while his right leg is bare like a peasant’s. Th is motley clothing is to suggest that Lutheran doctrines gain hold in all the ranks and in all the four estates of society. A mirror placed in front of the heretic points to the mechanism of satire, in which Figure 6. Th e armorial bearings of the heretic. Le blazon des hérétiques (Paris, 1832). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES YE-4106. 32 the heretic and the book the reader should recognize his own error and better himself. Th is psy- chological or cognitive process of self-recognition hinges upon the reader’s rejection and exclusion of the disjointed, monstrous body depicted in the poem and image. What the image blames on “heresy,” the fragmentation of a social unity, was in fact going on, except not in the precise way suggested by the visceral images and the allegories of the Blazon. Heresy was not alone in splitting society. In the early sixteenth century, French society was undergoing a dynamic transformation in which the traditional three estates of feudal France (the aristocracy, the peasants, and the clergy) were breaking up be- cause the fourth estate was gaining prominence while the clergy was also losing its status as a separate estate. Th e political theorist of Louis XII, Claude de Seyssel, no longer counts the clergy as an independent estate but argues that its members belong to one of the other three estates (the nobil- ity; the rich or bourgeoisie; and the lesser classes, peasants and artisans).²⁰ Inadvertently, the picture of the heretic conveys the image of a society that is becoming more diff erentiated and more fragile, since its unity cannot be conceived in the same terms as it was in the feudal Middle Ages. Th e Blazon also reveals the ambiguity between self and other, inside and outside, brought about by the appearance of Lutheran “heresy” in France. Th e heretic is fi gured at once as the agent of destruction (that is, the car- rier of false, slanderous, and infl ammatory doctrines), and as its victim, for “heresy” apparently attacks the social body that carries it (just as theo- logical discourse compares “pestilential” doctrines to a contagious disease). Th is ambiguity is present in the Blazon both rhetorically and visually. “Th e heretic’s” heart, body, and books are consumed by the very fi re that he car- ries. Even the sizable book with which the “heretic” is depicted can be seen as either the infl ammatory heretical book that consumes the church or the gilded manuscript that is the precious symbol of Catholic piety, whose im- age Gringore conjures up later on in the poem.²¹ Th e suggestion is that the enemy is within, and given the rebuking tone of the poem, the poet insists on pointing to the vice in his readers, supposedly in all four ranks of French society, who should recognize and correct their own corruption in the blazon. Th e poem recommends a correction through introspection and a return to an earlier and simpler form of piety. At the same time, by instilling a fear of contamination and destruction from within, it incites hostility and hatred toward those “inside” a Catholic society who can be excluded after being labeled as “heretics.” the heretic and the book 33

François Cornilliat argues that the rhétoriqueurs (late-medieval poets who practiced the “art of second rhetoric,” that is, a poetic rhetoric) work against the tide of the social changes that dominate the early decades of the sixteenth century by creating “artifi cial unities” out of signs while at the same time describing the breaking up of moral, political, social, or re- ligious unities.²² Th e “artifi cial unity” that Gringore, one of the rhetori- queurs, fashions in the Blazon in the place of the fragmented social and religious unity depicts a pious culture of reading and books that belongs to the enclosed space of the monastery and to the heart fi gured as an in- ternal space of piety. To exemplify this fi ctional unity, the poet recalls the praises of the Virgin Mary by the church fathers and by subsequent saints such as Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Th is example is far from being innocent, for the Marian cult, traditionally very popular in France, now came under attack not only by Lutheran ideas imported from Germany but also by French Christian hu- manists.²³ Th e names of those who have praised the Virgin Mary form a list that is the counterpart of the list of “heretics.” Th e last three (Au- gustine, Gregory, and Bernard) are the stellar representatives of monas- tic readers of the scriptures. Gringore’s last and most notable example of those “clerks [who] wrote / about the humble Virgin and Mother of Jesus Christ,” and “certain preachers / who always remembered the Virgin” is a praise of the miraculous kind. It consists of the words Jesus and Mary found engraved upon the dissected heart of Ignatius of Antioch, the Virgin Mary’s “prudent secretary”:

Whose heart was extracted from his body, And [the words] Jesus and Mary were found inside Imprinted in a very beautiful script In gilded letters having cut the heart Horizontally and vertically.²⁴

Th e heart of the martyred Saint Ignatius fi gures here like an illuminated codex that reveals two beautifully engraved, gilded words (lettre dor), “Je- sus” and “Mary,” as it is dissected. Th is image recalls Plato’s wax table that likens memory to an imprint upon the heart. Th is gilded engraving that is only miraculously revealed protects faith from the paradoxes of memory, namely, that, insofar as the surface of inscription can receive new inscrip- tions, it can be weakened and eff aced. Th e words engraved upon Ignatius’s 34 the heretic and the book heart form natural, durable, and secret inscriptions that are opposed to the books that are associated with the image of the “heretic.” But the gilded letters engraved inside the heart, which turn the heart into a beautiful handwritten illuminated codex (en tres belle escript), the product of mo- nastic readers and scribes, also evince the necessity of art, the fact that piety relies on reinforcement through reinscription and art—and Gringore must see himself as part of this artistic tradition.²⁵ Th is ambiguity between internal inscription or “natural” memory and external inscription or “ar- tifi cial memory” permeates Catholic polemical literature, which oscillates between a nostalgic evocation of a tradition of simple piety and embracing a new medium, the polemical printed book. Gringore goes on to cite the poetic and prophetic traditions (Virgil and the Sybils) as precursors of the Catholic Church: he describes the unity of the church as artifi cial, for it is maintained by arts, the semantic art of reading and interpreting the scriptures, the prophetic art of the Sybils, and poetry, which he now enlists in the defense of this unity. Seen in this way, Luther and the Lutherans justly resemble the barbaric invaders of a culture of letters and their opposition to Christian culture is marked by their pug- nacity, which the poet underscores by the pun, much used in the period, Luther—luter (“to fi ght”).²⁶ As if the word barbarian, alien to this culture of learning and letters, to the “artifi ce” of Christianity, were not suffi cient to describe the danger Lutherans carry, the poet continues to multiply pejo- rative signs marking “Lutherans” as “gluttons” (in reference to their refusal of fasting) who worship the senses and indulge in the desires of the body, and bestial, living like swine under the same roof, wallowing in the mirth of drunkenness, gluttony, and debauchery.²⁷ Moreover, the Blazon off ers a confounding set of comparisons moving from images of the physical body to those of the social body—from Lutherans to Turks and barbarians— only to relocate the adversary, after these images of intrusion from the outside, on the inside of the political body. Th e Blazon moves the threat through the image of “armed men” and “kindlers of public strife” and by blaming, ultimately, people’s inclination to lend faith to witches, ma- gicians, and fl atterers, their “too great willingness to follow their Lords” (suggesting that Lutheran doctrines initially gain followers among the ar- istocracy), and their intrepidness and susceptibility to “fl attery” (probably in reference to Luther’s doctrine of universal priesthood). Turning around the menace and transferring it from the outside to the inside of the com- the heretic and the book 35 munity, Gringore calls not only for a moral reformation but also for a new consciousness of the Catholic self based on repudiating the fearful other that it, paradoxically, harbors. Th e concluding verses of the Blazon ask the reader to imprint on his or her memory (mettant . . . en memoire) the proverbial jingle that concludes the poem: “Keeping the faith is deserving of praise” (Garder la foy cest chose meritoire). Th is poem, which identifi es authentic faith with the kind of pi- ety that is both restricted to the interiority of the heart and is intrinsically rooted in an artifi cial culture of reading and writing, generously off ers to include the reader of the poem in this culture. Th e closing phrase (catchy and easy to remember) also evokes the language of preachers and reveals that Gringore shares the strategy of the preacher: protect the faith of the common people by imprinting vivid and visceral images on their minds. Th is appeal to the reader’s memory suggests that the Blazon is an artifi - cial mnemonic device in the form of a printed booklet that translates the imaginary of the heretic into a poetic and a visual image that is to circulate in public places where books are traded. Even though Gringore’s books were censored by the Sorbonne in 1525,²⁸ the Blazon set a new trend, that of responding to heresy by depicting heretics in stereotypical images of lesser or greater poetic value. catholics print to fight heretical books

Luther’s example showed that once a book had been published, however outrageous, it was diffi cult to attack the author without resorting to the same technology.²⁹ Th is may very well be one of the reasons (besides the intervention of powerful patrons of bonae litterae) why the ban issued by François I on printing in 1535, in the aftermath of the second posting of the scandalous Zwinglian placards against the Mass in January of that year,³⁰ was lifted in less than two months and the printing press was soon enlisted in a full-scale battle against the “Lutherans.” Jérôme d’Hangest, the prior of the Sorbonne, pens a prompt response to the placards of 1534 under the title Contre les tenebrions lumiere evangelicque (“Against the Night Spirits: Evangelical Light”), and this libelle is republished with “amplifi cations,” presumably in order to respond to the second posting of the placards.³¹ 36 the heretic and the book

Th e author’s aim to attack the placard is hard to miss, as Hangest’s attack on the “detestable, injurious, and blasphemous posters” (attaches) mimics the verbal composition of the incipit of the placard: “Against the Gross, Horrible, and Insupportable Abuse of the Papal Mass.”³² However, while the placard combines rhetorical amplifi cation with a remarkable visual simplicity and a frugal design, the Catholic polemicist reveals a peculiar obsession for amplifi cation. Th e placards that have been posted against the Mass are “slanderous, shameful, and erroneous” words “inspired by Sa- tan.”³³ Another description shows them as “detestable and outrageous missives[s], full of snare that seduce the faithful and make him deviate from the right way,” and, were this charge not suffi ciently grave, he adds that they are “fi lled” ( farcie) with “fi lthy, dirty, and injurious words.”³⁴ Th ese syntactic adventures recall to the modern reader Mme de Cambre- mer’s tick of observing “the rule of the three adjectives” in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. While Mme de Cambremer “materializes into the opacity of a particular language” in her deliberate diminuendos,³⁵ which give away her insecure social status as someone who has married into the aristocracy, Hangest’s heavy style is the palpable mark of his unease with a public quite diff erent from the one for which he is used to writing. If he responds to the placard with a small book rather than another placard, this is probably because he judges that the book format (with its lengthier text organized into a series of “articles”) better transmits his authority as a doc- tor of theology and as the author of a standard textbook on moral theology bearing the prestigious title Moralia Magna (1519); further, it allows him to cite the scriptures extensively.³⁶ His French prose profuse with Latinisms and citations from the Vulgate Bible (with French paraphrases) likens him to Rabelais’s student from Limoges who speaks the Latinized jargon fash- ionable among the students of the Sorbonne instead of vernacular French. Th e heavy-handed bilingual prose that is the outcome of his stylistic ma- nipulations reveals that Catholic polemicists were just as willing as their fi ctional counterparts to “fl ay” their Latin along with their French in order to speak to an audience not versed in Latin and still keep their position of authority.³⁷ Th e Catholic polemical book—at once pious and defamatory—be- comes a cultural object that, unlike the gilded letters engraved inside the heart in Gringore’s Blazon, no longer occupies the interior spaces of piety associated with the Catholic tradition (the heart, the monastery, and the the heretic and the book 37 church) but circulates outside these spaces—in the home, at the fair, and on the street—joining there other forms of Catholic practices aiming at a broad public (itinerant preaching and processions) popular in the six- teenth century. French Catholics who combat their Protestant adversaries make unabashed use of the printing press.³⁸ Th e imaginary heretic with a book in his hand haunts the books of French Catholic polemicists in the sixteenth century. He acquires an imaginary power of seduction that can only be described in terms that are sexual and libidinal.³⁹ Hangest calls the placards “procurer[s]” (ruffi an), suggesting that they pander to the immoral appetites of their Catholic audiences. Th ese audiences susceptible to seduc- tion or intimidation generally fi gure in the works of Catholic polemicists as “small children, uneducated people, and ignoramuses.”⁴⁰ Th e fear that the power of “heretical” posters and books extended beyond the learned, to the uneducated and even to the illiterate, to women, and to children, was not only felt by Hangest. Antoine Mouchy writes: “[I]f the one to whom we must speak or respond cannot, or simply does not want to speak [in Latin] but in the vernacular, we must surely confer with him in that same language and forget, for the time being, our Latin. Th ese days we must respond to a book, which in size is small but in malice is great . . . , which is in French and does not speak Latin, just as the simple, common, and ignorant people. For this reason we must respond in a similar language to prevent it from seducing the people.”⁴¹ Catholic polemicists liked to recall that women were particularly sus- ceptible to being seduced by “heretical” books. Moreover, since women were traditionally pictured with a distaff rather than with a book, the im- age of a woman who reads appears to be an inversion of the status quo. Th e idea that women are more susceptible to heretical ideas has a long pedigree, going back to the church fathers. Th e female reader holding a book and walking in front of a landscape appears in a woodcut image illustrating one of Artus Desiré’s books as an image of misplaced autonomy that he calls “liberty” (Figure 7). Her caricature is an oblique prefi guration of the nineteenth-century bluestocking so much criticized for perturbing the sta- bility of the family,⁴² and her autonomy, which manifests itself in her act- ing out of a theological debate in the public square, is depicted as a danger- ous derangement of the social order. Suggesting a careful design executed by the printer, Desiré’s versifi ed description of the image is printed on the following page, image and text fi lling the entire printed page: Figure 7. Woman with a book. From Artus Desiré, Les Batailles du Cheva- lier Celeste contre le Chevalier Terrestre (Paris, 1564). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.D4606.550ci. the heretic and the book 39

Alas! Is it not strange to see Country folk, the bourgeois, merchants, And impious women dispute Who are weak in mind But want to create a new law? Yes forsooth, my dame Would like to discuss the Gospel With her women-friends [commeres] from the city In order to show herself knowledgeable [ fort scavante]. Another wretched and wicked woman Will have her old Bible in handsome French in her hand, To dispute about the laws, Although she cannot read a word of it. A third one reads Marot’s book, A fourth one her New Testament, And in their discussion Th ey criticize the Church in a thousand ways.⁴³

Women who possess vernacular books like the Bible, Marot’s translation of the Psalms, and the New Testament are able to pass themselves off as learned, but in fact they cannot read a word and are simply quarrelsome. Th is depiction of women who read is part of a general satire intended to show that “heretical” books can seduce people from all walks of life (“coun- try folk, the bourgeois, merchants, and loose women”), and the woodcut that appears above the text shows a woman dressed in clothes that reveal her to be from the city. Th is portrait is a satirical representation of the learned ( fort scavante) woman walking around idly and demonstrating her “liberty.” Th e scathing criticism notwithstanding, Desiré and other Catho- lic polemicists exploit the rising interest of city folk, including the wives of merchants and craftsmen, in books. Th e view that books seduce the simple folk (including women) has strong moral undertones of condemning “her- etics” for overturning traditional social order. It is even echoed decades later by Montaigne, always anxious, not so much to combat heretical doc- trines per se, but to ward off their destructive social eff ect. Speaking of the Reformation, the essayist declares that “today children and women rule [regentent] over their elders.”⁴⁴ However, while the Essays is a book that requires an educated reader who can read the bilingual text, Catholic po- 40 the heretic and the book lemicists write for those whom they call “ignorant,” and they are locked, as it were, in a fi erce competition with “heretical” books for readership. Historians have challenged the view that Protestant books were able to seduce simple, uneducated people by pointing to the low rates of literacy among this part of the population. Mass literacy would not appear until the nineteenth century. Even popular print, whose language was simple rather than erudite, was only accessible qua reading material to the very limited groups of literate craftsmen and merchants. However, historians of the book and cultural historians have redefi ned literacy by arguing that the ability to read was much more widespread among women, children, and adult men of trade than studies that focus on, typically, the number of those capable of signing legal documents indicates. Th ose who learned to read but not to write were children who were being taught to read (or decipher) at home but had not (yet) attended school; women, who were also often taught to read but not to write; and men with some ability to decipher texts but without proper literacy.⁴⁵ It is possible thus to read the multiple references to an audience of women, children, and “idiots” (simple people) susceptible of being seduced by “heretical” books as not simply a hyperbolic claim that distorts the “danger” of reformed print but also as a recognition of an emerging audience of poor readers and hence as an im- portant insight into the medium of the book and its ability to interact with audiences with diff erent reading capacities. By imagining an all-women assembly, where female society (commeres) aided by books (libelles) reigns instead of male reason, especially theological reason, Desiré acts as an “ideoclast,” as he attacks and ridicules the new Protestant ideology of the Word, in which women are granted access to the scriptures.⁴⁶ Along with his conservative fellow theologians and preachers, he may be condemning the phenomenon of women educated in theology, but while doing so he steps on the slippery slope of publishing books that women as well as men of little education could read, handle, and talk about.⁴⁷ Th e use of images in Desiré’s books further points to the printers’ skill in making their message accessible to a broad audience.⁴⁸ Th e woodcut image of the “tree of heretics,” for example, appears in numerous publica- tions by Desiré. Th is tree functions as a simple chart deploying the names of notorious heretics on the branches of a tree growing out of the groin of a she-devil (Figure 8). In an allegorical refashioning of the biblical “tree of knowledge,” the image shows that the “fruits” of hellish doctrines are themselves hellish. Th e image recalls the biblical story of the Fall by Figure 8. “Tree of heretics.” Artus Desiré, Les Batailles du Chevalier Celeste contre le Chevalier Terrestre (Paris, 1564). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Har- vard College Library, *FC5.D4606.550ci. 42 the heretic and the book evoking the tree of knowledge from which “heretics” derive their allegedly presumptuous authority, and its visual and emblematic means are acces- sible even to those who are unable to read the accompanying text in the book. Th e image of the tree also vividly presents the steady growth and proliferation of “heretical” teachings, the object of Desiré’s attacks. Five reformers contemporary to the publication of the book (Johannes Oeco- lam pa dius, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, Martin Luther, and Jean Calvin) are placed on the crown of the tree, to left and to right of the Antichrist. Th e branches upon which they are seated grow out of the tree trunk, from which, below them, other branches grow out, and on these lower branches are seated those earlier “heretics” whose teachings they allegedly follow. Th e tiny fi gures of these “heretics” on the branches are engaged in similar, indeed almost identical, gestures of teaching, some of them clutching a book. Th ese gestures have now come to be the defi ning character of a unique yet serial image of the “heretic.” Th e age of mechanical reproduction does not leave Catholic polemics untouched, and, moreover, poetry seems to be often synonymous with re- producible words and images. Gringore’s Blazon des heretiques proved to be a printing success in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day mas- sacre, when the royal printer Guillaume de Nyuerd reprinted it.⁴⁹ To make it fi t the occasion, almost fi fty years after its fi rst publication, the printer added the names of Calvin, the Huguenots, and Calvin’s successor at the head of the Genevan church, Th éodore de Bèze, to Gringore’s catalogue of “heretics” and rewrote the ending, which allowed him to erase Gringore’s signature appearing in the original edition in acrostic at the end of the poem. Th us a poem whose original goal was to encourage a return to the piety of the heart now circulates a public image of the hated other of Ca- tholicism. Th e erasure of the subject of writing detaches the poem from the pious self and makes its republication (probably one of several) the analogy of the endless reappearance of “heresy.”⁵⁰ Nyuerd reminds King Charles IX that a few heads of the “hydra of heresy” still remain to be chopped off .⁵¹ Th e multiplication of the “heads” of heresy calls for the renewed print- ing of the Blazon as well as for the countless other publications destined for the urban Catholic population of France. Gringore’s Blazon does not stand alone among the mass of printed poems that reach back to the play- ful poetic language invented by the late-medieval rhetoriqueurs. A curi- ous phenomenon: in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, poetic forms become the currency of polemicists, and among the poems the heretic and the book 43 that mock the massacred Huguenots in Paris, we fi nd serpentine verses and coq à l’ânes, in which the playfulness and pleasure of poetic language represent the apparent schadenfreude of Catholic Parisians over their de- feated enemies.⁵² Th roughout the sixteenth century, conservative Catholic polemicists, in the wake of Gringore and Desiré, recognize the importance of the print medium and of the use of visceral images and texts organized into lists, charts, articles, and catalogues for swaying people’s minds. In this way, they resort to external inscriptions to shape pious communities that are also reading communities. However, pious communities and reading communities will always be separate in the period, as reformers, such as the author(s) of the anonymous Farce des Th eologastres, recognize, and, consequently, vie for the attention of a reading audience. As the next chapter shows, Rabelais was among those who most clearly recognized and depicted the political consequences of a wavering audience faced with a scandal. two Clean and Dirty Words

How should one speak about religion? How should one criticize the cor- ruption of existing religious institutions? For those who were involved in the reformation of the church from the inside during the fi rst third of the sixteenth century, fi nding the appropriate modus loquendi for their convic- tions was essential, for writing and publishing involved a host of conse- quences. For Luther, the rhetoric of faith was determined by the separation of the spiritual and the ethical realms (the “inner man” and the “outer man”), and thus speaking about matters of faith did not necessarily entail ethical considerations. But for Erasmus, speaking like a Christian not only provided freedom but also imposed prudence, for which he devised the mask of “Folly.” Victoria Kahn argues that the paradox between faith and prudence cannot be resolved in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly unless the reader remains on a “skeptical suspension bridge.”¹ Many, from religious authori- ties to some of Erasmus’s admirers, were not willing to do so. Th e two French satires, the anonymous Farce des Th eologastres and a scene of comic calamity in Rabelais’s Gargantua, to which I turn in this chapter, reclaim the Erasmian mimesis of folly. Both are superb rhetorical performances in clean and dirty words 45 ridiculing, and in this process they resolve, each diff erently, the paradox of prudence and faith. Two diff erent rhetorical attitudes can be traced in these works: one is based on a Lutheran rhetoric that derives itself from the scriptural Word (“clean”) and announces not only the precariousness of the humanist ethos in a rugged and contentious political climate but also the precariousness of the individual; the other puts rhetorical pressure on deco- rum (“dirty”) in order to hold up a utopian possibility to the reader, who is to recognize him or herself as subject to political authorities, while also of- fering a neutral zone at some distance from them, in a space imagined with the help of fi ction that makes typography and topography coalesce. “Doctors infer the symptoms of sickness not only from a man’s appear- ance but also from his tongue. Surely the most reliable symptoms of a sick or healthy mind are in the tongue, which is the appearance of mind.”² In this sentence drawn from Lingua (“On the Tongue,” 1525), Erasmus mor- alizes about those who cannot check their tongue. Th e Dutch humanist makes, paradoxically, the “tongue,” that is, the human capacity of speech, disembodied as he turns the “sick tongue” into the allegory of an ethical failing. In the reformation of the church, however, subjects did not remain ethical abstractions. A wide range of experiences, emotional attachment to doctrine, persecution, death, and martyrdom, became foundational expe- riences for those who engaged themselves in reforming the church, who spoke on behalf of the Word. Th e countless examples, drawn mostly from classical sources, that Erasmus gathers in the treatise Lingua to give evi- dence of the harm one can bring upon oneself by speaking inadvertently or maliciously do not do justice to the actual consequences of words, es- pecially when in print. Even Erasmus could not control the ways in which his books were disseminated and read, and the fate of his French translator Louis Berquin reminded him of this fact. Both the Farce and Rabelais’s Gargantua depict the threat of being punished for the Word, but only Ra- belais considers speech (and, by extension, writing and publishing) as an act that is performed by the body and one that also implicates the embod- ied subject in a political realm of subjection and punishment. the clean book

In response to the authoritarian “rhetoric of exclusion” prevalent in the po- lemical engagement of the Roman Catholic Church with “heresy,”³ those 46 clean and dirty words who wished to challenge the authority of Catholic institutions in the France of the 1520s and 1530s resorted to satire, to the mocking of the authority by which the exclusion was performed. Luther had already sought to challenge the authority of the Pope by caricaturing it as usurped and downright sa- tanic (the papacy embodied for Luther the “Antichrist”), as arbitrary verbal violence (manifest in the papal bulls, edicts, canon law, and the decisions of the councils) imposing itself upon the world. In France, the single most ridiculed fi gure is Noël Béda, who embodies, in the eyes of reformers and reform-minded humanists, the archetype of the false accuser. Luther, who caricatures the papacy, and the international circle of humanists who poke fun at Béda in Latin, the language of the theologian, engage in what we can call ridicule of confi dence, as their ridicule of authority is carried out from the real or imaginary site of another authority, that of the scriptures. Th e success of these performances comes to the test in a French comic play, La Farce des Th eologastres. Th e hero of the farce is Erasmus’s French translator, Louis Berquin, a Flemish nobleman who stood in the service of François I. Berquin was a doctor of law and a lettered man, which earned him the friendship of illus- trious humanists like Budé and Erasmus. He shared Erasmus’s zeal for the unifi cation of Christianity and sought all his life to distinguish himself as a translator of Erasmus, but this is where his troubles began. Margaret Mann shows that his translations were performances in a dogmatic eclecticism: he interpolated passages of Luther and Guillaume Farel as well as his own ideas into Erasmus’s texts.⁴ Berquin’s translation of Erasmus’s Complaint of Peace (1517) under the title La Complainte de la Paix (ca. 1523) informs us about the material culture of the early reformed polemical book. Erasmus’s text is a mimetic performance—in Latin—in imitating the female voice of Peace, who “quarrels,” although much more reasonably than Folly, in- deed with measure and patience, for peace and reconciliation in a society in which those with power and authority, such as the princes, the prelates, the nobility, and the (male) citizens, eschew these values. Erasmus’s Peace gives voice to a moderate Christian logos, which is personifi ed as a woman who observes the ills of a (predominantly male) society of action, rivalry, and war from the outside. Th e title page of the French translation displays the woodcut with a pregnant young woman holding a fl ower while gaz- ing at a small dog playing at her feet (Figure 9).⁵ Th is scene of domestic contentment (which suggests that the printer reused an image originally made for another book, possibly one for women on the subject of conjugal Figure 9. Title page, Complainte de la Paix (Lyon, ca. 1523). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *NC5.Er153.Eh531b. 48 clean and dirty words

fi delity, which the dog symbolized in medieval and Renaissance culture) is an apt visualization of Erasmian satire: the voice of an unlearned woman enunciates the dominant reason of society, Christian logos. Erasmus’s rhe- torical procedures give symbolic prominence and centrality to the subordi- nate subject, mimicking the Pauline logic of “Folly.”⁶ Th e Dutch humanist also promoted the idea that women should learn to read the scriptures, although his own translation of the New Testament was into Latin. While Berquin carefully balances the demands of faith with those of prudence, his translation (although it is a faithful one⁷) transforms Erasmus’s irenic treatise into a polemical one. Th e French edition succeeds in accentuating the provocative quality of Erasmus’s text by omitting any reference to the illustrious author, to the printer, and even to the place of printing. Th e anonymous publication places the book directly at the center of contention by making clearly visible, rather than canvassing, its polemical intent.⁸ Th e woman who is peacefully smelling a fl ower on the frontispiece is not just an allegory of Christian humility, for she can also represent the new reader, as the French edition appealed to men and women alike. Th e force of Erasmus’s prudent mimetic voice could be diverted to at- tack specifi c institutions, as French and European humanists and Lutheran scholars ridiculed the faculty of theology of the Parisian Sorbonne. Most of the contention between Béda and the European humanists took place in Latin and was limited to an academic audience. Th e fi rst book in French ridiculing the authority of the Sorbonne was La Farce des Th eologastres, whose real heroes are not the theologians of the Sorbonne but Berquin, whose trial and subsequent victory over the theologians it narrates. In real life, Berquin was tried three times for heresy between 1523 and 1529, the third of which led to his execution at the stake. Th e Farce was probably written after the second trial in 1526, which ended victoriously for the translator-scholar only because François I intervened on his behalf.⁹ Th e title names the play as a farce, but while farces featured bawdy jokes and comic situations drawn from everyday life, the text of the Farce abounds in erudite puns that require some familiarity with theology and with the recent events of the Reformation. Th e title borrows a pun of Latino- German origin from the title of Melanchthon’s confutation of the Deter- minatio issued by the Sorbonne against Luther in 1521.¹⁰ Th e Latin quip originally coined by Luther’s colleague from the Latin words theolo- (“the- ology”) and gaster (“belly”), which references Paul’s diatribe against those who adore their bellies instead of serving Christ, gains another signifi cance clean and dirty words 49 in the French language, where the diminutive suffi x -astre (modern French âtre) gives the word a pejorative connotation beyond the biblical reference (Romans 16:18). A theologastre is a small, insignifi cant theologian, a “smat- terer in divinitie” (Cotgrave). To add insult to injury, the name Th eologas- tres refers to one person, the plural form functioning as a mock honorifi c title, ridiculing the self-proclaimed dignity of the theologian in the play. Worse yet, the name is also a personal insult specifi cally to Noël Béda, by evoking the syndic’s notoriously small stature and hunchbacked body. Th e Farce is an exercise in belittling, the verbal act that aims at diminishing the authority of the theologians of the Sorbonne (and in particular of Béda) by transforming the reason (raison) that underwrites their judgments and condemnations into unreason (déraison) by means of derision. Th e play opens in a schematic spatial setting that is both barren and loaded with symbolic signifi cance; to a sixteenth-century audience, the set- ting recalled the experience of morality plays and it recalls Samuel Beckett’s plays to contemporary readers. Th is setting consists of a road with only an allegorical persona, Dame Faith, lying by the wayside. Into this bare scen- ery walk two actors, Th eologastres and his companion Fratres, with each name in the plural to accentuate the absurdity of the honorifi c title. As Th eologastres walks on stage, he is screaming that he does not understand Greek or Hebrew, has never read the scriptures, and does not understand anything contained in them (Je n’y entens riens quant à my, line 14). Next to this avowal of abysmal ignorance, his equally loud proclamation of his own authority as the universal foundation of faith is an absurdity. For ex- ample, Th eologastres demonstrates his own ignorance when he expresses his surprise that, although he screams, he is still the butt of his adversaries’ parvipension (contempt and low esteem). If speaking loudly symbolizes authoritative discourse, speech that seeks to impose itself, then the cacophony that results reveals the foolishness of this claim of authority. Th e screaming Th eologastres, who is soon to be joined by a self-aggrandizing and equally loud Fratres, fails to hear and un- derstand the clamor of Faith (who is trying to complain about her plight) and further has problems with attention and intentionality: “Alas, how I suff er! / I am dying, pay attention to me! (entendés à moy! lines 28–29). Faith and, as it is later revealed, scripture are missing from the intentional world of Th eologastres, who almost fails to recognize Faith on stage: “Fratres, did I not hear Faith cry / yonder?” (lines 30– 31). When two other allegorical persons, Text and Reason, appear, Th eologastres admits that he does not 50 clean and dirty words know them either. Text does not fare any better than Faith, for he walks on stage in torn clothes, bleeding, leaning on a stick, supported by Reason alone. He too complains of having been battered, “stoned . . . scratched, turned and returned, and clawed (or scribbled) all over (graphiné)” with syllogisms, commentaries, and glosses (lines 130– 133). Th e writings of scho- lastic theologians are like wounds infl icted upon the body of Text. It is in vain that Th eologastres evokes the names of the authors of these “wounds,” the theological authorities from Alexander of Alis to Tartaret, Ricquart, Jacques de Voragine, Th omas of Aquin (the “Angelic doctor”), and Occam, for they appear in the French text of the play as outlandish and grotesque names (lines 104– 113). Th e play ends with Berquin’s intervention—Berquin alone hears Faith’s repeated clamor. Mercury appears as the representative of humanistic learning and as Berquin’s double, and he is ready to suggest the remedy: Text needs to be given a bath by Reason. Text thus cleansed from glosses and commentaries heals Faith and the play comes to a glori- ous end for Christian humanism. Illness is the central trope in the play, one that bespeaks the harmful ef- fect of “unreason” as healing stands for the benefi cial eff ect of reason. Faith declares that she suff ers from a “Sorbonnic colic” caused by the windy ar- guments, opinions, glosses, and conclusions with which the doctors have spoiled her stomach and made her gravely ill.¹¹ Th e illness of “a painful windiness in the stomacke or entrails” (Cotgrave) is thus a symptom of the (purportedly) windy, empty discourse of scholastic theology. In this allegory about illness and healing, it is not the body that is a concern but much rather a textual corpus (fi rst, scripture, then Berquin’s books). Th e Farce adopts the “radical” views of reformers like Luther and the Zwing- lian Guillaume Farel who see the literal meaning of scripture guaranteed by God, eliminating all need for interpretation, and deny the theological value of eff ort, which are views that Erasmus never quite accepted; the play also situates itself in a humanistic culture of competition and reputation, which it claims for those who have “restored” scripture, for Luther and Berquin. Th e play sutures the gap that opens up, in the debate between Erasmus and Luther, between faith and prudence.¹² Th is operation, how- ever, is of doubtful, if not tragic, outcome. Embedded in the play is a scene of interrogation of Berquin conducted by Th eologastres and Fratres. Faith implores Th eologastres to bring her remedy from the land “where reason rules” (lines 55–56), and, once again, Th eologastres does not know what she means until Fratres interjects the clean and dirty words 51 name “Luther.” Hearing Luther’s name, Th eologastres fi nally understands and retorts with the word-gesture “pestilence,” a technical term in church tradition, of biblical origin, not simply a metaphor of contagious disease but part of the technical vocabulary of Latin origin used to name heresy (line 57). Th is interjection is ridiculed in the play as an act of exorcism that reveals the superstitious fear of Th eologastres of this name being spoken (“Don’t speak that word,” line 58). Michel de Certeau notes that the condemnation of heretics is a gesture of repetition.¹³ Th e Farce re-enacts the violence of this condemnation to parody it and to reverse its eff ect by rendering the speech acts made from the authority of Catholic theology as acts of unreason, folly, and violence. Reason explains that in the past the theologians similarly misunderstood Berquin’s translations:

Th e Lord of Berquin Exposed to them Erasmus’s Latin, which they did not understand [n’entendent point]. So they put him in jail And in their crooked way Th ought to declare him heretic Without showing his error or the reason.

Th e theologians’ behavior has neither rhyme nor reason (grand desrai- son) (lines 179–186). Th e theologians, Text explains, call everything they do not understand (une chose non entendue) “heretical” (lines 206– 207). Th ey are trapped in a language that is that of déraison, which, according to Cot- grave, meant “unreason” as well as “wrong” and “injustice” (line 186). In the Lingua, Erasmus points to the meaning of the Latin word “cal- umny” (calumnia) as “accusation,” which allows him to link the “slanderer” with the Greek diabole and the Hebrew Satanos, both of which, as he ex- plains, mean “accuser,” and designate Christ’s arch-enemy and accuser in the Bible. Th us, by propagating a Christian ethics of speech, a Christian “tongue” that is to unify Christians, Erasmus inadvertently conjures up the inassimilable other of Christianity, rendering visible the logic of exclusion that underwrites it. Going one step further (but also considerably simplify- ing Erasmus’s position), the Farce suggests that only those who read and understand scripture can be said to have faith and also to dispute about it reasonably, while the theologians who claim authority in divine matters 52 clean and dirty words not only usurp their authority but also do violence to reason, to the text of scripture that is the sole foundation of faith and theology, and to those who attend to this text. Th e Farce thus performs a simple inversion in which theological reason becomes unreason, while scripture becomes equated with reason. Erasmus, who promoted a skeptical mediation of scripture through rhetoric and prudence, would have never accepted this position. Berquin appears as himself and as Mercury of Germany in the Farce. Mercury is an important fi gure for Christian synchretists, who continued to accept the view that classical authors had access to Christian revela- tion through allegories. Th ey saw Mercury as the transmitter of the Gospel through arcane symbols and, as such, as a double of Christ. Mercury is also a healer, which makes his persona seamlessly fi t into this allegory about ill- ness and healing. Berquin is Mercury as messenger, but what he transmits as “Mercury of Germany” is not the Gospel per se but Luther’s translation and “restored” version of it along with Lutheran doctrine. In a scene of face-to-face confrontation between Berquin and Th eologastres, the former is depicted as another victim of the violence of the latter’s irrational and injurious speech acts: theologastres: Who are you? Let us know. mercury: I am Berquin. fratres: Lutheran. berquin: By no means! I am Christian! [lines 485– 488] Th e ordering, authoritarian stance of Th eologastres and the interjection of the word “Lutheran” by Fratres (whose role in the play is that of an “in- verted translator,” that is, to translate rational into irrational and thus serve as an interpreter of sorts to Th eologastres, who apparently understands no other language but that of unreason) are the re-enactment of a trial for heresy. Th e word “Lutheran” is a technical term with which the Sor- bonne labeled Berquin’s translations of Erasmus, and also the books of the group of Meaux. Th e utterance of this word is shown as an act of gratu- itous violence, a violent interjection whose force is reinforced by the rhyme (Berquin / Lutherïen). Berquin/Mercury’s emphatic “by no means!” to the charge of being Lutheran and his confi dent “I am Christian” (chrestïen) recall a passage in Erasmus’s Complaint of Peace, in which Erasmus evokes Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians not to destroy the unity of Christ by following leaders (“I am for Apollos, I am for Cephas, I am for Paul”) but instead to call themselves “Christians.” Th rough this double citation clean and dirty words 53

(of Paul and of Erasmus), Berquin marks the language of Th eologastres as unchristian and, hence, violent. By the same token, in the scene in which the theologians and Berquin face off , Christian language is defi ned as the opposite of this violent, unchristian language, just as reason is the opposite of unreason. Th is opposition implies division rather than unity; exclusion, rather than inclusion—far from the universalism intended by Paul. In the next scene, Berquin (as Mercury) reiterates Luther’s famous re- quest at the Diet of Worms that he be refuted on the basis of the textual evidence of scripture: mercury: Enough now you two, gather up your deceptive wares And speak reasonably [par raison]. Cease your blazon Of sentiments: If I have erred, Show me my error, So that I [may] correct it. Don’t even try to juggle [with words] Like Béda did, when he admitted Having condemned a book Th at he had never read. Go elsewhere to play your game, You are only playing the fool [ follatrer]. (lines 496– 507) Berquin presents himself as Luther’s double who accords full authority (and reason) to the letter of scripture and does not shy away from accusing his adversaries of foolishness. Th is attitude of elevating the text to the status of sole authority inverts the rule that Béda applies to Luther’s books, or rather to the titles of his books, which provide suffi cient indication of the content for Béda.¹⁴ Th e scene of Berquin’s trial in the Farce ends with the doctors declaring him along with Erasmus, Lefèvre, and Luther to be “heretical rogues” (line 495). Paradoxically, it is through this incriminating speech act that the doctors defend Berquin’s reputation by placing him in the illustri- ous company of the “scholars of the Text” (textuaires), who attend to the text of the scriptures (Gerson, Erasmus, Lefèvre, and Luther are evoked as biblical scholars in the play). As the play draws close to its end, Berquin/Mercury defi antly states that the theologians have only succeeded in making his renown grow. He also nonchalantly off ers to serve as a translator for Th eologastres and Fratres to help them understand scripture. Th e humanist scholar identifi es Christian logos with the reason of Luther’s restored scripture, which is to say, with 54 clean and dirty words

Luther’s doctrine sola scriptura. His confi dent assertions in the play reveal his blind conviction not only in the truth of scripture, but also in the sym- bolic power of words to restore injured reputation and social prestige and perhaps even to save a life, but this conviction comes at the price of sacrifi c- ing the prudence that Erasmus carefully balances with faith for certainty in the “clean” text of scripture. rabelais’s lesson in urbanitas

Th e failure to pay attention to the Word of the Gospel forms the kernel of an episode in Chapter 17 in Rabelais’s second novel, Gargantua (ca. 1535);¹⁵ yet Rabelais’s story is far from proclaiming the sole authority of scripture. If the story is cryptic, it is because it bears the traces of two calamitous events in the early decades of the sixteenth century: a confrontation between the Sorbonne and the crown over the control of religion in 1533 that led to a popular revolt in the streets of Paris, and the aff air of the placards in the fol- lowing year. Th e story goes as follows: Th e juvenile, eponymous hero of the book (whose name suggests his large size) comes to Paris with his teacher Ponocrates in order to shed his provincial manners in the capital, where he seeks to fi nd out what “the young people of France study these days.”¹⁶ In front of the church Notre Dame, he is molested by a crowd of Parisians, who instead of welcoming the stranger stare at him and his gigantic mare, a freakish, exotic pet received as a gift from the king of Numidia. Th e nar- rator cannot hold back his contempt of the Parisians, “so daft, silly [tant sot, tant badault], and stupid by nature that a juggler, a pardon-monger, a mule with its tinklers [small bells], or a fi ddler at the crossroads will draw bigger crowds than a good preacher of the Gospel” (un bon prescheur evan- gelicque).¹⁷ Displeased by this crowd, Gargantua plays a practical joke of a characteristically Rabelaisian sort on them: he opens his codpiece and urinates on them. Th e narrator goes on to tell us that many of the Parisians drown in this “pissfl ood” (pissefort), but those who escape run up on top of the Montaigne Sainte-Geneviève (which is right next to the buildings of the Sorbonne) and begin to shout a litany of polyglot oaths and curses:

Th ey began to curse and swear—some in anger, others for laughter’s sake [par rys]—God’s wounds! Damme! Gollysblood! D’you see that? By our Lady! By the’ead of Gord! May God’s passion confound you! Da heada di Christo! By the guts of Saint Quimet! Virtue of Gosh! By Saint Fiacre of clean and dirty words 55

Brie! By Saint Trinian! I make a vow to Saint Th ibauld! Easter of God! God’s good day! Th e Devil take me! Nobleman’s honor! By Saint Chidlings! By Saint Godegrin who was martyred with cooked apples! By Saint Futin the apostle! By Saint Vital Parts! By our lady, woe is me, we have all been bathed for laughter’s sake [par rys]!¹⁸

Th is scene of cursing constitutes the highest point in the comic crescendo of the episode, one that provides the interpretive frame for the story’s de- nouement, in which Gargantua takes the bells of Notre Dame to hang them on his mare’s neck and, subsequently, the “entire city riots.” It becomes clear that the story about the Parisians and the bells is part of Rabelais’s scathing satire of the (purported) stupidity and malignity of the Sorbonne in the next episode, which presents the theologian Janotus de Bragmardo’s plea for the return of the bells. Yet what sets Rabelais’s story apart from just ridiculing conservative theologians from the viewpoint of someone who claims to be well versed in scripture is the involvement of a third actor, the Parisian crowd. Th is episode targets their lack of inter- est in sober evangelical teachings and their avid curiosity about unserious or sensational spectacles. Nothing in the story is more ambiguous than this crowd, which functions as a fi gure representing the uncertain and sometimes dangerous eff ects of words in the political arena and in indi- vidual life. By situating the story in the capital, the narrator places the Parisians’ lack of interest in the Gospel in the context of the political institution of the French monarchy. Th e events occur on the terrain between Notre Dame and the hill Sainte-Geneviève, which serves as a staging ground for the most powerful religious authority, the Sorbonne. In the Praise of Folly, Erasmus notes that preachers and street peddlers resemble each other so much that they seem to have learned their rhetoric from each other.¹⁹ A reader familiar with Erasmus’s satire understands that the Parisians’ avid interest in street entertainment is an allegory of their proneness to lend an ear to the preaching of the Sorbonne. Indeed, this episode retells the story of an actual riot that took place in Paris (in 1533), when the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne took its rivalry with the crown over the control of religion to the streets.²⁰ When the monarch prevented the Sorbonne from suppressing reformed preaching in Paris, the university resorted to what Marshall McLuhan calls the “hot” media by employing preach- ers and disseminating satirical poems against the so-called heretics and against the king, whom they accused of refusing to curb heresy in order 56 clean and dirty words to stir the crowd to riot. How do the crowd’s (by sixteenth-century stan- dards) “blasphemous” curses contribute to Rabelais’s satire, and what is the scope of it? In religious and moral discourse, the blasphemer was believed to bring God’s wrath not only upon himself but also upon his people and the political realm in which he abused God.²¹ First, Rabelais’s tale reveals the crowd’s proneness to unruly conduct, their quickness to be aroused to disobey in speech and act, to riot, which is exploited by the Sorbonne. It is not then surprising that Rabelais’s tale ends with Gargantua taking the bells of Notre Dame and putting these instruments of seditious ringing on his outlandish mare’s neck, where they can no longer cause political damage.²² However, this conservative interpretation of the cursing crowd is also modifi ed and the eff ects of the crowd’s unruly speech are defi ned diff erently in Rabelais’s text. Th e narrator frames this allegory about the importance of controlling the crowd in a situation of political rivalry between the monarchy and the Sorbonne with a toponymical fi ction. Th is chapter purportedly nar- rates why the capital of the monarchy changed its name from Leucece (Lu- tetia or Lutèce, the Gallo-Roman name of the city) to Paris. In a feat of mock-etymologizing, the narrator claims that the etymological origin of the name “Paris” lies in the Greek word parrhesia, literally signifying “say- ing everything,” speaking without constraint, but the narrator translates it, pejoratively, as “fi erce” or “arrogant” speech. Th e narrator’s explanation that “Paris” derives from the Parisians’ fi erceness in speech, and, he also adds, from their “arrogance” (outrecuidance), allows him to make a series of moralizing and condemning statements about the mob and even to opine about the government of the monarchy. Th e implications of the crowd’s curses go further, giving a warning signal to the monarch as well. Accord- ing to the political theorist Claude de Seyssel, the role of the king is to serve as an example of Christian piety through a “present and outward demonstration” of faith.²³ Th e publication of Seyssel’s book in the year of François I’s succession to the throne was rather untimely, because the new king often challenged (unless political interest demanded) the late- medieval conception of the monarch as the paragon of piety and defender of faith and as such the guarantor of the religious unity of the realm. Seyssel names the king’s religious tasks to be three: to practice often his healing power,²⁴ to reprove—if not extirpate—heresy, and to check “blas- phemy” in his realm. It is, however, not this traditional role that emerges in Rabelais’s mythical account of the origins of Paris. Four oaths in the list clean and dirty words 57

(Pasques Dieu, le bon jour Dieu, le diable m’emporte, and foi de gentilhomme) off er a brief chronicle of the history of the French kingdom by citing the favorite oaths of the four most recent French kings, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII, and François I. Th e crowd members’ performance of these oaths reveals that there exists a mimetic relation between the people and their king. Kings should provide an example for their subjects: this wisdom is echoed by many humanists (Ronsard and Montaigne, for example) in the sixteenth century. But this mimetic relation is reversed in Rabelais, for it is now the people who hold up a mirror, as it were, to their kings, as the “blasphemies” of the unruly crowd mirror not only the speaking habits of their kings but also their failure of government. Th e most daring aspect of the political allegory—a true performance in parrhesia—is the narrator’s critical jab at the king for failing to check the disobedient Parisians se- duced and excited by the Sorbonne’s preachers: “the Parisians are so prone [to riot] that foreign nations are astonished by the patience, or should I say apathy or stupidity [la stupidité], of French kings, who fail to check them by the legitimate means provided by justice.”²⁵ Gargantua was published seven years after François I moved his royal residence and his court to Paris (1528) and a year after the publication of Gilles Corrozet’s La Fleur des antiquités, the fi rst book dedicated to the history and monuments of the city that had become the political and sym- bolic center of France. Paris played a crucial role in the emerging idea of a “patrimony,” a French national treasure, and Rabelais’s story makes ref- erence to the legends of origin that circulated in the early decades of the sixteenth century and formed the object of the libido sciendi of French citi- zens, while also presenting its own mythical account about the origin of the city.²⁶ As documents and monuments that testify to the origin of the new capital were lacking, the name of the city was one of the few traces of a past, and all speculations about its origin took the toponymy as their point of departure. A myth that originates in Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Il- lustrations des Gaules and continues to circulate in the sixteenth century derives the name of the city from a legendary king of the Gaul named “Paris,” a distant descendant of Noah.²⁷ Another myth, cited by Geoff rey Troy and Gilles Corrozet, fi nds etymological anchorage in the name of a Greek people, the “Parrasians” (parrasiens), a group of warriors whom the legendary founder of the city, Hercules, left behind to guard it.²⁸ It was certainly these and similar etymological fi ctions that Rabelais had in mind when he composed his story, but he refashioned these fi ctions into 58 clean and dirty words a tale about the political consequences of speech. What is striking about Rabelais’s story is the missing reference to a founding “father” or “fathers” who come from the outside (Paris, Hercules, and the “Parrasians”) and derive their legitimacy from elsewhere, either from a biblical genealogy or from another (Greek) empire. Instead, Rabelais’s tale suggests that, more than its legendary and long-forgotten founders, it is the people who inhabit it who determine the fate of the capital. At issue is not the foundation of a city but a radical transformation that is foundational. According to Rabelais’s tale, there is already a city there, a place that is able to attract an infl ux of people. Th e comic and obscene oaths constitute a portrait of a crowd as a people “made of all diff erent pieces,” in which, as it has been many times noted, Parisians, Gascons, German lansquenets (mercenary soldiers employed in the French army), Italians, shoemakers (whose patron saint was Saint Th ibauld), vegetable sellers and people suff ering from the pox (both of whom claimed Saint Fiacre as their patron saint), and Scottish soldiers (whose patron saint was Saint Ringan) mingle.²⁹ Th is city was earlier called Leucece “for the white thighs of the ladies in the said city,” denoting its citizens’ avidity to pro- create, but procreation, the tale suggests, is not enough for survival. Th e Parisians survive because they can run away fast enough, that is, “by fl eet- ness of foot” (à legiereté des pieds).³⁰ Th us a comic medical refl ection on the survival of bodies through procreation gives way to a political refl ection about the survival of a political body. Rabelais’s tale anticipates the poet Joachim du Bellay’s refl ections on the city of Rome in Les antiquités de Rome (1558). Noting that the river Tiber alone remains from the former center of an empire, du Bellay concludes with an affi rmation of the politi- cal role of fl uidity:

Th at which is fi rm, by Time is destroyed, Th at which fl ees, Time resists.³¹

Rabelais’s tale is dedicated to fl uidity, whose image serves to underscore the transitory nature of empires, the fact that the political body is not immor- tal. Th e people of Paris resemble the river in many respects: they are with- out power, except the power to fl ee and survive, yet their physical survival is not itself a guarantee for the survival of the political body. Th e story is not simply an allegory of the political ambitions of the Sor- bonne and the instrumental role the Parisians play in them. Similarly, Ra- clean and dirty words 59 belais is far from just promoting the reformation of the monarchy, a new religious ordering of the political realm. Th e story is also about lives of people, who are embodied and subject to sensations; the lives of social bod- ies and empires, whose fate, while they do not feel, is closely bound up with the fate of their people; and even more about the eff ects of words, which also form part of the body that speaks and bears the consequences of speech. Even Rabelais’s cautionary acts of self-censorship (for example, his deleting most of the curse words from subsequent editions of the book) leave the essential facture of the text untouched: the shift from the realm of the political into that of fi ction. Th e rhetoric of exaggeration, which is shown by the number of the drowned (“two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen, without the women and children”), creates the fi ction.³² Alfred Glauser has ingeniously remarked that quantity and num- ber dominate the narration of events.³³ Th ere exist carefully constructed correspondences between elements in the story that are clearly “over the top”: the gigantic hero, the large crowd in a big city, the fl ood of urine (pissefort), and the fl ood of curses that pour out of the mouths of the up- set Parisians corresponding and responding to Gargantua’s fl ood of urine. Th ese large numbers vie with the enormity of the hero of the Great Chron- icles, whose story Rabelais reworks. In that comic epic, Gargantua touring in Paris (“the greatest city in the world”) takes away the bells of the church of Notre Dame because the Parisians poke fun at his oversized body and does not return them until the Parisians bring him lunch: three hundred oxen and two hundred sheep.³⁴ Rabelais may have participated in the cre- ation of this popular mock-heroic romance disguised as a historical “chron- icle,” whose importance in the creation of a national mythology critics have underscored,³⁵ and he certainly knew about it, as in the preface to Panta- gruel, Rabelais’s fi rst novel, the narrator compares the novel to this book “of which printers have sold more copies in two months than they will sell Bibles in nine years.”³⁶ A strategy of bluffi ng and exaggeration drives the narrator into a rivalry with the authority of the Bible. Th is rivalry re- appears in the excesses of the narration in the episode of Gargantua’s visit to Paris where fi ction replaces the Word. Most remarkable about this tale that in the end redeems some of the Pa- risians is that the lesson they learn does not come from scripture. For their lack of interest in the “good preacher of Gospel” and their too great interest in street performers and a “mule with bells” (who is perhaps no other than the syndic Noël Béda), the Parisians are not bathed in the “clean” words 60 clean and dirty words of the scriptural text but in urine, with which Gargantua both mocks and nearly kills them. Without any sermonizing, the obscene giant accom- plishes what the “good evangelical preacher” cannot, namely, to get the crowd’s attention and teach them a lesson. His prank is analogous to the voice of Folly in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly as she calls out to her audience: “[I]f only you will be so good as to give me your attention—not the kind you give to godly preachers, but rather the kind you give to pitchmen, low comedians, and jokesters—in short, lend me your ears, just as my protégé Midas did long ago to Pan.”³⁷ And yet there are diff erences. Gargantua’s lesson is not an utterance in which linguistic performance is checked by reason but the unchecked acting of the body. It is a strategic performance of unrestraint rather than a rational and moral choice. Gargantua’s infan- tile, overgrown physicality, not (yet) restrained by discipline and education, does the acting here. Th e crowd responds by equally visceral outbursts of oaths, and this discharge of words and feelings mimics Gargantua’s dis- charge of urine; their outpouring of strong words copies his pissefort. Th ey are still in shock, “sweating, coughing, and spitting,” as the narrator makes sure to emphasize the physical nature of the aff ront. While Erasmus turns a medical description of the tongue into an allegory about the Christian humanist ethics of speech, Rabelais’s narrative procedure reinscribes the movements of the body and its unchecked performances in passionate, “ex- citable” speech in a tale of political allegory.³⁸ By linking the acts of cursing and blaspheming to physical trauma and shock, Rabelais underscores the intimate relationship between enuncia- tion and the body. Gargantua’s reserved smile (en soubriant) is the minimal sign of exuberant playfulness and ambiguity, which informs his obscene and injurious prank disorienting the crowd, among whom some respond by cursing out of anger (par colere), while some others by cursing “for the sake of laughter” (par rys)—a homograph of the name of the city in sixteenth-century orthography. It is this pun, which is in fact a second mock etymology that the narrator off ers of the toponymy “Paris,” that con- stitutes the kernel of the fi ction. It is hard to believe that a crowd would feel like joking about an injury that had caused death by drowning to “two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen” of them—and yet the toponymic fi ction that the story employs allows for laughter at this calamitous moment to arise. Th e pun transforms the city (the actual site of unrest and riot) into an imaginary space where inhabitants are capable of clean and dirty words 61 turning the injury they receive into a joke—the possibility of linguistic wit transforming crude off ense into pleasure is clearly on the horizon here. Th e oaths of the drenched Parisians stand out in the episode because they are mimetic rather than diegetic (Gérard Genette), that is, the narra- tor imitates someone else’s voice instead speaking directly in his own. He mimics the voice of the irrational, passionate, and excitable crowd. How- ever, the curses too are performances in mimesis. Th e crowd literally echoes Gargantua’s statement that he will “give wine” to the curious Parisians for the sake of laughter (par rys) in their cries “we have all been given a bath for laughter’s sake” (nous sommes baignés par rys). Laughter is contagious in this scene, as the crowd responds to Gargantua’s smile with words that are uttered in order to incite laughter or as a way of laughing off the of- fense (par rys). While Rabelais’s narrator has no sympathy for the Parisian crowd as pawns in the Sorbonne’s rivalry with the crown, the transgressive and dangerous eff ect of their oaths disappears in these performances of cursing that mimic Gargantua’s prank in exuberance. Rather than being unruly and dangerous performances, they appear as simply ridiculous. Th e oaths slip or pour out of the mouths of the Parisians (the “lubricity of the tongue” was how blasphemy was aptly named in sixteenth-century French legal discourse), and Rabelais would seem to agree with the linguist Émile Benveniste’s observation that blasphemy is an utterance without any com- municative value.³⁹ When blasphemies turn into euphemisms, words be- come altogether meaningless. For speaking about the belly or other body parts of God implies a comic lowering of the register and even a combina- tion of incongruous elements that is essentially burlesque. Th is is why Rabelais’s tale about the Parisian mob is not so much about the people of the street. Laughter and laughable words in Rabelais are never totally devoid of a political signifi cance. Just as laughter, in contemporary medical accounts, partakes in an economy of excess, rhetorical laughter is also caught in a rhetoric of excess.⁴⁰ We have seen that this comic scene is built on fi ctional elements of exaggeration. Th e Parisians’ speech is the per- fect example of saying too much, of words that pour out of their mouths like the fl ow of urine the giant fails to restrain. Th eir curses are ambiguous: a regrettable failing, parrhesia, insofar as they reveal their disobedience to the crown; but a redeeming act insofar as they are producing laughter. In the tale, the Parisians represent a mass audience, uneducated and easily aroused by entertainment, including calumnious information, avid for 62 clean and dirty words scandal, and hard to edify. Th rough them Rabelais creates an allegory that radicalizes Erasmian satire by taking into account both the origin of speech in the body and its inclusion (especially in printed form) in a given political realm, rather than in the realm of the abstract moral self. We may say that Rabelais gives new meaning to the rhetorical term urbanitas, to the witty but occasionally scathing sort of joking that requires an urban and cultured individual. Rabelais’s tale exploits the intimate relation between laughter and derision, the hurtful ridicule of the other as well as recognition of what is ridiculous in oneself. Quintilian notes, “[T]he cause of laughter is uncer- tain, since laughter [risus] is never far removed from derision [derisu]. For, as Cicero says, ‘Laughter has its basis in some kind or other of deformity or ugliness,’ and whereas when we point to such blemish in others, the result is known as wit [urbanitas], it is called folly [stultitia] when the same jest is turned against ourselves.”⁴¹ In Rabelais’s texts this potentially injurious wit (urbanitas) gains a whole new signifi cance because it is the source of the idea of a utopian community of laughers. Th e Parisians who laugh are the true founders of an ideal city (par rys), a community that only exists in fi ction, but this fi ction can be realized in the act of reading by readers who choose to laugh with Rabelais’s book. Th is episode is not simply a refl ection of the political rivalries of 1533 be- tween the reform-minded and the orthodox, but it is probably also framed by even more topical considerations. Rabelais is believed to have fi nished his Gargantua in the aftermath of the aff air of the placards of 1534, after François I had placed a temporary ban on printing books.⁴² In this tense atmosphere in which the monarchy began a much tighter control over dis- sident opinions and, indeed, the very institution of the printing press was declared “scandalous” for a brief while, the stakes of publishing a book like Rabelais’s Gargantua were much higher. Th e risk was no longer provoking the censorship of the Sorbonne but also losing royal support. Th e famous epigram that the author prefi xed to the novel directly evokes these events:

Kind readers, who read this book [lisez], Strip yourselves of all emotions, And do not be scandalized by reading it [le lisant ne vous scandalisez]. For it contains no evil or infection. Indeed, you will fi nd little perfection In it, unless as material for laughter [en cas de rire]. No other argument comes to my mind [ne peut mon cueur elire]. clean and dirty words 63

As I see you being consumed by sadness, Better it is to write about laughter than about tears [de ris . . . escripre]. For laughter is the property of Man [rire est le propre de l’homme].⁴³

Although the epigram is traditionally read as an allegorical, “coded” mes- sage to the persecuted who are being “consumed” by great “sorrow” and whom the author enjoins not to “be scandalized,” that is, not to give up their religious convictions, these encouraging words remain ambiguous. To enjoin a reader not to be “scandalized” in this case is to enjoin him to carry out the reading of this dissident book with restraint. Rabelais mobilizes the vernacular meaning of the refl exive verb “be scandalized” (se scandaliser), denoting an aff ective response (anger) and a verbal one (quarrel and ar- gument).⁴⁴ Rabelais’s ideal reader would then neither be off ended by the book (and thus refrain from condemning it) nor would he be off ended by those criticized in the book (he would thus refrain from showing animos- ity to others). His or her restraint, this masterful example of moderation, would be articulated with transgressive excess (reading a nonconformist book), just as the stoicism advocated by the author (“Strip yourselves of all emotions”) fi nds its embodiment in the opaque, merry yet critical gesture of laughter. Th is community of friendly, well-disposed readers is analogous to the utopian community of laughers (par rys) on the Parisian street in the world of Rabelais’s fi ction. Rabelais’s text is thus ultimately the praise of the reader’s folly. Recognizing that words (and especially printed words) have consequences in a realm that is both social and political, the ridiculous text is Rabelais’s response to François I’s ban on printing—a plea for a private space of freedom and judgment that fi nds its expression in an act that is at once exuberant and judicious. In the context of this political situation, the Parisians’ laughable words guarantee their ability to distance themselves from their passions—the oaths being the immediate verbal outpouring of those passions—and thus their potentially off ensive speech is transformed into laughable words and, hence, livable worlds.⁴⁵ Th e epigram functions as a polite excuse for the rhetorical procedures that both imitate and put pressure on Erasmus’s rhetoric in the Praise of Folly. For Rabelais can be said to intensify Erasmian satire. For example, by citing a potentially scandalous language (blasphemous curses), he dis- regards the concern for decorum, but by exploiting the comic and (after Benveniste) “burlesque” potential of blasphemous utterances, he puts his reader even more to the test to refrain from being “scandalized.” We can 64 clean and dirty words say that Rabelais increases the power of language to off end, but he does so in order to optimize its power to elicit laughter and consent. While Eras- mus hopes that maintaining decorum is possible by managing the paradox between decorum and indecorous excess, and the Farce resolves the para- dox by bringing a theological solution to a political problem, the Rabelai- sian text imagines that indecorum, the creative performance of excess, can create a utopian community. Nonetheless, a textual awareness emerges rebus-like in Rabelais’s epi- gram, in the form of a “graphic unconscious”⁴⁶ of the scandalous poten- tial of reading. In the reader’s visual fi eld an intimate relation is formed not only between reading (livre, lisez, and elire), laughter (rire, ris, rire), and writing (escripre), but also between reading (lisez) and off ense (ne vous scandalisez). In the diff erentiated realm to which potential readers belong, ridicule does not always lead to a joyous laughter that calms and defuses hostility. Surely, the injunction to the reader comes with the recognition that some may take off ense at the satirical portrayal of theologians and preachers, at Béda’s portrait as a “mule with cymbals,” and especially at the political criticism of the Sorbonne’s eff orts to act as a guardian of or- thodoxy. However, the off ense of the reader can be of a diff erent sort—in- stead of on behalf of the Sorbonne, the reader may be “scandalized” about the Sorbonne and Catholicism. Such readers would, strictly speaking, not belong to the utopian circle of Rabelais’s amis lecteurs, yet such readers existed—the Calvinist authors of the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine pa- pale and the Histoire du mappe-monde papistique and the royalist authors of the Satyre Menippee take their readings of Rabelais into the domain of religious and political ideologies and aff ects. Th e Rabelaisian text requires the reader’s active participation and laughter, but not even Rabelais could foresee the uses that readers, Catholics and Protestants, reformers and poli- tiques alike, made of his rhetoric. three Scandalous Evidence

Donald Kelley notes that in the aftermath of the aff air of the placards, crimes became predominantly “literary.” Such crimes included the posses- sion or distribution of forbidden books, libelles (generally, small booklets), and placards (single, large-format sheets printed on one side).¹ Persons became subject to legal prosecution not (only) because of their conduct or speech but because they were associated (through possession, mostly) with printed publications. François I’s ban on printed books indicates that books were singled out as seditious, and this gesture linked “heresy” to political disobedience. Th ose who read the “scandalous” placards and were convinced by their vehement arguments no longer saw themselves as simply subjects to a monarch; rather, they recognized themselves fi rst and foremost as subjects bound to the sacred Word. Th is chapter examines the polemical literature printed in Neuchâtel, the city converted by Guillaume Farel, a radical from the Meaux group of evangelicals, as well as Calvin’s polemical treatises. Smuggled into France and disseminated in the Swiss Romandy, both of these bodies of writing endeavored to impose the sacred Word as the sole ratio of life. Why did people want to possess these “hereti- 66 scandalous evidence cal” books, handle them, and read them? How does the scandalous rheto- ric of evidence, the rhetoric that describes powerfully and convincingly the other’s failing, contribute to the spreading of the Word?

“a rt icu l at ing”

Th e placards came from outside of François I’s realm, and doubly so.² Th ey were probably authored by the minister Antoine Marcourt, printed in the town of Neuchâtel, one of the Swiss cities that Farel had successfully con- verted to the Reformation, and smuggled by volunteers into France and posted in Paris and the Loire valley, not forgetting the chateau of Amboise, where François I was sojourning. In 1535, the same placards were posted in Geneva, where they helped bring about the “reformation” of the city. Th e distribution of the placards in France shows that they were aimed at the political center of the French state, at François I’s staging ground for the manifestation of his centralized power. Th ese printed missives did not directly attack the king. Rather, they included him among the intended readers, and this is precisely what contributed to their provocative nature. As the incipit Articles veritables sur les horribles, grands & improbables abuz de la messe papalle: Inuentee directement contre la saincte Cene de Je- sus Christ (“True Articles Against the Horrible, Gross, and Insupportable Abuse of the Papal Mass: Invented Directly Against the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ”) indicates, they attack the Catholic Mass on the doctrinal basis of the rejection of the real presence. Zwinglian doctrine allows them to decry the Mass as an “apery” that mocks Christ’s sacrifi ce and harms all Christians. Th e proto-Cartesian argument, which states that Christ’s body cannot be at two places at the same time (that is, if it is in heaven, it cannot also be at the altar), could have especially provoked François I’s outrage because “the French monarchy was too implicated in sacramental conceptions not to have taken an attack on the Mass very personally.”³ Indeed, the placards desacralize royal power by addressing the king as a mundane prince, situating the sacred elsewhere, in an entirely diff erent, invisible realm, whose only visible evidence is scripture. Just how severe were the measures adopted against the placards is revealed by the fact that today only one copy of them survives, and probably because this copy was not used as reading material.⁴ Th e “elsewhere” that the placards loudly promote is also signaled by vi- scandalous evidence 67 sual means on the sheet. When we look at the placards we see four neatly delineated, concise articles. “Articles” were traditionally used in scholastic argumentation as lengthy divisions that often ran several pages. For this form, Rabelais coined the derisory participle articulant (suggesting that this activity is done by the lower regions of the body rather than the intel- lectual faculties).⁵ Th e placement of the concise articles, four on one side of the sheet, reveals a concern for the visual dimension of the text. Th is design presents the viewer with an ideogram that announces through its dense yet organized appearance the triumph of the Word even to the il- literate viewer. Th e blanks that separate the four densely printed articles while pointing to a void also suggest that the sense of the text is not present (it is in the “spirit,” rather than the “letter” of scripture, and certainly not in the material words printed on the placard),⁶ which is why the creators of the Articles veritables can aff ord to debase their words. Yet to give evidence of the invisible elsewhere required mediation beyond the actual words of the scriptures, not only through translations, commen- taries, and printed copies of the Bible, but also through polemical books. Th e polemical books printed in Neuchâtel—where also the fi rst Calvinist Bible, the Bible of Olivétan, was printed—follow Luther’s example in that they restage the biblical “scandal” through vituperative attacks that seek to deliver their own evidence. Th e placards were anti-Catholic pasquinades, acerbic in tone, and nailed to pillars or walls in the public square.⁷ Th e tone of Marcourt’s placards is scathing, making it diffi cult to say where the theological argument ends and where the vituperation begins. Th e four articles not only attack the Mass but also describe it, along with the en- tire institution of Catholicism, as an inverted totality. Th e derisive tone is strongest in the fourth article, which represents the Mass as a willfully organized enterprise whose aim is to harm all Christians: “By means of the mass they have grabbed [empoigne] everything, destroyed everything, and swallowed up everything, and they have also disinherited princes, kings, merchants, lords, and have committed all atrocities that one can name [tout ce que on peult dire] both in the realm of the living and in that of the dead.” Th is self-conscious referencing of the act of naming calls attention to the linguistic procedures of the placards, which rely on the rhetorical form of the inventory. One is reminded of Leo Spitzer’s analysis of the Rabelaisian rhetoric of “exaggeration.” Spitzer shows that Rabelais’s lists often serve the purpose of “simulating a reality in order to destroy it” and ultimately to “shake the 68 scandalous evidence solidity” ( fi x i t é ) of our conception of the world.”⁸ Spitzer ingeniously and impishly exposes this “grotesque” and “exaggerated” quality of Rabelais’s text in order to pull the rug from under the arguments and “fi ndings” of Abel Lefranc and his school of Rabelaisants who sought solid historical ref- erences behind every single detail of Rabelais’s words. According to the German philologist, Rabelais’s words evoke images that do not refer at all to a concrete reality, or rather, that refer to something larger than reality. Spitzer’s notion of exaggeration is useful for thinking about the Articles veritables, which create a fi ctional reality, that of Catholicism, in order to shake the reader’s conception of the world. Th is simulated reality is an evil totality, a negative one, which feeds on verbal descriptions of the grotesque and the carnivalesque to push readers to condemn, wholesale, the world that is represented. Yet if this rhetoric of scandalous evidence aimed at scandalizing readers (that is, making them feel off ended by Catholicism) is inclined toward exaggeration and proliferation, it is also pulled, in the opposite sense, toward organization and schematic simplicity. Th e latter appears in the placards in the reduction of “all that one can say” to four neat articles that fi ll the page. the catholic fairground and books on the market

Th e reformers of Neuchâtel liked to engage in literary crime and thereby challenged, both directly and indirectly, the existing political and reli- gious imagery of the French monarchy while they also helped to spread the Word in France and in the Savoyard cities. Th e dedicated and experienced printer of Neuchâtel, Pierre de Vingle, had learnt his trade at the presses of Claude Nourry in Lyon, where he had printed a broad range of popu- lar and religious books including Berquin’s translation of the Complaint of Peace and Rabelais’s fi rst book, Pantagruel.⁹ He was expelled from the city for printing French Bibles under an audacious but fi tting pseudonym, “François Cavillon,” or “French Caviler.”¹⁰ Th e group of Neuchâtel was able to supply France and the Swiss cities with religious books that ex- ploded like word bombs. One of the reasons for their effi cacy was their attentiveness to format and design: the press specialized in books of small format that were tongue-in-cheek attacks on Catholicism published anony- scandalous evidence 69 mously and without indication of the printer, and often under deceptive or vague titles.¹¹ Th e group in Neuchâtel poured new wine into old bottles in order to burst the reader’s metaphysical worldview. Th e book La Verité cachee, devant cent ans (“Th e Hidden Truth, a Hun- dred Years Ago”) appears to be a mystery play allegedly written “a hundred years ago” in Hainau, but “corrected and augmented” recently “on the basis of Scripture.” Presenting a new message in the old guise of a mystery play, this text is an exposition of reformed teachings in versifi ed dialogues with marginal references to the relevant books and chapters of the Bible. Th e literary form and its familiarity allow the book to enter into an exchange with buyers and readers, who orient themselves by the format until they learn to orient themselves by the new doctrines transmitted therein. Another reuse of the familiar is displayed on the title page of the Con- fession de Beda (1533). Th e full title of the libelle informs the reader that he is reading a confession of faith by Noël Béda, the syndic of the faculty of theology at the University of Paris.¹² In the preface addressed to François I, the syndic confesses that he has been granted the “intelligence of Holy Scripture,” and this sham confession makes him into a comic mouthpiece of Protestant doctrine. Th e Confession de Beda was printed in the immedi- ate aftermath of the riotous events of 1533, the same event that Rabelais evokes in the episode of Gargantua’s visit to Paris in Gargantua. Béda had to pay a price for challenging the monarchy: he fell out of royal grace and was expelled from Paris, then recalled, only to be exiled again to the rocky tidal island of Saint Michel. Th rough his humiliation, loss of offi ce, and exclusion, Béda becomes the lowly Other, who is belittled as his fi ctional persona exalts the Word—a truly scandalous piece of evidence that could disorient readers, some of whom took this mock confession at face value.¹³ Th e woodcut image printed on the frontispiece provides additional “evi- dence” about Béda’s exile and alleged conversion. It shows Noah in the ark with a dove carrying an olive branch above his head, the sign in the biblical story that the waters have retreated from the earth after the deluge. Th e dove is traditionally interpreted as the fi gure of the Holy Spirit (Fig- ure 10). Th e verbal association between the biblical Noah (Noé in French) and Noël Béda makes Béda the new Noah, the recipient of divine grace, and depicting “him” in the ark shows that he has returned to Paris. While the epistle and the confession suggest Béda’s conversion, this image goes a step further, suggesting that he has also been pardoned by the king and is Figure 10. Title page, Confession de Beda (Neuchâtel, ca. 1533). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français. scandalous evidence 71 now returning to Paris. Th e frontispiece appears to be a reuse of a woodcut image originally prepared for a traditional pious book. Putting together such a book could not have been hard, for the main text, Béda’s mock con- fession of faith, consists of twenty-two articles of Zwinglian credo phrased in austere language that is devoid of any humor. Again, this fi ction deliber- ately confl ates royal pardon (in reality, Béda was not exiled for his religious views but for inciting sedition) and divine grace and belittles royal power by showing it as the executor of divine will. Th e French translation of Luther and the painter Lucas Cranach’s Pas- sional Christi und Antichristi (1521) under the title Les faictz de Jesus Christ et du Pape (ca. 1534) resorts once again to the strategy of the deceptive cover, as the French translation of the polemical German title turns it into an ambiguous designation that suggests a pious book in which the Gospel and the history of the papacy appear side by side. Luther and Cranach’s book univocally transmits the message “that the pope heads the church of the Antichrist, and that the true church is invisible except for these marks: baptism, Communion and preaching,” and the French edition hardly al- ters this message.¹⁴ Antithetical pairs of images transmit this message in the German original. For example, on the left-hand side, Christ is depicted riding on a donkey, with his index fi nger raised as a gesture of preaching that which he enacts: poverty and humility (Figure 11). On the opposite side, the pope is depicted at the head of a group made up of the emperor, church dignitaries, and representatives of worldly offi ces to show that his power is of the world (Figure 12). Th e scene of hell in the upper right-hand corner of the image, toward which the pope’s raised index fi nger gestures, points to the real telos of his actions, damnation. Th e antithetical structure of the representation of Christ’s church and the pope’s church appeals to the public’s judgment to choose either one or the other. Familiarity with the Bible, whose scenes the images on the left side of the book reproduce, forces the reader to condemn the scenes on the right side.¹⁵ Th e image of Christ on the donkey recalls the biblical scene of his entry into Jerusalem, but the silhouettes of the town in the upper right-hand corner point else- where, suggesting the alternative of an ordered, prosperous urban life in contrast to the disarray of hell. Les faitz follows Luther and Cranach’s original version in presenting im- ages of Christ and the Pope side by side as each other’s antithesis, yet, as if the printers of Neuchâtel did not believe in the formal minimalism of the book’s “engineered correspondences,”¹⁶ they add some disquieting evidence Figure 11. Christ teaching poverty. Passional Christi und Antichristi (Erfurt, 1521). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 520.21.539. Figure 12. Th e worldly power of the Pope. Passional Christi und Antichristi (Erfurt, 1521). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 520.21.539. 74 scandalous evidence

Figure 13. “Christ wants our treasure to be in heaven; the other one asks for gold alone on earth.” Les faictz de Jesus Christ et du Pape (Neuchâtel, ca. 1534). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français.

about the reign of the Antichrist. Each one of the additional woodcuts em- phasizes the false economy that reigns in the pope’s church, which consists in pomp, luxury, profi teering, and immeasurable greed to possess and ap- propriate. For example, the Neuchâtel version presents Cranach’s image of Christ preaching poverty with the inscription “Christ desires that our treasure be in heaven” twice, and the second time contrasts it with another image depicting the sale of indulgences carried out with bells and a great fanfare to poor people who bring their livestock in exchange (Figure 13). Th e image on the right-hand side is of German origin (as the inscription on the sack of money indicates) but is decidedly not by Cranach. Th is slight manipulation of the images from the original not only makes the visual space of the book more cluttered but also helps to introduce a new theme: the carnivalesque and grotesque nature of Catholic ceremonies. Replacing the iconoclastic minimalism of the German Reformation, these images point to the strategic deployment of shocking and visceral images. scandalous evidence 75

Calvinism, including Farel’s proto-Calvinist theology, went further than the Lutheran Reformation in eliminating the sacraments and in di- minishing the role played by the church in salvation. In his classic study on the rise of the idea or “spirit” of capitalism in Protestantism, Max We- ber argues that “the complete elimination of salvation through the Church (which was in Lutheranism by no means developed to its fi nal conclu- sions), was what formed [in Calvinism] the absolutely decisive diff erence from Catholicism.”¹⁷ In Weber’s view this elimination of the role of the church in salvation led to “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual” who was thrown upon his own eff orts to organize and rationalize the external world and thereby “create” his own salvation.¹⁸ Th e books of the Neuchâtel press make possible the rationalization of the external world by projecting a spiritual-economic sphere in which the reli- gious book is the medium of gaining spiritual “profi t” (salvation), and this proto-capitalist logic of exchange animates the circulation of books. One of the bestsellers of the Neuchâtel press, the Livre des marchans (fi rst printed in 1533 and many times reprinted) is an exercise in provid- ing compromising evidence about the Catholic Church as an enormous fairground. Th e full title of this book, which names the author as “Pan- tople” (“high-soled slippers”), allegedly a “close relative of the Seigneur Pantagruel,” and the place of publication as “Corinth,” may have drawn the readers of Rabelais’s fi rst book Pantagruel, which was published in Lyon by Claude Nourry the year before.¹⁹ Th e actual author was Antoine Marcourt, whose name appears in the later editions of this much reprinted book.²⁰ Th e title promises a satire in the style of Rabelais about merchants, but these merchants turn out to be the priests, monks, and prelates of the Roman Church. Th e evocation of Rabelais’s hero in the title of the fi rst edition is a somewhat misleading “advertising sham,” the kind we are to expect from the press of Pierre de Vingle, for the book bears very little re- semblance to Rabelais’s fi rst book.²¹ Th e reference to Rabelais in the title has only one justifi cation: the Livre des marchans criticizes the diffi cult technical language of scholastic theology practiced at the Sorbonne. Its author affi rms that in his book “no Sorbon- nic obscurantism” can be found (il n’y a pas une diffi culté Sorbonnique).²² It confl ates this language with the almost nonsensical legal quibbling of Rabelais’s scatological lawyers, Baisecul (“Kiss-Ass”) and Humevesne (“Suck-Fart”). Far from imitating Rabelais, however, the book equates the language of Rabelaisian satire in Pantagruel (whose targets range from law- 76 scandalous evidence yers to theologians and on to bourgeois women) with the actual language of the Sorbonne, thus literalizing Rabelais’s exaggerated representation. Consequently, the criticism of “Sorbonnic obscurantism” entails also the rejection of the rhetoric of Rabelaisian satire, which explains why the refer- ence to Rabelais’s Pantagruel disappears from the second edition on. From a stylistic and lexical point of view, the Livre des marchans has nothing in common with Rabelais’s book, whose scatological images it shuns in favor of an exaggerated simplicity that the author advertises in the preface, de- claring that the book is “so easy, clear, and truthful that all people will eas- ily understand it.”²³ Th us while Rabelais, in his Pantagruel, imitates and creates a wide range of “languages,” from the erudite to the satirical,²⁴ the Livre des marchans resorts to a new strategy which consists in presenting its argument in a plain style that is closer to spoken language and is the precursor of Calvin’s prose. Yet the grotesque is not completely absent from this rhetoric of sim- plicity that the author repeatedly underscores. Th e central image of the book, the Roman Church depicted as a fairground, is both a grotesque im- age and a schema whose function is to “render the argument more evident [evidente], straightforward and simple.”²⁵ Th e Livre des marchans single- mindedly develops the allegory of the pope’s marketplace. Not one but two economies are outlined in the book, both of which are substantiated through biblical citations. Th e Roman Church is likened to the money- changers whom Christ drove out of the temple; to Judas, who accepted money for betraying Christ; and to those “merchants of the earth” in the book of Revelations who will lament on the day of the Last Judgment. Th e vice of the church consists in selling somebody else’s (that is, Christ’s) goods and making profi t on them. Th e goods of the Roman Church such as “justice, virtue, wisdom, pardon, mercy, and the remission of sins” have been “stolen” from Christ and have been tampered with, for the papist merchants “paint their wares”;²⁶ therefore, so the argument goes, they have no real value, so not only do the faithful pay dearly for them, but they receive worthless goods for their money. Th e merchants of the church also conduct themselves as corrupt salesmen by imposing unfair monopolies such as Catholic holidays, which the author describes as “fairs” where reli- gious services are being sold—nobody is allowed to sell them except for the Roman Church. Now, in stark contrast with the dishonest merchants of the Church, Christ is described as the generous “merchant” who “paid” for scandalous evidence 77 everyone’s sins through his blood, both “acquitted them of their debts” and “redeemed them” (racheptez).²⁷ He off ers authentic merchandise (salvation) for free as soon as one trades with him. Th e message is clear and simple: while at the pope’s marketplace the buyer is deceived and loses on the bargain, at that of Christ, he makes a “profi t.” Th e reader is to choose between these two economies. Today, eco- nomic theorists resort to the utilitarian model to describe the Reformation as a successful attempt to break the monopoly of the Catholic Church in selling religious goods, religion as a commodity, and to penetrate into the “marketplace of Christianity.”²⁸ According to them, it was Protestantism’s ability to show that it was off ering the same “product” (salvation) for a “lower price” and at a “better deal” that allowed it to break the millennial domination of the Roman Church of the religious marketplace where sal- vation was the most craved merchandise. Th is successful “marketing strat- egy” was also precisely what distinguished Protestantism from those “her- etics” and “sects” who proposed countless new dogmas and set out to form alternative churches but were in the end suppressed by the Church. What these utilitarian theories represent as the emergence of a rational choice of “gain” over “loss,” the Livre des marchans reveals to be rather a powerful rhetoric of scandalous evidence. Th e logic of this evidence leaves the choice to the reader’s judgment. Antoine Marcourt, the presumed author of the placards, reiterates the Lutheran call to free examination as he urges his readers in the Declaration de la Messe (ca. 1534) “not to read hastily . . . but fi rst read everything, understand and examine it,” before rejecting or em- bracing its argument.²⁹ However, if the reader does not reject the Livre des marchans as such, he or she cannot but reject the papist “fairground.” Th e Rabelaisian rhetoric of exaggeration and the simplicity of the schema borrowed from the world of trade intertwine in the most powerful rhetorical tool used in the book, to wit, the inventory. Th e church’s crimes form a long list of dishonest goods:

men, women, children, born and unborn ones, souls, the spirits of the liv- ing and of the dead, visible and invisible goods, heavenly, earthly, and hell- ish goods, food, time and the days, marriage, clothes, shaving, unction, ornaments, bulls, pardons, indulgences, remissions, bones, relics, expec- tances, dispensations, exemptions, sacraments, and God’s holy works; bread, wine, oil, lops of meat, milk, butter, cheese, water, salt, fi re, fumigations, ceremonies, incense, songs, melodies, wood, stone, fraternities, inventions, 78 scandalous evidence

traditions, laws, impostures, and countless other things, from which they know how to make profi t marvelously ruining, gnawing on, and devouring the poor folk who are unbelievably separated from their God.³⁰

Th e inventory evokes the world of merchants and the art of bookkeeping in which goods and profi t are recorded in an exact and orderly fashion. In this sense, the text quite simply imitates the ledger of a merchant and generates the appearance of an ordered totality, but this totality is the exact opposite of the chaotic, carnivalesque space of the fair that the text also calls into being. In the Catholic “fair,” we are told, sheer variety, dishonesty, and deceptive transactions undermine order. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White imagine a (somewhat ahistorical) marketplace as a “hybrid” place, where “pure and simple categories of thought fi nd themselves perplexed and one- sided.”³¹ Th is marketplace produces “the muddling together of work and pleasure/leisure.”³² Social historians have drawn similar conclusions, show- ing that fairs in the Renaissance were at once privileged centers where well- coordinated transactions took place between local and foreign merchants and, at the same time, feared places of dangerous comingling, overfl ow, and disorder.³³ Th e inventory of the “goods” sold by the Catholic Church, with its surprising juxtapositions of wildly disparate “wares,” simulates the confusing and deceptive nature of this imaginary place, while it also draws the reader into its own logic of exchange. Th e inventory is a rhetorical tool that is at once capable of simulating disorder and imposing order upon this simulated reality. By making pos- sible an ordered disposition of its subject, it renders the argument clear, if not transparent, and thereby promises not only clarity but also a mastery of an object that it represents as inherently chaotic and subversive. Th e au- thor hints at a “marvelous”—that is, secret and dishonest—profi t making (“they know marvelously well how to extract money”), but the inventory also conjures up a sense of negative wonder, possibly fear, in the reader to whom Catholicism appears no longer familiar but strange and so “marvel- ous” that “it is not possible to believe that it’s true.” Beyond this frightful world, the book gestures to another marvel, that of the transformation of reading into a “spiritual profi t,” making a mediation between the material and the spiritual realms possible.³⁴ Rather than the simple disenchantment that we associate with the two worlds of Protestantism and early capitalism after Max Weber, the Livre des marchans refi lls the world of Catholicism with a sense of the grotesque while it gestures toward a spiritual and social scandalous evidence 79 change brought about by the imminent collapse of an allegedly unstable religious institution and, following that, salvation. Th e image of the marketplace gives shape and organization to the ar- gument in the book, and thus it serves as one of the “spatial models ap- prehended by sight.”³⁵ Th is kind of verbal evidence, which bears little re- semblance to the detailed, vivid description that manuals of rhetoric call “evidential” (the vivid presentation of objects by verbal, rhetorical means), operates through visualizable schemas and mental images created in the text. To “render the argument evident” entails the representation of ob- jects and surfaces perceptible by sight (both literal and mental), rather than persuasion achieved through eloquence. Th e reader can take a mental view of the “wares” displayed at the Catholic marketplace and imagine its vio- lence while the book itself becomes the imaginary site of a very diff erent transaction, one that is allegedly much more profi table. No other idea is suggested by the succinct injunction printed on the title page: “Read and profi t from it” (Lisez et profi tez). Acquiring profi t is linked to reading be- cause the Word has been promoted to the sole medium of salvation in the economy of Christ. To enter into this economy, one must have access to the Word. Th e author’s reference to evidence reveals that he thinks of the situation of reading the book as analogous to the situation in which a buyer buys a product, which is one dominated by the visual experience: he dis- plays his arguments against the church as an “honest” merchant displays his wares to the buyer. Th e rhetorical power of this gesture consists in giv- ing the reader the impression that he or she is off ered a fair exchange rather than a sham, as the one off ered by the merchants of the Catholic Church who “paint their wares.” Th e evidential quality of the argument consists in the presentation of the book as a visual object, a surface, an appearance that hides a truth. Th e reader’s experience of the book mimics the visual one of the buyer of merchandise: the reader’s experience includes the ambiguous title (at fi rst glance, it appears to be a satire about merchants) and the visual layout that includes marginal glosses and references to chapters of the Bible as the ultimate piece of evidence in the argument that both orients the reader and convinces him that his reading will bring him “profi t.” While Catholicism is depicted as a menacing disorder that knows no bounds (the pope’s marketplace is an enclosed space that is constantly over- fl owing with goods, merchants, foreigners, visitors, etc.), the book opens up the visible space of trade toward an invisible and immaterial biblical space and toward a social space of transmission (of goods and ideologies) not 80 scandalous evidence bound by political limits. Th e book involves the readers through the act of reading in the “fair economy” off ered by Christ: “diligent” readers desirous of more “profi t” may look up the biblical passages because the chapters are already indicated in the margins. Th ey may multiply their “talents,” gather more knowledge, through not only reading but also by transmitting, “ped- dling” the ideas in the book. Th e 1541 edition of the Livre des marchans is decked out with tiny man i- cules (V) printed (rather than handwritten) in the margins. Th ese marks (which appear at three diff erent places in this edition) direct the reader’s at- tention to important passages. Th e fi rst one refers the reader to a paraphrase from the book of Revelations of the crucial passage about the punishment of the “merchants of the earth” at the Last Judgment,³⁶ and the second one to the “vengeance of God” and also to the account of the scandal of the monastery of Évreux, a topical reference to the apparitions allegedly seen by the monks of the local monastery.³⁷ According to the eschatologi- cal perspective of the text, these two subjects should be pondered side by side. Only the third reference is a comic one, poking fun at the cultic place Larchant, a place of pilgrimage dedicated to Saint Mathurin, who was the healer of fools and therefore also the patron saint of clowns and buff oons, suggesting, not surprisingly, that the Catholic “marketplace” is a congrega- tion of fools.³⁸ Th e evocation of the Saturnian, carnivalesque folly of the Catholic fairground is, however, devoid of humor. Th e manicules impose order upon the reading and silently point toward a place of clarity, where both the obvious foolishness of human superstition and the irrefutable cer- tainty of the scriptural message are revealed, and they also suggest the rela- tion of the book to the readers who are to take the Bible into their hands, read and recite it, as part of their spiritual duties.³⁹ Th e Livre des marchans proved to be such a successful book that Calvin adopted the model of the inventory for his treatise on relics (1543). Th e title of this book is deceptive in the style of the books of Neuchâtel, as it may appear to the reader that the author honestly argues for the usefulness of an inventory of relics: Traité des reliques, ou Avertissement tres utile du grand profi t qui reviendroit à la chrestienté s’il se faisoit inventaire de tous les corps saincts & reliques qui sont tant en Italie qu’en France, Allemagne, Espagne et autres royaumes & pays (“Treatise on Relics, or Very Useful Warning Concerning the Great Profi t that All Christians Could Derive from the Inventory of All the Bodies of the Saints and Relics Th at Are Held in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Other Kingdoms and Countries”). Because scandalous evidence 81 relics were often hawked by merchants, as they were displayed for show in churches and shrines, Calvin conveniently resorts to the image of the pope’s marketplace to describe them. Part of Calvin’s criticism is to point out the slippage from adoring Christ when looking at a piece of the cross to adoring the object as an easy one that occurs gradually and unwittingly. It is precisely this dangerous (for Calvin) move from the invisible to the vis- ible encouraged by relics which makes them smack of “idolatry.” Calvin develops the theological fi gure of the “stumbling block” to de- scribe the irresistible and dangerous force of seduction (for him, the stum- bling block is both a psychological and a theological reality) exerted by the false sacred upon the subject of faith, who is imagined as a viewer, indeed, as an individual dominated by sight. Calvin’s treatise breaks the aura of these deceptive and seductive objects in the scopic fi eld by force- fully calling the reader’s attention to the material aspects of relics, espe- cially to the fact that they are quantifi able. His inventory of relics is much more extensive than the list of wares on the Catholic fairground in Le livre des marchans: large and small pieces of the cross that are preserved in the churches of Western Europe, the several fl asks fi lled with Mary’s milk (“if the mother of our Lord had been a cow, she could not have produced so much milk”), the countless thorns from Christ’s mock crown, of fourteen nails from the cross, and so on. Showing them as quantities, Calvin can also subject them to the common logic of the material world (which is also a proto-Cartesian world), namely, that one and the same thing cannot be at more than one place at one and the same time. Th e same argument is used in both the placards of 1534 inspired by Zwinglian theology and in Calvinist discourse to discredit the real presence in the Eucharist (“Christ cannot be both in the host and in heaven”). Presented in this way, the several heads of John the Baptist listed one after the other (to which Cath- olic theology grants the benefi t of the doubt) become disenchanting. In Calvin’s text, relics appear no more than broken bones, teeth, or shreds of clothing, to which the iconoclast does not even need to take his hammer. It is comic that unseemly body parts or bones are adored as holy, such as hair, teeth, Christ’s foreskin, and, to top it all, the imprint of his buttocks in the altar-stone of the Cathedral of Reims.⁴⁰ In the culture of Catholicism, relics were encountered in sacred places, in churches and shrines, and the faithful often made pilgrimages to honor famous relics. Th rough his inventory, Calvin is able to create a mental space where relics, isolated material objects invested with a miraculous presence 82 scandalous evidence scattered over the Christian world,⁴¹ are no longer “stumbling blocks” in the visual fi eld, but rather they reassert the power of mental vision that is able to grasp them at a single glance. Calvinism, through the power of the mental eye, renders possible a switch in what is considered sacred, from an old form (objects, places) to the text, with its own spatiality. To the false sacred, Calvinism places the text in opposition, both in its sacred and in its profane form. Th e rhetorical eff orts of the reformers of Neuchâtel and of Calvin to raise the printed word to the status of irrefutable visual evidence remind us of Adorno’s critical insight that Calvinism loses hold of the sa- cred because its attempt “to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by the obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form.”⁴² It is the Word that becomes the guarantor of an absent totality, of the spirit that the mind’s eye, not the physical eye, is to grasp behind the words. calvin, erasmus, rabelais, and calumny

Vituperation occupies a very specifi c place in Calvin’s writings, and its re- lentless rhetoric serves to shape the mental vision of those who adhere to the new faith by allowing them to grasp the adversary as an enemy in a battle that takes place in the invisible, spiritual realm. In his preface to the posthumous edition of Calvin’s Opuscules, Th éodore de Bèze, Calvin’s suc- cessor in Geneva, readily concedes that Calvin was a vituperative writer: “By no means do I wish to deny that he about whom I speak had a vehe- ment nature. . . . I will say fi rst that not only does the Lord foresee in which social situation he wishes to employ his servants, . . . but he also frequently fashions and deploys and sometimes even alters their nature.”⁴³ Bèze claims a higher logic for every vituperative word in the collection of Calvin’s short works (mostly polemical treatises) by informing the reader that vituperation did not come to Calvin by nature but rather from an alteration done to his nature by “special grace,” hence forming part of a providential scheme.⁴⁴ Bèze’s justifying remarks are necessary because polemics had become by then an integral part of Calvinist theology, not just a stylistic addition. Early on in his career, Calvin brought about a transition in the order of reformed discourse from the books of the Neuchâtel press to Calvinist doctrine as the dominant medium of the Word. Calvin narrates his own coming into the role of polemicist in terms that are moral and judicial. In scandalous evidence 83 this way, he maintains ties to the humanist culture, ties he established dur- ing the years of his studies at the Parisian college of Montaigu and at the Faculty of Law at the University of Orléans. In his epistle addressed to the French king François I, prefi xed to the fi rst edition of the Institutes in 1536,⁴⁵ Calvin describes how the tumultuous aff air of the placards transformed his own self-perception from being a “minister” of the Word to becoming its “advocate.” At fi rst, he says, he merely wished to instruct the “French,” his countrymen, who have much “hunger and thirst” for Christ, but only “slender knowledge” of him. Th en an attack on “doctrine” forced him to adopt a diff erent course of action and appeal to the king’s judgment:

But seeing that some unrighteous people in your country have been stirred to such a rage [ fureur], that no room was left for his [Christ’s] doctrine [sa doctrine], it seemed to me that I should make use of this book of mine both as instruction to those whom I fi rst wished to teach and as a confession of faith to you, by which you learn about the doctrine [la doctrine] against which those who disturb your kingdom by fi re and by sword have been stirred to such a furious rage [d’une telle rage furieusement . . . enfl ambez].⁴⁶

Calvin remains vague about the placards: he erases any concrete reference to the event they created and evokes instead “doctrine” (la doctrine), a per- sonifi ed feminine noun, which is described as the subject of an attack by her adversary’s “rage” (a word that he repeats for emphasis: fureur, rage, furieusement), thereby creating a semi-mythical account of the recent past. Moreover, “doctrine” now announces, instead of Marcourt’s Zwinglian placards, which actually stood under attack, Calvin’s own theological trea- tise, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which is about to be published, but which did not exist yet and thus did not play any role during the aff air of the placards.⁴⁷ Calvin thus retroactively founds Calvinist dogma in a cataclysmic, embattled moment before its inception and makes this mo- ment into the turning point in his own career from teacher to apologist. Th is fabled origin also inscribes “doctrine” in a political scene, that of the French monarchy, and at once allegorizes this political scene into a moral and judicial scenario in which “doctrine” is accused and persecuted, and where it is to be defended.⁴⁸ Calvin’s account makes polemics into an es- sential part of Calvinism, whose “doctrine” unfolds amidst attacks. As a consequence, sixteenth-century Calvinism does not simply imply adher- ence to a doctrine, not simply an act of belief, but a state of embattlement in the political and moral realms. 84 scandalous evidence

Calvinism gives its set of beliefs and doctrines its fi rst systematized ex- pression in the 1536 publication of the Institutes, but it is further defi ned as a way of acting in a specifi c political situation, with recourse to humanist ideals, and in particular to a commonplace popularized by Erasmus. For the second edition of his unorthodox translation of the New Testament pub- lished in 1519, Erasmus ordered a woodcut from Ambrosius Holbein, which depicted Slander (Calumnia) as the protagonist of an elaborate scene: “She” is portrayed as a young woman holding a torch in one hand, while with the other hand she is dragging a youth by the hair toward a tribunal where she is to accuse him, slanderously. Upon the tribunal sits a judge with oversized ears; behind him stand his councilors Ignorance and Suspicion. Slander is not doing this alone, for a cortege of women is egging her on: Envy, Fraud, and Treachery. Also part of the scene is Regret, who stands at a distance with her arms crossed over her chest and with her eyes looking timidly at the female fi gure behind her, Truth. Truth is turned toward the scene, but she casts her eyes upon the ground, as if she could not bear the sight of the gross injustice that is being done to her (Figure 14). Holbein’s woodcut is one of the countless Renaissance visual representations of a topos known in the Renaissance as “Apelles’ Slander.” Th e commonplace originates in a fa- mous essay by Lucian of Samosata in which the Syrian philosopher claims to have seen a painting by the legendary Greek painter Apelles of Kos. It is not unlikely that Lucian made up both the description of Apelles’ alleged painting entitled On Accusation (Diabole) and the story (which is histori- cally inaccurate) about its origin, as no other references to either are extant. If he did so, it was most likely in order to draw attention to the mutual dependence of the great artist and his less talented critic.⁴⁹ As Lucian tells the story, Apelles is unjustly accused by envious rival An- tiphilis of fostering a revolt against Th eodotas, the king Ptolemy’s governor in Phoenicia. Ptolemy is so angered by the news brought to him by the ac- cuser that he gives credence to the accusation without even considering the absurdity of the claim, and perhaps he would have had Apelles beheaded, were it not for one of the captured rebels who exculpates him out of pity. Ptolemy repents and sends Antiphilis into slavery, but Apelles, still resent- ful, avenges himself on the monarch by painting him with ears of an ass (like those of the mythological king Midas) and stretching out an arm to welcome the allegorical fi gure of Slander. It is understandable why Erasmus, a victim of accusations himself, chose this scene to adorn the title page of his much-attacked New Testament. Th e Figure 14. Calumnia by Ambrosius Holbein. Des. Erasmi Rotterdami in Novum Testamentum . . . Annotationes (Basel, 1519). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *f NC5.Er153B.1519 pt.[2]. 86 scandalous evidence

Figure 15. A detail from Calumnia by Ambrosius Holbein. Des. Erasmi Rotterdami in Novum Testamentum . . . Annotationes (Basel, 1519). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *f NC5.Er153B.1519 pt.[2]. humanist author thanks Pope Leo X for fi nally recognizing his work and clearing him of guilt. Th e woodcut thus signals that the “slanderers” have been checked and the truth has fi nally been seen by the one who is in the position of judge, while it also warns about the uncertainty of higher pa- tronage that every author faces. One of the readers of the 1519 edition of Erasmus’s Annotations, whose title page is adorned by the same woodcut, colored the fi gure of “Slander” red to highlight her importance in the dra- matic scene that unfolds in the image.⁵⁰ Slander is indeed at center stage in this drama, in which the author is the poor accused dragged by the hair (Figure 15). Jacob Burckhardt saw in reputation a privileged means of gain- ing social prestige in Renaissance Italy, and in humanism an institution that allowed individuals to gain reputation.⁵¹ Following in Burckhardt’s footsteps, the social historian Peter Burke shows that Renaissance human- ism was also a culture of slander and disrepute.⁵² Th ere was certainly no better way of attaining prestige than through the public disgrace of those who were one’s adversaries or, in allegorical terms, one’s “slanderers.” In his Lingua (1525), Erasmus calls slander “diabolic” and “satanic,” recalling that the meaning of these Greek and Hebrew words is “accuser.” Erasmus’s confusion between “slander” (Latin calumnia) and “accusation” (Greek dia- bole) is not an oversight but probably another evocation of the topos origi- nating in Lucian’s essay (whose original Greek title, “On Accusation” or Diabole, was routinely translated as “Slander” or Calumnia). Th e accuser (a legal term) is also the slanderer (a moral term that is invested with religious signifi cance).⁵³ Erasmus asserts that the critics’ relation to the author is scandalous evidence 87 parasitical: “Homer had his Zoilius, Virgil his Pero, Horace his Maevius, Ovid his Ibis—yet even the names of these men would not survive now if they had not been transmitted to latter days by the services of those they belittled.”⁵⁴ Th e critic has the author to thank for his reputation, but then again, the story of Apelles shows that the artist’s or the author’s reputation is only truly solidifi ed once he has been exculpated from a false accusation, and once the accuser has found disgrace, as the accuser’s disgrace is also the proof of the artist’s greatness and seals his reputation. Erasing all references to classical and humanist literature, Calvin retells the topos of “Apelles’ Slander” with the personifi ed fi gure of “doctrine” as the innocent victim of unjust calumniators:

If someone argued, in order to stir up hatred against the doctrine [ceste doc- trine] of which I am trying to give you account, that she has already been condemned by the agreement of all estates, that she has received in verdict several sentences, he undoubtedly says nothing more than that she has been violently struck down by the force and conspiracy of its enemies and ma- liciously oppressed by their lies, deceits, slander [calomnies], and treachery. It is fraudulent and treacherous that it is unjustly accused of sedition and mischief.⁵⁵

Th ese words place the political battle fought by the monarchy (afraid of sedition), the Sorbonne (whose theologians “suppress” doctrine with their “lies”), and the Parliament (the condemnation of “all the estates”) over the control of religion into the allegorical scenario of calumny and persecution. In the excerpt, Calvin fi gures the monarch in the position of the judge whose ears are fi lled daily with the lies of the “slanderers.” And just as in the humanist versions of the allegory of Slander, the accusations deliver the proof against the accusers; the “horrible accounts” and “insidious detrac- tions” of those accusing “doctrine” reveal the malice of their authors, who, Calvin adds, are only good for the fi re and the gallows.⁵⁶ Worse yet, those who are supposed to be impartial judges have been “carried away” (Calvin uses strong words to describe this: ravis et transportez) by a passion that blinds them and forces them prematurely to condemn the doctrine. Many are the judges (the authorities) who are carried away by anger, many are those who are deceived (the Catholic population at large) by the lies of the slanderers (the theologians of the Sorbonne), and many are also the victims (the reformers and members of the “true” church, of the community of the faithful). It is at this precise moment, when judges are too many and advo- 88 scandalous evidence cates are too scarce, when “no one comes forward to counter these furies with a defense,” that Calvin undertakes the defense, for Christian truth, which has been “covered up and entombed” as if “she” (la vérité is another feminine noun that is personifi ed, as are la doctrine and l’église) were “ig- nominious,” and for the church (l’église), “murdered,” “banished,” and so “intimidated” that “she does not dare to speak up (sonner mot) for herself.” Calvin sets the king apart from this scene as the one sitting upon the tri- bunal of justice, to whom Calvin, exercising the rhetorical tools of epideic- tic oratory, presents the case of the innocent victims. Th e king is not to be blamed for not having rectifi ed the case yet, for the matter has so far been handled, not with the “gravity with which judicial matters are customarily conducted” but with an “impetuous ardor.” While François I condemned those responsible for the aff air of the placards as inciters of sedition and thereby politicized religion,⁵⁷ Calvin redraws the political crisis as a moral and, ultimately, an eschatological allegory. His appeal to the monarch’s judgment, now that the case has been presented in the proper judiciary manner, is framed by an eschatological reference to God’s “strong hand” that is the ultimate tribunal “if the detractions or the malignant stop up your ears depriving the accused of a place where they can defend them- selves.”⁵⁸ Th e visual drama involved in the allegory of calumny does not go unnoticed by Calvin. Holbein paints the fi gure of Truth in the background with her left hand slightly raised and her fi nger pointing upwards. Truth in the image is biding her time, waiting for a revelation whose guarantor lies outside the frame of the scene depicted in the image. What began as a bid for royal patronage for the Reformation, as the conversion of the kingdom proves to be impossible, especially after 1540,⁵⁹ turns into a more complex eff ort to persuade those sympathetic to the Ref- ormation, attract powerful patrons, and discredit adversaries, all of which Calvin undertakes in his polemical treatises.⁶⁰ Th ese eloquent but vitu- perative libelles continue to address an educated and, in part, aristocratic audience that is of a considerably higher social status than the audience targeted by the books printed in Neuchâtel. Instead of off ering them a deal in which the book mediates a spiritual profi t derived from an entirely other realm in exchange for the readers’ money, involvement, and good judgment of the book, Calvin sets out to redraw their mental vision completely. Se- rene Jones, who in her Rhetoric of Piety undertakes to read Calvin’s rhetoric in the Institutes “as a literary critic might read Rabelais and Montaigne,” argues that one of Calvin’s goals in his polemical discourse is to win over scandalous evidence 89 the moderate humanists in France, who do not wish radically to break with the Roman Catholic Church.⁶¹ In his polemics, Calvin’s strategy is to point to an eschatological drama by pointing the fi nger (rhetorically) not only at a transcendental truth but also at the spiritual “enemies” of “doctrine.” Calvin adopts a satirical per- spective that stems from viewing social and political reality through the “spectacles of Scripture,” which “bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their color, sweet and bitter of their taste.”⁶² His particularly “mocking” and derisory rhetoric thus serves to orient the reader, by rhetorical means, in an invisible drama. Calvin’s par- ticular “politics” of caricature diff ers from treatise to treatise, depending on the moment and on his targeted audience, but in each instance the ad- versary appears as a “scandal” and as a potential “stumbling block” to the faithful unless they learn to readjust their vision and see the danger.⁶³ It is fi rst in the Petit Traité monstrant que c’est que doit faire un homme fi dèle connaissant la vérité de l’Évangile quand il est entre les papistes (“Small Treatise Indicating What a Faithful Person Who Knows the Truth of the Gospel Has to Do When He Is Among Papists”) (1543) that the reformer gives the austere advice to those living among “papists,” but in particular to Frenchmen living in France, either to go into exile or, if they are not able to, “to abstain from partaking in Catholic practices”—even at the price of persecution.⁶⁴ Th is advice arises out of Calvin’s interpretation and sys- tematization of the Bible, and out of his doctrine, but it understandably shocks many Frenchmen and Frenchwomen sympathetic to the Reforma- tion. Calvin’s goal in this treatise is to reveal the full extent of the error of those who “adore God in secret and pretend to adore the idols in order to satisfy their persecutors” and show that it is “nothing but mockery.”⁶⁵ Admitting that by not participating in Catholic rites the faithful entail the risk of persecution, Calvin commends the example of martyrs of the early church who “preferred to be fl ayed alive to dissimulating so much as to commit an exterior act of idolatry.”⁶⁶ Th e martyr is the persecuted victim, but he is also, like Truth in Holbein’s image, the one who points publicly to the higher tribunal of truth. In the theater of providence, she makes the world of appearances and lies dissolve through the simple gesture of deixis. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, citing Augustine, Calvin describes the martyr as an index of the Last Judgment, the eschatological fi gure of Truth: “[W]hen we see the righteous brought into affl iction by the ungodly, assailed with injuries, overwhelmed with calumnies, and lac- 90 scandalous evidence erated by insult and contumely, while, on the contrary, the wicked fl ourish, prosper, acquire ease and honor, and all these with impunity, we ought forthwith to infer, that there will be a future life in which iniquity shall re- ceive its punishment and righteousness its reward.”⁶⁷ In Calvin’s reference to those martyrs of the early church is the hyperbolic fi gure of the believer who, unlike those who hide from persecution under the “false exterior” of “idolatry,” is willing to reveal, even at the price of his skin, his faith, and thereby points toward that “other” realm that remains, under normal cir- cumstances and to the physical eye, invisible.⁶⁸ To convince French reformers to accept the risk of martyrdom, Calvin proceeds by means of another kind of deixis, by denigrating, pointing the fi nger of scorn and accusation at those who are unwilling to take this risk. Caricature dominates in Calvin’s second treatise, the Excuse de Jehan Cal- vin, a Messieurs les Nicodemites, sur la complaincte qu’ilz font de sa trop grand’ rigueur (“Excuse of Jean Calvin to Messieurs the Nicodemites in Response to Th eir Complaint about His Great Strictness”) (1544). Th e word “excuse” in the title is to be translated into English through the legal term “essoin” (an “excuse” for not appearing at court), and, in this treatise, Calvin sets out to explain why he does not accept the excuses of the French converts in response to his accusations that they continue practicing Catholicism. His “excuse” is also an indictment of French reformers, whom Calvin calls in the treatise “Nicodemites” in an ironic reference to the biblical Nicode- mus: “As they borrow the name of Nicodemus and make a shield out of it pretending to imitate him, I too will call them by this name for the time being. . . . For in what do they resemble Nicodemus? Th ey say, it’s that he came to see the Lord at night without declaring himself to be one of his disciples.”⁶⁹ Th e designation “Nicodemite” contains in a nutshell the argu- ment presented by the French reformers in their own defense: they claim to adore Christ as did the biblical Nicodemus, that is, in secret. Th rough the name, Calvin attributes a voice and an argument, indeed a distinct iden- tity, to his adversaries.⁷⁰ Th is attribution allows him to polemicize against them by challenging their alleged self-defi nition as imitators of Nicodemus on the basis of biblical evidence. He points to two biblical passages, Nico- demus’s open defense of Christ in the sanhedrin and his participation, after the crucifi xion, in the ritual preparation of Christ’s body for burial.⁷¹ Th e sanhedrin, historically the “Supreme Court of Chief Priests” in Jerusalem (who, in historical reality, assembled only with the consent of the Roman rulers), are depicted in the Gospels as the false accusers of Christ.⁷² Calvin scandalous evidence 91 vividly describes the scene in which Nicodemus openly proclaims his faith, the danger of persecution notwithstanding:

Let us remark the moment. Here are the priests, the Pharisees, and all the other enemies of the truth who are exulting themselves as if they had won. On the other side, the poor faithful are very frightened [estonnez] and al- most in despair [quasi esperduz], seeing their master and savior, in whom they have laid all their hope, has passed away; and his body is hanging on the gallows between criminals and brigands. Th e Pharisees, scribes, and priests are listening carefully [sont aux escoutes] to see if anyone dares to open his mouth. For they are not content to have executed him but also want his memory to be extinguished. Th ey are still enfl amed by the rage that they had applied against his person and are eager now to use it against all his members. Th e crowd is also agitated, so that Nicodemus can be cer- tain that he would provoke everyone’s rage [la fureur] by showing himself [en se monstrant] openly as disciple and friend of Christ. Nonetheless, he manifestly professes his faith [en faict profession evidente], in front of every- one. He fears not shame and disgrace. He fears not hatred. He fears not a riot. He fears not persecution. Th is is what it means to nicodemize!⁷³

Calvin practices here his technique of adding dramatic details to biblical scenes and of further dramatizing the action by using lively or colloquial expressions—a technique noted by William Bouwsma.⁷⁴ He depicts Ni- codemus as coming forth to show his allegiance to Christ by volunteering to prepare his burial with the Pharisees and the riotous crowd in the fore- ground and the dead Christ in the background. At this crucial moment, when (in Calvin’s presentation) Christ (formerly the victim of false accusa- tion, now the very fi gure of Truth) is unrecognized by all and about to be forgotten, Nicodemus stands as the hyperbolic example of the one who does not listen to the slanderers but is willing to come forth and testify (en se monstrant), even though he is himself about to fall victim to slander and accusation.⁷⁵ Calvin can now speak with contempt about the Nicodemites’ obstinate refusal to practice their religion publicly:

their opinion is that they remain decent [se maintienent encore honneste- ment] as long as they can hide under the garment of Nicodemus. . . . At least this is what they think. For, in truth, as each of them tried to pull a piece of the garment to cover himself, through their tugging this way and that way, they tore it completely, not simply into pieces but into shreds.⁷⁶

Th is mocking exposure of the Nicodemites is diametrically opposed to the nakedness of Truth (the voluntary self-exposure of Nicodemus). But 92 scandalous evidence

Calvin’s argument also serves to show that the revelation of the truth is inevitable, and the means can just as well be the exposure of the false, who can no longer “remain decent” or “honest” (covering their nakedness and their shame). Th e mocking representation of the “Nicodemites” tugging on Nicodemus’s garment until it is in shreds evokes the humiliation of self- exposure along with the biblical connection between nakedness and shame. Calvin’s last disdainful remark that the “Nicodemites” resemble the bibli- cal Nicodemus only in that one respect, that they too “bury” (ensevelis- sent) Christ, turns Nicodemus and the Nicodemites into each other’s per- fect chiasmic opposite: Nicodemus’ literally enshrouds the physical body of Christ, thus contributing to his resurrection, while the Nicodemites metaphorically cover up “the spiritual Christ” and thus condemn him to oblivion.⁷⁷ In his treatise Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (“Against the Fantastic and Furious Sect of Libertines, Who Call Th emselves Spiritual”) (1547), Calvin attacks a mystical group with a radical view of grace. Jean Wirth suggests that instead of taking on prominent Libertine thinkers, those erudite scholars who question the authority of scripture (Brunfels) or argue for an allegorical interpretation of it (Agrippa), Calvin attacks rather insignifi cant fi gures like Quintin and Pocque.⁷⁸ Th e explanation for this may lie in the fact that these “Lib- ertines” enjoy the patronage of aristocratic women, like the king’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, as in the case of Pocque, and aristocratic women in Rouen, as in the case of the Franciscan monk who spreads Libertine doctrines in town (against whom Calvin writes a treatise two years after attacking Pocque and his followers). Th e “incomprehensible and dubious words” of the Libertines are then dangerous because they can appeal to those whose support Calvin would like to obtain.⁷⁹ To expose them is once again his rhetorical procedure: “If there were a way not to render public their disgrace [turpitude], and by doing so one would not lend them sup- port, I would gladly refrain from it. But because it has to be done in order to prevent them from doing evil, I point the fi nger at them [je les monstre au doigt], and no one should by off ended by it.”⁸⁰ While in French the idiomatic expression “to point out with the fi nger” (monstrer au doigt), of- ten used by Calvin to describe his own procedures, carries the meaning “[to] point out evidently, lead one (as it were) by the hand unto a thing” (Cotgrave),⁸¹ the index fi nger also serves as the gesture of accusation, as the fi nger of scorn. Evidence in Calvin’s polemical treatises (as in the ear- scandalous evidence 93 lier books fabricated in Neuchâtel) always carries an aff ective charge. Its perlocutionary force is to render the adversary contemptible. To expose the adversary is “to paint these monsters in such vivid colors that anyone will be able to recognize them from afar and beware” (de peindre si bien au vif ces monstres, que chascun les pourra appercevoir de loing, pour s’en donner garde).⁸² Th e rhetorical force of vivid pejorative images that “point out” the adversary’s depravity “evidently” is increased by the fact that “monster” is derived from the Latin monstrum, “omen,” or, literally, “that which has been shown.” Th e “monstrous” adversary “reveals” his or her own mon- strosity in Calvin’s treatises. Calvin’s “monsters” are not prodigies of nature like Luther’s “Monk Calf” (a deformed calf that Luther makes into the allegory of the Pope in a virulent satirical pamphlet that he authors to- gether with Melanchthon) but rather ordinary people whose “monstrosity” lies in their spiritual and physically invisible failings, which Calvin exposes through caricature.⁸³ In his treatise against the “Spiritual Libertines,” Cal- vin goes a step further than in his earlier treatise against the “Nicodemites”: he mentions the leaders of the “sect” by name, for, as he asserts, they are “like dangerous beasts that need to be branded.”⁸⁴ Th e condemnation and execution of Quintin, one of the Libertine leaders named in his Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse, makes the judicial order in France seem mo- mentarily to coincide with providential order. Analyzing the visual metaphors in Calvin’s and his followers’ theol- ogy, William Dryness argues that “Protestants who follow Calvin . . . will imagine themselves as players in the theater of creation, see themselves, in other words, as being ‘absorbed’ by and into the redemptive story that God is directing.”⁸⁵ Readers encounter vivid description and emotional appeals in the text, which are staged in their mental theaters; it is the reader’s own social and phenomenological world that is transformed into the drama of Providence.⁸⁶ Th is means that not only the Calvinist subject but also his “others,” those around him, play a part in the Providential theater, and their roles are divided sharply into those who defend and exalt Truth and those “false accusers,” who are her enemies. In this world into which the faithful are absorbed, the wicked appear with more clarity than the good. It is not by chance that Calvin objects to the Libertines’ teaching that sin has been abolished and that what other religions call “sin” is mere “imagi- nation” and presumption (the French cuyder meaning both). In Calvin’s eyes it is perhaps the gravest mistake to think that one has no spiritual enemy; in fact, before the certainty about salvation can be mediated in 94 scandalous evidence

Protestantism through the asceticism of everyday life (as Weber argues), the Calvinist subject relies on the anxiety-producing but ultimately also reassuring presence of “enemies” and “stumbling blocks.” As Calvin puts it, the faithful are “lambs in the midst of wolves.”⁸⁷ To dispel views that the spiritual Quintin died the death of a martyr, Calvin remarks that God delays his judgment of “the wicked and of the persecutors of the Church, leaving them unpunished for a while, not be- cause he is asleep or because he is unable to bring remedy, but much rather because he contemptuously laughs [il se moque] at their audacity.”⁸⁸ Th e contemptuous, mocking laughter that informs Calvin’s caricatures im- plies the corresponding disdainful regard of divine judgment, but, while it performs this apocalyptic referencing, it also breaks up the divine gaze into the gaze of the readers. Calvin uses his rhetoric of description to ap- peal to and solicit the judgment of his readers. Adopting the perspective of the external, divine judge, to which Holbein’s Truth silently gestures, the rhetoric of the polemical treatises is at once pointing to this invisible truth that is elsewhere but can be rendered present through the Word, and to the “accuser,” the adversary, whose wickedness, even “monstrosity,” it renders evident. Martyrs and monsters point to the same truth in Calvin’s polemi- cal treatises, but while his pen did not write the testimony of martyrs (this task was executed by Jean Crespin and later, more superbly, by Agrippa d’Aubigné), it testifi es with rhetorical force and vigor to the monstrosity of others. Serene Jones suggests that Calvin takes on a particularly radical group of French humanists in France because he competes with them for the fi - nancial support of the French aristocracy.⁸⁹ Her argument provides a pos- sible explanation for Calvin’s particularly scornful attack on Rabelais in the treatise De scandalis (“On Scandals”) (1551) as one of the monstrously irreverent “mockers” who after “having tasted the Gospels” were struck by a “blindness” because they profaned the “pledge of eternal life” with “rib- ald mockery.”⁹⁰ Indeed, Rabelais made bids for the patronage of important aristocrats with sympathies for the Reformation. His Tiers livre (published in 1546) is dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre. His Quart livre is dedicated to the Cardinal Odet de Chastillon, a member of a powerful aristocratic family with two brothers, Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, and Gaspar de Coligny, Admiral of France, both converted to Calvinism. In his dedicatory epistle to Henri Odet de Chastillon, Rabelais, perhaps to underscore his loyalty to the crown as he also courts the support of a scandalous evidence 95 patron who can be attacked as a “heretic,” resorts, as Calvin did earlier, to the image of the monarch-patron who wisely discerns calumny. He fi rst remembers the past by recalling that François I had his books read to him by a fi dele Anagnoste (“a faithful reader,” a word of Rabelaisian coinage); then he remarks that the current king, Henri II, granted permission (pri- vilege) for the printing of the Quart livre, which functions as a “protection” against the “slanderers” (de maniere que pour moy il vous avoit octroyé et par- ticuliere protection contre les calumniateurs). Rabelais calls the royal privilege (permission to print granting legal rights to the author and the printer) an evangile, but in his punning wording, rather than lending a metaphysical meaning to social and political reality, the biblical word “gospel” gains a concrete sense. It is good news indeed for Rabelais, the author, to have the monarch’s support.⁹¹ In the same book, Rabelais rejects Calvin’s theologization of the physi- cal world by retorting to Calvin’s accusations that those who propagate “perfection” through dogmatic rigor rather than living by nature are not children of Nature (Physis) but truly monstrous children of “Antinature” (Antiphysie).⁹² It is perhaps a hint at the role of slander that Rabelais fi gures the monstrous bodies of the children of Antinature not only with spherical heads “entirely round like a ball,” upon which they roll upside down, with bulging eyes glued to their heads as heels are glued to shoes, with their legs in the air, but also with “ears pricked up and large like those of a don- key.”⁹³ Calvin and the author’s other critics targeted in this passage have donkey’s ears because they listen to slander and spread it in their books. Th e humanist culture that Erasmus, Calvin, and Rabelais shared allowed them to turn the tables on adversaries’ accusations by rhetorical means. While Erasmus adds the biblical face of evil to humanistic images of the slanderer to darken the portrait of the adversary, and Calvin construes him as monstrous to a spiritual eye, Rabelais’s ridicule in turn reveals Calvin’s nonphysical vision itself as a monstrosity that acts in a physical, natural, and social world. However, Calvinist polemical literature, as we shall see in the next chapter, fi nds a way to turn Rabelais’s clever physical satire to its own spiritual use. four Th e Kitchen and the Digest

Th e “Angelic Doctor,” Th omas Aquinas, defi nes “derision” as a serious sin whose aim is the shaming of the other.¹ Renaissance authors such as the Dutch humanist Erasmus and the French poet Joachim du Bellay, how- ever, strive to reconcile classical satire with Christian morality by promot- ing the kind of satire that has a moral function (“high satire”), whose aim is to “correct the vices, not to attack persons.” Humanists defend it as an “honest” discourse with universal moral validity. What then happens when authors who are converted to the truth expressed through the scriptural Word—whose goal is no longer the correction, let alone the salvation, of the spurned other—resort to a form of satire, adopting its moral justifi ca- tion for their own ends? Converted from an education in humanism, law, and theology to the study and predication of the Word, these polemicists, pastors, and scholars no longer share Erasmus’s skeptical allowance for a variety of beliefs concerning matters that are adiaphora (indiff erent), and even less do they share his concern for decorum. Although Calvin’s ra- tionalization of the scriptures as “doctrine” denies the ability of human reason to attain knowledge and qualifi es all forms of human science as “fi c- the kitchen and the digest 97 tions,” polemicists who undertake the defense of Calvin’s doctrines make abundant use of literary culture, both erudite and popular. In Geneva, a derisory form of satire is transformed into a means of transmitting ideas that defi ne faith and selfhood in that city; the Calvinist elite of pastors, theologians, and polemicists hope to smuggle these ideas into France and disseminate them among French Huguenots (as French reformers were called after 1560). calvin and pierre viret: lowering the tone in geneva

In a famous preface to Pierre Viret’s Disputations chrestiennes (“Christian Disputations,” 1544), Calvin endorses ridicule and, more specifi cally, a “joyous and pleasant manner of teaching.”² It is the Horatian dictum of utile dulci, teaching and delighting, that the reformer defends while also conceding, “[I]t is true that doctrine alone, if we know that it is good and useful, is suffi cient for us.”³ Calvin fi rmly believed in the gap separating “human reason” from “divine reason” and, like Erasmus, believed also that this gap required rhetorical mediation; hence, to resort to satire was just an- other means to the same end, the propagation of the Word. Calvin’s pref- ace may also have served the purpose of justifying the strange combination of diff erent registers, the satirical and the theological, in Viret’s work. To ward off censure from religious and political authorities in Geneva who did not always see the point in taking “delight” in the austere matters of faith, Calvin writes: “To ensure that no one . . . feels disgusted by reading it, it needs to be noted that one can dispute about the matters of Christianity in two ways: fi rst, by criticizing the foolish superstitions that have taken root among Christians under the false pretence of religion, although they are no more than errors whose aim is to reverse and destroy Christian- ity; second, by demonstrating [en monstrant] the simple and pure truth, as God has revealed it through his sacred Word.”⁴ Satire, in its Calvinist incarnation, was intended to attack errors and thus indirectly to promote faith. One single but fi rmly drawn limit (scripture could not be the target of satire, only its benefi ciary) gave authors great latitude in using rhetorical means of evidentia, in “showing” (by rhetorical means, rather than “dem- onstrating” through logical or theological arguments, as the Standard En- glish translation of the Institutes suggests) the vices and corruptions of the 98 the kitchen and the digest

Catholic tradition. Th is negative side of the adversary is constructed by rhetorical and poetic means, and by these means, the adversary’s error is also made to encompass his entire being. What satire creates is a negative ontology in which the being of a topsy-turvy world is confi rmed—and in- deed granted—in the evidence of the description and in the performance of ridicule.

“poetic theology”

Th e best way of showing something is by taking it apart. Pierre Viret tack- led Catholic theology. Th e studious and precocious convert to Calvinism, who broke off his studies at the rigorous College of Montaigu at the age of twenty-two, knew Catholicism very well. All his life, as an itinerant preacher and a prolifi c author of polemical works, second only to Calvin,⁵ he also strove to empower the Word by building a better social world (in accordance with his faith), and by destroying, in the process, an old world that was already crumbling.⁶ Viret distinguished himself through his “in- tellectual vitality,”⁷ his avid interest in all forms of studies, and through his eloquence. Unlike Calvin, in his polemical works he limited himself to brief references to scripture, and preferred to rely on a rhetorical kind of evidence, on analogy and description. He exploited the form of dialogue, usually with four interlocutors. Both the Disputations chrestiennes (1544) and its later, expanded version, La Physique papale (1552), provide examples of rhetorical argumentation. In the Physique, a fi ctional interlocutor, Hilary, explains that there are two ways of presenting a topic: either one exposes the parts successively, point by point, or one presents the whole at once,

as if we placed in front of our eyes the entire building, then let us see it dis- solve into all its parts and show point by point, piece by piece, everything that is contained in each part and in the whole.⁸

Th e successive treatment of parts, the method of a theological treatise di- vided into articles, does not provide the same vivid evidence as the presen- tation of the entire argument in one concrete image. Th e “papist market- place” in the Livre des marchans is such a rhetorical image. In the Physique, this image is provided by the physical sciences (alchemy, medicine, bath- the kitchen and the digest 99 ing, etc.) to which Catholic theology, purportedly devoid of any spiritual knowledge, is likened. Viret treats the “superstitions” of Catholicism in an orderly fashion while his rhetorical procedures “ruin” its “edifi ce.” It is the same analogy of the “edifi ce” that allows Th éodore de Bèze to refuse any theological compromise on the question of the Eucharist at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1560. In the Harangue des ministres de la parole de dieu, his ad- dress to the assembly of clerics, royal family, and aristocrats printed in the aftermath of the colloquy, he argues that Catholic theology is a “shabby building” that scholastic doctors have built by “adding articles to articles, as if the Christian religion were an edifi ce that is never completed.”⁹ Viret parodies the age-old idea of a transition between pagan culture and Christianity that was fi rst explored in late antiquity in allegorical in- terpretations of classical works and then pursued with renewed interest and vigor in the Renaissance.¹⁰ “Pagan” culture yielded mere “fi ctions” and “fabrications,” that is, knowledge that has no epistemological value because it is human rather than divine in origin. Catholicism is a succession and an ill-willed appropriation of this “pagan” culture. It has made additions to the “edifi ces” (the “fi ctions” or “fabrications”) that the “pagans” con- trived, and it has done so to malicious ends. Th is view allows the polemi- cist to cite, in a fragmented and decontextualized fashion, both classical- humanist culture and Catholic theology and rites, in such a way that the human “science” and “poetry” contained in the former become tools for debunking the latter. In the Disputations, Viret uses the phrase “poetic theology” to name a broad range of knowledge prior to revelation including pagan mythol- ogy, Homer, Virgil, and Horace, classical philosophy and alchemy, and oral knowledge from popular legends, rumors, and old wives’ tales that Viret’s characters recall having heard in their childhood.¹¹ Th e question about the location of purgatory (Calvinism altogether rejects purgatory as a legitimate concept) is transformed in the dialogue “Th e Alchemy of Pur- gatory” into an eff ort to archive the false or fabled knowledge from diff er- ent geographic regions: the poetic underworld culled from the “myths of poets” who recount tales about the travels of Ulysses, Th eseus, and Aeneas to Hades; the history of funerary rites in ancient Rome; accounts of the existence of similar burial customs in the French Pyrenees; a Catholic leg- end that describes the mountain Aetna as the mouth of hell and purgatory; superstition holding that two mountains in Norway, the “Hethelberg” and 100 the kitchen and the digest

“Nadhegrin,” are places where one can descend to the infernal regions;¹² similar legends circulating about mountains in Scotland and Th uringia; and beliefs that the “pits of Saint Patrick” in Ireland are the gates of purga- tory and hell.¹³ All these “fi ctions” constitute in Viret’s Disputations what Michel de Certeau calls in another context the “unconscious”—knowledge that is pre-revelation because it is derived from classical antiquity, from a local and oral culture, or from one’s childhood. Th ese widely diff erent sources are treated (and leveled) as equally “useful” forms of ignorance constituting the “fi ctions” that enter into the poetic theology of a Christian Europe. Th eir sole usefulness consists in the fact that they make possible the debunking or “mocking” of the ill-willed “fi ctions” of Catholicism.¹⁴ Th e categorical and singular emphasis Calvinism places on scripture, which in turn is fi xed through new authorized vernacular translations and print, renders all other cultures of letters (modern and classical, scientifi c, poetic, or historical) “primitive” (meaning pre-scriptural); this reasoning identifi es Catholicism as the only willful and hence ill-willed ignorance of revelation. Viret repeatedly presents Catholicism as a perverted use of these other, more innocent “fi ctions.” For example, in the Disputations, he claims that the Catholic Church derived this doctrine of purgatory from the “pagan” customs of purgation. Th us the interlocutor Hilary maintains that while the Greeks and Romans recognized the purgative power of salt (evinced by the scenes of purgation in Homer and Virgil and by Proclus’s thesis that salt water is purgative because salt contains fi re), the Catholic Church appropriated salt (contained in holy water) from pagan alchemy to put it to malevolent ends. Catholic priests kindle people’s appetite with salt to entice them to eat the sacrifi cial host, which Hilary interprets as a comic form of the “eating of Christ.”¹⁵ Salt is also a commodity of the Church (in funeral ceremonies for which they charge money), which makes it into an instrument of the greed and hunger of the clergy who exploit the faithful (fi guratively “devour” them).¹⁶ Viret builds his own fi ction of the Eucha- ristic meal as “theophagy” (a derisory interpretation of the real presence) and “anthropophagy” (a fi gure for all sorts of abuses of those “faithful”), using images current in the 1540s and 1550s in Protestant propaganda, im- ages that become increasingly violent at the dawn of the civil wars as the “abuses” of Catholics will not only include material exploitation but also physical violence. By making a tabula rasa of old rationalities, Viret pre- pares a new rationality that is represented solely by Calvinism. the kitchen and the digest 101

Viret’s technique of decontextualized citation, which renders his books so disorienting for the modern reader, served many purposes in the lit- erature of vituperation. Rather than simply degrading and parodying the literature that he cites, Viret’s citations serve another purpose: with the help of titles, summaries, notes, and indexes in his books, Viret’s massively referential dialogues render ideas from a broad range of works accessible. Viret’s dialogues function as a medium of transmission, a digest of ideas. Reading Viret, one is reminded of some of the episodes (for example, the “frozen words”) in Rabelais’s Quart livre, when the travelers and interlocu- tors try to explain an experience by citing erudite knowledge and multiply references that are historical, anecdotal, and literary—to no avail. Viret was probably familiar with the works of Rabelais, and he certainly knew the works of Agrippa von Nettesheim (whom he often quotes), both of whom at once created encyclopedias of learning and treated the vanity of erudition. In Viret’s books, erudite knowledge has similarly lost its value to explain the world (at least from a strict Calvinist standpoint). Unlike in Rabelais, where these references represent the disorientation of the travel- ers, however learned, in a fragmented world whose unity erudition can no longer restore, in Viret’s books, each piece of erudition orients the read- ers toward his theological and ideological message. All information can be used, if manipulated, to discredit Catholicism and, indirectly, to support Calvinist doctrine. It is likely that Viret’s books attained popularity with readers because the technique of compiling learning and ordering it ac- cording to subjects, keeping all the information ready for later use, was the predominant method of processing information for early modern scholars. Th e reader of Viret’s books fi nds all the information already gathered and ordered, except that its sole usefulness consists in defending the vigorous logic of Calvinist doctrine. the poetics of ragout: the satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale

“What harm can it do to me if I read everything?”—asks the French poet Clément Marot, who stood fi rmly in two literary traditions, biblical (his translations of the Psalms into French were completed by Th éodore de Bèze) and worldly. Marot explains that “reading everything” (tout lire) can- 102 the kitchen and the digest not do him any harm, because he has received the “sense of choice” (sens d’elire) as a divine gift, permitting him to proceed on his own to accept everything that accords with scripture and to reject everything that does not.¹⁷ Marot’s defense of his voracious literary appetite fi nds its counter- part in the hyper-learning idealized by Rabelais’s hero Pantagruel (whom the narrator calls an “abyss of learning”).¹⁸ Both these authors, Rabelais and Marot, read much and incorporated their readings into their literary creations. Th ey also both promoted and popularized reading. Calvinist au- thors like Pierre Viret followed in their footsteps, although with a diff er- ence. Th ese polemicists reserved the right “to read everything”; however, they also exercised their right to reject everything—everything but scrip- ture, that is. Reading as an exercise in choice is the sole method of the Satyres chres- tiennes de la cuisine papale (1560), a poetic exercise in Calvinist satire that owes its form to Marot’s octosyllabic coq-à-l’âne (satiric poems in which the subject changes abruptly through jumps from the “cock” to the “don- key,” or from one non sequitur to another), rather than to classical satire, although its author clearly was a reader of both—and of much more. Th e Satyres chrestiennes was printed anonymously as a libelle (in octavo format) by the Genevan editor Conrad Badius. Th e anonymity of the publication suggests caution on the part of author and printer, who could not be fully confi dent of the reader’s approval, as the libelle represents an experiment in the polemical use of poetry, demonstrating “in an exemplary fashion that Geneva was working hard to defi ne what was allowed and what was forbid- den in print.”¹⁹ Th e Satyres chrestiennes is also a good example of the technique of rhetor- ical rather than theological argumentation, of representing the argument in one image, “the papal kitchen,” which is successively broken up into parts in the description. Th e image of the “kitchen” recalls the late-medieval comic theater (where hell is represented as a kitchen and a topsy-turvy world ruled by a woman) and the humanist topos of the feast. Th is image also cites Calvin’s Institutes, in which the theologian accuses Catholics of turning their “belly” into their god and the church into their “kitchen,” in which church members tend to the fabricated fi re of their religion, drawing diff erent benefi ts from it (some get the juicy bits, others mere morsels), but not minding, for they all need the “fi re” of their kitchen.²⁰ Th e preface is the only part of the book written in prose and in a direct, serious voice; in the kitchen and the digest 103 it the author echoes Calvin’s preface to Viret’s Disputations chrestiennes in the form of a personal confession: “[I]n my young age, theology was not my profession and I spent little time reading Scripture. . . . But having come across certain writings that were facetious but altogether Christian, our gracious God unveiled to me the secrets of his Word, and, immedi- ately, I was horrifi ed by the abyss into which I had fallen.”²¹ Th e author’s story of conversion provoked by the reading of these “facetious writings” provides the apology for his ars poetica, announcing an experiment in radi- cally lowering the tone in order to get his serious message across while also gaining the benevolence of an audience which includes both austere read- ers of scripture and those who enjoy “facetious” and amusing readings. Th e Satyres chrestiennes is a poetic edifi ce that at once creates the false be- ing of Catholicism and destroys it: “[I]n order to destroy a building one has to begin by . . . demolishing the kitchen.”²² Th is poetic edifi ce is made up of a preface, written in prose, a preliminary poem, eight poems called “sat- ires” of several hundred lines, interrupted by a comic “complaint” placed between the “Seventh” and the “Eighth” satires, and six epigrams that close the book. Th ese heterogeneous pieces anticipate the form of the menippean satire that will emerge at the end of the century and will be used as a po- lemical tool against the ultra-Catholic party by authors who support the future King Henri IV. In addition to the diff erent literary forms, marginal notes in French and Latin in the Satyres chrestiennes provide the reader with explanations of diffi cult words and with summaries, while also referring him to a storehouse of erudition ranging from Greek and Latin history, poetry, and French history to other polemical books and authors. Th e eight satires describe the various places, persons, and events of the “papal kitchen”: (1) its “building,” (2) its “garden,” (3) its “offi cers,” (4) its “laundry” and its “utensils,” (5) a “feast” in the kitchen, (6) a second (peni- tential) “feast,” (7) an “after-dinner colloquium,” and (8) the “trouble” of the feast. Th ese satires are interspersed with stories to add to the variety, and the “Seventh Satire” is a dialogue among three “papists.” Th e author comes close to composing a single work that imitates the multiple meanings of the word satyre listed in Robert Estienne’s Th esaurus Linguae Latinae:

A poem written in more than one metric form or about several subjects. An abusive poem [carmen maledicum] composed to censure people’s vices (like the satires of Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius). 104 the kitchen and the digest

A song that abounds [satium] in persons and actions. A plate fi lled [a satyra lance] with many varied fruits that was off ered to the gods by the ancients. Full law [lege satura] [which combines together many provisions in one single law]. A “stuff ed” genre that refers to many diff erent subjects [a defi nition bor- rowed from Varro]. A plate of dried fruit, peeled barley, and pine nuts sprinkled with unfer- mented wine. Laughable and disgraceful songs that resemble the songs of Greek satyrs.²³

Th e word “satyres” in the title may very well indicate that the poem is an off hand imitation of the object designated by this medley of defi nitions. Th e Satyres chrestiennes is a prosimetron form (mixing prose and verse), it abounds in actions and persons, it is an abusive poem that cites Horace and Juvenal (although it is nothing like their satires), it is a mock culinary treatise, it proposes to explain the legal foundation of the monarchy, and it is a “laughable” and “disgraceful” work that disregards decorum as defi ned by Calvin in his preface to Viret’s Disputations. Th e title promises a satirical representation of Catholicism as the court of Bacchus (the pope) reveling in the company of satyrs (4: 172). Th e word “satyres,” however, also refers the reader to Conrad Badius’s printer’s mark; through this mark, it gestures to the fi gure of the satyr as the revealer of divine Truth. Th e strategic place- ment of this mark on the title page reminds the reader that the libelle is engaged in gaining prominence and reputation for the one and sole author- ity of scripture (Figure 2). Th e Satyres chrestiennes builds the image of the “papal kitchen” out of citations, many of which have a culinary signifi cance: the names of cooks (and martyrs) that form a comic catalogue at the beginning of the “First Satire,” Juvenal’s satire on the luxurious lifestyle of Roman aristocrats whose litter is followed by their kitchen, lists of dishes from fi fteenth- century culinary treatise author Platina as well as Rabelais, Aulus Gellius on the custom of mutatio (mutual invitations exchanged among Roman aristocrats), Herodotus on the Libyan origins of the Greek custom of ritual ululation, and a macaronic war of cooks at the end of the “Eighth Sat- ire,” in which dishes and saucepans serve as weapons. Th e polemical argu- ment to which the rhetoric of description lends itself shows the “dishes” the kitchen and the digest 105 of the “papal kitchen” to be the unpalatable dealings of the Roman Church. Th e author presents himself, like Marot, as someone standing in two literary traditions. He has benefi ted from the restoration of scripture to its “pure” Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources:

Now, reader (if you believe my true story) It happened on a sunny morning When Hebrew, Greek, and Latin Rendered in both prose and verse, Th e rose pots uncovered And the earth all around [en rondeur] Was fi lled with a sweet smell [bonne odeur]. (1:76–82)

Likening the “restoration” of scripture to the removal of the “pots” that cover the roses refers both to the uncovering of the “many knaveries” (Cotgrave) of the Catholic Church and to the “sweet odor” (a metaphor of Christ) that fi lls the spherical earth (en rondeur). Th e poet recalls the eye-opening experience of reading scripture that allowed him to see the construction of the “papal kitchen” and its “fabrications” ( fabriques) (1: 86). Th is reference to the biblical Word as the foundation of vision recalls Calvin’s famous comparison of the scriptures to spectacles; however, the rhetoric of description that we fi nd in the Satyres chrestiennes is not in- debted to the Bible but to a poetic and literary tradition. Although the theological stance of the book is clear—it never ceases to defend scripture and a specifi cally biblical vision of the universe—the Bible is not among the works cited in it. Th is libelle resorts to poetics, rather than to apologetics, to fi ght.²⁴ Th e problem with the theologians of the “papal kitchen” is that they do not “thirst” for the “good beverage” of scripture and “have never drunk from it” (1: 53–56). Elsewhere, scripture is fi gured as “sugar” that is missing from the “papal kitchen” (3: 306– 316). Th e opposition that allows the poet to construct the antiworld of the pa- pal kitchen is thus not a theological one between idolatry and authentic faith but an “aesthetic” one between good- and bad-tasting, wholesome and poisonous food: “[R]eader, do not touch this poisoned meat . . . but take joyous refreshment in this writing” (1: 60, 64–65). Th e numerous cita- tions from Calvin, Viret, Bèze, Marcourt, Catholic polemical literature, Erasmus, Platina, Horace, Juvenal, Cornelius Agrippa, Villon, Gringore, 106 the kitchen and the digest

Marot, Rabelais, and, to lower the register even further, the medieval Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin, the famous comedian Jean du Pont-Alais (who went by the artistic alias Songecreux), and the conjurer Maître Gonin seem to have been copied out of the commonplace book of an author who is an insatiable reader of both erudite and popular literature and theater. Th e poet’s ars poetica reveals the precarious nature of this enterprise:

Up! Strike pen and writing box. Reader, I will write you the history Of the grand cuisine, Of Melusine’s pleasures. I will describe to you all its fragrant places, Where a tempest stirs up and mixes Th e smoky winds of the world. (1: 25– 29)

Th e poet announces that he will write the “history” of the papal kitchen, mixing the erudite with the culinary register. Poetry is polemics when the pen strikes like a weapon. Th is poetry is also cosmological, as it tra- verses the material terrestrial world (dominated by insalubrious wetness, darkness, and winds) and the celestial one dominated by “Apollo,” or the sun:

Now return your face True Apollo to me And make me glide through this mist [en ces brouillars] Round like a ball [Rond rondement comme une boule] And make my plume in the end fl y across the fi rmament To glorify you from century to century. (1: 62– 75)

Ptolemaic cosmography often symbolically designates theological notions in Calvinist theology; for example, Calvin, Viret, and Bèze use the sun as an analogy for the Trinity, while the “moon” serves as the image of the church. Lunar eclipse, says Pierre Viret,

occurs when the moon is exactly facing the sun and the earth comes be- tween them preventing the moon from receiving the light of the sun, which it is accustomed to receive; the same happens to the clergy when their sins become an obscure cloud [comme une nuée obscure] and an obstacle pre- the kitchen and the digest 107

venting God’s favor and grace to reach them, and when a fog and darkness of ignorance [un brouillas et des ténèbres d’ignorances] prevent them from seeing Christ.²⁵

Similarly, the emblem of lunar eclipse in Bèze’s Vrais Pourtraits (1581) de- scribes the church that has been obscured by “human wisdom” (Figure 16). It is the image of darkness and fog (brouillars) that is cited in the descrip- tion of the “papal kitchen” in the Satyres chrestiennes. Th is locality is dark (tenebreux territoire) because the light of scripture is missing (“Th e Word of God, although it is well-acknowledged, / Does not beam on you,” 5: 14, 15–16) and wet from “salty and dirty” (sale et salé) holy water (5: 26), with which the papists replace pagan rites of purgation and use it to render the fl ock hungry and lewd (salace, 5: 42). Dark and foggy imply the “eclipsed” or corrupt state of the church and its exclusion from grace (grace is sym- bolized by the celestial sphere). Another emblem shows the sun as a face and the full moon, also as a face, turned toward the sun and benefi ting from its light (Figure 17). Just as in Calvinist cosmography, in which the light of the sun withdraws the moon from the attraction of the Earth, po- etry is a movement from the “foggy” “elemental region” (the place of inces- sant movement and change) toward the “fi rmament,” the “celestial sphere,” through the intervention of grace, fi gured by Apollo, turning his face, the sun sending its rays, toward the poet. Th e author of the Satyres chrestiennes refashions poetic inspiration as the intervention of divine grace. In the next chapter, we shall see that Ronsard presents poetry as a Herculean eff ort in his poetic contest with Protestant polemicists; the Satyres chrestiennes, how- ever, opposes mere poetic eff ort as an ineff ective means to obtaining grace, which it uses as the sole agent of elevation and, consequently, as the sole guarantor of poetic immortality. In the ambiguous image of the misty atmosphere (brouillars) that also denotes scrap papers (brouillars or papiers brouillars) on which “we write things carelesly, or at randome [sic]” (Cotgrave), the poetic text itself is de- valued as temporal and random. Th e poem’s composition is hasty, and, in citing other texts, the poet deliberately rejects the painstaking process of imitation that consists in an emulative appropriation through repeated reading, or (in Quintilian’s term) the “digestion,” of the original text(s), in favor of abrupt, decontextualized references. He swallows without chew- ing, and his careless and random manner of treating the sources defi nes the textual outcome. In the Satyres chrestiennes, instead of appropriation Figure 16. Lunar eclipse Emblem XLI. Th éodore de Bèze, Vrais pourtraits des hommes illvstres en piete et doctrine. . . . Plvs, qvaranteqvatre emblems (Geneva, 1581). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 565.81.208. Figure 17. Th e moon “facing” the sun Emblem XL. Th éodore de Bèze, Vrais pourtraits des hommes illvstres en piete et doctrine. . . . Plvs, qvaranteqva- tre emblems (Geneva, 1581). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 565.81.208. 110 the kitchen and the digest through imitation, we fi nd a process of hasty, “undigested” incorporation followed by ejection. Th e latter is the author’s most striking metaphor for the process of composition, which is the poetic technique that corresponds to his theological and ideological rejection of a complex tradition made up of texts and practices labeled as “papist.”²⁶ Th is manner of composition is not only defi ned by the theology behind the work (which denies the eff ec- tiveness of “works”); it also relies on an appropriation of the poetics of an older, pre-Pléiade generation of poets, such as Clément Marot and François Rabelais. It may strike the reader as surprising that the poet solicits Apollo’s in- tervention, especially since the “Second Satire” derides the use of images of saints in the Catholic Church by showing them as idolatrous transforma- tions of pagan gods. Among the images in the gallery of the “papal gar- den,” martyrs Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian are debunked as pretended heirs to the healing powers of Asclepius and Apollo (2: 104– 107). Th e refer- ence to Apollo as the fi gure of divine grace, however, falls outside this criti- cized Catholic tradition of translatio. It is the conscious use of a fi gure that has several functions: besides linking the work to the symbolic fi gure of the sun as the revealer of Truth common in Calvinist theology, it also evokes the god of poetry.²⁷ Th is poetic and indirect depiction of the intervention of grace through the fi gure of Apollo is a consciously forged symbol of the polemical strategy deployed in the text, which lacks a theological register, and in which poetry alone serves the polemicist in his fi ght. In the universe of the Satyres chrestiennes, the poetry dedicated to Apollo (whose intervention should make the poetic eff ort in the end superfl uous) is opposed to the purely “materialist” poetry of Catholicism. In the story that concludes the “Second Satire” about the tavern keeper “Trompillon” (a “second-cousin” to Villon), the poet Villon represents an Epicurean materi- alist poetics. Th is anecdote cites Villon’s famous refrain, “But where are the snows of yesteryear?” (Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?) in an off hand fash- ion and appropriates it to a specifi c end. Trompillon is the deceitful mer- chant who builds a snowman (the pope), dresses him up, and tells every one that a rich man has arrived to buy all sorts of goods. Many who sell their goods for credit to him are cheated because the snow melts, and they never receive their money. Th is story stands as an allegory for the deceitful “busi- ness” conducted in the Catholic Church, which cheats the faithful out of salvation (indeed, Trompillon would deserve a place in the Livre des mar- the kitchen and the digest 111 chans). It also takes issue with the materialism of the natural circle of death and regeneration in human life and in nature that Villon’s ballad celebrates. Th e image of the sun warming up the “atoms” and causing “these phan- toms” fi nally to melt in the poem is the fi gure of the incoherence of the material world that is revealed behind the mask of its apparent coherence, analogous to the deceitfulness of the Church that manifests itself once the mask of its apparent authority disappears. Villon’s poetry is rejected by the Calvinist author, who appropriates and distorts the poetic material implied by the proper name “Villon” that is contained and alluded to in the name “Trompillon.” In addition, “nature,” which forms the epistemological basis of rhetorical theories of imitation and abundance, is rejected as an inau- thentic source of knowledge. Calvinist theology deems nature to be devoid of logic and internal cohesion unless a divine design permeates it. Further- more, Calvinism labels all forms of naturalism as “Epicurean.” In the Insti- tutes, Calvin declares that the world of nature, without the intervention of grace, is no more than a random movement of “atoms,” whose substantial- ity is deceptive to the point that all knowledge derived from nature alone is false.²⁸ However, the Satyres chrestiennes rejects everything material and poetic by poetic means, and the poet’s theological position does not pre- vent him from the poetic fashioning of varied surfaces and multifaceted edifi ces. Th e role allotted to poetry remains ambiguous in this undertaking. Th e opposition between poetry and scripture and between the necessity of grace and the arbitrary play of human poesis considerably bring down the value of the poetic tradition that is being cited and imitated, and yet the capacity of poetry to “teach and delight,” to bring the reader to reading scripture, lends it a specifi c value. It is not poetry in general that the book defends but only its very specifi c evangelical use. Th is ambiguity of the role of poetry as represented in the Satyres chrestiennes has many implica- tions. Th e specifi c use made of poetry in the book is justifi ed by its singular and unlimited power of representation. In showing the vices of the Roman Church as unwholesome, disgusting dishes, the work also presents itself as a poetic “ragout” that the poet defi antly off ers up to the adversary, the “hypocrites” (caphars). Th e poem’s facture consists of a mishmash of cita- tions, which are given without a sense of respect for the original work, that is, without reference to the original context. However, it is precisely the technique of decontextualized citation carried to the extreme, the arbitrary 112 the kitchen and the digest choice of words guided only by their phonetic or graphic (that is, material) qualities, the abundance of puns, of “arbitrarily forged words” or “words forged for pleasure,”²⁹ that makes this work into a poetic model for po- lemical purposes. Most of the poem is devoted to grotesque images that describe the “dishes” of the “papal kitchen” that delight the “spongers” of this kitchen but disgust the poet who describes them. Satire is the poetic process through which the doctrines and rites—both of which are fi gured in the poem as “dishes”—of Catholicism become ridiculed and rejected. Th e laughing po- etic persona never partakes in the “fun” (the feast) which he laughs at.³⁰ Laughter freezes into a gesture of unbelief and contempt, the refusal to “eat” the new “potage” cooked up by the doctors of the Sorbonne, rebap- tized as “doubters” (doubteurs) (3: 338). Th e poet foretells that “people will laugh [on rira] at these new ragouts, / And soon everyone will say [chacun leur dira], / You have cooked up [broyez] these ragouts [ brouets], / So eat them!” (3: 340– 343). Th e poet recalls in the preface that his own conver- sion occurred while he was laughing (comme en riant), reading “frivolous,” probably satirical works. Sardonic laughter excludes any common ground with the other. Right after contemplating the butchery of the innocent, the poet declares that he must laugh:

Parsons, lethal mockeries [mortelles moqueries], Delight in the gentle sounds of their fl utes, And fl ay their lambs alive, And let them starve on the straw. Vicars (savage rabble) Soon perform a butchery [en font boucherie]. Seeing which my mouth must laugh [ faut que ma bouche rie]. (3: 97– 103)

Th is sardonic laughter can only be shared by a reformed community whose members reject Catholicism, its practices and its theology. Th e im- age evokes from afar the mythical singing contest between Apollo and Pan arbitrated by King Midas, who favored Pan’s fl ute to Apollo’s lyre. Apollo makes ears of a donkey grow upon Midas’s head to punish him for his unrefi ned judgment. In another version of the myth, the satyr Marsyas is fl ayed for competing with Apollo. Th e poet also imagines that he partakes the kitchen and the digest 113 in a musical competition whose goal is to ridicule (exposer à risée) (3: 476). Proserpine, the governess of the “papal kitchen,” has ears of a donkey like Midas (1: 146). She not only prefers Pan’s fl ute to Apollo’s lyre, but she is similarly fond of the cymbal (a version of the church bells) and the drum, both carnivalesque instruments. It is with this music that the Calvinist polemicist, who has identifi ed himself as the devotee of Apollo, competes. His task is to promote Apollo’s lyre by provoking in his readers displeasure and disgust for Proserpine’s music. His procedures are mimetic—in the Erasmian and Rabelaisian tradition—as he imitates the dangerous melody that he wants his readers to reject. Church bells are musical instruments for the perpetual feast that transpires in the papal kitchen, and the poem is a contrefactum, a new poem, a moral message or “chastisement,” composed for these old tunes borrowed from the Catholic Church: “I composed for these tunes / A song to chastise you with” (1: 130– 131). Th e “dishes” of the papal kitchen are not simply unpalatable, but also disgusting. Nuns wash the “dirty laundry” of the papal kitchen in con- vents or in toilets (the French word retraits signifi es both), and they wash it in a river of vomit whose sources are the “drunkenness” and “gluttony” of the priests. Th is exaggerated rhetoric of description constantly mobilizes moral and aesthetic ideas: “Arrogance” and the “love of luxury” are the detergents that they pour on the laundry. “Rage” and “tyranny” wrangle and beat the laundry, and “chicanery” folds it. Th e poet asks the reader if he can smell the insupportable stench that results from the fi lthy operation: “Can’t you smell the stench of putrefaction / Th at these cesspits [retraits], or should I say gluttons / With a doctoral degree [ gras-buez, literally, a pun on fat drunkard who has “graduated”], emit?” (4: 39– 40). Th e aesthetic of disgust continues in the description of the papal feast: the Introibo (the part of the Mass when the priest enters and walks to the altar) is depicted as a disgusting “salad invented by Celestin” (5: 98– 99). A marginal note in Latin explains that Pope Celestin added the Introibo to the liturgy of the Mass. Another note, in French, comments on the word “salad”: King Philip Augustus, a French king in the twelfth century, was the fi rst one to impose the decimes (royal revenue from taxing the clergy) to collect money for the Crusades, which were also called saladines (and although this refer- ence is implicit, the Catholic clergymen are perhaps also likened to Sala- din, the twelfth-century ruler of Egypt and Syria, who successfully resisted the Crusaders, and hence to the Muslim “infi dels”). Arbitrary references to 114 the kitchen and the digest both church history and French history are mixed up in this curious poetic “salad.” Disgust reaches its peak with the description of anthropophagy, the eating of (human fl esh), which makes the poet vomit:

Th at [human fl esh] is all that Th ese carnivores [charopiers] want, once Th ey have tasted a bite. Let us go on to laugh, and to vomit [gorge rendre]. (5: 335– 338)

Th e image of vomiting does not only refer to the rejection of Catholic doc- trines and rites, it also models the poetic procedures that make the poem function. Th ese procedures lack the rhetorical process of “innutrition” and “digestion” but consist of internalizing and rejecting, spitting out, the en- tire encyclopedia of “papal” science, poetry, liturgy, and history with the violence and rashness of the refusal of food by the stomach.³¹ Th is con- demnation, although it is not without moral overtones, is also comic, for it is a reversal of the regular process of swallowing and digesting, just as the poem, the poetic “ragout,” reverses the regular process of reading (fi gured as taking in, eating) and imitation (whose fi gure is digestion) and appears as a vomit of words, internalized only in order to be rejected and expelled from Calvinist culture to clear the table for scripture. Th e poetic persona who cites a broad range of learning also ejects the words in the same fash- ion as the mouth produces laughter or vomits undigested food. imitating erasmus and rabelais?

Th e poetic text presents itself as an unpalatable “feast of words” that will spoil the stomach of those in the Catholic camp, but which readers con- verted to the ideological camp of Calvinism will be able to enjoy in an indirect fashion.³² Th e preliminary poem invites the “hypocrites” (the Catholics) to the feast to off end them. Th is reasoning is a reference to one of Erasmus’s convivial colloquies, entitled Poludaitia (A Feast of Many Courses, 1527), a dialogue between Spudius, who is planning a dinner party, and Apicius, the gastronome. Apicius tells Spudius that, if he wishes to of- fend no one, he should invite no one, as it is impossible to please everyone. As a second resort, by making sure that there is variety in the dishes and the kitchen and the digest 115 the entertainments, one can minimize the damage and make sure that ev- eryone fi nds something to be pleased by. Th e poet willingly accepts that off ending guests is unavoidable and serves up to his “hypocrite readers” an unpalatable poetic “ragout”: “Fill you must, whatever may come, / Breeches and doublet with this ragout [brouet].”³³ Th e poetics of the ragout exagger- ates the rhetorical ideal of variety tempered by moderation that Erasmus’s colloquy promotes. Although Erasmus’s Praise of Folly may well be among those “certain facetious writings” that the author evokes in the preface, crediting them with bringing about his conversion, the relation of the text to the Erasmian model is tense, if not contentious. We are reminded of Erasmus’s declaration in his letter to the Louvain theologian Martin Dorp that “the merriment generated by wine can dispel certain vices which could not be corrected by sternness.”³⁴ Th e ridiculed fi gure of the tonsured priest or monk (tondus, pelez) whose shaved head likens him to a criminal and a fool (both of whom were shaved bald) makes the Satyres chrestiennes mi- metic, but instead of speaking as Folly, in imitation of the unrestrained, direct speech of Stultitia, the poet speaks to a foolish and degraded audi- ence, whose style (music, poetry, history, etc.) and whose taste he mimics and rejects. Th e author of the book cites Rabelais very often, including Gargantua and the Quart livre.³⁵ Th e author has, for this reason, been called a “Rabe- laisian”³⁶ and an amateur of Rabelais.³⁷ By adopting Rabelais’s linguistic games and his comic language, he does indeed carve out a niche for himself at some distance from Calvin’s strict condemnation of Rabelais as one of the “mockers of God” in Des scandales. However, a closer look reveals that the author’s intertextual strategy toward Rabelais consists in transforming through exaggeration the Rabelaisian rhetoric of cornucopia, while citing and exploiting the power of Rabelaisian satire. In the prologue of Gargantua, Rabelais’s fi ctional narrator famously compares the book to a marrow bone, which the reader is invited to open just as a dog “cracks open” the bone and “sucks out” the marrow. In the prologue of the Tiers livre, the author calls his book a “Diogenic barrel,” which is “inexhaustible” because as much wine as the author draws for the reader through the bung, he promises to funnel back in through the lid.³⁸ Rabelais’s image of the wine barrel returns in Bèze’s emblem of the drunkard, who discharges as much “liquid” through the “bung” of his barrel-belly as he pours in through his mouth—an allusion to the diuretic 116 the kitchen and the digest quality of wine (Figure 18). Th is image condemns wine drinking by de- picting those addicted to wine as grotesque bodies transformed into leaky containers. Th e emblem promises no satisfaction, let alone learning, to be gained from drinking. In the same way, the poet promises no pleasure to those (Catholic) “hypocrites” whom he force-feeds his off ensive poetic “ra- gout” (and whom he also labels as “gluttons”); he will merely fi ll their bod- ies that are fi gured as sartorial containers (“breeches and doublet”). Th ose who indulge in the fare of the papal kitchen are no longer to be corrected. Th ey revel in unrestrained pleasure seeking, gluttony, and drunkenness, their synecdochical images are laughing faces (gelasins), and they intoxi- cate themselves with laughter (souls-de rire). What then distinguishes this imitator’s poem from Rabelais’s text? Ra- belais’s images of poetic cornucopia do not exclude the obscene and the scatological. For example, the “Gaster” episode in Rabelais’s Quart livre (1548, 1552), the story of a fantastic voyage by Pantagruel, Panurge, and their companions on the high seas, engages in these themes. Gaster is the personifi cation of the belly as “the fi rst Master of Arts.” He is also the gro- tesque governor of an island inhabited by theologians. He turns out to be a despotic ruler who has no ears for listening and whose commands cannot be resisted. It is in this sense that all arts are “culinary,” according to the narrator, as they respond to the commands of the belly. Th e Quart livre is Rabelais’s most virulently polemical book. It cari- catures religious disagreements between Catholics and Protestants by depicting the enmity between Quaresmeprenant (“Lenten Fast”) and the Andouilles (“Sausages”), pokes fun at the Council of Trent as an exercise in passing articles through a sieve in order to consecrate the ones that can be used against the “new heretics,” and, in the Gaster episode, attacks spe- cifi cally the rite of the Eucharistic Mass at a moment when the relations between the French monarchy and the papacy were particularly hostile. Rabelais’s narrator elaborates on the popular proverb that “a hungry stom- ach has no ears” in a hyperbolic praise of the universal reign of hunger, then moves on to a satire of the practices of the Engastrimyths (“Speakers from the Belly”) and the “Gastrolatres” (“Worshippers of the Belly”), who revere Gaster like their God and carry around his wooden image called “Manduce” (literally “gnawer”). Th is culminates in a scathing criticism that evokes Paul’s severe diatribe against those “whose god is the belly.” Just when Rabelais manages to turn biblical rhetoric to the service of the political ambitions of the monarchy, the Gaster episode takes an abrupt Figure 18. Th e drunkard Emblem XXXVIII. Th éodore de Bèze, Vrais pourtraits des hommes illvstres en piete et doctrine. . . . Plvs, qvaranteqvatre emblems (Geneva, 1581). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Typ 565.81.208. 118 the kitchen and the digest turn. François Rigolot points to the fact that the biblical critique of these worshippers of the belly notwithstanding, Rabelais ends the episode by whetting the reader’s appetite through a long list of the names of the dishes off ered by the Gastrolatres to their idol: fi ve diff erent kinds of bread, stews ( fressures), nine kinds of fricassees, hodgepodge, ragouts, chitterlings gar- nished with fi ne mustard, sausages, blood pudding, pig’s feet with lard, salt venison with turnips, and an abundance of other kinds of game, birds, beef, veal, and pork dishes, pastries, fruits, and cakes, all accompanied by generous libations of wine.³⁹ Rabelais’s abundant list of dishes and drinks is a performance in rhetorical abundance (the French language is shown as rich and powerful) that mimics the mechanism of insatiable hunger. Th is episode shows that Rabelaisian “art” is culinary in that it begins with the belly; it promises access to a sensual delight, but it claims that there is a moral and political nourishment hidden in it. It is in the service of this moral and political edifi cation that Rabelaisian cornucopia engages even the scatological register of language. In the episode, not the narrator but the stomach has the last word: Gaster debunks those who believe him to be God by recommending that they “see, consider, philosophize about, and contemplate” his feces, to understand “what divinity they can fi nd in his fecal matter.” Halfway between the mouth and the anus, the stomach (Gaster) becomes the agent of a reversal from the mouth (and the copious list of dishes) to the anus (which becomes the new “source” of insight). In the Satyres chrestiennes, the motto of the papal feast is “stomach,” Gas- ter (3: 382). Th is word, borrowed from Rabelais, announces that the reversal of order from the mouth to the belly and from the belly to the anus is the order of the day. Th e Calvinist poet, critical of the Latin liturgy, describes the Greek and Latin words used in the Mass as distasteful dishes (because the faithful do not understand them) and borrows from the Rabelaisian list to name the dishes served to Gaster (who, we realize, is no other but the Pope in this anti-Catholic book) for this purpose: halleluias and eleisons are fi llets of game and hagios and himas are “chidlings, / Sausages, saveloys, white puddings.” And their “exorcisms, fooleries, adjurations, and charms” are “Grilled pig’s liver slices and salmagundis, / Hazlet, croquettes, spicy sauces” (5: 128–140). Th e verbal cornucopia that whets the reader’s appetite in Rabelais is transformed here into a rhetoric of disgust, evincing the “Sar- danapalian” love of luxury that dominates the papal feast. Th e Rabelaisian Gaster is accordingly transformed into a pun signifying that the “papists” the kitchen and the digest 119

“spoil everything” (tout gaster, 5: 185). But the poet also gives a more specifi c meaning to this word by referring to the double entendres that describe the busy monks around the spit and in reverential poses “run[ning] the meat through with a skewer” after another has “larded” it, thus vividly alluding to the alleged homosexual practices of monks who do not fear to “spoil everything” (tout gaster, 3: 65– 78). As in Rabelais, monks are called picquelardons. In Rabelais this expression is derived from se picquer à, to love something or somebody (that is, monks are “lovers of lard”), but the description of the monks around the spit in the Satyres chrestiennes literal- izes this expression making them into “piercers” of lard (from the Middle French verb picquer, “to prick, to thrust”)—that is, sodomites. Th e author can only be called a lover of Rabelais in a perverse way—for if he borrows Rabelais’s words, it is to give them a new sense. He aims at investing Rabelaisian vocabulary with a kind of revolting power that fur- ther exaggerates the scandalous potential in Rabelais’s text. In so doing, he gives a whole new sense, not only to Rabelaisian vocabulary, but also to the humanist practice of serio ludere. Like Rabelais, the Satyres chrestiennes requires that the reader not “be scandalized” (Rabelais’s expression), that he enjoy the poetic ragout (“Should your mouth become a slave / To this fi lthy infection? / No! No! Refresh yourself instead / Joyously, with this writing,” 1: 62– 64). Th e condition of enjoying the text of the Satyres chres- tiennes is the disgust felt toward Catholicism (“fi lthy infection”). Rabelais views laughter as an exuberant sign of his readers’ ability to accept his criti- cal ideas; while laughing, they refrain from being angry or “scandalized” by his work. Laughter in the Satyres chrestiennes, however, is transformed into a gesture of condemnation and rejection. Th is is why only pejorative punning is possible on the toponymy “Paris.” Th e name of the Parisian who is easily impressed by the rectangular hat and the white alb of a priest is Parisot (“a Parisian fool,” from sot, “fool”). Th e theologians of the Sor- bonne are a frivolous crowd whose members “for the sake of laughter [par ris] / Satiate themselves with merriment” (3: 303–304). In this citation of Rabelais’s satire of the Sorbonne, there is no room left for ambiguity. Th e utopian idea of Paris as the site where urbanitas, the ability to tell and take a joke, thrives, is entirely lost in the Satyres chrestiennes. Readers who visit and revisit the papal kitchen by reading the Calvinist libelle will not fi nd in it a word that could redeem the capital of the French monarchy or its inhabitants. 120 the kitchen and the digest france and the satirical topography of the eucharistic meal

Th e negative ontology of the papal kitchen is based on the false doctrine of the existence of the “god of white dough,” a theological error from the point of view of Calvinist doctrine. Moreover, this theological error, the Catholic host believed to embody Christ’s “real presence,” also encom- passes a political world with which French Calvinists had to come to terms in the years immediately preceding the fi rst war of religion, which broke out in 1562. Toward the end of 1559 (the probable date of composition), the particularly severe Edict of Écouen, which ordered the extirpation of “her- esy,” was issued. In this political context, the poet of the Satyres chrestiennes sees the war against the community of the faithful as imminent: “Th ey trot on foot and by horse, / Th ey run up and down, / To set up ambushes for the Church” (3: 174– 176). Th e cannibalistic cruelties perpetrated against the faithful, who are “boiled, roasted, and taken to be burnt to ashes,” in the papal kitchen describe the realities of the persecutions that Protestants had to face in France. “Proserpine,” the ruler of the papal kitchen who transported it from hell to France (“to our France”), is an incarnation of Catherine de Médicis (whereas “hell” is the Italy of the papacy). After the death of Henri II, the power of Catherine de Médicis increased, and, al- though she undertook a politics of reconciliation, organizing the Colloquy of Poissy (1560) in an attempt to reconcile French Catholics and Protestants in a theological debate, she also gave free rein to the ultra-Catholic Guise brothers and refused to lend an ear to the political ambitions of the Protes- tant nobility whom Calvin and Bèze hoped to guide. By the late 1550s, the Eucharist had become the main point of theological diff erence between Catholics and Calvin’s church, between France and Geneva. Th e Satyres chrestiennes vehemently rejects the Eucharist, the major theological diff er- ence between French Catholics and French Protestants. Historians have tied this unique libelle (that appears to have been printed only once) to several authors, but the most compelling case has been established for the authorship of Th éodore de Bèze.⁴⁰ Bèze was a poet before he converted to the Word. References to Burgundy, Bèze’s home region, scattered through the text, perhaps serve as his signature.⁴¹ Th e im- age of the poet rolling like a “ball” ([r]ond rondement comme une boule) in the foggy and wet papal kitchen anticipates Bèze’s rhetorical insistence on declaring the abuses of the papacy and refusing a theological compromise the kitchen and the digest 121 at the Colloquy of Poissy, where his speech emphasizes the importance of speaking “in good conscience, simply, clearly, and frankly (rondement).”⁴² In the Satyres chrestiennes, the poet “rolls” in the materiality of poetry, but he also speaks frankly and without any concern for decorum. By mocking the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, he acts as a mouthpiece of his own convictions. In the political climate of 1559, the conversion of the monarchy to re- formed ideas no longer seemed possible. Th is is perhaps why the poet at- tacks the institution of the monarchy, at least in its current form, by claim- ing that the crowning ceremonies of monarchs are founded in Catholic rites (3: 243–246). Catholicism and the French monarchy are implicated in the facetious pleasures (3: 240) of the papal kitchen, whose topography is also the satirical topography of Catholic France. Th e poetic subject’s exo- dus from the realm of Gaster (“who has no ear”), which becomes France at the end of the poem,⁴³ suggests the renunciation of political ambitions in a climate of hostility but not without hopes for revenge in the future when his “return” will make the adversaries “cry” (8: 114– 115). Th e literary historian Charles Lenient envisions the prominent polemi- cists of the Genevan Reformation, Th éodore Bèze, Pierre Viret, Henri Es- tienne, Conrad Badius, and Calvin, sitting around a fi re in the evenings and amusing themselves with composing the Satyres chrestiennes.⁴⁴ While this scenario probably never occurred in real life, this imagined community of Reformers amusing themselves by writing satire in Geneva is not very diff erent from the ideal readership projected by the Satyres chrestiennes and other anti-Catholic satires composed by Reformers in Geneva. To cite an earlier example, in Bèze’s Latin satire Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii (1553), composed of a series of fi ctional “epistles” sent by a servant back to his master, Pierre Lizet, Reformers are depicted as people with a good sense of humor who read satires about themselves in order to get a good laugh. Bèze’s Epistola chronicles the servant’s experience in Geneva, where Lizet sent him to spy on the inhabitants and report on their vices, but the Re- formers intercept his letters and ridicule them.⁴⁵ Th is imaginary possibility of a community that turns attacks into laughter performed from a safe dis- tance is what must have propelled the author of the Satyres chrestiennes to write a poem that only those with strict Calvinist convictions could enjoy. It makes us wonder how many readers did in fact gather around this poem to enjoy its particular humor. Was it able to create a community of laugh- ers who also felt disgusted by the adversary who was now, at the dawn of 122 the kitchen and the digest the civil wars, turned into the enemy? Th e question is all the more relevant, since the Satyres chrestiennes was not only destined for Genevan readers, most of whom were already converted to Calvin’s ideas, but also for readers in France, that is, for those still inside the “papal kitchen.” (It was probably marketed at the fair in Lyon in 1560.) Th ese readers may have welcomed the satirical tone that allowed them to distance themselves from Catho- lic France, even if they remained physically inside the monarchy. How- ever, the more than great abundance of erudite citations would exclude less educated readers. Th e work assumes some familiarity with Protestant and Catholic polemical works, notably, on the Protestant side, with the polemi- cal treatises of Pierre Viret and his parallels between poetic and theological “fi ctions.” Th ese references could, alternately, also draw readers to a book that promised to be a jumbled storehouse of erudition. We cannot tell. To a reader well versed in humanist and polemical literature and passionate about French poetry and popular theater, the book appeared as a puzzle whose pieces he could put together. To a less educated reader who could nonetheless read or hear its catchy rhymes, it represented a rich storehouse of res and verba, some of which may have already been familiar from ser- mons, placards, or from other sources. Th e success of the book cannot be measured by the number of printings or by the number of actual readers (even if we were able to count them), but by its singular appropriation of a humanist rhetoric of variety and as a model of a comic “digest,” a poetic ragout (brouet). In the latter, it follows Pierre Viret, whose innovation it was to maximize the number of citations from humanist and other learned sources. Th is technique of the “digest” was important at a time when books had a precarious existence and publics had limited access to them: informa- tion in books had to come from multiple sources. Th e Satyres chrestiennes stands out as such a model by the variety of sources arranged into one im- age and into a veritable poetic edifi ce. It perfects Marot’s model of reading everything and rejecting everything that does not correspond to biblical teachings, but while Calvinist satire rejects literally all secular learning, it continues to promote poetry as a means of this rejection. huguenot humor in lyon

In Lyon, as the city turned Protestant for a brief period in 1562 after it was occupied by the Protestant army during the fi rst civil war, monasteries the kitchen and the digest 123 were closed and Catholics, along with their “idols,” were driven out of the city. Th e space of the city had to be fi lled with a new and true form of the sacred.⁴⁶ Polemicists contribute to this restructuring of urban space poeti- cally. Against the backdrop of the rich tradition of the arts and of artisanal culture in the city, which included poetry and the fabrication of printed books, these poems appear rushed and rudimentary.⁴⁷ Th ey nonetheless reach back to poetic models and rhetorical games in order to circulate com- mon themes of the Reformation. Th e papal “cauldron”—well-established topos of the “idolatry” prevalent in the Roman Church—reappears in sev- eral of them. In the Discours de la vermine et prestraille de Lyon (“Treatise of the Vermin and the Clerical Riff raff of Lyon”), we fi nd a monk who is worried that his cauldron will be overturned and that the soup spill. Th e monk says good-bye in a lengthy poem that catalogues all the idols that he adores as his god:

Mondieu, alas! My joys, my darlings, Adieu pleasure, and adieu all merriment Adieu comfort, and adieu contentment Adieu cloister and adieu trickeries [ fi n s t o u r s ], Adieu my grub and adieu monk-hood, Adieu, I say to you, tripe and potbelly Adieu greasy cabbage, meadows, wells, and fountains, Adieu orchards in which I take no more pleasure, Adieu to you, luxurious riff raff [ frippons & racaille] Adieu vermin and the whole clerical riff raff [prestraille] Adieu to all the others, for we have to go Adieu my days, my bed, and my sleep [mon repos] Adieu my wine, and adieu my cups [mes pots] Adieu to you, henchmen of the Antichrist Adieu my nymph, my little girl, my sweetheart. Adieu falcons, joyful venery Adieu birds, adieu my little dogs, Adieu my spaniel, whom I will no longer groom, Adieu cards, dice, and trickery Adieu, alas, our extravagance Adieu partridge, quail, hens, and plover, Adieu to the sauce that we eat with turtledove, Adieu chapels and the bread of deliverance 124 the kitchen and the digest

Adieu I say to you, without fail, indeed. Adieu château, mansion, and farmyard, Adieu the amorous juice of my vineyard Adieu I say to you my thousands of brethren Adieu lay brethren and all you Cordeliers Adieu tapestry and plates Adieu to you Jacobins and prelates, Adieu canons, adieu fun Adieu all, I am weary, and I’m gone [car ie suis las].⁴⁸

From an aesthetic or poetic viewpoint, there is nothing innovative about this poem. It does not invite the reader into a storehouse of learning, nor does it require the reader to possess a reading culture. Th e poem only evokes culinary art, venery, and venereal pursuits, and those also only su- perfi cially. Th e monk depicted in it is not interested in any pleasures be- yond the simple ones of the body. Th e anaphoras repeated at the begin- ning of each verse lend a monotonous rhythm to the monk’s catalogue of pleasures, yet this poetic device becomes the carrier of a theological mes- sage. Th e monk’s anaphoric “adieus” are his way of saying goodbye to those objects that he venerates as his god. He speaks to (his) god (à-dieu), but it is to be understood that this god is an idol. Th e desolation of the monk (car ie suis las) so vividly depicted in this poem is a parody of his idolatry, for his god is his belly, all those things that he can stuff into it, and all his other pleasures. Th e irony of the monk’s adieus is that the god he invokes as his god is not permanent; he is a “god” whose time is over (that is, an idol, in theological terms), one who is lost and with whom the monk must part. Th e monotonous repetition of adieus serves the iconoclastic function of both representing the monk at the moment of invoking his god and revealing the transient nature of the object of his devotion. Th e simple po- etic construction (the diametrical opposite of the crammed, multifaceted poetic edifi ce of the Satyres chrestiennes) succeeds in evoking a theological dilemma, that of the idol, with which the deceived believer enters into an intimate spiritual contact, only to fi nd out that the presumed sacred other is not available, it is not sacred, not the Other. Th e poem thus does not sim- ply mock Catholic monks as gluttons (although that is part of it), but also reorients the reader’s view away from a familiar material space and hence toward an invisible, immaterial space, that of the Spirit. Such a reorienta- tion was necessary in the attempt to refashion the city and fi ll it with the the kitchen and the digest 125

“true” sacred. Viewed from the perspective of a larger theological and phil- osophical tradition, however, the anaphoras of the anxious monk reveal the tautology that founds the sacred in any tradition, Catholic or Protestant.⁴⁹ Th e god of Protestantism, always absolutely Other, deus absconditus, is al- ways withdrawn from every thing. Th e monk is parodied and his “god” is made into a comic idol, but his experience of fear and dismay, of anxiety, at the disappearance of the sacred is very close to the religious world of Protestantism. Th is anxiety is the one against which Protestantism off ers help, but which it also maintains. In Lyon, not only fear and laughter but also Catholic monk and reformed reader possess an uncanny resemblance. Both the Satyres chrestiennes and this poem show, unwittingly, that while engaging in verbal denigration and ridicule, the Calvinist self was locked in rivalry with the despised other. five Priests, Poets, and Print

Catholic piety becomes dependent on “external inscription” in preaching and print, as we saw in Chapter 1. Th is chapter examines how two Catho- lic authors—the priest and polemicist Artus Desiré and the poet Pierre de Ronsard, whose very diff erent poetic and rhetorical practices, social status, and political positions set them wide apart—made use of the medium of the polemical book. Although their diff erences bear comparison only in the libelous parodies published by Ronsard’s reformed adversaries, Ronsard’s Discours and the Catholic anti-Huguenot poetry written in imitation of Ronsard’s poems after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre allow us to investigate how imitation, the practice that makes the writer and the poet compete with their predecessor and excel among their contemporaries, loses its ethos and becomes manipulated into an instrument of propaganda in the troubled times between the conspiracy of Amboise (1560) and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572). artus desiré and the book

If the doctors of the Sorbonne, like Hangest (whom we saw respond to the placards of 1534 with a fi erce but somewhat lengthy libelle written both in priests, poets, and print 127

Latin and French), fi nd themselves estranged from their public, the Pari- sian priest Artus Desiré hits a tone that reveals a much greater ease with his readers. Reversing the predicament of the poet Gringore, who inserts a moralizing jingle from the preacher’s discourse into his Blazon des here- tiques, Desiré writes his moral, theological, and polemical sermons in rhyming verse. Th e sizable corpus of his printed works off ers us a perfect example of the medieval preachers’ desire to instruct simple people coupled with an understanding of the medium of print. His small, octavo-format books were too long to be recited from beginning to end by a crieur, but they could easily be slipped under the coat or into a bag, transported, and read to others. Th ey attest to the author’s recognition of the importance of “incorporating” the medium of the voice into print; in his crude poetry lengthy theological expositions are seasoned with slanderous rumors con- cerning “those who went to live in Geneva.”¹ Desiré belonged to the “ultra” wing of the Catholic party. Th e author of the sole monograph on him, Frank S. Giese, suggests that his books (of which more than twenty appeared in more than one hundred editions between 1545 and 1586) fi lled the empty space left by a missing authority in the conservative Catholic camp in the years after the death of Noël Béda and before the formation of the Catholic League. Th ese fi gures are surpris- ing given Desiré’s low social and ecclesiastic status, but they indicate the audacious goal he undertook to achieve with books.² Th e sole authority Desiré could claim for himself was through his books, and he did so in the stringent and callous voice of the defender of the Catholic cause, at- tacking Reformers and, increasingly, also the monarchy for failing to “ex- tirpate heresy.” Along with many other Catholic propagandists, he became increasingly impatient when he saw the (relative) tolerance that the mon- archy showed toward “heretics.” After the death of François II, the Regent Catherine de Médicis and the Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital undertook an offi cial politics of reconciliation. It was inaugurated by the Edict of Am- boise (1560), which granted the reformed population the “freedom of con- science,” and culminated in the Edict of January in 1562, which granted them the exercise of their religion outside cities. Desiré saw in this politics the equivalent of “advocating moral degradation and impending insurrec- tion, as well as disobedience to God.”³ After being caught with a letter soliciting the aid of the Spanish monarch in 1562, Desiré was exiled. How- ever, not only did he return to the polemical arena after a relatively short period, but his books continued to appear, both new and reprint versions, 128 priests, poets, and print for another two and a half decades.⁴ Th e books that bear his authorial name are notable as performances in angry ranting against the reformed population. In Le Miroer, he is looking for kindling to ignite the fi re which will burn “this adulterous and fi lthy progeny.”⁵ In the Combatz (1550), he hopes that France will be soon purifi ed of the “scum of French soil.”⁶ His swineherd Guillot, the fi gure of the simple but infallibly pious Catholic, runs in the forest imploring the judges of France to “burn all the swine!”⁷ He represented the political voice of those who sided with Rome against the monarchy’s politics of reconciliation and whose repeated demands, in his published books, for the extermination of the “heretics” came tragically true at the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre.⁸ Alice Hulubei compares Desiré’s books to the malicious and violent rants of a woman selling vegetables in the market hall.⁹ Th is comparison is apt in one respect, as it points to the deliberate lowering of the regis- ter, going well beyond the lowering implied in the transition from Latin to French—and even beyond adapting theological discourse to a form of “hate speech” against “heretics.”¹⁰ Desiré could speak in the voice of the crowd, that of the marketplace, but this was not all that he could do. If he single-mindedly aligned himself with a specifi c (and dire) political cause (the defense of Catholicism and the undermining of the royal policy of reconciliation), what set him apart in his camp was his exceptionally acute awareness of the importance of the medium. His books were produced and reproduced, undergoing manipulations that attest to an awareness of the needs of readers who handled and read the book: chapters and marginal summaries were progressively created, smaller books were republished and integrated into new books, and simple yet remarkable illustrations were included. What is to be examined is not so much Desiré the polemicist, or even Desiré the pamphleteer, but much rather the books that were usually trademarked by his name (with some exceptions), and the functions that these printed missives were able to fulfi ll. Desiré’s name itself became the symbol in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in the po- lemical literature of the heated years of the 1560s, of the particularly hateful polemics targeting those who converted to the Reformation. We can speak not only of Desiré the author but also of a “Desiré phe- nomenon,” as a number of works, some of which were published anony- mously and were probably not composed by Desiré, share structural corre- spondences with Desiré’s books. A case in point is the small book Passevent parisien respondent à Pasquin Romain (“Parisian Passevent Responding to priests, poets, and print 129

Roman Pasquin”), published anonymously in 1556.¹¹ Th e name of the main character (signifying “swifter than the wind”) refers to his superhuman fl eetness of foot, recalling also the rapidity with which printed materials traveled—a fi tting name for this publication that appeared without the author’s name and the place of printing and remains thus hard to track. Th e name was not the author’s invention; it fi rst appeared in Th éodore de Bèze’s Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii (1553) (briefl y discussed in the previous chapter). Executed masterfully by Th éodore de Bèze, who was at the time professor of classical languages in Lausanne, this witty, biting Latin libelle is yet another humanist exercise in playing seriously, with the express intention to belittle Lizet’s authority not just as a theologian but also as a prominent fi gure opposed to the Reformation. Passavant writes his letters to his master in order to mock the Genevans (per irrisionem), but the actual eff ect of his letters is to render himself and his master Lizet ridiculous. Lizet has published a “terrifying book” in Paris that has fright- ened the “heretics” so much that they cannot respond, Passavant tells the Genevans, and they begin to laugh. Th ey deplore the fact that Lizet took so long to fi nd a publisher and that he did not “give us something to laugh about” (ad ridendum) earlier.¹² Passavant soon reports to his master that they may one day publish Lizet’s book just to get a good laugh and, “as they say, in order to render visible, once and for all, the bestiality of the papists.”¹³ Yet, despite its real polemical edge, the Passavant also shows that in the erudite and solidly reformed circles of Lausanne and Geneva, turn- ing condemnations of “heretics” into ridicule can be carried out from a safe distance. Ridiculing from this position requires no need for prudence. One is free to turn the tables, transforming authority into folly, turning the per- secuted into the judges, opposing humanist learning to theological author- ity. No words can entail a real danger when pronounced from the safety of this reformed university and thus the pleasure of sardonic laughter can be unbridled among this group of humanists who have “escaped” from France.¹⁴ Bèze ridicules thus the adversary by accusing him of failing in his attack and debunks the attacker as ultimately incompetent and entirely dependent on the skills of the author whom he attacks. How then does the Passevent parisien compare to this erudite tradition of polemical satire? Th e libelle “debunks” Bèze as the veritable author of the Latin Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii (originally published anon- ymously) and Pierre Viret as the one who “reviewed and corrected” the text (this observation also implies that Bèze was not capable of writing it 130 priests, poets, and print without help). However, the gestures only appear to return the ridiculing that in the Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii targets Catholic authors, because the Passevent parisien is not, properly speaking, a response to Bèze. Th e targeted audience of Passevent parisien lies outside the limited circles of erudite readers, humanists and theologians, who were the intended readers of Bèze’s Latin satire. Th e actual public is comprised of the inhabitants of large cities, especially of Paris (the city evoked in the title of the book) and Lyon (where it was probably fi rst published), a mass that is predominantly holding on to traditional Catholic rites, but among whom there are those who might waver and allow themselves to be taken in by the “scandalous” ideas of the Reformation. What is at stake is not the criticism of individu- als as authors but much rather fostering distrust in “heretics” in general by depicting them in stereotypical terms. Bèze and Viret become glaring examples of the general immorality and corruption that supposedly reigns in Geneva. How about the contents of this libelle? Th e Passevent parisien avails itself of the humanist form of the dialogue to create a fi ctional situation, in which Passevent, who has just returned from a “long peregrination” in Geneva, recounts his experiences to his Roman friend Pasquin. Th e libelle purports to undeceive the readers tricked by Bèze’s fi ctional personage and to give a “true” eyewitness report of Geneva and the life of “those who have gone to live, as they say, according to the reformed Gospel.” Th e roles are clear- cut. Th e presence of a “Roman friend” as Passevent’s interlocutor suggests that Passevent is an orthodox “Roman” Catholic, rather than a partisan of the monarchy, whose “corruption” the author criticizes. Th e friend’s name also evokes pasquinades that the booklet consciously imitates. Th rough a minor orthographic adjustment and the alliterating initials in the name “Passevent parisien,” the author also changes Bèze’s “Magister Passavant” into a quintessentially Parisian character, the embodiment of the Parisians’ staunch Catholicism. Th e title of the libelle thus reclaims Paris (the to- ponymy, the city, and the community that it denotes) as specifi cally Catho- lic. Th rough a series of slanderous anecdotes Passevent provides “evidence” (monstrer euidemment)¹⁵ that helps him reinterpret Calvin’s term “freedom of conscience” as “freedom of the fl esh”:¹⁶ Calvin allegedly cohabiting with a nun for fi ve months, whom he keeps by using the money intended for the poor and then marries off , pregnant, to a French gentleman; Bèze alleg- edly getting one of Viret’s servants pregnant; and Viret allegedly killing the baby—without even baptizing it. Passevent also points out what Calvin- priests, poets, and print 131 ists call “suff ering for the Word” stands for legitimate “imprisonment” and “banishment.” Th e main goal of the libelle is to demystify the language of the Genevan Reformation as a language coined by those Calvinists who mask their vices with a duplicitous language. Passevent’s name designates his superhuman swiftness, turning him into the allegory of coarse rumor. Th e choice of this name not only echoes Bèze’s title (where the register of derision suggests an obscene signifi cance, that is, “passing wind”), but it also suggests that the author understands the importance of the new form of “publicness” brought about by print culture and reveals his con- scious attempt to imitate it. Joseph Koerner argues that the Reformation invented a new public space embodied by the “everywhere and nowhere of information transfer” that came about through the detachment of the sacred from physical places and rites and its attachment to the immaterial Word (“spirit”).¹⁷ In Catholic polemics, we can observe a similar detach- ment of the sacred from traditional pious practices in that polemicists use discursive tools such as sermons, processions, and polemical books to draw crowds and gain them for their cause. Desiré was certainly aware of the success of the Passevent parisien, be- cause he wrote a sequel to it, Les grandes chroniques et Annales de Passe par tout Chroniqueur de Geneve (“Th e Great Chronicle and Annals of Passe- partout, Chronicler of Geneva”) (1558). Desiré, as the author of this libelle, deliberately includes himself in an exchange of ridicule. His aggressive mockery targets authors and books like Th éodore Bèze in his Latin Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii, the anonymous author of the Passevent pa- risien, Rabelais, and the author (perhaps Bèze) of the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale. By mocking these humanistic authors, Desiré also ranks himself with them, as author, even if he violently rejects their convictions. Th e readers and the broader audience of the Passevent and Les grandes chro- niques could thus feel that they partook in a larger “debate,” even if they were not eff ectively capable of reading Bèze’s Latin text or if Rabelais’s eru- dite jokes remained inaccessible to them. To accommodate his voice to his projected audience, Desiré creates characters like Passepartout, a plainspo- ken chronicler who goes back and forth between Paris and Geneva and brings back news from the city. As we shall see, by evoking this fi gure of the chronicler as raconteur, Desiré also manages to conjure up Rabelais’s narrative fi ctions. Les grandes chroniques adopts the form of dialogue in order to stage a conversation between Passepartout and Maître Pierre du Quignet, who was 132 priests, poets, and print the real-life church ward of the Notre Dame of Paris (in Desiré’s words) sit- ting “always in a little corner” (quignet) of the cathedral. Passepartout, like Passevent, is the personifi cation of rumor and symbolizes the medium of the transmission of information in print among the three points of a tri- angle: from Rome, he brings criticism of the corruption of the church in France to France and supplies more copiously rumors from Geneva about the corruption of the Frenchmen and French women who went there. In a scene of encounter, when he is asked by the church warden, “Where do you come from?” he simply responds, “From everywhere” (De par tout).¹⁸ Th e footloose Passepartout is a personifi cation of the extensiveness and facility with which printed books travel. According to Passepartout, the corner of the magnifi cent cathedral no longer shelters the pious Pierre du Quignet but rather keeps him ignorant and therefore susceptible to the presumably beguiling books and sermons of Calvin and his followers that “slander” Catholicism. Desiré and those Catholics who undertook to combat the Reformation with books were conservative in their ideologies but progres- sive in their use of the print media, foreshadowing Victor Hugo’s Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre Dame, who declares, Ceci tuera cela. Le livre tuera l’édifi ce.¹⁹ Catholic polemical books actually contributed to destroying the edifi ce of the medieval cathedral. If recoiling in one’s own faith is a danger- ous attitude, Passepartout off ers remedy against the “poison of heresy” by encouraging Quignet to “buy and look at” his book that costs only fi fteen or twenty deniers to fi nd out about the life of those who went to Geneva “to escape being burnt.” Passepartout’s chronicle is a vicious satire that heavy-handedly popu- larizes Rabelais’s fi rst comic epic, Pantagruel (1532). Rabelais is the source of the scene in which Passepartout encounters in Geneva a runaway monk from Angers who is starving and appears in torn clothes “like an apple-picker”:

As I was there one of their brothers Comes up to me, Calling himself a newcomer in the city. His clothes were torn, his body almost naked, Dressed like an apple-picker, And he was one of the most obstinate men In matters of heresy, priests, poets, and print 133

Th at I ever saw in my life. Th en the poor indigent man Asked me for money, To buy himself a piece of bread, Saying that he was dying of hunger, And he has not yet had lunch [n’auoit point desieuné ]. Now, he has been fasting too long [long temps ieusné], Th is is what he may have meant, For I am sure that it was at least one pm. Hearing him say this I asked: Are you from the land of France? I am, says he, without a doubt, I was a Franciscan in Angers, And came here for fear of being burnt, And to learn about the Gospel of the venerable Luther.²⁰

Th is scene rewrites Chapter 9 from Rabelais’s Pantagruel in which Pan- tagruel meets Panurge while strolling outside the walls of Paris.²¹ Th e pro- verbial expression “dressed like an apple-picker” (signifying “in shabby clothes”) recalls verbatim the description of Panurge, who turns up in torn, shabby clothes, declares in thirteen foreign languages—some real, some imaginary—that he is dying of hunger, and begs Pantagruel to give him something to eat. Pantagruel does not understand these languages (Ger- man, “the language of the Antipodes,” Italian, Scottish, Basque, “Lanter- nian,” Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew, Greek, “Utopian,” and Latin), which creates a comic scene of misunderstanding. Panurge in vain explains to Pantagruel that even without words his appearance should move him to pity. Th e giant only understands Panurge when at last he begins to speak in his native language, French. Th e encounter between Pantagruel and Panurge is a moral tale about the supreme consequences of Paul’s teach- ing of love and friendship,²² but Desiré waters down Rabelais’s moral tale considerably. Without a moral tale comparable to the one that Rabelais off ers to the reader, Desiré’s Passepartout simply mocks those who alleg- edly leave France for Geneva to fi nd themselves hungry and impoverished. To this mockery of poverty, Passepartout adds an injurious interpretation: the man’s desire to have lunch (desieuné ) is indicative of his gluttonous desire to break fast and to disregard altogether fasting, whose holiness the 134 priests, poets, and print

Reformation rejected, for as he says, “he has fasted (too) long” (long temps ieusné ). Finally, Desiré echoes Rabelais’s story of encountering a stranger who turns out to be one’s compatriot: just like Panurge, this poor man also turns out to be French, originally from Angers. A series of anecdotes reveal that the inhabitants of Geneva come from diff erent geographical locations in France: Calvin is a Picard from Noyon, a “lewd” shoemaker turns out to be a Gascon from Bourges, the “lustful” daughter of a merchant also comes from Bourges, a “corrupt” lady who accuses her “virtuous” servant of stealing money is from La Rochelle, another woman who runs away from home pretending to take a journey to Saint Claude, a village in the Alps, from where she crosses the mountains to go to Geneva, is from Mou- lins in Burgundy, and so on. Th e transalpine city appears as the corrupt version of cisalpine France, thus holding up a satirical mirror to the French Catholic Church, whose corruption Desiré wants to berate. In this way, the libelle maps the fallen Church of France onto Geneva, making the familiar look strange, criticizing the corruption that Desiré believes has crept into the Gallican Church. Moreover, he not only combats the adversary outside France but also shows that the enemy is also inside from where it is to be cast out, purged, annihilated. Calvin, Passepartout warns, may well live in Geneva, but “he often returns and visits many places / In this king- dom” and is well connected, “has friends everywhere / So that one could not get rid of him / Without the intervention of the legal authorities.”²³ Rabelais’s story of Panurge’s friendship with the giant prince Pantagruel is transformed into a political message warning Catholics (with a leaning to- ward Rome) about Calvin’s growing infl uence among the French nobility. Passepartout thus fosters hostility not only toward “those who went to Ge- neva” but also toward those sympathetic to the Reformation in France and in particular toward the French nobility, among whom many converted to and sympathized with Calvin’s doctrine. Th e “scandal of language” as an “exhilarating freedom from constraint,” which Panurge embodies in Rabelais’s novels,²⁴ is used by Desiré to discredit Calvinist discourse as an essentially corrupt, excessive, fallen signifi er, which is seductive in its im- morality and deceptive at the same time. Calvin is the true Panurge—De- siré borrows his description almost word for word from Rabelais’s book. Desiré adapts an episode in Rabelais’s Pantagruel to his own ideological and polemical ends: while the crafty Panurge teaches a lesson in love to Pantagruel, Desiré’s Passepartout suggests that no charity should be prac- priests, poets, and print 135 ticed toward those who dissent from the Roman Catholic Church. Desiré’s procedures are very diff erent from the practice of imitation that informs humanist writing, the kind of “intertextual dialogue or confl ict” that re- quires that the imitator read and reread the text before adapting and ap- propriating it in a text of his own keeping in mind the overall sense of the passage that he imitates and appropriates.²⁵ While imitation is inseparable from an ethos that strives to preserve the integrity of the original text, De- siré’s manipulation of an episode in Pantagruel reveals him as a reader who is disrespectful of the internal coherence and meaning of the original text. In popularizing pieces of Rabelais’s text, he wants to gain readers for his own books and not for Rabelais.²⁶ Desiré also follows Rabelais, however crudely and heavy-handedly, in the stylistic practice of mixing registers, which Erich Auerbach discovers and so acutely describes in Rabelais’s works.²⁷ Th e word “Priapist” (pria- piste), by which the Celestial Knight calls the Terrestrial Knight in Desiré’s Les Batailles du Chevalier Celeste contre le Chevalier Terrestre (“Th e Battles of the Celestial Knight Against the Terrestrial Knight,” 1564), is a word at once erudite and obscene.²⁸ Once again, it is a name that suggests the seductive and corrupt deceitfulness (paillardise) of Calvinist discourse, to which the Celestial Knight opposes a discourse of morality based on the divine law.²⁹ Desiré is a specialist at describing the “Babylonic” city of Geneva—he depicts the “great poverty” of the city, the ruination of the church, and the melancholy of the inhabitants, who fall into the category of the excluded other (“paler than the Jews”). Allegedly, the walls of the city are built of relics stolen and smuggled out of France (this may be another reference to Chapter 15 in Rabelais’s Pantagruel, in which Panurge aspires to build the walls of Paris out of women’s pudenda³⁰). He pleads with the king of France to “bar the passage,” otherwise it is to be feared that they will steal everything. Th e voice of the Genevan Priapist, the Calvinist with an oversized phallus who represents debauchery (a standard accusation lev- eled against those who converted to the Reformation in Catholic polem- ics), is now also turned into a means of criticizing the corruption of French Catholics and in particular the prelates who wear “diamonds and rubies.”³¹ Th e Priapist’s voice does not harbor the kind of paradox that Erasmus and Rabelais off er to their readers: the fi delle Papiste readily concedes the valid- ity of the charges of the Priapist Terrestrial Knight, and thus normalizes them.³² Th e voice of the grotesque, phallic accuser is incorporated into the 136 priests, poets, and print moralist’s discourse, where it is mastered. By rendering the Calvinist signi- fi er grotesque and priapic, by associating it with sexual seduction, immo- rality, and political disobedience, Desiré depicts it as a disruption of law and order in the realm of the monarchy, rather than a guarantee of sacred order. Th e moralist discourse of the papist Celestial Knight then imposes order on this allegedly disruptive (“priapic”) discourse. Another one of Desiré’s experiments with print was a parody of the Genevan Psalter, a project that borders on sacrilege. Th e Genevan Psalter, based on Clément Marot’s extensive psalm translation completed by Th éo- dore de Bèze, was immensely popular in France among Calvin’s followers and Catholics alike. Desiré took it upon himself to “respond” to the book that was to become the ultimate bestseller of the Reformation.³³ His coun- teroff ensive against the psalms takes a double form. Th e Contrepoison (ca. 1561) is an irreverent parody of the Huguenot Psalter intended to reveal its fake, fabricated quality and thereby to discredit the entire philological en- terprise embraced by Huguenots.³⁴ Desiré claims that Marot (whose name nearly rhymes with marotte, “the fool’s scepter,” and marotter, to “play the fool”) has

[P]layed the fool around so badly [si tresmal Marotté ] Th at he has taken away the sense of Scripture Which is a great and scandalous crime.³⁵

In the Contrepoison, the songs are taken up in the same order as in the Hu- guenot Psalter. Everything has to be transformed following a mechanical principle of copying or mirroring, as if the author of the parody were fac- ing the enemy in the line of combat. Desiré accompanies his polemical Contrepoison with a pious book of hymns intended to be sung in church (fi rst published ca. 1561), which he later republishes under the new title Plaisants et armonieux cantiques de de- votion (“Joyful and Harmonious Devotional Songs”). Th ese eff orts to write pious songs reveal that Desiré’s eagerness to combat the popularity of the psalms through parody goes hand-in-hand with a desire to benefi t from the power of devotional songs (diff used in printed form) to build commu- nities and “churches.” In the preface to his book of cantiques, Desiré revisits the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris which he describes as a city on the island (sur cette isle encoignee), an idyllic, self-contained “corner” of piety. Th e woodcut image on the title page displays two shepherds tending their priests, poets, and print 137

fl ock in a bucolic scene, one of them gazing at the angelic messenger who hovers over them in a cloud. Desiré’s songs are invested with a nostalgic desire to return to an older and simpler past before the arrival of the Ref- ormation that has invaded the cities (Figure 19). However, his cathedral of piety is now literary, bolstered by printed books, both pious and polemical. Th e Plaisans et armonieux cantiques does not lack the deprecating presenta- tion of the other: in the old days, explains Desiré in the preface, people went to the “matins” but nowadays instead these “curs” (mastins) sing Ma- rot’s songs (chansons Marotines). To advertise the songs of his own creation, Desiré declares that sung in the cathedral, they would have the power to convert even Calvin himself, or if they failed to do so, this would only be because he would be too “drunk” to appreciate them. Th is plebeian impu- tation of Calvin’s drunkenness reveals Desiré’s unwillingness to see a real adversary in Calvin, whose views are irreconcilable with those embodied in Catholic rites and religious practices. It is not simple naivety or hatred that inspires this excessive claim but also Desiré’s stubborn inability, which he shared with all those who subscribed to the views of Catholic extremism, to recognize the diff erence. Repeatedly, he depicts the religious other as a corrupt version of the self, whose otherness has to be represented through images that provoke condemnation and debase him into a being to be ex- pulsed or destroyed. Michel Jeanneret dismisses Desiré’s works on the grounds that they “repeat the same arguments over and over again and discredit themselves through the excessive use of invectives”;³⁶ however, repetition and excess, while they considerably lessen the poetic qualities of these works, appeal to a broader audience for whom they mediate a pious and a literary culture. Ironically, it is the (admittedly) rare humor that reveals a mimetism prac- ticed by Desiré of his erudite Protestant adversaries. A pun in one of the last works that Desiré put out depicting Calvinist readings of scripture as a “cuisine” of sorts sparkles with wit:

[T]hey want to be believed (crues) And to eat all the points Of Scripture raw [crus].³⁷

Such is also the title of this pamphlet adopting the verbal alchemy of de- rision that borders on poetic invention and closely resembles the ridicul- ing tone of Calvinist satire practiced by Th éodore de Bèze: La singerie des Figure 19. Bucolic scene. Artus Desiré’s Plaisans et armonieux cantiques (Paris, 1560). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.D4606.560p. priests, poets, and print 139

Hvgvenots, marmots et gvenons de la nouuelle derrision Th eodobeszienne (“Th e Apery of the Huguenots, Marmosets and Apes of the New Th eodorbezian Foolery”) (1574). Desiré’s persistent “combats,” his crude citations of Rabe- lais and Bèze, are consistent and systematic eff orts to inscribe himself in a fi ctional “dialogue” with his humanist and Calvinist adversaries—even if he can be said simply to steal a few scraps from the humor and the wit that come to these authors in much greater abundance—in order to create a readership that, for his theological and political purposes, appears to be ideal. pierre ronsard: imitator of artus desiré?

Th e prominent Pléiade poet Pierre de Ronsard published several anti- Reformation poems under separate cover, which he later (in 1567) gathered under the title Discours des miseres de ce temps (“Speeches on the Miseries of Our Time”). Th ese poems can be viewed in the context of Ronsard’s po- etic oeuvre (as they have been, notably, by Daniel Ménager); however, they also merit an examination as polemical engagement (as François Rigolot has shown).³⁸ Both these scholars remark upon the political dimension of Ronsard’s poetry and the poet’s conscious eff orts to create a symbolic place of prominence for himself within the public realm of the monarchy, while they also carefully set apart Ronsard’s Discours from the political genre of the polemical pamphlet.³⁹ Ronsard, of course, built a poetic persona for himself by making use of a rich poetic tradition available to him; more- over, he built perhaps the most elaborate poetic persona any poet in the sixteenth century ever built. What happens then when this poet descends into the arena of polemics dominated by personas and aliases, albeit of much cruder facture? What is the relation, if any, between the poems that Ronsard later gathered under the title Discours and the anti-Reformation literature written by the defenders of the Catholic Church and widely cir- culated in print? When Ronsard descends into the arena in which Catholics and Reform- ers are already waging fi erce verbal warfare, he does not do so in order to join either camp. As Daniel Ménager underscores, Ronsard does not write for the Catholic Church but to defend the monarchy, whose survival he, like Montaigne and many other moderate Catholics, cannot imagine with- 140 priests, poets, and print out maintaining the traditional institution of religion.⁴⁰ And his manifest goal is poetic: Ronsard envisions for himself the role of the poet who de- fends this political realm. His fi rst polemical poem was written on the oc- casion of the repression of the conspiracy of Amboise (Elegie sur les troubles d’Amboise, 1560). It is fi lled with claims of founding a new genre. If Ron- sard vaguely acknowledges any predecessors in the defense of the “Catholic case,” he is quick to assure that they wrote “badly”:

Alas, of the Lutherans the case is very bad, But they defend it well. By a fatal misfortune Ours is holy and good, but we defend it badly.⁴¹

Th e poet’s call for an entirely new poetic defense and his disparagement of his predecessors are gestures that resemble the declarations of du Bellay in his Defence and Illustration of the French Language (fi rst published in 1549): they function as a poetic manifesto. As François Rigolot has argued, Ron- sard does not so much defend Catholicism as he wishes to promote poetry into the very means of the defense of a cause and create a new genre.⁴² Th e cause is that of the monarchy, for whose prominent members Ronsard has been writing his encomiastic poetry. However, some of the members of this court have, in the meanwhile, converted to the Reformation. Al- though neither these aristocrats nor the Genevan camp led by Calvin and Bèze took part in the conspiracy of Amboise (Calvin and Bèze were trying instead to acquire infl uence over prominent members of the French aris- tocracy), opinions in the circles from which Ronsard could expect patron- age were divided. In the eyes of the reformed nobility who participated in or sympathized with the conspiracy, the attempt to seize the child King François II was not a plot but an eff ort to withdraw him from the hands of the “tyrants,” the Guise brothers. Pro-monarchist lawyers used terms like “plot,” “conspiracy,” and “rebellion” to describe this eff ort. Among these lawyers is Guillaume des Autels, Ronsard’s friend to whom the poet dedi- cates the fi rst poem of the Elegie. Who the “we” is in this segment is diffi cult to say. For, as we shall see, in this and the subsequent pieces of the Discours, the poet who identifi es him- self as a royalist constantly shifts toward a more conservative “Catholic” identity, by, for example, citing a religious language that was understand- able even to those aligned with Catholic orthodoxy. If by “we” Ronsard means “France,” the monarchy, and the people, it should be noted that the priests, poets, and print 141 inclusive pronoun does not unify these entities; rather it covers over the theological and ideological diff erences splitting this political body. Th ose in charge of the aff airs of the state and representing the monarchy of the adolescent king Charles IX (the regent Catherine de Médicis and the chan- cellor Michel de l’Hôpital) were pursuing a politics of reconciliation, and Ronsard’s “we” may be gesturing toward the unity that their politics aimed at without, however, revealing the complexity of the task of reconcilia- tion (whose ultimate failure becomes most apparent during the Saint Bar- tholomew’s Day massacre a decade later). Ronsard’s “we” covers over the fact that such a unity can only be sought through diffi cult political mea- sures and negotiations. Moreover, this “we” can be easily confused with a more specifi c Catholic “we,” one that defi nes itself against the reformed other. Ronsard’s anti-Calvinist poems encourage this confusion to some ex- tent. Let us, for example, take the example of his position on the ques- tion of responding to the Reformation (military retaliation versus nego- tiation and reconciliatory measures). Th e monarchy wavered a great deal on this matter during the 1560s. In the poems printed between 1560 and 1562, Ronsard the polemicist-poet argues that because the adversary used books to seduce the people who no longer follow the church’s teaching, it is with books that the fi ght must be waged (“We must confound them with books, disputing, / With books we must attack them, with books we must respond to them”).⁴³ Just as the lyre is the specifi c symbol of the ode, the lute of epic poetry, and the guitar of love poetry in Ronsard’s po- etic oeuvre, militant poetry also requires a symbol. Th is symbol is at fi rst the book. However, a poetic enterprise in which words are taken for arms is very close, at least rhetorically, to a poetry advocating militant action. Ronsard steps onto this slippery slope in the corrections that he makes in the numerous re-editions of each poem. Th e fact that he changes the words from exhorting his readers to recognize the urgency that calls for a militant poetry (“With books we must attack them, with books we must respond to them”) to proposing that there is an urgency to “attack them with weap- ons” (“With arms we must attack them, with arms we must respond to them”) (1562, second edition), or, in 1578, to underscoring the importance of knowledge in attacking (“With knowledge we must attack them, with knowledge we must respond to them”), suggests how uncertain Ronsard was about how the unity of the social and political realm idealized in his 142 priests, poets, and print poems was to be achieved. To present a program in which verses (rather than weapons) do the fi ghting is his way as a court poet to off er his services to the monarchy for teaching, but also taming, controlling, and winning back the passions of the “riotous mob,” for which Ronsard has many expres- sions in the poem (la tourbe mutine, vulgaire mutin).⁴⁴ Th e fact that in 1560 he proposes to do it with books and the “voice alone” without resorting to weapons, through a poetry that stirs up patriotic passion by “fl attering their hearts,”⁴⁵ corresponds to the politics of reconciliation adopted by Ca- therine de Médicis and Chancellor Michel de L’Hôpital after Amboise⁴⁶— but later Ronsard’s poetic images fl uctuate with the fl uctuation of royal policy. If the book has a symbolic signifi cance in the Discours, Ronsard does not cease to elaborate on it. In 1562, in the Instruction pour l’adolescence du Roy thres-chrestien Charles IXe de ce nom (“Instruction for the Child King Charles IX”), Ronsard recites the view shared by Catholic preachers and, in their wake, by polemicists, that piety (at least, the piety of the simple people) is a matter of memory. He warns the monarch (who is twelve years old at the time) about the danger of Lutheran doctrines for the “people.” Th e king must keep the “laws of his ancestors”:

And watch out that the curious teachings of a new sect Are not imprinted [imprime] on people’s minds.⁴⁷

Th e Catholic conviction that simple people will be converted if they hear or read the “curious” and “new” doctrines that become “imprinted” on their malleable minds, which cannot resist a new inscription, appears in Ronsard’s text as a citation of a moralizing language that originates in the language of preachers. Th is conviction is voiced by Gringore (“keeping the faith is deserving of praise”). In the poems of Ronsard, who imitates Pe- trarch, Pindar, and Horace, this citation is quite unusual. Just as in Catho- lic polemics, where the image of people’s malleable minds is linked to fears about the power of “heretical” books to seduce them, in Ronsard’s poem the word imprime evokes the medium of print, as the medium through which new teachings become imprinted upon people’s minds. Th is invoca- tion, however, is indirect and it raises the question of whether it indicates the poet’s conscious engagement, even rivalry, with the “curious discourses” that, Ronsard fears, seduce the population. Ronsard never saw himself as a popular poet, so he could not undertake priests, poets, and print 143 to combat the “curious discourses” by addressing the “riotous mob” that they seduced. He was the poet who sought to set himself apart from his poetic predecessors and from the common folk by studying, memorizing, and imitating classical poetry, that is to say, by weaving careful fables out of ancient mythology, which were both enticing and served as veils hid- ing moral and philosophical messages whose nature was esoteric, requiring refl ection and research from the reader.⁴⁸ He tells us that he learnt this allegorical art from his teacher of classical Greek, Jean Dorat. Despite its allegorical nature, Ronsard’s poetry is not disconnected from the political reality of his time: his poetry of praise is also elaborated through such al- legories. In the polemical poems, Ronsard weaves a net of references to the myth of the “iron age,” when strife, indigence, hard labor, war, political upheaval, and opinion reign instead of law and order. According to the myth, this dark age is brought about by disobedience toward laws estab- lished by Jupiter, both recalling and surpassing the disobedience of the gi- ants.⁴⁹ Th ese poems of admonition blame religious diff erence for the social and political disintegration of France, bringing about an era analogous to the mythical iron age. Th us the allusion to “a new fancy” that has divided the kingdom in the Elegie to des Autels unfolds in the Discours des miseres de ce temps (1562) into an allegorical depiction of “Opinion,” a siren-faced, winged monster with quiet feet of wool whom Jupiter fathered with Dame Presumption.⁵⁰ Ronsard imagines this “monster” slipping into the “cabinet of Th eologians” and saw there the seeds of disagreement, confusing the doctors “with a hundred of diff erent passages.”⁵¹ In the Remonstrance, he continues to elaborate the allegorical tale of “Opinion” by describing her throwing a serpent upon Luther’s chest.⁵² Th e serpent glides into the folds of Luther’s clothes without touching his skin and poisons his heart, breath- ing into him a “serpentine soul.” Th is image recalls, however distantly, Gringore’s blazon of the heretic, along with the deep-seated Catholic fear that Christianity may become “baroque,” that is, multiple and diversifi ed. Ronsard, like Gringore, resorts to poetic invective to restore the semiotic unity of Catholicism at the time when it is breaking up. Th e urgency implied in this eff ort pushes Ronsard to reject history as model for his poetry in favor of verses modeled upon satire and prophetic verses from the Bible. Th e historian’s “non-mendacious ink,”⁵³ Ronsard suggests in the Discours des miseres de ce temps, could provide a moral ex- ample (in the form of a counterexample) to future generations: 144 priests, poets, and print

Tell our children about our fatal misfortune, So that reading your book they bewail our misery.⁵⁴

Th e exemplarity of history is to be gained from the distance that separates the viewer from the events of the past, allowing for an emotional reaction that accompanies the insight into the nature of the events. Th is distance is guaranteed by the historian’s faithfulness to facts. “Th e historians of our time,” Ronsard recalls in the Responce aux injures et calomnies de je ne sçay quels predicans et ministres de Geneve (“Response to the Insults and Calum- nies of Some Nameless Preachers and Ministers of Geneva”), “record dis- passionately and faithfully, event by event, our civil wars for posterity.”⁵⁵ As readers of the records of history, the readers of future generations draw a moral lesson based on their individual judgment and according to their place and time. In the Discours des miseres de ce temps, the contingency of their views makes Ronsard anxious:

With what face, what eyes, oh inconstant centuries [siècles inconstans]! Will you view the history of our time?⁵⁶

History can only serve as example, but it cannot guarantee to protect the present time from the “inconstant centuries.” It is this realization about the contingency of future opinions that prompts the poet to underscore his resolution to write heroic poetry (and continue to spell out his poetic pro- gram) in the Continuation du discours des miseres de ce temps (1562):

I want, defying the years [maugré les ans], to publish [publier] to the world, [my poems, written] with a pen of iron [plume de fer] upon paper of steel [papier d’acier].⁵⁷

Militant poetry does not shrink from words of blame traced “with a pen of iron, upon paper of steel.” Th ese hard, abrasive materials not only de- note the tone of blame but also the durability of the words engraved with a sharp and hard pen into a hard surface, with which Ronsard aims at no less than controlling the memory of future generations, thus setting himself apart from the dispassionate descriptions of the historian, which remain subject to the contingent judgment of future readers. Th e confl a- tion of style and the act and material conditions of writing becomes even more apparent in the claim of writing “in a hardened style” / “with a hard- ened stylus” (d’un stile endurci), where the hardness of these materials and of the style also fi gures as a guarantee of the durability of these images priests, poets, and print 145 and protects them from the eroding eff ect of time (Contre le trait des ans, Continuation⁵⁸). Th is is why Ronsard identifi es himself with the biblical and Catholic tradition when he casts himself as a prophet who “loves” and “preaches” the truth in an address to his friend the historian Paschal. In other words, Ronsard imagines his poetry to live in a perpetual “golden age” (with its images never corroding) and also in an “iron age” (taking part in the war that divides the nation). In Ronsard’s militant poetry, images of the printing press and images of poetry are often confused or at least intertwined. Each poem of the Dis- cours was printed many times individually between 1562 and 1672, at the rate of about three hundred copies per printing,⁵⁹ each time allowing for a “hardening” of the style through a new combination of words; in addition, the image of a pointed iron stylus tracing the poem upon a “paper of steel” recalls the technique of etching used in the composition of the little bro- chures by which the poems were published by the Parisian printer Gabriel Buon. Ronsard originally published his polemical poems separately in the form of small brochures in quartos (called plaquettes in French), made up of a few sheets. Gabriel Buon, who was the sole printer to hold Ronsard’s permission to print the poems, printed the title page and the ornamental bandeaux from images etched upon steel and copper (Figure 20). Th ese plaquettes were available to a much broader public than Ronsard’s collections of poems and the collected editions of his works (which presup- posed a certain level of learnedness on the part of the reader) generally were. Correspondingly, it is hard not to notice that in the Discours Ronsard uses a language that is considerably simpler than that of the Hymns. Bibli- cal citations are far more frequent than in his other poems. For example, Ronsard wrote the Remonstrance at the crucial moment when the reformed army led by the prince of Condé was besieging Paris. It was published as an anonymous leafl et with a citation from Paul’s letter to the Romans (Ro- mans 16:17) on the title page, warning against those who “cause dissentions and scandals.” Th is biblical language does not correspond to the style gen- erally sought and imitated by Ronsard (who generally avoided Christian images); while it is part of the new style he is forging, it also recalls the widespread Catholic watchword that the spread of “new” religious ideas “scandalizes” the people. François Rigolot argues that in the Discours Ronsard translates political confl ict into rhetorical and aesthetic terms, but in doing so he imagines the self (presumably both his own poetic and authorial one as well as his Figure 20. Gabriel Buon’s “offi cial” edition of the Discours des Miseres de ce Temps (Paris, 1562). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.R6697.562d. priests, poets, and print 147 ideal reader) as a public subject, rather than as a private one, that is, as a subject of the monarchy rather than as a refl ective self.⁶⁰ We may add that the Discours are Ronsard’s most public poems also in the sense that they appeal to the widest audience by virtue of their format as well as through a language familiar to Catholics. Some of the “arguments” that Ronsard presents simply are calls for a military response, as, for example, in the Continuation, whose allegorical “Idol of France” declares that the decline of the French monarchy is due to its failure to take up arms against the Hu- guenots.⁶¹ Th e militant tone that Ronsard invents in his Discours is meant to be a metaphor that takes poetic defense for a kind of heroic warfare, but this tone also allows for an easy slippage from a metaphorical warfare to a literal one. Ronsard’s mythical universe is allowed at times seamlessly to collide with the social reality of the civil wars. Published separately as bro- chures, the Discours seem to have their own life in print, where they func- tion not so much symbolic arms promoting the poet’s self-fashioning (as a poet defending the monarchy) but rather as discursive weapons, no matter the exact wording. Even if not intended to represent the conservative Catholic party, Ron- sard’s brochures spoke to militant Catholics whose goal was to combat the Reformation, as evidenced by the existence of pirated editions printed in French cities in which the Catholic population considered the Reforma- tion to be especially threatening. Th ese copies of the Discours were printed and used, eff ectively, as “arms” against this perceived enemy. We know of pirated editions from Toulouse and Troyes.⁶² Th e ornate illuminations of the Troyes edition and the archaic Gothic type chosen by the printer thoroughly transform the image of the text, adapting it to the tastes of an audience used to reading popular adaptations of medieval romances and pious books in chapbook format (Figure 21). Gothic letters appealed to less erudite readers, and, famously, the fi rst edition of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (ca. 1532) was published in Gothic font (it is also the printers of Troyes who invent the Bibliothèque bleue at the end of the sixteenth century, whose function is similarly to render diff erent books accessible to a larger pub- lic). Without their author’s knowledge and consent, indeed, without any changes to the original words, Ronsard’s poems thus enter into a circu- lation with readers who regard them and use them as a literature of in- vectives. Th rough the format in which they were published and through their composition, exemplifi ed especially in Ronsard’s ambiguous use of Figure 21. A pirated edition of the Discours des Miseres de ce Temps (Troyes, 1562?). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES P-YE-605, fol. a2r. priests, poets, and print 149 the pronoun “we,” which can be appropriated by any Catholic group, the poems of the Discours lend themselves to such polemical uses. Is Ronsard caught in a mimetic combat with Genevan polemicists? It is not until the Responce (1563) that he admits that “blaming and admonish- ing” (taxer et blasmer) in his poetry engages him in an exercise similar to that of the Huguenot authors:

as he berates with great freedom and injurious words the Pope, the prelates, and the entire ancient institution of the Church, I too may, for my part, speak with freedom against his doctrine, the Supper, preaching, the mar- riage of priests, fantastical predestinations, and Calvin’s monstrous dreams, which a number of predicantors [predicantereaux] in Geneva, who have been either egged on by their concubines, spurred by hunger, or simply desirous of change, welcomed with open arms, and which later came to France in order to bewitch our youth and (which is even more harmful) a great number of those men who earlier stood as public examples of being wiser than others, more skilled in the aff airs of the state and less inclined toward pernicious novelty.⁶³

What Ronsard originally claimed to be an exercise in style quickly turned into a polemical exchange, and to a large extent thanks to his adversar- ies. Th is passage echoes many of the commonplaces of Catholic polemical literature, for example, the hunger and debauchery of Calvinists and the “enemy within.” In the years 1562 and 1563, Ronsard was attacked by a group of Gene- van pastors who published their witty verses against him—often in poems that copied Ronsard’s with only a few crucial words changed to alter sig- nifi cantly their meaning in order to indict Ronsard and Catholicism. Th e fl ood of Huguenot “responses” provoked by Ronsard’s poems is perhaps an indication of the fact that Genevan polemicists attributed a signifi cant public infl uence to these poems published by the prestigious royal poet. Th eir most cutting insult directed at Ronsard may be the accusation that he “imitates” the Catholic propagandist Artus Desiré. Ronsard’s poetic talent is diminishing with age, suggests the pastor Antoine de la Roche- Chandieu writing under the pen name “A. Zamariel” (“the Lord’s Song” in Hebrew). He was once a poet, now he is a priest. He once imitated Pindar, but his now “infertile Muse”

Imitating [contrefaisant] the style of an Artus Desiré, And banning from memory Pindar’s music, 150 priests, poets, and print

Sings only foolish songs, Which bring him blame and infamy, And their subject could get him dismissed from his parish.⁶⁴

Of course, from the point of view of poetic technique, this claim is absurd. Th e Discours are not poetic imitations of Desiré’s books, which Ronsard may never have read. It is the Calvinist polemicists who engage in the prac- tice of contrafactum that they attribute to Ronsard: they copy Ronsard’s verses with small modifi cations to change their meaning, involve them, even more, in the circulation of polemical literature, and use them as weapons against Ronsard and to defend their own theological and political cause. We have seen that Ronsard’s poems evoke the vague “we.” Daniel Ménager, moreover, suggests that Ronsard fi nds himself without a specifi c audience in the poems of the Discours, addressing abstract, allegorized en- tities such as “France.” Ronsard’s adversaries are able to hijack the place of this unspecifi ed interlocutor and initiate a provocative and somewhat hostile debate with Ronsard by, in turn, lending him the persona of a priest (which Ronsard was not, although he did benefi t from ecclesiastic revenue), a spokesperson for Catholic ideology.⁶⁵ Th e Genevan pastors’ through-and- through pragmatic view of poetry as a discourse that generates images for an audience and as a medium particularly apt for a polemical and political use certainly contributed to their willingness to “imitate” Ronsard and to turn his poems inside out in this manner in countless poems. Ronsard’s adversaries claim that he vilifi es the Reformation in images that are strik- ingly similar to those that circulated previously in the Catholic propa- ganda. Viewed as a polemical claim made in the stressed political arena of France in the wake of the conspiracy of Amboise and of the ensuing massacre of Vassy (where François de Guise retaliated for the conspiracy by killing a pious reformed community), one cannot help but agree with their claim that Ronsard imitates, if not copies, a Catholic way of depicting so-called heresy and heretics. Zamariel may unfairly compare Ronsard’s style to Desiré’s, but his poem, wittingly or unwittingly, echoes Ronsard’s claim about his “hardened style/stylus” that the poet makes into the very hallmark of his Discours. Ronsard’s “stylus” indeed produced verses that re- sembled Desiré’s style. While denigrating Ronsard’s poetics, the Genevan polemicists actually confront the politics of his poems that ultimately, in the public space (and in part independently from the poet’s control), con- tribute to fostering hatred of those who converted to Calvin’s teachings. To priests, poets, and print 151 his adversaries who plunder his verses to turn his own words against him, Ronsard can retort that his poetry serves to them as a mystic, cornucopian source, a fountain from which they draw their rhymes (“in my plentitude / You all abound).⁶⁶ Th e poet does not hesitate to reproach them for their ignorance of the “arcane art” (art caché ) that distinguishes him from bad poets like them,⁶⁷ but these eloquent critical jabs made on the grounds of the autonomy of poetry as an art inaccessible to the masses (and of the autonomy of the poet with an emerging consciousness of his own status as an author) cannot account for the fact that his own images circulate where they can be used to combat the public image of Huguenots. Moreover, the poetics of contrafactum honed by Genevan authors aims precisely at depriving poetry of its autonomous value by disregarding and eliminating the allegorical depth that characterizes Ronsard’s poetry, and by means of this technique, it attacks Ronsard’s authorial prestige (along with his Ca- tholicism) in order fully to politicize his poetry and turn it against him. In order to intensify the polemical eff ect, Ronsard’s adversaries responded to him and also further involved his Discours in a public forum by reprinting all the major poems of the Pléiade poet. A series of pirated editions were made in Lyon in 1563 (the city that converted to the Reformation for a brief time in 1562), which allowed readers to read Ronsard’s original attacks along with the responses of his adversaries, the Huguenot pastors.⁶⁸ Even though Ronsard does not “imitate” the poor verse, let alone the politics, of a Catholic preacher who is eventually accused of lèse-majesté, his poetic images printed with the “iron pen” of the printing press circulate as part of the polemical literature in the aftermath of the conspiracy of Am- boise and in the early years of the wars of religion. Th e critical response to Ronsard is colored by the Calvinist distrust of “poetry” as a false antithesis to the Word (single source of truth). Huguenot pastor, friend of Calvin and Bèze, Antoine de la Roche-Chandieu, alias A. Zamariel, describes “Th eol- ogy” as a woman abused by the commentaries of theologians (as we saw in the Farce des Th eologastres) as well as by the verses of the poets:

Most people want me to perish, And they are not content that the ignoramus Sorbonne, To disfi gure me beats me so heavily. But these turbulent and perverted Spirits, Turn against me the fury [la fureur] of their verses, And thus redoubling their poetic fervor [leur fureur poëtique], Th ey are now impelled by a frenetic rage rage[ phrenetique], 152 priests, poets, and print

And they throw at me the dung and ordure Th at they fi nd in the ditch of Epicureans.⁶⁹

Zamariel, in whom we can see someone speaking in the name of Hugue- nots whose life in France was increasingly diffi cult, sees in Ronsard’s po- etic fureur a means of increasing the excessive hatred to which not only reformed theology but also those who profer it are exposed in France.⁷⁰ Th e Genevan pastors do not grant poetry any of the two Horatian val- ues, teaching and delighting: they see in it instead a practical and polemi- cal tool for promoting the only knowledge they recognize (biblical). Th is perspective enables Zamariel to have a keen understanding of the politics achieved by Ronsard’s poetry (if only at the price of remaining blind to his poetics) and represent it as an instrument of detraction and injury (throw- ing mud at the other). In this sense, Ronsard’s project of establishing the new genre of a militant poetry that takes the place of and then imitates the force of arms, has become a reality from which Ronsard can only recoil on the pages of his carefully crafted collections of poetry. When Ronsard arranges his militant poetry under the general title Discours des miseres de ce temps in his Oeuvres (in various editions from 1567 to 1584), the works become part of a closed unit in the well-built structure of the book, pro- duced through a series of manipulations and rearrangements that do not respect the chronological order of their original publication or the chrono- logical line of historical events but rather evince the poet’s freedom to mold his poetic material. Th ey become tools for an authorial self that affi rms itself, and their direct polemical eff ect is lost because, located on the pages of a far more costly collected edition, they are aimed at a limited circle of readers who engage the text in the for intérieur (“internal tribunal”) of refl ection.⁷¹ ronsard and the poetry of disgrace

Ronsard’s two poems about the Huguenot “Hydra,” written to celebrate the military victories of Henri d’Anjou over the reformed army, are diffi cult to place within his polemical oeuvre. Judging by the words alone, they are the most blatantly militant pieces in the Discours. Th e poet’s ethos in these poems continues to consist in the eff ort, heroic in itself, to labor against the eff ect of time by crafting poetic images that are durable and hard. “Her- priests, poets, and print 153 culean labors” was the image Erasmus found best described the work of the scholar who sets out to preserve the texts of classical authors by editing them. Hercules chopping off the heads of the Lernean Hydra was an em- blem of the scholar’s endless labors. In his mythological universe, both in the Hymnes and in the last two poems of the Discours, Ronsard makes Her- cules into a key personage.⁷² Nuccio Ordine shows that Giordano Bruno allegorizes Hercules as Eff ort in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast to criticize Calvinist theology, which denies the value of eff ort or “works.”⁷³ Ronsard’s decision to cast the Duke of Anjou as Hercules in the Hydra po- ems can also be read as an allegorical representation derived from a similar philosophical and theological signifi cance. However, Ronsard may also be citing the Lernean Hydra as an image that circulated widely and publicly in anti-Lutheran and anti-Huguenot poems (for example, in the re-edition of the Blazon des heretiques after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre).⁷⁴ Montaigne too notes that Luther’s questioning of Catholic dogma brought about more disagreeing interpretations (“more divisions and altercations”) than did the scriptures and calls this proliferation of debates and disagree- ments la teste de Hydra (“a Hydra’s head”). In saying this, Montaigne cites an expression that is used in Catholic polemics as a visceral metaphor for religious dissent, but he also transforms this image into one that bespeaks the developing diff erences in a theological tradition and authority in which he sees the basis of a political unity.⁷⁵ Rather than persons or a group of individuals, Montaigne’s Hydra describes the state of ever-multiplying and hence no longer resolvable controversies, that is, polemics itself. Far from using it to capture the adversary as the enemy, Montaigne takes the image to paint the current state of political and social aff airs embracing all of French society without distinguishing between Catholics and Huguenots. Ronsard’s “Hydra,” however, univocally and unmistakably designates the Huguenots. In the L’Hydre desfaict (“Th e Hydra Defeated”), the three- headed Hydra of the reformed army led by Admiral Gaspar de Coligny is used as a simple tool for the visualization of the geography of battles. Geo- graphic entities in France are represented as fallen prey to the beast: its tail has crushed Rochelle while “its three heads” quench their thirst in the river Vienne, with Angoulême in its claws; Niort lies in ruins under the belly of the crawling monster, and its enormous chest “presses against” Poitevine. Th e cities where the army of Henri d’Anjou has defeated Coligny’s army are the “heads” of the beast that have been cut off : Limoge, Jarnac, and Poitiers. Ronsard’s allegory of the Hydra provides a simple visualization 154 priests, poets, and print of Catholic military victories. Th e headless body retreats to La Rochelle, but the poet encourages the Duke of Anjou to pursue the remainder of its body:

Have courage, Prince! Th e work must be fi nished, And the body of the adversary must be killed, And gathered piece by piece [par tronçons].⁷⁶

Th e poet then advises the duke to hang the bleeding carcass of the Hydra, once all the “sections” (tronçons) of its cut-up body have been assembled, as a trophy, on the temple whose foundations were laid out by Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and for which, Orpheus-like, Ronsard is laying the walls with his poems. In L’Hydre desfaict, Ronsard continues to write with a hand of steel (une aimantine main), sing in a voice of bronze (voix de bronze), and transcribe it with an iron stylus (une plume d’airain), which refl ects once again not only the combative style fi t for an “iron age” domi- nated by war and strife, but also his hopes of creating striking and durable images. Th e Catholic prince, the hero who has defeated the Huguenot army as many times as there are heads of the Hydra, and Ronsard, the founder of heroic poetry of combat, build together the poetic and military monument that commemorates the victories. Th e completion of this mon- ument requires that poetic eff ort join the military defeat (and massacre) of the remainder of the reformed army. A second poem with the same theme, Les Elemens ennemis de l’hydre (“Th e Elements Who Are the Enemies of the Hydra”) pursues an allegori- cal interpretation of a cold winter, a drought devastating the crops in the fi elds, the appearance of comets in the sky, and the fl ooding of the river Loire as the four elements’ (air, earth, fi re, and water) active support of the Duke of Anjou’s military campaign against the reformed army. He concludes the poem by suggesting that these elements should be “denied” to the “new monster” (Coligny). Chased from the elemental world of the French monarchy, Coligny could take brief refuge on an island off its At- lantic coast, the Isles de Maraines (the actual Île d’Oléron):

So that the waves carry away from France the bones Scattered in the wind, and of his fate [son histoire] Neither book nor memory testify [ny livre ny memoire].⁷⁷

Ronsard wishes that the bones of Coligny (who has been defeated by the Duke of Anjou but not in fact killed) will be scattered in the wind and priests, poets, and print 155 disappear without any trace. Th is wish may be seen as a desire to forget the memory of the wars, erasing the story (histoire) of Coligny’s life from the history of France. It may thus echo a watchword in the royal edicts, trying to promote reconciliation through destroying the traces of Catholic- Huguenot confl ict, oubliance (“oblivion”). However, denying proper burial and thus a public monument that marks the place of the body, beyond being an interventionist attempt to rewrite history, means also to deny re- nown and historical memory in the space of the French monarchy, a double disgrace from the pen of a poet. What may be called wishful poetic imagination in Ronsard’s mytho- poetic universe actually prefi gures Coligny’s fate during the Saint Bar- tholomew’s Day massacre. For many Catholic royalists, the massacre was tantamount to the armed intervention, even revenge, that Ronsard, in the 1560s, encouraged the king to carry out. Ronsard famously refrained from celebrating the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and Daniel Mé- nager suggests that he remained silent out of “prudence.”⁷⁸ Ronsard is also careful not to publish his Les Elemens ennemis de l’Hydre, celebrating the military success of the duke Henri and calling for the public forgetting of Coligny, until a much later date.⁷⁹ However, the poem probably circu- lated in manuscript form in the broader circles of those poets who followed Ronsard’s encouragement to compose polemical poetry on behalf of the monarchy.⁸⁰ Proof of such circulation is the anonymous Catholic poem printed in brochure form entitled Discovrs svr la mort de Gaspar de Coligny (1572), one of the many Catholic poems to be printed and sold in the aftermath of the massacre to celebrate Catholic victory along with the defeat, death, and disgrace of the reformed population. Th is poem is a gross vulgarization of the Ronsardian rhetoric of praise and disgrace. It imitates heavy-handedly Ronsard’s mythologizing poetry, borrowing its argument in particular from Les Elemens. Th e poem begins with Jupiter (Charles IX) appearing, carrying a pistol, in the council of gods and declaring his decision to ex- terminate the reformed population. Th is design of “divine vengeance” is quickly intercepted by smart Minerva (Catherine de Médicis), who sug- gests that he enlist the Catholic princes instead. Th is mythological scene is a (distant) echo of the scene in Ronsard’s L’Hymne de la justice, in which Jupiter, who plans to drown the people of the iron age in a deluge, is per- suaded by Justice to send her down instead to found a new golden age. In the Catholic militant poem, this mythological setting allegorizes the meet- 156 priests, poets, and print ing of the actual royal council, where, according to the account of many post–Saint Bartholomew’s Day libelles, the extermination of the reformed population was decided upon with the participation of King Charles IX and Catherine de Médicis. In this obvious eff ort to “immortalize” the eve of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which steals Ronsard’s style, the Catholic princes from the house of Lorraine (the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Aumale, to whose ranks the poet adds his patron René, Duke of Paulmy), are described as “these vigilant demi-gods,” the “royal troupe” (le royale troupeau), passing the eve of the massacre “glued to” a book (colez sur un livre) and playing the lute. Th ese activities depict them not only as lovers of the muses but also as heroes watching over the history of France (the lute being singled out by Ronsard as the Pindaric instrument of heroic poetry and the symbol of his own national epic, the Franciade). Elements of the massacre gain symbolic signifi cance: the “sacred pistol” (with which they attempt to assassinate Coligny two days before the massacre), the ex- ecution of Protestant princes as rebels, the dead bodies that are thrown into the river Seine, and, most importantly, the body of Coligny that is profaned and mutilated. Just as in Ronsard’s Les Elements, in the defama- tory Discovrs svr la mort de Gaspar de Coligny, the elements (the river Seine, a personifi ed Earth, and the goddess of the air, Juno) refuse to receive the massacred Coligny’s body. In this way, the poem creates a mythological explanation why Coligny’s body is cut up in an act of symbolic vengeance. Like many of the Catholic poems and libelles written after the massacre, this one too recounts the interpretation of the mangled body upon which the admiral’s alleged “crimes” can be read: his hands cut off because he desecrated churches with them, his head cut off because he deceived many with his designs. Countless Catholic poems describe the disgrace of the Huguenots and in particular of Gaspar de Coligny, who becomes the “scapegoat” through which the rivalry of Protestants and Catholics is to be checked. Th ese po- ems take on a plethora of forms from the “serpentine poems” (in which the last word of a line is repeated as the fi rst word of the next line) and coq à l’ânes (rambling satirical poems) that recall the pre-Pléiade poetry of Marot and the rhetoriqueurs.⁸¹ However, the poetic style of the Pléiade becomes the particular hallmark of an aggressive royalism that does not shrink from openly celebrating the disgrace of the Huguenots. Th e court poet and Hel- lenist Jean Dorat (upon whose name his student Ronsard once constructed priests, poets, and print 157 the pun that his poems are made of gold) “interprets” the maimed body of Coligny according to the text of Sophocles’ Oedipus:⁸²

And to avoid that his body rest on the land, Th at this enemy of the Holy Cross violated, He hangs on a disgraceful cross, a rope having been tied Around his feet, like an Oedipus.⁸³

Coligny’s maimed, unburied body hanged up upside-down with a rope tied around his feet likens him to the tragic fi gure guilty of hubris and regicide. Th is comparison is made possible by a detail in the play, the meaning of the Greek proper name, “swollen foot,” which recalls two precise elements in the plot, the tying together of the child Oedipus’s feet and the persis- tence of the mark of this earlier trauma in Oedipus’s adult life—it becomes instrumental in his tragic self-recognition at the end of the play. Dorat uses his profound knowledge of Sophocles’ poetic images that few were skilled enough to cull from the Greek text and his refi ned skills as a philologist and imitator to depict Coligny as guilty of the crime of disobedience to the laws of the monarchy and to the monarch. One can only wonder if the Hellenist also remembered Tiresias’s cruel prophecy in Sophocles’ play: “no man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you.”⁸⁴ Dorat is not alone among the “sacred troupe” in using Herculean poetic and philologi- cal labor in defense of the monarchy in the aftermath of the massacre.⁸⁵ To many Huguenots, as we shall see in the next chapter, the brutality bespeaks the loss of any law and order in the French monarchy. Th us priests and po- ets, while their rhetorical and political ambitions widely diverge, fi nd their common enemy in the Huguenots during the fi rst long decade that goes from the conspiracy of Amboise and the beginning of the wars of religion to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and its troubled aftermath. six Fabricated Worlds and the Menippean Satire

Catholic polemicists avail themselves of visceral images of religious and moral corruption within the church and portray them increasingly as threats to law and order in the monarchy, while Calvinist satires are most successful in creating alternative satirical spaces, negative worlds, and even negative ontologies. Although sympathetic audiences are projected into a position outside these fi ctional spaces, from where they can view them in their projected totality and reject them (using critical judgment that is, however, never without aff ective charge or “disgust”), readers and audiences come to haunt, if not inhabit, these uncanny and fascinating spaces. Th e theological and ideological positions they inhabit become fi rmly defi ned against the contours of an inimical world irreconcilable with their own. Satires thus assume a political role in France, even before the struggle for the monarchy, fi rst during the failed conspiracy of Amboise, subsequently during the civil wars that break out in 1562, and, most intensely, after the assassination of Henri III (1589) in the war fought between the Catholic League and Henri de Navarre. Th is political role is largely defi ned by the divisiveness of satire, by the scandal that consists in drawing audiences into opposing views. fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 159

We can say that the worlds into which satires draw their readers are “fabricated” in the sixteenth-century sense of the word meaning “framed,” “fashioned,” “plotted,” “forged,” or “invented” (Cotgrave) to underscore the fi ctional and artifi cial character of each and every totalizing ideologi- cal world. Yet these fabricated worlds gain actual signifi cance in the po- litical arena, and they even can be used as tools for recasting a national social space after the crowning of Henri IV. In this chapter, I compare the techniques of fabrication that led to Calvinist cosmographies of a “papist world” and those in the Satyre Menippee, a libelle that helped Henri de Navarre win the hearts and minds of the Parisians, but whose supplements aim rather at reterritorializing readers in a habitable (albeit imaginary) so- cial space that coincides topographically, although not typographically, as we shall see, with that of Paris and more generally with national space. In both these works, the reader’s active engagement is solicited in forms that are bookish but not solitary. books from scraps: the case of the “fifth book”

Th e failed colloquy of Poissy showed the unwillingness of the radical Cath- olic and Calvinist parties to debate and reach a consensus on sharp theo- logical diff erences. It is not surprising that in the following years, which are also those of the fi rst and second civil wars, scraps of Rabelais’s anti- Roman satire attacking specifi c aspects of Catholicism (notably fasting, church bells, and papal authority) are reused. A number of publications, today collectively referred to as the “Fifth Book” because they present themselves as continuations and even closures to Rabelais’s four books, re- claim his authorship and reanimate Rabelaisian satire in this period of so- cial upheaval. In each extant version of the Fifth Book¹ is also the author’s (or a team of authors) willingness to work from scraps, to publish a work that is based on hasty compilation, on manipulations such as organizing, forging, and copying of textual material. Th e shortest one among these hybrid texts and the earliest version to be printed, L’Isle Sonnante (pub- lished in 1562 or 1563), appears a little after the massacre of Vassy.² Mireille Huchon has argued on the basis of an extensive grammatical analysis that the three extant versions of the text are “editions” of extensive “scraps” or “drafts” originally composed by Rabelais. Th e question, as she presents it, 160 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire is whether these “scraps” were assembled and completed by a friendly imi- tator or by a Calvinist plagiarist who turned them to his own polemical use. Huchon’s grammatical analyses have been motivated by an eff ort to rescue, at least in part, the authenticity of the Fifth Book, and she provides evidence that two sets of scraps drafted by Rabelais were in the composi- tion of all three extant texts: the fi rst set comprised of chapters originally written for the fi rst edition of the Quart livre (1548) but discarded, possibly because Rabelais deemed their anticlerical message too scathing, and the second set of some rather sketchy scraps Rabelais wrote as a (never-realized) sequel to the Tiers livre.³ Th e question of the authenticity of this hybrid and puzzling text emerges with a singular acuteness in the prologue of the Cinquiesme livre (1564).⁴ Th is prologue is a piece of textual evidence that we are dealing, at least in part, with a compilation, since it clearly reprints a version (an early version according to Huchon) of Rabelais’s prologue to the Tiers livre. It is in this version that Rabelais-Alcofrybas confesses that he could never “pull off ” imitating (quant est de moy imiter je ne les scaurois) those French poets who have brought “heroic deeds” and “diffi cult themes” to the “eternal con- struction [ fabrique] of our vulgar tongue,”⁵ an ironic statement suggesting that the text is just a poor copy of the poetic edifi ces forged by these far greater authors. In the (presumably later, reworked) version that Rabelais prefi xes to the Tiers livre, he transforms this ironic comment on his poetic art into a patriotic claim that by rolling his inexhaustible Diogenic barrel (the symbol of his poetic creativity, the source of his fi ction) forward, he will contribute to the fortifi cations of France’s ramparts.⁶ Th is oscillation between imitation (whose product is never a mere copy but an independent piece that vies with the original) and the mere copy may lie in the rhetorical procedures identifi ed by Terence Cave, which turn the artistic originality of abundance (copia) into mere repetition, copy, and verbosity.⁷ Rabelais’s preface to the Tiers livre also ties the question of rhetorical constitution and epistemological status to political engagement and usefulness: it claims that satire has the power to contribute to the unity of the political edifi ce. With the intensifi ed politicization of satire, it is precisely the political space of the monarchy that is burst by the antagonistic views transmitted in po- lemical works and Rabelais’s project of a specifi cally pro-monarchist satire is revisited by the Satyre Menippee in the early 1590s. fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 161 cosmographic anti-catholicism

Of remarkable Rabelaisian style is a satirical book from Geneva entitled Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique (“Th e History of the Papist Mappa Mundi,” 1566, 1567). Th e fi rst edition of this book was accompanied by a large-sized map entitled La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique (“Th e New Papist Mappa Mundi,” 1566), serving as a visual tool for the presentation of the arguments of the book and for rendering it accessible to a broader pub- lic. Th e map and the book together present a double scandal. Th e map is a schema that reproduces the techniques of organization contained in the text. In addition, it provides its own iconoclastic iconography of Catholi- cism. In the text, the rhetorical eff orts to appeal to the reader and debase the adversary manifest themselves in a relentless performance of vitupera- tion carried out in striking images. Th e Mappe-monde nouvelle has been attributed to an engraver born in Paris, Pierre Eskrich, who spent a part of his life traveling between Lyon and Geneva and oscillating between Catholicism and Calvinism.⁸ Th e His- toire presents itself as an explanation of the satirical mappa mundi, as an extended legend and a discursive presentation of the images depicted in the map. Th e cosmographical schema allows for a straightforward orga- nization, as the author’s arguments against the Roman Catholic Church are listed under rubrics that are constituted by the “twelve provinces” and “seven republics” of the papal world and cities contained in each. Just as in the Satyres chrestiennes, a variety of persons, things, and actions are ar- ranged under each rubric. Eskrich’s map has been estimated to be “probably the largest satirical image published in the sixteenth century.”⁹ It replicates by visual means the Histoire’s scheme of nineteen provinces and six republics, with cities in each province and republic, and with depictions of hell (the pope’s sum- mer palace) and purgatory (his fortifi ed castle), and the court of the King of Free Will, the pope’s main ally. Th e text spells out the message that the “papist mappa mundi” is the map of the infernal world, and hence a mere “fabrication,” as mapping a place where no stars are present is not possible. To bear this out, the map is placed inside the devil’s mouth, which is drib- bling with saliva. Outside the contours of this monstrous mouth, instead of cupids or angels blowing wind, six devils blow fi re. In addition, Eskrich constructs the map by superimposing the outline of the city of Rome over 162 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire the circular schema of medieval maps of the world. Th us the papal world is both Hell and Rome.¹⁰ Striking is the prevalence of chorographic detail in this disorienting space that is at once cosmographic and topographic, rendering the papal mappa mundi a fragmented totality or a “labyrinthine topography.”¹¹ Th e set of walls (reproducing major Roman walls, gates, and boulevards), rivers, and lakes on the map function as lines of demar- cation for the distinct places, but they become also the organizing tools in the image. For the mappe-monde nouvelle papistique is nothing other than a grid (similar to the “places,” abstract units of distinct localities that help to organize the content of memory in artifi cial memory analyzed by Frances Yates) upon which a series of striking, violent, or grotesque images (imagines agentes, active or dramatic images) can be placed.¹² As a maker of images, the engraver Eskrich found himself in a diffi cult situation in Geneva where the text ruled and images were, for the most part, banned; as a convert to Protestantism, he was forced to live as a “Nicodemite” in Lyon. In his life and work, the clear lines of demarcation that he draws on the map between opposing theologies fi gured as antagonistic military forces did not exist. Th e dramatic tension that is created by the setting of the papal world in the mouth of the devil (which, it appears, could close at any time) can be taken as an expression of a precarious existence in two worlds at the same time.¹³ It is in search of striking images with which to represent the vices of Ca- tholicism that the author of the Histoire resorts to the cosmographic model, which was in vogue in the period of discoveries. Th e analogy of the discov- ery of the New World contributes to the visual schema that both image and text adopt, with the twelve provinces of the papist world correspond- ing to the twelve provinces of New Spain, and the seven allied republics to the territories of Peru governed by the Portuguese. In the Preface, the author boasts of being the fi rst “cosmographer” of the “papist world” and, continuing the analogy, explains that he

had to gather that which had been written about this world by a variety of authors, just as those new Cosmographers who, wanting to describe the New World, on the West, that is New Spain and Peru, the lands of King Philip, and, on the East, Calcutta, Goga, the Moluccas, and other lands belonging to the king of Portugal, had to repeat that which has been said about these places by Ptolemy, Solinus, Strabon, and many other ancient and modern authors who could not write abundantly about these places because they had not yet been discovered.”¹⁴ fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 163

With this declaration, the mock cosmographer of the papist world puts his fi nger on the structural ambiguity of cosmographic writing in the sixteenth century, namely, that its authority rests upon endlessly recycled conven- tion, much of which is fabled knowledge. Th e text signals repeatedly that it relies on cosmographic hearsay (information is everywhere introduced by the stock phrase “it has been said around the world that . . . ,” which renders it anecdotal and of dubious epistemological value) as a tongue- in-cheek gesture suggesting that it consciously exploits the cosmographic convention of gathering striking chorographic detail (whether it is truth- ful or not) and throwing it inside the empty rubrics provided by the cos- mographic and cartographic schema.¹⁵ If the papist mappa mundi is du- bious because it contradicts Ptolemaic geography, the response of the polemicist is to embrace the more fundamental ambiguity of cosmographic narratives. Instead of renowned authors in geography, the Histoire constantly refers to the canons of the church and classical poetry as sources, simultaneously devaluing them as hearsay. Th e text is both iconoclastic and provocative, that is, it inventories and debunks the “scandals” of Catholicism through images that should strike the reader’s imagination and provoke his emo- tional reaction. Th e accompanying map makes this idea palpable by placing next to one another the iconoclastic activities of reformers. Musculus pulls down the cross, henceforth the symbol of idolatry in the Catholic Church, while others, Th eodore Bibliander, Blaurer, Martin Borrhaus, Sebastian Münster, and Erasmus Sarcerius, are trying to tear images and statues out of the hands of jealously protective monks. A group of “papists” lays bricks and constructs, out of “stumbling blocks,” or “scandals,” a building that corresponds to the circular Rotunda on Sebastiano di Re’s map of Rome (Figure 22).¹⁶ While the cosmographic allegory allows a schematic, ordered presentation in text and map, the argument presented in the book boils down to a paratactic arrangement of these topics, in which each descrip- tion constitutes a distinct detail, striking and memorable. Indeed, a zealous quest for vivid images that please, strike, or shock the reader’s imagination informs the rhetorical procedures of the Histoire. Th e verbal description in the Histoire and the visual representation in La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique are both coordinated and in a relation of rivalry with each other, as were, apparently, author and engraver.¹⁷ It is as if the text of the Histoire tried to outdo Eskrich’s engraving in presenting the reader with outland- ish images of an imaginary Catholic world. Apparently dissatisfi ed with 164 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

Figure 22. Reformers destroy “idols,” while “papists” build the Rotunda from stumbling blocks. A detail from La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7. the work delivered by the engraver and anxious to extend his control over the visual product that he allegedly “describes,” the author of the book promises “to give order that the images be more pleasing and much more delicate than what you see now.”¹⁸ Going down the list of “Provinces,” the text presents much that is dra- matic, grotesque, or pleasing in the way that reading the book recalls por- ing over a guidebook in which details are favored over the coherence of space. Cities abound in hidden places, edifi ces are piled upon edifi ces. Th e Province of Devout Places boasts of its numerous churches (and some of Rome’s famous churches show up on Eskrich’s map), while the crosses tow- ering here and there over the infernal landscape of the papist world recall the columns of the Eternal City.¹⁹ Th e Province of Hermitages surprises the Calvinist traveler with complete cities built in the middle of forests or inside mountains.²⁰ Th e Province of Pilgrimages is a Levantine space fi lled with pilgrims, mules, camels, and monkeys. Th e pilgrims walk around in their world (as do all other fi gures on the map) oblivious of the presence of the grotesque infernal creatures with whom they cross paths (Figure 23). Th e court of the “King of Free Will,” who has walked off the pages of fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 165 another book,²¹ is described as a place fi lled with “novelties” pleasing to the eye including a garden where all sorts of festivities are held accord- ing to the fancy of the great dame “Good Intention.” Th e image of the “garden,” the long-standing symbol of a luxurious French culture, is thus transformed into the satirical image of Catholic religion—no more than a “mixed salad” gathered in the garden of the King of Free Will (Figure 24).²² Th ese images satirize and debunk traditional icons of Rome and of Ca- tholicism, while they also invite the reader and the viewer to linger over the picturesque details, recalling the aesthetics of wonder in Pantagruel’s mouth.

Figure 23. Th e Province of Pilgrimage. A detail from La mappe-monde nou- velle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7.

Figure 24. Th e court of the King of Free Will. A detail from La mappe- monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7. 166 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

In an oblique reference to the Treaty of Tordesillas signed in 1494 be- tween the Spanish and the Portuguese and sanctioned by the Roman Cath- olic Church, the author of the Histoire claims that the empire of the church was constructed by this geographical act par excellence. Calvinist critics of the papacy frequently accused the Catholic Church of masterminding the conquest and the plunder of the New World, and the author of the Histoire “redraws” the boundaries of the papist universe, placing the Province of the Mass in the same region as the one in which the French colony on the east coast of Brazil was situated. Although the colony was dismantled un- der military pressure from Portuguese settlers by the time the Histoire was published, this reference to a failed French colony (whose history echoes the failure of a Genevan Calvinist mission to the New World) allows the author to exploit another striking image: the cannibalism of the local Tu- pinambas.²³ Th is region of the world is best known at the period through the books of the French cosmographer André Th evet, whose work has been noted for the predominance of both factual and fanciful details at the price of congruity and organization and has thus been compared to a menippean satire.²⁴ Th e cosmographic procedure of drawing comparisons between widely diff erent regions (or “climates”) of the world, of explaining one re- gion through an analogy between an element of one region and elements in another one, is precisely Th evet’s most common method in his Cosmog- raphy. Th evet’s passion for describing the world through such resemblances may have been kindled by the fact that as royal cosmographer he had ac- cess to the entire royal library in Fontainebleau. During Th evet’s lifetime, his Cosmography was attacked for its widespread use of erroneous and fan- ciful information. Nevertheless, his juxtapositions, whose incongruity and inaccuracy were apparent even to many contemporaries, constructed out of Brazil a mythical matrix of the world.²⁵ It is this cosmographic construc- tion that Trento turns into the matrix of the “papist” world. According to the Histoire, the papist world is analogous to the New World, for just as the straw cabins of the Tupinamba tribe (a picturesque chorographic detail culled from Th evet) cannot withstand the cannonballs of the Spanish and the Portuguese, so also the fl imsy constructions of the papal universe cannot withstand the attacks of the “cannonballs” of scrip- ture. Th e analogy between the “new world” of the papacy and the newly discovered (and still largely unknown) territories of the Americas gives away the principal strategy of both engraver and writer, which consists in fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 167 portraying the violence of the Tupinambas’ cannibalism and the violence of the Spanish (hence papist) conquest as mirror images. Images about atrocities perpetrated by Spanish conquerors became known in Europe es- pecially after the publication (in 1552) of Bartholomé de las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, whose debunking of Spanish atroci- ties was often turned to polemical ends by Protestant authors. Th e Histoire follows a series of French anti-Catholic pamphlets beginning with Les faitz du Jesus Christ et du Pape, in which the alleged spiritual and material ex- ploitation of the faithful is symbolically labeled as “devouring them.” Th e book attacks the Eucharist, which prompted Calvinists to accuse Catholics of “eating their God of dough.” It also foreshadows the iconography of the engravings prepared by the Flemish Protestant author Th eodor de Bry for his multivolume book of engravings entitled America (1590–1634), in which images of Spaniards slaughtering Indians are juxtaposed with images of Indians massacring Spaniards. Both the images of the New World and the analogous ones of Catholicism are evoked with the same purpose, to show that a new reason based on writing/print/scripture is called for to grant a new order to the world.²⁶ Th is new order is indicated in Eskrich’s map by the international (German, French, English, Scottish, Irish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Austrian, Flemish, Dutch, and Polish) Protestant armies as- sailing the papist world, ready to invade and destroy it in order to overwrite its chaos with a new logic that extends beyond political boundaries. Images of brave reformers slinging books as weapons, wielding books that burn and books that are also swords and lances inside the papist mappa mundi, suggest that the new order is based on the scriptural text (Figures 25 and 26). Th e image of this new order penetrating the “old” space occupied by Catholicism also seems to aim at rivaling the violent gesture of territorial conquest attributed to the Catholic Church. To the rape of Dame Truth by the Catholics (a detail on the map) corresponds to the attack on Dame Transsubstantiation by evangelical doctors (another detail). Th e two piles of broken images and relics amassed by zealous iconoclasts who are de- picted at their arduous work bear a structural resemblance to the shaky and unfounded edifi ce built out of “stumbling blocks” by busy “papists” right next to it. While the “violence” of establishing a “new world” is discredited by its shaky epistemological foundations, the other violence of sweeping away the papist world is shown to be justifi ed (in the world of Trento and Eskrich, in any case) by its evangelical grounding. 168 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

Figure 25. Th éodore de Bèze fi ghting with a book. A detail from La mappe- monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7.

Figure 26. Reformers defy embattled devils with books. A detail from La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7.

Th e Calvinist ideology defends, at least for the time being, the participa- tion of writer and engraver in the same procedures of “fabrication,” which become especially evident in the writer’s and the engraver’s satirical en- gagement with the same cosmographic methods. Th e books brandished as weapons by reformers such as Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel (Figure 27) fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 169 are opposed to “papist books” that fi gure on the map as dangerous and seductive merchandise sold in the papist marketplace (next to fi sh) because the books of the reformers all supposedly originate in the militant power of scripture (Figure 28). However, the scriptural Word had long ceased to solely make up the polemical books printed in Geneva—satire eliminates biblical content altogether. Reformed books, insofar as they are polemical weapons like the Histoire and the Mappe-monde, abound in satirical works transmitting their message by projecting imaginary worlds and anti-worlds or negative ontologies. Eskrich’s Mappe-monde was itself a polemical book, sold in the form of twenty-eight woodcut images printed upon loose sheets, which could be either bound in a book format or assembled to form a wall map. In either of its uses, as the image of a total anti-world and as a series of details to be viewed as a graphic book, it provided a powerful counter- part to Trento’s book.²⁷ No organizing eff ort, no projected new order halts the paratactic move-

Figure 27. Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel. A detail from La mappe- monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7. 170 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

Figure 28. A “papist” market of books. A detail from La mappe-monde nou- velle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7. ment of the text. Th e Histoire does not stop at establishing a mimetic re- semblance between cannibalism and Catholicism; it relentlessly adds new analogies to describe the Mass, which is an “open house, with tables laid and decked out with gold and silver that they call ‘altars,’” the “papists” “devour everything on this altar, smearing their snout with blood, eagerly lick the goblet in which the blood is contained,” they come in great num- bers, “almost an infi nite number of cruel Lycaons, horses of the Th racian king [Diomedes], Anthropophagi, Sphinxes, Osirises, Dragons, Pithons, Eritonians, Minotaurs, Cyclopses, Polyphemes, and Laestrygonians, all of whom eat and nourish themselves on human fl esh,” and, fi nally,

these heathenish butchers mix to this fl esh some of the blood that they keep and spice the mixture with ceremonies, enchantments, and supersti- tions to make a dish which is like the theriac, and they advertise this dish as good and benefi cial for many ills, and they sell much of it, but [they claim that] it is well worth the money because it has more power than all of Saint John’s herbs.²⁸ fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 171

Th e text is organized by paratactic repetitions, substitutions, similes, and comparisons that permit the juxtaposition of disparate images. Th e fi nal comparison of the Catholic Mass to a medical hodgepodge, a “theriac” (literally, an antidote to poison, a component of which was opium) with which the “papists” allegedly deceive and hypnotize the world (an early version of Marx’s criticism of the dulling eff ect of religion applied solely to Catholicism here), also points us to the text’s own procedures. For the text of the Histoire is also a “theriac,” a concocted text, a satura, a mix of juxtaposed images, which presents itself as an antidote for the “ceremonies, enchantments, and superstitions” of Catholic religion. In the Histoire, the vision of an enormous anti-Catholic library emerges. Describing the Province of Pilgrimages, the author notes that there are so many places of pilgrimage that, were one to take inventory of them, “they would fi ll all the books of a large library” (une grande librarie [sic]).²⁹ Why, we may ask, inventory the places of pilgrimage and devotion, the errors, rites, sacraments, doctrines, and texts that a Protestant believer can only deem useless and even harmful? Th e eff ect of such inventories or “libraries” reaches beyond iconoclasm. To inventory the ruins of the papist world in their totality calls for a fantastic library to serve as a new form of artifi cial memory. Moreover, the idea of the imaginary library made up of records of errors takes us back to the mock catalogue library of Saint-Victor in Ra- belais’s Pantagruel with satirical titles such as “Th e Codpiece of the Law,” “Th e Preacher’s Foxtail-duster, composed by Turlupin,” “Th e Apparition of Saint Gertrude to a Nun of Poissy During her Child-Birth,” “Tartaret, On How to Defecate,” “Béda, and On the Excellence of Tripe.” Th e function of Rabelais’s library catalogue is to poke fun at scholastic learning, but more importantly, to transform a space and a community of reading, the mo- nastic one, into another imaginary community.³⁰ Th is other community is the utopian one that consists of the readers of Rabelais’s books—those who laugh at the linguistic exuberance that fuels the satire of a conserva- tive tradition of scholastic learning and the art of preaching. Th e Calvinist author’s evocation of an anti-Catholic library indicates that he too imag- ines a community of readers who would not only read the iconoclastic in- ventories of the scandals of the papacy but would also enjoy doing so. It is clear that the readers who entered this library (or study or bookstore, as the word librairie signifi es all three) and bought or read the books would be ideal readers of the Histoire.³¹ Indeed, the book is precisely engaged in fab- 172 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire ricating such a “library” through its paratactic lists. Th e Histoire thus joins a series of anti-Catholic books, the Livre des marchans, Calvin’s treatise of relics, and the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, that by virtue of be- ing inventories and catalogues, attract readers and draw them into their imaginary worlds. Nowhere does the paratactic rhythm of invectives appear more force- fully than in the monologue by the ferryman Charon. His description of the prelates whom he transports over the river to hell is a repetition of ver- bal onslaughts and insulting terms:

I am about to split and die from laughing at these beasts, ignoramuses, strange birds, do-nothings, pigs, lechers, and detestable buggers fi lled with all sorts of fi lthy ordure and enormous vices, so cruel that they can never have their fi ll on the goods and the blood of the poor people.³²

His language loses its descriptive value, for how is it possible to visualize all the grotesque details he rants off : “aspic vipers, basilisks, hydras, cen- taurs full of poison, Chimeras with torsos of lions, vomiting fi re, diff er- ent sorts of contorted sea-monsters, seals, orkens and espaularts [the last two signifying two diff erent types of seals].”³³ Charon the ferryman has a hard time navigating his skiff —for one “must carry a compass [calamite] in order to sail and keep a straight course, and have an astrolabe to take altitudes and ascertain the elevations of the sun, and understand well the changes of the Moon,” but this is not possible in the infernal place where the sun and the moon are absent, rendering orientation impossible. Th e fu- rious ferryman decides to discipline his “lunatic” passengers with his oar (à beaux coups de baston). Similarly, in his monologue, repetition is what gives rhythm and vibration to his vindictive words and his performance is remi- niscent of Diogenes’ coups de baston in Rabelais’s Pantagruel. As frenzied Charon carries on, he becomes a diabolized, cannibalistic reincarnation of his namesake in Lucian, who says he will “split the head of 25 or 30 pairs of these depraved wimps with [his] oar; put them on the spit, roast them like capons, and eat them; tear out the heart from their chest; beat them, kick them, and give them a good thrashing with his oar in order to break all the bones in their bodies, tear out their long beards hair by hair and use it as padding in [his] boots and in the saddles of his mules, donkeys, and draft horses.”³⁴ While Charon’s fi gure is hard to fi nd among the clutter of the map’s infernal landscape, there emerges a cadence whose thrashing rhythm fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 173

Figure 29. Charon, the ferryman. A detail from La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique (Geneva, 1566). © British Library Board. All rights reserved. C.160.c.7. is calculated to be humorous (Figure 29). Th e runaway poetics of this in- vective was certainly intended to amuse the reader who was enjoying the book in his library or study. And when the text elicited laughter it signifi ed that the reader inhabited a world which was no longer (and nowhere) com- patible with this imagined, scandalous anti-world of Catholicism. In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, the dead who board Charon’s ferry to cross Lethe are to shed all their attributes, are stripped and shaven, and boiled down to mere dry skulls, and must forget their past lives—which they cannot, for in Lucian’s dialogues they all turn out to be “nostalgic whiners.”³⁵ Th e Histoire works with the reader’s memory and through it his sense of belonging to a community of the faithful. In his conclusion to those readers who may be displeased by the book (Aux fantastiques) the author declares:

if some things are several times repeated in this history, it is to help the readers better understand the subject matter and to engrave in their memo- ries [mettre en memoire] the rage, cruelty, theft, frauds, and tyrannical acts 174 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

of the Pope and of the gang of his followers. Desirous that all things be understood well, the author allowed himself to repeat them often, burn- ing with zeal for the glory of God and moved by fear that the evil deeds of priests, monks, and others like them would not be understood well if they were only said once, he repeated them to make them easier understood and better imprinted upon the readers’ minds [mieux engraver aux esprits des Lecteurs].³⁶

Here we may rediscover the insight into the art of memory and into the psychology attached to the rhetoric of insults and denigration. Repetition is the mother of learning, for words become engraved upon the listener’s or reader’s mind, which becomes a surface analogous to the printed page. Charon’s is a comic performance of the conviction that words can func- tion as clubs, but they are most eff ective when they are used to strike the reader’s memory and imagination. Th ese words do not target the adver- sary since there is no question of converting those who live in the “papist” Inferno through witty corrective satirizing. Th us these words cannot ef- fectively ruin the papist world, but they can arouse the laughter of those readers who are already inclined to accept the book’s ideological and theo- logical views. Th ese readers may fi nd a sense of community and a sense of orientation in this disorienting satirical cosmography. Th e readers of the Histoire are ushered into the imaginary anti-world as the dead are ush- ered into Hades by Charon, and they are to remember the imaginary de- marcations of a world of oppositions and thus also to inhabit this divided world. Th e paratactic thrust of the text and the schematic organization of the map, the cosmographic excess and dispersion and the clear-cut, two-di- mensional distinctions thus do not so much contradict as they complement each other in shaping the reader’s mental and aff ective world. Th e Histoire (and the accompanying map) is a perfect example of the hot medium of the polemical book that treats the reader to an information overfl ow (the scandals of the Catholic Church), and expects the reader’s prompt response to this overfl ow. Details draw readers (or viewers) into a process of contemplation that should quickly lead to their grasping the message. Th ey can revisit both the map and the text, enjoy discovering more and more of the chorographic details and the striking images, but the message will not change—no space is left for meditation and judg- ment. It is this prompt and active participation of the reader to which the author jokingly alludes in the conclusion, that if the reader fi nds the work fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 175 to be too long-winded, he should do what he would if his hooded cape (cappe) or his jacket (saye) were too long: apply his scissors to it and cut it shorter.³⁷ Th e readers are asked not to spend more time with the text than suits them. Th is “quick” reception both demands the reader’s consent and promises him reading pleasure (rather than hard work and study). Just as the author, presumably Trento, wrote the book by pasting in imprecise allusions from his readings, the reader is invited to read the book as he pleases, “wander” in the diff erent provinces of the “papist world” as long as he wishes to and cut out the passages he likes and paste them into a private album.³⁸ Th e author believes that reading constitutes a pleasure of appropriation and does not subscribe to the sacredness of the book. Th ere is more in this suggestion than simple iconoclasm toward books and other objects of human artifi ce so characteristic of the Reformation. It is that the book allows the creation of imaginary spaces that the reader can dwell in and, metaphorically speaking, inhabit. Further, as he reads and handles the printed text, and as he appropriates the book, the reader also joins a community fi gured in ideological rather than aesthetic terms as that of the “faithful.” menippean satire and the typographic space of paris

Th e insight that readers enjoy an overfl ow of information as long as it is presented to them in a manageable fashion fi nds its full exploitation in a new literary form that emerges at the end of the sixteenth century, the menippean satire. Th e French Satyre Menippee was a collaborative libelle consisting of a medley of texts, conceived by the Catholic and Protestant moderate political faction to support Henri de Navarre (King Henri IV from 1598 to 1610) in his eff orts, both military and ideological, to recapture the capital, win and end the civil wars, and reunite France in the early 1590s. Th e Satyre Menippee is a hybrid text that came into existence in sev- eral stages as the various authors “updated” the text with new additions to include topical references to current events. “Menippean Satire,” the ulti- mate (although not the original) title given to the collection of pieces sup- porting the Navarrist party, is an elegant reference to the legendary Cynic Menippus and to Marcus Terentius Varro’s menippean satires. Th ese works 176 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire were known only in fragments, but, in fact, the term becomes a schema for a discourse defi ned by a mimetic relation to the excessive and contentious style of polemical discourse and by a form in which strong images and dif- ferent styles and forms are juxtaposed in the same book. Th e authors of the Satyre Menippee exploit the technique of addition and compilation not only within each version but also by publishing new “supplements” to adapt the work to the rapidly changing times. Th e fi rst version, Satyre Menippee de la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenu des Etats de Paris. M.D. XCIII. (“Menippean Satire on the Virtue of the Span- ish Catholicon and on the Meeting of the Estates in Paris in the Year of 1593”), which circulated in manuscript form in 1593, preceded the conver- sion of Henri de Navarre and his return to Paris. Th is “core” text—a satiri- cal representation of the “Assembly of the Estates” in 1593, during which the ultra- Catholic League under Spanish infl uence tries to promote the Duc de Guise to the monarchy— champions the election of Henri de Navarre at a time when the League is still strong and the conversion of Henri de Navarre to Catholicism, let alone his succession to the throne, is far from certain.³⁹ A sequel (Suitte du Catholicon d’Espagne . . .) is added “after the Parisians came back to their good sense, and were reduced to obedience to the king,” along with other pieces such as the mock elegy on the death of a donkey belonging to the League, a poem that recalls the events of the siege of Paris, especially the starvation of the inhabitants of the besieged city.⁴⁰ Another signifi cant addition is produced after the crowning of Henri de Navarre as Henri IV (Le Supplement du Catholicon ou Nouvelles Regions de la Lune) to tackle the tenuous problem of the memory of the recent past in a period of relative consolidation.⁴¹ What kind of world do these dif- ferent additions fabricate for readers? Th e political agenda of the earliest versions of the libelle is hard to miss. Part of the propaganda machinery of Henri de Navarre operating from Tours (the seat of the Navarrist party), these libelles aim at exposing the political ambitions of the ultra-Catholic party, at defusing the “foreign threat,” and, indirectly, at leading the reader to a vision of a national unity. Th e dominant metaphor in the libelle for the rhetorical manipulations through which the public space of the aff airs of the state is usurped is the Catholicon—the opiate allegedly peddled by the “Spanish charlatan.” Th is metaphor debunks the imperialistic ambi- tions of Spain over France and the religious zeal of the allied ultra-Catho- lic French nobility. Catholicon represents this hodge-podge of ambitions fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 177 and deceptive rhetoric, the mind-numbing drug sold to the population at large.⁴² Its rhetorical appeal to the imagination through striking images rather than the reader’s impartial judgment suggests that the Satyre Menippee adopts the language of sermons—and of satirical pamphlets.⁴³ Among the comic speeches made by the members of the “Assembly of the Estates,” the speech of Cardinal Nicolas de Pellevé is a vivid, mock cosmography of Spain’s imperialist ambitions:

Do you really believe that [the emperor of Spain], who is the lord of more kingdoms than there are letters in the alphabet to count them by and so rich that he does not even know what to do with his treasures, would want to trouble himself on account of such a trifl e as the seignory of France? Th e entirety of Europe is not worth to him, in a manner of speaking, one country upon these new islands that he has conquered from the savages. When he exudes sweat: it is diadems; when he blows his nose: it is crowns; when he belches: it is scepters; when he goes to the toilet: it is counties and duchies that come out of his body, so much is he fi lled and stuff ed with them. . . . His actions in the Low Countries and in the New World should convince you that he has nothing evil in mind, no more than an old ba- boon. But even if he were to make you all kill each other and perish by fi re, iron, and hunger, would you not be very happy to sit up yonder in Para- dise above the confessors and the patriarchs and poke fun at the Navar- rists [maheustres] whom you see below being roasted and boiled in Lucifer’s cauldrons?⁴⁴

Despite the cardinal’s protestation against the idea that Spain may try to annex France, every grotesque detail in his speech describing an already enormous Spanish empire suggests that France’s occupation by Spain is im- minent. Moreover, in this speech addressing the representatives of France’s three estates, the expression “such a trifl e as the seignory of France” re- veals that the speaker has already adopted Spain’s imperialistic perspective. Th e cardinal also embodies the caricature of the Catholic preacher who preached in Paris for the League. Th e view from “Paradise” of the torments of the maheustres (“swaggerers,” an insulting term applied to the camp of Henri de Navarre), who are being boiled in hell, is particularly alarming to the Th ird Estate (comprised of gentrifi ed urban population and the coun- try landowners) to whom the pamphlet primarily appeals. “Hell” is a code word for the kinds of death and physical torture that would be meted out to Frenchmen loyal to the state, the pamphlet suggests, were they to allow 178 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire themselves to be convinced by the propaganda of the League and subject themselves to Spanish rule. Th is brief passage from the earliest version of this complex and hybrid booklet already indicates the main tension that informs its composition: its aim is both to promote a new national unity under Henri de Navarre and to address the people of Paris, especially the bourgeois of the city, and their experiences during the time when the city was occupied by the Catholic League and terrorized by a populist group named “Th e Sixteen,” and dur- ing and after the siege and starvation of the city by Henri de Navarre.⁴⁵ Th e paradox of this text lies in the gap between its “propagandistic” func- tion and its readers, people with lives and experiences which do not fully coincide with the representations promoted by the monarchy. Of particu- lar signifi cance are the “second preface” (fi rst printed in 1593, after the en- try of Henri IV into Paris) and the Supplement du Catholicon ou Nouvelles Regions de la Lune (“Supplement to the Catholicon, or, Th e New Regions of the Moon,” fi rst printed in 1595, after the consolidation of the monarchy). Against the fantastic and frenzied cosmography painted by Cardinal Pel- levé, the Supplement off ers topographies that focus on detail in order radi- cally to enlarge the reader’s scope of vision, fi rst by visiting a hidden and hitherto unperceived corner of Paris, then by describing a quick voyage to the moon. Th e second preface of the printer grafted upon the original (a pictur- esque story about the allegedly Italian author and the stolen manuscript) takes us to an imaginary landscape in search of the book’s reclusive au- thor. Th is new preface provides fresh insight into the identity of the author, playfully named Agnoste Misoquene (“Unknown, Enemy of Novelty”) and identifi ed as a native of the city Eleutherie (“Freedom”). He is moreover not from Italy but Alethie (“Truth”), a land inhabited by the Parresiens (“Frank Speakers”).⁴⁶ Th e name of the inhabitants of this fi ctional city located in a fi ctional land recalls—indeed cites—Rabelais’s foundational myth about the origins of the name of the city “Paris.” We saw in Chapter 2 that in Rabelais’s Gargantua the narrator calls the cursing Parisian crowd Parrhe- siens, that is, “fi erce speakers,” making their excited interjections and their licentious tongues stand for their political unruliness. By proposing a sec- ond etymological explanation for the name of the city of Paris (par rys, by prank or for the sake of laughter), the narrator of Gangantua also projects a community of the resilient and the good-hearted who learn the lesson of urbanitas after being ridiculed. Rabelais’s satirical portrayal of the Parisians fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 179 as politically disobedient and easily manipulated by Catholic authorities against the monarchy has indeed come full circle during the League years in Paris. Th e reign of the League was inaugurated by the riot of the Pari- sians against King Henri III during the infamous “Day of the Barricades” (May 12, 1588). Th e citation of this riotous scene from Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534 or 1535) indicates both an attentive reader (one who understands the reference to riot) and a complete reworking of the signifi cance of political obedience and disobedience along with the meaning of parrhesia as a phil- osophical, political, and rhetorical term literally denoting “saying all” but in the philosophical tradition meaning more specifi cally “frank speech,” “courageous speech,” or even “fearless speech.”⁴⁷ Although the Supplement returns to the events of the Barricades and to the theme of (some) Pari- sians’ disobedience, it removes the pejorative sense Rabelais had attributed to parrhesia (as a lack of restraint that can lead to political disobedience and subversion), and it goes beyond merely promoting joyous laughter as an antidote to riot, by evoking rather the ethos of parrhesia as courageous truthfulness in the political realm. Th e Parresiens of the Satyre Menippee are valorized for their frankness because the authors believe that after pub- lic order has been restored, it is frankness and the unabashed statement of facts that are called for. “Typographe,” the printer, wears out three pairs of shoes looking in vain for the home of the reclusive author in Paris. But he does run into a few Parresiens. Th ese bold citizens are dedicated to the truth and to stating it live on the pages of the second preface. Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century editors of the Satyre Menippee changed the spelling and the typography of the word Parresiens to Parisians, thus collapsing the distinction between Paris and the bookish, typographical space of parrhesia. Yet this diff erence is crucial and the printer intrudes precisely in order to maintain the gap be- tween real space and the fi ctional topographies in the book—or rather be- tween Parisian topographies and parrhesiastic typographies—and between the author as a moral authority and the book that circulates free of his con- sent. For only the imaginary topography and the fi ction of a reticent author permit the unrestrained remembrance of events of the past, especially since the times have changed from siege to reconciliation. Henri IV’s offi cial policy orders once again, and with increased force, that the populace for- get. He bans not only remembering but doing so in a context which could lead to off ense and injury, legal dispute or physical violence in a law that involved purging the archives of court rooms, abandoning quarrels, and 180 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire burning books and any documents suspected of being able to “re kindle” the memory of past injuries. In a public declaration made in 1585, Henri de Navarre, then a prince aspiring to unite France, refers to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre cryptically as “better to be forgotten than remembered” (vaut mieux oublié que rementu).⁴⁸ Once king, he adopts the same attitude vis-à-vis the entire past of the civil wars, including the fresh memory of the siege of Paris. Shortly after Henri IV captures Paris in 1594, he issues an edict in which he “abolishes” the memory of the “troubles” in order to promote reconcilia- tion and forgetting (oubliance):

we have of our special grace and royal authority abolished and abolish the things that occurred in the aforesaid city during and on account of the cur- rent troubles, which we wish and order to remain extinguished, abolished, appeased, and regarded as not having happened.⁴⁹

Barbara Diefendorf points to some of the pitfalls of this royal policy, espe- cially when after the occupation of Paris by the League, some of the chiefs are burned in effi gy—a measure that is supposed to promote forgetting but, in fact, becomes a public commemoration to a public that is not eager to—or simply cannot—forget. Th e mark of absolutist power is that it pres- ents itself as a direct mediator—eliminating church—between God and the nation or, in this case, the people of Paris. Th e act of royal clemency re- places divine grace to induce forgetting and forgiving on a social scale. Th e Supplement then does not so much defy royal policy as it tries to respond to the need for social memory that emerges in the gap that opens between the performative utterance of the pardon enacted by Henri IV and the social reality defi ned by the irreducible fact that the past impinges upon the pres- ent life of the individuals who make up the social body. Th e place of memory that the second preface (which rejects forgetting even before the Edict is published) and, later, the Supplement (which con- tinues to do so after Henri de Navarre’s victorious entry into Paris) opens up is not a private one of individual memories. Th e discourse of satire con- tinues to speak a truth in the mode of excess, and the excess is with respect to the legislation of royal power acting as divine mercy, from which it dif- ferentiates itself by imagining a separate realm for social discussion. Th e truths declared about the past in the second preface and in the Supplement remain banished to the fi ctional landscape of Parresia, as becomes clear fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 181 from the imaginary conversation between Typographe and the only par- rhesien available for a conversation—a distant relative of the author (who never turns up). Th is distant relative is available to convey the author’s con- cern that the new publications of the book

could, in our times, engender some scandal and off end people of quality who are named or referred to in it. For those who have already recognized and corrected their errors deserve the memory of these errors to be erased [suprime] and buried [ensevelisse] rather than refreshed and perpetuated in writings that are biting and facetious [piquants & fascetieux].⁵⁰

For better or worse, Typographe, who has already printed the “biting” book four times, is planning to do so for a fi fth time as well, despite these concerns of the (likewise fi ctive) author voiced indirectly by the relative. Th is long-winded second preface calls attention to printing and circulat- ing as necessary steps in the dissemination of books that make them into objects independent of their authors.⁵¹ Th us the second preface resolutely promotes parrhesia, a rhetoric that calls “bread, bread, and fi gs, fi gs,”⁵² that is, one that distinguishes between those who proved their loyalty to social unity as they conceived it (in the form of hereditary monarchy) and those who were, in their plain language, “traitors.”⁵³ After a period in which society was dominated by violent factions and stigmatizing, the preface refuses to accept the erasure of all distinctions and insists on draw- ing clear and distinct boundaries between moral categories. Th e author’s erudite “relative” readily explains that the book is an antidote to forget- ting by “biting the conscience of those who feel that they are being at- tacked” and “making burst out in laughter those whose soul is innocent and confi dent of never having wandered off the right path.”⁵⁴ Th e book insists on publicizing the errors of those who did wrong (an inherent part of the literature of scandal) precisely because its authors see themselves as victims of the ostracism and fi nger-pointing practiced by the earlier regime:

I know that there are people who are displeased by the fact that some of us speak out and write with such licence [ainsi librement], and they are of- fended [s’off ensent] by the fi rst word that brings back our past affl ictions, as if, after so many losses, they wanted to take away from us our feelings, our tongue, our speech, and our freedom to complain [la liberté de nous plaindre].⁵⁵ 182 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire

Taking sides with the injured (their liberty and property lost), with the un- rewarded and in general with the Th ird Estate, the rising class comprised of artisans, merchants, small nobility, and people of the pen, the anony- mous “relative” who takes the liberty to speak (ainsi librement) in the place of the “author” upholds the satirical outlook of the book. He rejects opin- ions of those who advocate forgetting because he sees in their arguments the mere subterfuges of those who accused others or otherwise committed wrongs against them in the past. A pleasure to some and an off ense to oth- ers, however, vituperation presented in a printed form has the advantage of being published and presented to a reading public: “anyhow, the argument is public [l’argument est publiq], and everyone can made additions to it as long as they are pertinent to the subject matter.”⁵⁶ Th e “public” character of publication appears then within the public realm of the state. Th is concession suggests signifi cantly that the “relative” who speaks here in the author’s place (and supplanting his moral authority) off ers the lit- erary model, the menippean satire, as a model for the discussion of the past on the larger, social scale. Th e Satyre Menippee is in fact such a hybrid book of additions. Th is literary model does not provide any limitations (“everyone can made additions to it as long as they are pertinent to the subject matter”), as it apparently invites diff ering perspectives. Could this literary model become a social model for a contentious form of “collective memory” of the past? Th e limitations to this possibility were enormous in the period, as “defamatory pamphlets” were forbidden during the wars of religion and the new political regime of Henri IV set out to banish them with more force and effi cacy. Th us this hybrid text to which new additions can always be made did not succeed in transforming a traumatized society into a menippean satire, a playful and open debate. Nor, however, did things end with the second preface. Taking advan- tage of the hot medium of satires that solicits readers’ quick response, their pleasure or off ense, the book continued to solicit response or intervention after the consolidation of the monarchy. Th is intervention, however, is alto- gether limited to a typographical space. Th e second preface makes a careful eff ort to maintain the gap between Parresiens and Parisians, which parallels its attempts to separate the heterogeneous public realm of readers and the “proper” public realm of the monarchy. To achieve this, the authors have to resort to the trick of anonymity and to an elaborate structure of disorient- ing frames, as well as to punning distortions of proper names, to maintain fabricated worlds and the menippean satire 183 a distance from the political realm. Although at fi rst conceived to promote Henri de Navarre’s siege of the city, among Parisians who were little willing to accept a Huguenot for their king, the later additions to the book cease to be interventionist attempts to manage the political arena now ruled by Henri IV as the elected and sanctifi ed monarch, and they turn instead to- ward constructing a collective memory of the past. Th e loose, unfi nished, and motley form of menippean satire thus be- comes an invitation to make additions to increase the diversity of points of view. Th e narrators of the book position themselves at a distance from those who either supported the League or failed to support Henri de Navarre and are, nonetheless, the winners in the political changes. Retelling the events of the recent past—“refreshing” the memory of past diff erences and inju- ries—becomes the unconcealed agenda of the Satyre Menippee and, in the Supplement of 1595, it settles on a Lucianesque way of narrating history. It is then little surprising that when three Parisians, Aliboron, the Free Ar- cher of Bagnolet, and Roger le Bon Temps, still traumatized by their recent experiences of the Day of the Barricades when the Parisians chased away their king, make it to the Moon, after descending to and passing through the hell of the Catholic League, and—in a memorable scene that recalls the crossing of the dead over to Hades—drink from the fountain in front of the Moon Palace, they do not come to forgetting. Th ey come instead to a Platonic anamnesis, where they see through a trapdoor a series of images of the recent past such as a view of the Spanish Armada sinking and the sailors hurling themselves overboard and looking like miniature eggs or droppings, the shameful dealings of monks in scenes reminiscent of the Quart livre and the apocryphal L’ isle sonnante, the dishonest and cruel feats of Captain de Lagny, and many other images that fl oat in front of their eyes like (as they say) “Plato’s ideas.” After all, what better place to narrate the mayhem of the recent past than from the Moon, the very site of changeability and inconstancy?⁵⁷ Th e abrupt and fantastic shifts in perspective in the additions to the Sa- tyre Menippee—from bookish typographical spaces down to hell, then up to the Moon and through a trapdoor to a view of the earth—mimic but also parody the volatile social space, the sudden changes in public opinion and perception that greatly determined the fate of Paris in the recent past as Parisians went from being subjects of Henri III to rebelling against the monarch and inviting the League to assume the government of the city and 184 fabricated worlds and the menippean satire then, almost overnight, returning to Henri IV’s camp. Th ese shifting im- ages also serve as counterperspectives to the universalizing and fi nalizing scope of the grotesquely totalizing cosmographical view that earlier texts of the Satyre Menippee attribute to the League. Th e past must be remem- bered to avoid repeating it. Th e narrator of the Nouvelles des Regions de la Lune fi nally settles on a stoic attitude of fi nding the “middle” between two evils. On the one hand the leveling force of forgetting everything—which, like crossing the river Lethe, would turn social life into hell—and slander- ing and vituperation without any concern for the remorse, self-criticism, or correction on the part of those who erred. Th e French authors of the Satyre Menippee at the end of the sixteenth century turn the rhetoric of insults honed by polemicists into a work of remembering and the form menippean satire into a form of social existence, and, in doing so, they become self- appointed historiographers of the new monarchy. seven Public Scandals, Withdrawn Readers

We saw in Chapter 2 that the jolly Parisians who proff er their curses “for the sake of laughter” ( par rys) after having been drenched in urine in Rabelais’s Gargantua are analogous to a public who read and enjoy satire without taking off ense. (Th is is Rabelais’s vision of his readership.) Rabe- lais fabricates a moral allegory about the streets of Paris, with its mixed populations and its sprawling mobs, for a more limited and self-possessed public of readers. Th e tale draws a distinction between Parisians who laugh off the injury and the crowd of parrhesiastes, the riotous rabble (“so prone [to riot]”) who can easily be stirred up to rebel against royal power, which enables the reader to enjoy political satire while remaining detached from the realm of political passions. Th e enjoyment that is expected from the readers of the book grants them a certain distance from the political events and draws them into the nondiscursive space of laughter that grants them distance from their own passions as well as from those of others. Well be- fore the appearance of a “private” sphere in the modern sense, Rabelais thus imagines a semi-private space created through reading and laughter, as this laughter remains animated by the political events that occur in the 186 public scandals, withdrawn readers public space. As we have seen in the previous chapters, Rabelaisian laugh- ter can be transformed into a tool for religious and political polemics, even if, in the process, it is transformed into something completely diff erent from what Rabelais once envisioned. Th e public space of sixteenth-century France becomes increasingly discursive, increasingly antagonistic, and, in the last third of the century, the possibility of the reader’s withdrawal be- comes a more vital issue than ever before. Rabelais’s comic etymology shows the fragility of any clear distinction between easygoing “laughers” and quick-tempered “cursers”; after all, the “Parisians” are both those who get upset and those who do not. Hence, the tale of the Parisians also functions as political allegory that shows that Paris and, by extension, the political body of France are inseparable from its population that is easily divided and unpredictable. Th e political govern- ment of the people (of the “vulgar” masses) and the moral self-government of the individual are brought into an allegorical relation with one another in Rabelais’s tale. But laughter fostered by ridicule is never neutral in a public space, where it can be put in the service of various political posi- tions that can diff er widely from Rabelais’s nondogmatic, monarchist one. Laughter—in Genevan pamphlets and in the Satyre Menippee—is never just about the self: it also imparts religious and political insights. Th e lit- erature of religious and political satires discussed in the previous chapters exploits the readers’ refl ection and even their sense of humor to make them feel off ended by the comportment, words, or convictions of others whom they cast in the role of the accused or ridiculed adversary. Catholic pam- phleteers like Artus Desiré recast Rabelais’s stories as rigid allegories about the malignity of the reformers and the general tendency of the Catholic population to give in to their infl uence (Chapter 5), while Genevan pam- phleteers use Rabelais to attack Catholic theology and ridicule Catholicism (Chapters 3, 4, and 6). In these pamphlets, ridicule is a rhetorical tool that increases the reader’s sense of diff erence. Th e authors of the Satyre Menip- pee (Chapter 6) imagine that this experience of diff erence, the diff erent experiences of the past that separate French citizens at the end of the civil wars, can generate a debate in print, which they contrast against the level- ing forgetting of the past. Th us they undertake to reconcile in a vaguely Rabelaisian fashion the social body with the help, once again, of satire, reclaiming the positive sense of parrhesia as useful activity for the construc- tion, indeed, for the constructive imagining, of a national unity. public scandals, withdrawn readers 187

Under the tense political circumstances that dominate in the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s, the journals of Pierre de l’Estoile resort to the power of the ridiculous and to satire as tools for gaining distance from the excitable, scandalous words that fl ood the public space of the monarchy. Th e scene is, once again, Paris. L’Estoile, a bourgeois member of the Parisian parliament, diligently records the events of the city during the reign of two successive kings, Henri III and Henri IV. More than fi ve decades after the publica- tion of Gargantua, during the popular uprising on the day of “the Barri- cades” (March 12, 1588) when King Henri III is expelled from Paris by the riotous Parisians, the crowd is not only a political entity but also a public for satires in which religion is mixed with politics. Th e physical violence of the civil war seems to be re-enacted by the fl ood of violent words, preached and printed ones, that fi ll the streets, crossroads, squares, and churches of the city, and which reappear copied into or glued to the pages of l’Estoile’s Journal. L’Estoile was not only a chronicler of public events but also a tire- less copier and collector of everything scandalous. In l’Estoile’s activities that involve him with polemical print, the lit- erature of vituperation, as a collector, a reader, an eye- and ear-witness, a chronicler, and a compiler, the distinction between the political realm and the realm of refl ection and laughter seems at fi rst diffi cult to make. L’Estoile readily admits that he shares all too much the Parisians’ frivo- lous interest in scandal and slander, and, as Gilbert Schrenck, coeditor of a critical edition of the Registre-Journal suggests, l’Estoile develops an “obses- sion” for this literature, often culls his information from these polemical sources, and cites their language to the point of allowing them to dominate his own voice. To point to this aspect of l’Estoile’s writing, Claude-Gilbert Dubois calls him an “average Frenchman of his time,” who is unable to withdraw from the pleasure of reading the satire that he criticizes.¹ L’Estoile unabashedly talks of his “curiosity” driving him to collect sa- tirical, slanderous, and polemical printed materials, satirical poems, pas- quinades, caricatures, graffi ti, and political documents of topical interest in albums as well as to copy them into his journal along with records of note- worthy events, public ceremonies, deaths, executions—the events of the court and those of the street. His curiosity seems to know no bounds—and no political boundaries, either. During the most feverish days of League propaganda, after the assassination of the Guise brothers, he is a frequent attendee of Catholic sermons, if only to catch the one phrase that best ex- 188 public scandals, withdrawn readers emplifi es their seditious message. His unwillingness to leave Paris after the Parliament, where he was councilor, was taken over by the League makes him seem very much like those who, according to the authors of the Satyre Menippee, did not “leave their houses, possessions, and offi ces.”² Although he clearly shares the views of the politiques, and, as he tells us, he is placed on the blacklist of the Sixteen among those to be “hanged,” he stays in Paris rather than joining those members of the Parliament who escape with the fl eeing Henri III and entrench themselves in Tours. Th e fi rst versions (manuscript and printed) of the Satyres Menippee encouraged Parisians to change camps and return to “obedience to the king.”³ L’Estoile does not propagate. He does not publish his journals during the League years, in- deed he does not publish them in print at all in his lifetime, thus limiting access to the literature of invectives to a small coterie of friends, who are the sole public of his carefully crafted satirical presentation. His greatest eff orts go solely into recording and manipulating scandalous words that belong to others and that had already appeared in print as part of the propaganda campaign of the Catholic party. He records words preached from the pul- pit and published by the moderate politiques, and words pronounced and published by prominent statesmen and nobility: the satirical poems of his much-admired friend Rapin, pamphlets published by the Navarrist party, declarations by Henri de Navarre, those published by the Catholic League, by the camp of Reformers, and by the popular government of Paris, along with edicts, papal bulls, and countless other writings and images in print. L’Estoile’s journals have served as a tool for historians documenting the tumultuous years of the League, including the years of terror under the Sixteen, a populist group who invited the League to govern the city af- ter the assassination of Henri III; the siege and subsequent conquest of the city by Henri de Navarre through starvation and negotiations; and his entire reign as Henri IV, which l’Estoile survives by a few months. But the most remarkable trait of l’Estoile’s journals is their strong tie to the place where they were written, Paris, which, as the capital, is the object of contention between Leaguers and Navarrists and, fl ooded by propaganda and satire, spectacles and riots, also provides the bulk of the materials for l’Estoile’s collecting, chronicling, and copying. L’Estoile’s Paris is a city of, to recall Rabelais’s pun, parrhesia, of linguistic license that manifests itself in preaching and print alike and fi nds an avid public in the Parisians. Th e political upheaval resulting in disorder and death that Rabelais imagined to be the outcome of the preachers’ manipulating the Parisian crowd with public scandals, withdrawn readers 189 placards and sermons has become a reality in the Paris under the reign of the Catholic League but, in addition, the redemptive power that Rabelais imagined in satire and ridicule has taken a new form. L’Estoile prepared two manuscript versions of his journal documenting the decadent and tumultuous reign of Henri III, one of which he titled Registre-Journal d’un curieux, and the other Memoires-Journeux d’un cu- rieux. Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenck’s critical edition is based on the earlier version, but the slight variations in the later one are indicated in the text as a separate layer (the text of the Registre-Journal is marked as “A” and the deletions and additions of the Memoires-Journeaux are marked as “B”).⁴ Th eir edition consciously follows the convention standardized by Pierre Villey for Montaigne’s Essais, which has three layers (“A,” “B,” and “C”) corresponding to the three main stages of its composition.⁵ Th is editorial solution implies that there is a similarity between l’Estoile’s two manuscript books and Montaigne’s inimitable book combining moral, philosophical refl ection with personal descriptions, whose versions were printed successively and, with each substantial publication, enriched with a new layer.⁶ However, unlike Montaigne’s Essais, the two Journals were not intended to appear side by side in one book. As we shall see, the two versions of the journal of the reign of Henri III served diff erent functions, which have to do with l’Estoile’s eff orts to extend their reach to a lim- ited sphere of readership and circulation. It’s the critical edition that cre- ates, for the fi rst time, a multilayered textual space analogous to that of Montaigne’s book nonetheless, l’Estoile’s journals remain comparable—as this editorial solution suggests—to the Essais because both undertake a mediation between the semi-private space of reading and refl ection, and the public space of the street, the church, the crossroads, and the public square. the art of containment

Th e incipit of the Registre-Journal reveals the chronicler’s own understand- ing of the political function of the discursive medium of satire:

[A. B] It is just as little possible for any earthly authority to prevent the licentious French tongue [liberté françoise] from speaking as it is to bury the sun in the earth or to lock it up in a hole.⁷ 190 public scandals, withdrawn readers

L’Estoile copies this motto from an unspecifi ed source (it could have been a friend’s or even his own invention) that registers the futility of the eff orts of the authorities to censor satire and restrain the discursive freedom of polem- ics that intervenes in the public realm of the monarchy and undermines its authority both directly, as in the libelles d’état, and indirectly, by virtue of revealing the failure of censorship.⁸ Th e grotesque image of trying to bury the sun underground reveals a bitter consciousness of the powerlessness of the state, which, during the reign of Henri III, was engaged in the futile ef- fort to manage a public space that was increasingly controlled by discursive means in the service of diff erent religious and political camps rather than dominated by the symbols of the monarchy and the church. Th e image does not stop there. For the sun is also the image of frank speech, of that which reveals the truth; by noting the inevitable revelation of the truth as that which, like the sun, cannot be permanently concealed, l’Estoile tacitly sides with the authors of the Satyre Menippee and, indeed, with satire in general. Discursive freedom acquires in his journal’s incipit a specifi cally French character as the “licentious French tongue” (liberté françoise).⁹ To reclaim it as specifi cally French calls for not only an understanding of the moral function of truthfulness but also for an “art of containment,” a prac- tice of recording and transforming it in such a way that it becomes the textual basis for a diff erent reading attitude than that originally solicited by satires.¹⁰ Th e management and deployment (in inventories) of information in view of fabricating images of the other, as in the lists of heretics and in Calvinist satires of Catholicism, is no longer at stake; the new focus is on the management and containment of the overfl ow of politically disobedi- ent, licentious words. Th e Registre-Journal is a container for the liberté fran- çoise: a register organized by a linear chronology (with entries that follow by year, month, date). It sometimes breaks this linear chronological order to allow for an accumulation or “explosion” of citations. Th e latter is the function of the libelles and satirical and defamatory poems that l’Estoile copies typically, but not solely, at the end of his chronicle of the events of each year. Th e chronicler thus renounces a rational discourse that tries to censor excessive assertions of truth and adapts instead his own voice to the discourse of satire, although occasionally he resorts to voicing his condemnation, as in the declaration that “passion and slander” are “the diseases of our time.”¹¹ Adopting, for the most part, the satirical tone of public utterances rather than a voice of refl ective judgment, the journals constitute a book of citations (in the form, for example, of literal citation, public scandals, withdrawn readers 191 paraphrase, and stylistic assimilation). L’Estoile records voices that are in discord, insult responding to insult, irony countering calumny. Th rough multiple techniques of citation, he creates dialogical texts in which words are always found to belong to someone else. In hindsight, he remarks that his Registre-Journal records “the good and the bad, the truthful and the slanderous [le bon et le mauvais, le véritable et le médisant] . . . in a bric-a- brac fashion” [pêle-mêlés ensemble].¹² But this “bric-a-brac” arrangement is not entirely random, and the “good and the bad” and the “truthful and the slanderous” emerge before the judicious reader’s eyes. L’Estoile subjects his materials to manipulations that are both unique and meticulous, while he strives to master the material he collects through selection, arrangement, diff usion, and perhaps even by adding some poems that he himself composed.¹³ Moreover, he applies a satirical pressure to the events that he chronicles and engages in a “playful” (to cite Schrenk) engagement with the documents and pamphlets that he collects. His writ- ing style can be characterized as a sort of contamination by the “senti- ments and passions of the parties” who waged the pamphlet war.¹⁴ His journal of Henri III exploits the playfulness inherent not only in linguistic wit and poetic techniques employed in these pamphlets (among l’Estoile’s collections, we fi nd imitations of du Bellay’s satirical sonnets, rebuses, coq- à-l’ânes, elegies, discourses, etc.), but also in the fact that they serve the pleasure principle, for they express what certain parties wish to hear; they play into their fears and desires. To the Parisians who wish to acquire more wealth and more self-governance, King Henri III is a “tyrant” squander- ing money on his “favorites,” while levying heavy charges on the popula- tion. To the Navarrists, who wish to solidify their much-contested politi- cal power, the religious revival propagated by the League is mere political ambition masquerading as pious zeal. For this camp, whose primary base comprises Huguenots (who are later joined by Catholic politiques) the sa- tirical images by Protestant satirists discrediting Catholic religious “cer- emonies” serve as handy tools to reveal the inauthenticity of the League’s undertakings in general. L’Estoile’s language, as he records the memorable events of the League years (between 1585 and 1589, when the League be- comes a formidable political force, and between 1589 and 1594, when it governs Paris), borrows the language of the satirists of these two camps. Th e League is targeted for its (allegedly) unrestrained, manipulative use of seditious words both in print and in sermons. L’Estoile is so concerned with reserving this pejorative, politically disobedient kind of license—akin 192 public scandals, withdrawn readers to Rabelais’s parrhesia—for the League that, as Edwin Duval’s perceptive insight shows, “the most virulent samples of a Protestant polemic” do not make their way into the journals.¹⁵ When he ridicules the League or the court, he uses images that are current in Huguenot satires of Catholicism: the League “devoured” or “gluttonized” (gourmandé ) the king,¹⁶ and the king’s piety is a “face” masked with “a sac[k] of a penitent and a hermit” to please the League.¹⁷ Reporting the events of the tumultuous Day of the Barricades, he paints in vivid images the silly (badaud ) Parisians who re- volt against the king, the preachers who “march at the head of the rebels like colonels” scheming to capture the king with an army of “seven or eight hundred armed students and three or four hundred armed monks,” the Duke of Guise who temporizes too much, lacking the “courage to carry out that which he undertook,” and the king who, on the next day, “let the beast escape whose reins he was holding loosely” [en ses fi lets, literally, “by the watering bit,” a thin bit used to take horses to drink].”¹⁸ Th e Pa- risians are “zealous Catholics,” or rather “most hot-headed barricaders.”¹⁹ Th e assassination of the cardinal of Lorraine provokes l’Estoile’s comment that the cardinal “did not breathe but war, did not roar but massacres, and did not pant but with blood.”²⁰ Catherine de Médicis loves “in the Florentine manner,” that is, according to her self-interest, and this portrait follows closely the language of Huguenot pamphlets attacking her, notably the virulent La vie de Saint Katherine published in 1574.²¹ Th e Sixteen is a “sixteen-headed monster” who “handled rudely, abused [like a dog, mas- tiner] the king’s authority and the law,” and the Sorbonne is “the banner- carrier and trumpet of sedition.”²² L’Estoile paints a grotesque portrait of the League at the moment when they hold the city in their hands, after the assassination of Henri III, by showing that even when they are victorious they are unable to produce au- thentic religious piety, and that their overheated processions and blasphe- mous sermons are rather a parody of piety.²³ Historians have argued that the new practices of Catholic piety that provoked l’Estoile’s disapproval were part of a new Catholic identity (Diefendorf ) and formed a genuine Catholic Reformation (de Certeau), and that “the Sixteen” promoted a form of republicanism aiming ultimately at a constitutional monarchy with which at least certain members of the League, notably the duc de May- enne, cooperated (Salmon).²⁴ However, l’Estoile’s views of the League, the Sixteen, the “new” practices of piety, and the Catholic clergy are univocally disdainful. His satirical depictions of the court and King Henri III, who public scandals, withdrawn readers 193 ignores his duty to keep order and leads a life of luxury and of excessive, ostentatious piety, drives him into hyperbolic similes about the corruption that is so great that “it would transform even the most chaste Lucretia into a Faustina” (a famous Roman prostitute).²⁵ By criticizing the avidity with which pamphlets, and religious rites and practices such as sermons and processions, clothing, masks, theatrical per- formances, and festivities are used by the various parties and the crown to vie for and maintain discursive and political control of the public space, both at the court and on the streets, l’Estoile also writes as a moralist who exposes the corrupt pleasure fueling these activities. He does this, however, not simply for moral reasons but also for political ones: he deems them destructive of the state. In his chronicles, the extravagances of the court, the nonchalance of the king in the face of so great a political crisis, and the indulgence of the League in excessive ceremonies that appeal to the Parisian crowd bespeak a corrupt indulgence in such guilty pleasures. Th e Leaguers’ violent and lawless pleasure-seeking during the wars of religion (“raping of women and young girls, even inside the holy churches, the des- ecration of altars, murders, assassinations, robbery, and collecting ransom from the poor people, which were mere games for them”²⁶) is all the graver because it mirrors the political debauchery committed by the royal family and the court, and both these actions contribute to the demise of the state. In the Registre-Journal, through the mechanisms of citation and arrange- ment, the chronicler seeks to recuperate this pleasure, to defuse its politi- cal danger, and to turn it into a controlled and contained sort of pleasure, geared toward refl ective judgment. Some entries in the journal suggest that l’Estoile was conscious of the fact that it is hardly possible to distinguish, based on sheer discursive grounds, the satires of the League from those published by the party of Henri de Navarre. He gives us many examples of the dynamism and mal- leability of satire. For example, under the rubric of the year 1586, he cop- ies two satirical sonnets into his journal, and comments on them under the title “Th e King of Navarre’s Counter-Trenches.” Th e event in question is the publication of a document²⁷ in which Henri de Navarre (who was raised in the reformed faith) publishes a confession of faith in which he declares his willingness to be “instructed” in Catholicism. Th e title and the commentary in the journal show that l’Estoile was fully aware of the stra- tegic signifi cance of a theological discussion among Henri de Navarre and his reformed advisors and Catholic clergymen for the survival of the mon- 194 public scandals, withdrawn readers archy. As the title of this section suggests, l’Estoile himself considers the “Declaration” a strategic act of self-defense, a “counter-trench” dug to dif- fuse the eff ect of the League’s eff orts to undermine the prince’s legitimate claim to the crown on grounds of “heresy.” At this time, Henri de Navarre was trying to conclude an alliance with King Henri III, and his manifest willingness to consider Catholic doctrine was indeed a step taken toward this alliance. It was a “counter-trench,” whose function was to avoid alien- ating the Huguenots among Henri’s supporters.²⁸ Any response in the public space can elicit a counterresponse, any “counter-trench” can provoke other “counter-trenches.” Th e military meta- phor of trenches and counter-trenches not only evokes the fact that Henri de Navarre and the League are engaged in a war over French territories at the time, but also that the literature of vituperation obeys the logic of re- directing a verbal attack received back at the adversary by transforming it into a counterattack. Among the “many publications” that the League puts out to discredit Henri de Navarre, l’Estoile publishes a satirical sonnet call- ing Henri de Navarre the “wolf” in fox’s clothing, scheming (like a fox) to devour (like a wolf ) the church:

He tries very hard, and I am afraid that secretly Some letter or a pamphlet [quelque livret] of his, Will be printed in Paris so that they elect him [à fi n que l’on l’elize].²⁹

Th is pasquinade staged as a forewarning of a manipulative publication (which plays on the French expression crier au loup, to warn against im- pending danger) is itself disingenuous, since the “letter or book” whose publication it warns about has already been published. Th e sonnet more- over establishes a connection between printed propaganda and political rivalry. Henri de Navarre’s election to the throne is the goal of the alleg- edly manipulative “letter or pamphlet” (à fi n que l’on l’elize). Th e word “elect” (elire) in French recalls its etymological root lire (“to read”), and the sonnet suggests that election would be the fearful consequence of the public’s reading Henri’s “letter or book” and tries to persuade the public to reject this election. Such attempts to manipulate the reactions of readers take into account the fact that they are readers of other printed materials as well. Discouraging reading would be futile, so instead the pamphleteer tries to undermine the eff ect of another publication. Following this poem l’Estoile documents a second “counter-trench” by public scandals, withdrawn readers 195

Henri de Navarre’s camp, this time in the form of a sonnet that is com- posed following an identical pattern of rhyme functioning as a mirror im- age of the former. Th is sonnet calls the chief of the League, the Duke of Guise, a “fox” who resorts to support from Spain to seize the king’s crown:

He restores the League, and no night passes Without smuggling a few Spanish doubloons Or posting some notes [quelque billet] In Paris, in order to get elected king [pour que Roy l’on l’elize].³⁰

Th e sonnet attributes equally grave consequences to the unspecifi ed quelque billet as the League sonnet does to the quelque livret of the Navarrists. By repeating and manipulating the words of the fi rst one, the sonnet success- fully reverses the accusations of the Catholic adversary, but in doing so it also reveals that in the public space dominated by quick wit and judg- ments made on the spot and without deliberation, the medium of satire is reversible and unstable. In the public domain dominated by licentious speech (liberté françoise), diff erent “truths” forcefully asserted can can- cel each other out or reverse each other’s force. Nonetheless, the goal of l’Estoile’s textual manipulations is not to empty discourse of the powerful “presence” with which it is invested in humanist writing but much rather to safeguard against this danger and to harvest truthfulness from invective and slander.³¹ A look at the page in l’Estoile’s Registre-Journal reveals how he tries to master this instability. Instead of a direct commentary, he provides an in- direct one in the next entry, made on Saturday, November 22, 1586. He reports the execution of François Le Breton, a lawyer in the Parliament, for the crime of lèse-majesté “as inciter to sedition” and “perturber of peace” (repos public).³² Le Breton’s crime consists in publishing a book in which he slandered (avoit inseré plusieurs propos injurieux) the king, the chancel- lor, and other offi cers of the state. L’Estoile paints Le Breton’s portrait in a piecemeal fashion out of the opinion of unspecifi ed others—fi rst, of those who knew him, who think that he was a zealous Catholic, to which l’Estoile comments that Le Breton’s obstinate and excessive conduct led him to “in- sert” “many injurious words” into his book, to publish them, and to refuse to retract in front of the court. Another comment reports the opinion of people in general: “it was apparent” from the argument of the book that he “was mentally deranged,” thus “many people” were “astonished” to see 196 public scandals, withdrawn readers him condemned to death. L’Estoile’s portrait of Le Breton thus remains in- direct. He does not directly assert his opinion but still allows for a truth to emerge from the assertions of others, from rumor, hearsay, and unspecifi ed information. As careful as l’Estoile might be to avoid directly criticizing him, Le Breton’s name already suggests his tendency toward excessive and perhaps reckless speech, since bretonner means “to speake thicke and short” (Cotgrave), that is, quickly, and hence also without deliberation and judg- ment. L’Estoile takes the utmost care to avoid accusing Henri III of having judged badly.³³ Nonetheless, his account leaves no doubt about Le Breton’s dangerous penchant for excess and confi rms his close ties with the League, especially to a public familiar with the events of this period. Th e term “per- turber of peace” is a legal one designating a crime that, in l’Estoile’s eyes, epitomizes the conduct of the League (and it is a charge often repeated in anti-League polemical pamphlets): to undermine the law and order of the state (repos public). One rabid Leaguer’s actions mirror the entire party, whose other members cannot be directly accused of this pathological be- havior.³⁴ In the manuscript of the Registre-Journal, the entry on Le Breton is placed on the page facing almost exactly the fi rst “Sonnet” published by the League, and this layout leaves no doubt that there was a relation be- tween the foolish verbal excess of Le Breton and the League’s politics that undermines the Valois monarchy and seeks to exclude Henri de Navarre from power. While the journal’s chronological arrangement creates the sense of a succession of fortuitous events, a closer look often reveals careful selection, arrangement, and manipulation of materials. Now the Navarrist sonnet appears not just as a simple repetition but as a necessary and strate- gic counterattack, a trick that allows it to avert the dangerous and, on the political scale, potentially detrimental attack of the League’s verbal excess. L’Estoile’s Registre-Journal functions as a mimetic, refl ective antidote to the destabilizing eff ect of satirical discourse, primarily to the riotous violence of League propaganda and, in a broader sense, to the dangerous decentralization of the public space through a proliferation of discursive materials that contest the monarchy. Th is function of the journal is best il- lustrated by an image, presumably one of those disseminated in the city by the Navarrist camp, which l’Estoile glued into it. Th e image depicts Henri de Navarre as Perseus facing the Gorgon Medusa of the League, whose monstrous hair of serpents is refl ected in the shield carried by Henri. It is by looking at this refl ection that Perseus avoids the petrifying eff ect of Me- dusa’s terrible head (Figure 30).³⁵ It is not by chance that l’Estoile inserted Figure 30. Henri de Navarre confronts the Medusa head of the League as Perseus. Pierre de l’Estoile’s manuscript Registre-Journal. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque national de France, Français 6678, 455r. 198 public scandals, withdrawn readers this image into his manuscript journal (which contained only two other images, both of which were portraits of King Henri III). Th e chronicler’s techniques of manipulation themselves resemble the strategy of Henri de Navarre that is symbolized in this image: they allow the mirroring of the potentially harmful proliferation of words whose power can be petrifying (to the eff orts of the Navarrists to restore the monarchy) and thus destruc- tive (leading to the dissolution of the political body), and through this mir- roring or “showing,” to use a word often employed by l’Estoile, they render it powerless. Th e Registre-Journal is like the polished shield that allows Per- seus to approach Medusa; it allows French readers to take pleasure in read- ing political satires by diff using their politically petrifying power. exemplary folly

By relinquishing, for the most part, the intent to transmit the serious word, l’Estoile devotes his energy to registering the verbal “folly” that reigns in Paris. One of the most impressive products of l’Estoile’s eff orts to gather, select, and catalogue the licentious words that circulated in the public space is the Bibliothèque de Madame Montpensier (“Library of Madame Mont- pensier”), dated October 1587. Th is work is itself a ramas, an inventory, allegedly of books contained in the library of a grand dame of the court, Madame de Montpensier, or Catherine de Lorraine, the prominent sister of the Duke of Guise, who did not make a secret of her support of the League. Th e “Library” is the catalogue of an imaginary library (recalling Rabelais’s famous catalogue of the library of the monastery of Saint-Victor), and it ex- hibits, tongue-in-cheek, the reading habits of the League’s most prominent woman. Because the technique l’Estoile adopts is the same as the one used by the libelle (selection and arrangement), it is only l’Estoile’s arrangement and documentation that distinguish it from his text (Figure 31).³⁶ Th e list of titles makes reference to the events of the recent past, and in this it presents a satirical digest of the history of the 1580s. Not only does l’Estoile narrate some of the events, but he also shares the perspec- tive and the language of ridicule with the “Library.” One fi ctional title im- mortalizes the failure of the Duke of Guise to capture the city of Sedan: “Th e Glorious Bragging [Grande Cagade] of the Duke of Guise in Jamets, with the capture of the city of Sedan, by the aforementioned Sir, printed in Rheims.”³⁷ L’Estoile’s own comment on this event elsewhere in the Registre- Figure 31. “Bibliothèque de Madame de Montpensier.” Pierre de l’Estoile, Registre-Journal. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 6678, 352v. 200 public scandals, withdrawn readers

Journal shows that he shares the same perspective: “from this undertaking the Duke of Guise only gained shame and ridicule.”³⁸ Th e mock-heroic title of an alleged pamphlet commemorates an event at the court: “Civil Combat between the Lords Nemours and the Count of Saint Pol, Found in a Napkin.”³⁹ L’Estoile tersely narrates the rivalry of two noblemen vying for the king’s favor, which requires no commentary in his eyes:

On May 3, during the king’s dinner at the Louvre, a disagreement arose between the Count of Saint Pol and the Duke of Nemours, each of whom claimed himself more worthy than the other of serving the napkin to the king.⁴⁰

Another title pokes fun at a virulent pamphlet entitled Le Catholique an- glois published by a partisan of the League: “Th e Perfect Slanderer” [Parfait Mesdisant], by Louis d’Orléans, Advocate. Printed Recently in Paris, by Le Catholique anglois.⁴¹ L’Estoile’s remark concerning this book published, ac- cording to him, in 1586, is no less scathing: “well-done for a piece of slander [pour une mesdisdance], a bad cause having found a good advocate in Louis d’Orléans, former advocate at the Parliament of Paris.”⁴² Another title nar- rates the failure of the Count of Brissac to defend the chateau of Angers, and makes fun of him for losing his treasured unicorn horn with its case:

Th e False Hope of the Count of Brissac Concerning the Recovery of the Case of his Unicorn along with his Government, with the Protestation of the Good Newsmongers of Angers.⁴³

L’Estoile ridicules the League chief’s defeat and especially his loss of his “unicorns” and their “cases,” as the loss of these treasured “curiosities” (and phallic symbols) represent his demise better even than the capture of his castle. He relates that the siege of the chateau of Angers was

undertaken and executed upon oral command from the king, who wanted to take it from the hands of the Lord of Brissac, one of the chiefs of the League. Brissac lost in the siege many valuable properties including his uni- corns and his cases.⁴⁴

Yet another title ridicules the theologian Guillaume Rose, a Leaguer:

Remarkable Treatise on Mental Derangement [de l’alteration des cerveaux], the Causes and Eff ect Th ereof and its Origin. Dedicated to M. Rose, Bishop of Senlis.⁴⁵ public scandals, withdrawn readers 201

L’Estoile describes M. Rose as one of

the kitchen boys [marmitons] and soppers [souppiers] of the Sorbonne, who dip their bread in its beef pot, fi ne councilors of the State, who spent all their lives locked up in a college domineering over and devouring [pedanti- zer et manger] the poor students of theology.⁴⁶

Th e “Library of Madame Montpensier” is a catalogue of the most glar- ing vices of the period seen from a perspective that is adverse to the League, critical of the court, and sympathetic to Henri de Navarre. Th e imaginary catalogue implies that this is just a digest: one could read more, as the representation of these vices is not yet exhausted. Th e libelle playfully gestures toward other texts (the alleged library of the principal propagan- dist of the League). Its presence in the Registre-Journal suggests l’Estoile’s own awareness that satires are rationalized representations (lists, inven- tories, catalogues, maps, registers, etc.) of allegedly chaotic, disorderly re- alities, where it is the organization that grants the satirist a view from the outside, a counter vision, if only indirectly, of a rational world. Th e sati- rist both makes claims of a total representation and constantly gestures toward places where his material saturates and overfl ows the boundaries of his representation, for in order for the satire to be eff ective, the mate- rial, the negative world projected in the satire, has to surpass all eff orts at organization. On the pages of the journal of Henri III, the fi gure of Madame de Montpensier is the personifi cation of folly. Her restless fi gure with scis- sors attached to her belt,⁴⁷ symbolic of a Messianic fervor that fuels her feverish political activities, shows her to be the embodiment of religious excess that invades the political realm of the monarchy. L’Estoile draws a caricature of the religious zeal of Madame Montpensier turned into politi- cal ambition, thus echoing the authors of the Satyre Menippee. As a cari- cature of the chaste female fi gure of truth whose nakedness is inoff ensive because it signifi es that truth needs no ornament, Madame Montpensier is constantly depicted in the journal as a public woman, whose indiscretion in speech and lewdness in conduct symbolize the pro-League propaganda that pervades the public space and seduces the masses. According to one of the anti-League satires copied by l’Estoile, she is the embodiment of sin committed “brutally, publicly, indiscreetly, and viciously,” declaring (in her own voice): 202 public scandals, withdrawn readers

Figure 32. A correction in Pierre de l’Estoile’s manuscript Registre-Journal. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 6678, 409r.

My body has no other desires than lubricity and folly, and my mind is solely devoted to diabolic designs and plots.⁴⁸

In particular, in the entry of February 14, 1589, l’Estoile reports on the “fi ne and pious processions” in the city on Mardi Gras “instead of the dis- solute and fi lthy carnival and the Lenten feast that are customary.”⁴⁹ He cites thus the voice of the ultra-Catholic League, which bans the popular festivities of Mardi Grass as immoral. For his own voice that exposes the League’s false piety, l’Estoile claims frankness: “to speak truthfully frankly [pour en parler à la Verité franchement] the entire thing was a carnival and many took piety as a mask for lewdness” (Figure 32).⁵⁰ L’Estoile’s self- indexing frank speech ironically reinscribes the penitential procession in the space of the carnival, precisely into the space that the newly reformed Catholic piety seeks to ban. He points out (maybe with some exaggeration) that the nocturnal mingling of men and women wearing nothing but a sack to cover their bodies creates an upside-down world, in which young women end up pregnant instead of reformed. But the carnivalesque inver- sion that l’Estoile discerns is not simply that of immorality and impiety, but of a license that is capable of destroying the political unity of France. Madame Montpensier’s body, “covered only in a thin cloth with a hole cut in it for her neck,” with the crowd leading her “under their arms,” “cozy- ing up” (mugueter) to her and “caressing” (attoucher) her, “scandalizing” public scandals, withdrawn readers 203 those Christians who attend the ceremonies out of sincere piety, stands out again as the parody of the all-pervasive, reckless agitation of the League that leads to a scandal of religion and, more importantly, to the crisis of the state which relies on religion for its unity.⁵¹ A remark in Montaigne’s essay “De l’art de conferer,” fi rst published in 1588, elucidates the important role that Madame Montpensier’s satirical portrait plays in the pages of l’Estoile’s journal in the years 1586 to 1589. Citing a view attributed to Cato the Elder, Montaigne remarks that wise men can learn more from fools than fools from wise men.⁵² Since there are few positive examples in the public space to learn from, only negative ex- amples that have the power to warn or deter are expedient.⁵³ Montaigne’s Essais promote, instead of imitation, which in the public space leads to vio- lent rivalry, an ethics of disengagement and withdrawal, acting “by retreat” (à reculons), which allows the individual to carve out a space for himself apart from the violence that invades the public space.⁵⁴ L’Estoile’s proce- dures carried out in his journals similarly invest the violent and outrageous images and language of satire that dominate the political realm with a new kind of usefulness for readers who are willing to retreat from the political realm and draw their lessons from it. Th ere are infi nite fractures in the kaleidoscope of l’Estoile’s satire, where even folly (whose most fl eshly embodiment is Madame Montpensier) can serve as an instrument of truth. Th is is perhaps why l’Estoile collects “more than three hundred pamphlets” of “various kinds” fi lling up four “great volumes . . . bound in parchment,” which he had “labeled in [his] own hand” and another in-folio in which he gathered “images and defamatory placards of all kinds” from the time of the League in Paris. He concedes that he “should have thrown [these documents] into the fi re . . . were it not for the fact that more than some noble thing, they can show and unmask [à monstrer et descouvrir] the abuses, impostures, the vanity, and the fury of this great monster [ grand monstre], the League.”⁵⁵ One of the images in the album exemplifi es the kind of montage of images that l’Estoile often prepared: it is a Catholic broadsheet displaying the effi gies of two ultra- Catholic leaders, the Guise brothers, whose assassination by the king is presented as martyrdom. Th e image itself presents a complex space, jux- taposing the scene of crucifi xion (which appears embroidered on a curtain that forms the upper half of the image) with the murdered bodies of the Guise brothers (laid out in front of the curtain and in the lower half of the image). A poem placed in the middle connects these two distinct events, 204 public scandals, withdrawn readers describing the Guise brothers as martyrs whose blood “cries for vengeance.” Th e teardrops that fall copiously (embroidery on the curtain whose eff ect has been created by a skillfully prepared and colored woodcut image) are tears of mourning shed equally for Christ and the Guise brothers. Ele- ments in the image have been colored with red paint: the body of Car- dinal Louis de Guise, the clothing of Henri de Guise, the tall candela- bra in the lower half, and the cross and various relics in the upper half (Figure 33). Th ese relics and symbols include an ear cut off with a sword (probably in reference to the betrayal of Jesus and the cutting off of the ear of the slave who seizes him in Matthew 26:51),⁵⁶ the wine chalice (sym- bol of the Passion of Christ), and a sudarium (a veil with the imprint of Christ’s face). Th ese emblematic images recalling the Passion suggest that Christ’s fl esh and blood have been besmeared anew with “the blood spilled in Blois of these brothers.” No doubt, l’Estoile hopes that the poem that links piety and the cry for vengeance will speak loudly and clearly and show itself as disobedient speech, but to make this idea more palpable he also pastes a satirical League pamphlet attacking the king’s most promi- nent favorite on the bottom of the page. Th is “scrapbook” method, which consists in juxtaposing the solemn and the satirical voices of the Catholic League, serves to defuse the gravity of their religious voice and show (à monstrer et descouvrir), all the more emphatically, its monstrosity (grand monstre). One has to adopt an attitude of playfulness to engage with the discursive threat presented by satires, which can thus be mitigated on the pages of the journals. Th e frivolous laughter generated by the derisory public discourse is irresistible, but laughter can lead to an insight into the sobering fact that there is nothing to laugh at:

I laugh when I see the whole world slander someone, Now this one, now that one, princes and kings, But, when I have laughed enough, I realize there is nothing but laughter [rire].⁵⁷

Slander (mesdire) generates laughter (rire), and this corrosive laughter emp- ties the world of everything solid until nothing but laughter is left. How- ever, this baroque folding of laughter upon itself can lead to an enrich- ment of an internal, private space as well as also being channeled to carry Figure 33. Th e effi gies of Henri and Louis de Guise, from Les belles Figures et Drolleries de la Ligue. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque national de France, RES GR FOL-LA25 6 Xr. 206 public scandals, withdrawn readers a political message, which in l’Estoile’s case has to do with his political alignment with the Navarrist party and the monarchy. the laughing king and the withdrawn reader

On Monday, April 11, 1605, l’Estoile records the publication of a satire that caught his attention—and also that of King Henri IV:

Th e “Book of Hermaphrodites” was printed at this time, and it circulated in Paris in the same month, where news of this pamphlet fi rst whetted the appetite of the curious [aux curieux], to whom it was being sold for the exorbitant price of two écus even though it was not worth more than ten sols. I know someone who paid this price for it to a bookseller near the royal palace. Th is small libelle, which was, I think, quite well-done, revealed the corrupt and impious lifestyle of the court, making clear that France, once a respectable school of virtue, is now the refuge and dwelling place of all vice, voluptuousness, and impudence. Th e king wanted to see it, and he or- dered it to be read to him. And although he found it a bit too licentious and provocative, he only wished to be informed about the author’s name, which was Artus Th omas. Th e king did not want him to be searched for because, as he said, his conscience did not permit him to trouble a man for speaking the truth [pour avoir dit la verité ].⁵⁸

Th is scene evokes another scene at the court of Henri IV: the monarch em- ploys a page to read out to him a popular satire that is the dernier cri in the bookstores and on the streets of Paris (Rabelais coined the word anagnostes, a Greek-derived neologism, to name the page whose job it was to do the job of reading to the high-ranked). Th is is the image of a monarch who does not underestimate the power of discursive genres in the public realm of his empire. Nor is he frightened by the satirical representation of the monarch as “hermaphrodite” in the pamphlet: he leaves the alleged author in peace. Th e reason for this may be that the striking image of the “hermaphrodite” does not refer to Henri IV but to his predecessor Henri III, the French king assassinated in a Catholic coup in 1589, whose manifest bisexuality, his love of luxury, and his favoritism were notorious in the satirical litera- ture of the period. Th e “hermaphrodite,” a medical anomaly that shows up in the brilliant royal surgeon Ambroise Paré’s book Des monstres et prodiges (“On Monsters and Marvels,” 1573), fascinated the period’s cultural imagi- public scandals, withdrawn readers 207 nation as the emblem of the boundless possibilities contained in natural forms. However, in the political culture of the 1580s and 1590s, “hermaph- rodite” became a code word applied to the tendency of King Henri III and the court to vacillate in supporting now the League, now Henri de Navarre.⁵⁹ An emblem decorating the frontispiece of the fi rst edition dis- plays a portrait of Henri III as a “hermaphrodite,” dressed in lavish clothes and wearing an earring. Th e epigram explains that the “hermaphrodite” forgoes the choice between two sexes and he/she abandons reason and mo- rality in favor of augmenting his/her pleasure. Th e accompanying phrase “I cannot say no to anyone” (A tous accords), attributed as a personal motto to Henri III, reinterprets the physical and moral aspects of hermaphroditism as a political attitude. In fact, it echoes a satirical poem from the period of Henri III’s reign collected by l’Estoile:

Th e great lords demand everything [demandent tout] Th e king grants them everything [accorde tout].⁶⁰

Probably written shortly after Henri III’s death in 1589 to satirize the late king’s powerlessness to control the feuds of the two most powerful aristo- cratic families (the Guises and the Bourbons), the libelle’s real target is the moderate political party or the politiques, who advocated religious toler- ance and the peaceful coexistence of two religions (Catholicism and Prot- estantism) in the kingdom.⁶¹ Th is is why a whole society of hermaphrodites is depicted and satirized in the libelle, who are governed by a monarch- hermaphrodite. It seems probable that the satire was authored by a Catho- lic author (possibly Artus Th omas) who sees in the tolerant attitude of the politiques toward Protestantism as well as Catholicism a threat to the res- toration of the foundational truth that cements social order and law and guarantees the survival of the political institution of the monarchy.⁶² However, the pamphlet was not published until years after Henri III’s assassination, in 1605, during the reign of Henri IV.⁶³ A narrative frame, probably written for the printed publication, creates the eff ect of a tem- poral distance from the past: an initial narrator cedes his voice to another narrator, an anonymous traveler who had allegedly fl ed Europe to escape the “bloody tragedy” of the civil wars and is now returning as peace has been restored. Th is frame serves to situate a satirical representation of the recent past within a contemporary setting. Th is recent past that is marked off from the present through the narrative presented in the frame (depar- ture from France during the civil wars—travels including to the “island 208 public scandals, withdrawn readers of hermaphrodites”—return to France after the civil wars) is not so clearly separated from the present in the consciousness of l’Estoile (writing in 1605). He interprets the object of satire as the present of France, “once a respectable school of virtue . . . now the refuge and dwelling place of all vice, voluptuousness, and impudence.” For l’Estoile there exists only an idealized, distant past (the time before the civil wars), while the recent past of less than two decades before is not yet a distinct past. His own Registre- Journal is also such a retrospective look at the recent past, as we can assume that he did not fi nish the work of compilation, editing, and copying in the years following the death of Henri III. L’Isle des Hermaphrodites similarly takes up one of l’Estoile’s favorite subjects: the Parisians’ avid interest in writing and reading satires, pasquinades, slander, and scandal. Th e success of this little book, as l’Estoile remarks, only proves that the satirical view of French society present in the libelle is justifi ed, for the Parisian crowd shows itself ready to pay even an exorbitant price for the pleasure of read- ing a libelous story. In this cleverly written and marketed book, a shipwrecked narrator steps on the island of the Hermaphrodites, which fl oats on the ocean without anchorage, and sees there an edifi ce so beautiful and so intricate that the eye cannot take it in at fi rst sight. Th is multifaceted edifi ce that has to be described through a series of distinct ekphrastic descriptions becomes the model for the narrative description of the entire island, which constantly moves from one “wonder” and “novelty” to the next. Wandering among the throng of hopping islanders into a building, the narrator-traveler chances upon a bedchamber and witnesses the pompous morning toilette of a high-ranking Hermaphrodite, as he/she is being transformed into a “half-woman.”⁶⁴ Th e narrator then enters a room fi lled with statues repre- senting Ganymede, Hermaphrodite, Sardanapalus, and Heliogabalus, the heroes, or rather “saints, gods, and idols,” revered by the Hermaphrodites, as well as with papers consisting of “pasquinades, satires and other kinds of poetry,” along with extracts from Hermaphroditic laws. From there, he penetrates into the monarch’s boudoir, where he fi nds two “heretical pam- phlets,” goes on to witness a chaotic and cacophonous scene in a tavern where the diners gluttonously devour the food as soon as it is served and simultaneously cry out greedy demands for royal favor, observes the Her- maphrodites at court during their dinner and conversation, and fi nds a “beautiful gallery” where he fi nally ends his walk and settles down to read the “heretical pamphlets.” Th ese scenes reveal a society that is hypocritical, public scandals, withdrawn readers 209 in the original sense of the Greek word: it is a theater peopled by actors who freely exhibit their preference for pleasures over virtues. Not only do ceremonies evoke the essence of their religion, but they also turn ceremo- nies into religion. Th e theatrical quality of life on the island presents a grotesque example of Folly’s suggestion in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly that a certain amount of “folly,” or self-delusion, such as the kind that the specta- tors of a play experience, is necessary for a happy individual life; however, the Hermaphrodites’ love of theatricality not only helps them live their individual lives but also provides the law and the religion that defi ne their social and political life. Th e Hermaphrodites prefer art to nature and surface to depth, so they take great pleasure in clothing, makeup, theater, and poetry, as well as in discursive forms that create artifi cial, fi ctional worlds such as slander, lies, pasquinades, and satire.⁶⁵ Th eir aesthetic taste shows their society as one in which only truth claims can be encountered, without any regulation or restraint from fundamental notions of truth. No laws hold them to fun- damental truths, values, or virtues, because their laws command them to gratify their desire for pleasure in a proto-libertine fashion. Th eir great- est satirical masterpiece is the “digest” (un extrait) of their laws, prepared and ready, waiting for curious visitors to read them.⁶⁶ Th eir laws mimic and parody the language of the royal edicts, especially royal ordinances that established laws “perpetually” (à perpetuité ) but were in reality ineff ec- tive.⁶⁷ Th e Hermaphrodites provide their own satirical description in their laws. Th ey not only abandon the laws of the normal world (both moral and medical laws), but their laws mirror them as their inverted counterparts: just as they hobble—spurning the stable ground under their feet—from one seductive appearance to the other, their government commands the creation of shifting and untrue representations of each other, a practice that culminates, on the one hand, in their elaborate sartorial customs and dressing ceremonies and, on the other, in the all-pervasiveness of slander. Th eir laws prescribe the latter:

Slander [medisance] shall be their ordinary way of talking without regard for family, society, and friendship, for to scandalize and to slander [scandaliser et calomnier] the honor and the reputation of those to whom one has sworn friendship is one of the most common and necessary laws of civility.⁶⁸

Besides slander and calumny, the laws also command boasting, self-praise, blasphemy, mockery, and the fl attery of the monarch to his face as well as 210 public scandals, withdrawn readers attacks on his person and on the state in defamatory books and deceptive double-talk, while they forbid pious language of all kinds. Th e Hermaph- rodites can never stop fabricating appearances through discursive, sarto- rial, and artistic means because this fabrication constitutes the very fabric of their society, and this character of the society forces the observer to keep shifting his regard, to remain a traveler in constant displacement upon the island. Th is is where the presumed author of the satire, himself a translator of Th eophrastus’s ekphrastic descriptions, must occupy a double position: as a religious moralist, he condemns the Hermaphrodites’ practices in the name of solid truths and values, but as a satirist engaged in drawing audiences into his satirical world, he exploits them in the complacency of description. Th e libelle is itself engaged in recasting French society as a fi ctional real- ity, a distortion of reality that entices the reader, and the moral criticism is inseparable from satire that “slanders.” Th e Hermaphrodites know that reading is pleasure, and in the digest of their laws that they prepare for their visitors they have created a textual edifi ce (an arrangement of items that exposes itself to the reader as an object that is all surface exposes itself to the viewer) that is also such a simulated reality. In short, they under- stand the pleasure of reading in which traversing the physical space of the book leads to the organization of the social space according to these tex- tual edifi ces deployed in lists, anthologies, and collections. Th e narrator- traveler is, moreover, not just an outside observer but is himself involved in this work of preparing the text, for, as he explains, he translates the Latin digest he fi nds on the island into French, and in the process he makes his own selections, anticipating the demands of his more specifi c audience: “I found there several other laws and ordinances, which I decided not to in- clude in the collection [recueillir], for, being more or less in conformity with the laws that ordinarily exist in the world, they did not seem to be worth the eff ort, so I only translated those which seemed extraordinary to me.”⁶⁹ Th is remark suggests that the narrator shares the passion of authors and readers of satires for the striking and the extraordinary, and he follows his preference for them as he makes his own selection, orders and organizes the material from his particular point of view, and frames it for the readers, creating an object for their reading and pleasure. In the society of the “hermaphrodites” in which literally nothing is sa- cred except for theater, ostentation, lies, treachery, and slander; where ev- public scandals, withdrawn readers 211 erything is shown; and where language, architecture, book printing, art, and the sartorial trades all without exception serve the purpose of creating appearances that hide no truths, the sole truth that is to be found is pre- sented as a secret of sorts—not so much hidden from the eye as in retreat. Telling is the ending of the book: Having observed an extravagant dinner, the narrator is invited to enjoy more of the curious sights of the island. He declines and makes his way instead toward a “delightful garden” which he had previously discovered through one of the windows of the dining hall. He fi nds himself in “one of the most beautiful galleries that one can imag- ine. . . . a place of voluptuous pleasure,”⁷⁰ where he reads those “heretical” pamphlets that he has found among the bric-a-brac in the monarch’s dress- ing room, the hidden center of the political realm. Th e Hermaphrodites’ laws provide us a clue as to what “heresy” is:

for we consider all those who in writing or speech defend chastity and sanc- tity, and those who through their satires wish to mock our way of life pro- fane, heretical, and schismatic.⁷¹

We may infer from the law that these “heretical” pamphlets are those which uphold religious and moral values in a society that shuns these val- ues altogether. Th en the secret interior site of the dressing room would be the sole foothold where one could step away from the constant slippage of language and signs of untruth. But is such an authentic kernel from which society could be criticized still conceivable? For, paradoxically, in the Her- maphrodites’ society, a sermon about chastity and sainthood would be in- distinguishable from the discourse of the hypocritical moralist. In fact, the laws of the Hermaphrodites encourage moralizing, for it is the best excuse for slander.⁷² Th e moralist drifts without anchor in an ocean of slander (where the slanderer is also a moralist), creating an ambiguous public realm in which one slanderous statement can only be countered by another one and truth cannot be upheld because it is immediately countered by a slan- derous response. Th e garden seen through the window, this pleasant place of solitude and reading, is the inversion of the outside and, as such, the fi gure of the pri- vate realm of judgment opposed to the public realm of incessantly chang- ing opinion following its epicurean and Sardanapalian bent. In his essay Du parler prompt et tardif (“On a Ready or Hesitant Delivery”), Montaigne distinguishes between wit (esprit), producing its eff ects suddenly, and judg- 212 public scandals, withdrawn readers ment ( jugement), working slowly and after premeditation.⁷³ Th e “private” realm of withdrawal is the realm of judgment, and its “private” character does not have to do with a sharp distinction between a domestic sphere and the public sphere (such an autonomous private sphere does not emerge until the eighteenth century); rather it has to do with gaining time. In the same way, it is the traveler’s decision to discontinue his travel, his move- ment from one appearance to another, and to take a break and linger on reading the couple of books found in the monarch’s boudoir that makes the diff erence. Th e garden is a site of repose and coming to standstill, con- trary to the rest of the island where the traveler is constantly in movement from one appearance to the next one, and where he cannot resist new in- formation, new knowledge, and new pleasures. It is a place of absorption, where appearances gain substance again because they are transformed into the object of the reader’s quiet refl ection, and become subject to his con- sent or criticism.⁷⁴ L’Isle des Hermaphrodites affi rms that true satire, a truly critical stance, is only possible at a certain distance from the social sphere where representations are incessantly exchanged for one another. It is such a space, detached from the overfl ow of constantly shifting, epistemologically uncertain, and politically uncontrollable representa- tions, a site where the constant transfer of libelles and of slander comes to a standstill and becomes available for contemplation and refl ection, that L’Isle des Hermaphrodites projects as the ideal space occupied by an ideal reader. Similarly, Montaigne’s Essais is a textual space of judgment rather than of wit. Montaigne considers lying as the most pervasive public “vir- tue” in a “corrupt age,” and he notes that ironically the “greatest injury” that one can infl ict through words is to accuse someone of lying, a charge which everyone rushes to deny.⁷⁵ Like Montaigne, the narrator of L’Isle des Hermaphrodites fi nds no truth in the society of the Hermaphrodites, where theatricality is the sole religion and where the laws ensure that every thing remains fragmented and, further, that public space is broken up into count- less fractional points of views. Le monde n’est plus que caballe—against this satirical view of France as a totality broken into fractions (caballes), the Navarrist pamphlet recorded by l’Estoile in 1586 projects a unity embod- ied by Henri de Navarre, pretender to the monarchy.⁷⁶ It is not hard to see that these authors, Montaigne, l’Estoile, and the author of L’Isle des Hermaphrodites , agree upon a satirical representation of French society and promote a withdrawal from a society that no longer has shared religious and political assumptions. Th e argument that true satire is only possible public scandals, withdrawn readers 213 from a distance relies on postulating a morally sovereign autonomous judg- ment. In L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, the “heretical books” are found lying in the king’s dressing room. Th ese “heretical books” reveal an intersection of the perspective of an individual who withdraws from the political arena in which slander circulates and the monarch’s perspective, his all-seeing gaze that controls the circulation of everything that is published. Just as the king’s laughter reveals that he is not afraid of the “Medusa’s head” of political satire, the presence of the “heretical pamphlets” in the monarch’s boudoir shows the monarch’s awareness of these materials and his control over them. Th e boudoir is the “public” place par excellence in the absolutist state, the room where the aff airs of the state are decided (especially on the Island of the Hermaphrodites, whose most important state aff air is dress- ing and toilette) and the place from which the circulation of publications and more generally everything that is public or is published is monitored. Th e story of the “heretical books” taken from the monarch’s boudoir and perused by a withdrawn reader points to the fact that by the end of the sixteenth century, polemical discursive forms such as satire constitute com- plex “mixed spaces,” both private and public.⁷⁷ Th e pamphlets found in the monarch’s boudoir in L’Isle des Hermaphrodites suggest that the monarchy sometimes relied on polemical pamphlets and satires to reinforce its power, while in other instances, it suppressed them. Henri IV’s appreciation of the libelle quoted in l’Estoile’s Registre-Journal similarly reveals him as truly sovereign because he is unafraid of scandal. His nonchalance suggests that he is in control of this public space, which he allows to exist into the semi- private realm of moral judgment (that of “speaking the truth”). If the realm of judgment in l’Estoile’s journal and the satire L’Isle des Hermaphrodites has political implications, then it is within this political frame that communities of readers become possible. In L’Isle des Hermaph- rodites, this community is fi gured vividly in the fi nal scene, when the nar- ration returns to the frame, with the narrator-traveler bearing off his narra- tion and abruptly addressing his audience engaged in listening to his story. A sudden shift at the end of the pamphlet from the narration to an imagi- nary scene of narration suggests a parallel between the listener’s (and by extension the reader’s) view and the narrator’s view. Th e reader is promised that he will enter this new space detached from any imaginary identifi ca- tion with the public. L’Estoile’s journals were destined for a restricted circulation, a coterie rather than society at large. Th e two manuscript versions of his journal 214 public scandals, withdrawn readers of the reign of Henri III, the Registre-Journal and the Memoires-Journaux, originally served two distinct purposes. He records that on December 14, 1606, he lent the large and precious volume of the Registre-Journal to a friend and received it back two months later. In exchange, he received “po- ems from the court, which circulate, apt to entertain the idle and curious minds fond of slander in which our century abounds.”⁷⁸ Th ese poems were Le combat d’Amour et de Repos, an unspecifi ed poem by François de Mal- herbe with a response by Pierre Berthelot, and “three or four slanderous poems” (médisances). After the “gospels of Paris,”⁷⁹ satires became, once they no longer represented a threat to the state, the currency of the collec- tor and exchanger. Inside the Registre-Journal, they obtain a new life, cir- culate within a restricted circle of friends, collectors, and hommes d’esprit, the emerging class of educated bourgeois who enjoy literary exercise, and whom l’Estoile trusts. It is likely that he copied the later and somewhat shorter version (which he states is “for myself”) because the original and more voluminous copy was in constant circulation. Th is coterie constitutes the actual public of the journals, but we can imagine that, had l’Estoile had them printed in his lifetime, they would have allowed a broader read- ing public to refl ect on their recent past. Both l’Estoile’s journals and L’Isle des Hermaphrodites carve out a space of private judgment whose single and stable point of view coincides with the projected, abstract gaze of the abso- lutist monarch, and the projected image of this private space expresses the subject’s desire for an ordered, centralized public space. We have come closest to the virtue of urbanitas imagined by Rabelais in his Gargantua, and the utopian polity of laugher that, in Rabelais’s fi ction, coincides with the national unity tied to the monarchy. Th e approval of the monarch is consciously staged, both in l’Estoile’s journals and in L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, for indeed, this coincidence has to be ensured, to show that this realm does not threaten the monarchy. Privacy depends on the monarch’s approval, even if tacit, and its survival remains dependent on a precarious political order. Th ese later satirical authors take a path of craft- ing “cooler” satires that promote calm and pleasurable individual refl ection that imitates and confi rms the (momentary) balance in the consolidated political realm. Conclusion

Th e authors of the Satyre Menippee imagine the utopian possibility of read- ers expressing their political diff erences through additions to the pamphlet, thus turning the new literary form of menippean satire into a tool for voic- ing, enacting, and defusing irreconcilable diff erences of view that call into question the monarchy’s politics of reconciliation after the consolidation of political power.¹ Such a space of “agonistic” exchange cannot remain but imaginary in the sixteenth century, before the birth of political plural- ism, and yet this vision suggests that the authors of this unconventional pamphlet, monarchists who were also thinking beyond the hegemonic boundaries of the monarchy, were able to imagine the value of dissensus for the health of a social body.² Although the absolutist monarchy sought to curb polemical literature as a dangerous speech act that could revive the memory and the disastrous eff ect of past injuries and destabilize social order, satire continued to attract the interest of collectors who saw in it a diversion conducive to moral refl ection, available to those who were able to withdraw from the political arena. As we have seen in Pierre l’Estoile’s journals, paradoxically, these writers and journalists turn satire into the very tool of this withdrawal by the end of the century. 216 conclusion

How important was the literary and imaginary dimension of vitupera- tion for the emergence of a political genre? Th e humanistic practices that often lie at the roots of polemical literature, or to which authors and cre- ators of polemical literature refer, are rhetorical devices of distancing and refl ection. When simplifi ed and manipulated, these devices can be used to draw audiences all the more into an ideology, into a group whose members “know.” However, they can also be used to distance them from views that are being propagated in the political arena, on the street, in the church, and on the public square. Th e vivid images that project these communities do not fade even when the causes that have animated them do. Studying the literature of vituperation in sixteenth-century France teraches us that the power of words and symbols lingers beyond the social and political circumstances of their publication.³ Th e images that bespeak a vital political imagination in these pam- phlets constitute a robust and oft-revisited quarry in French history. Th e Satyre Menippee was reprinted countless times with notes and supporting documents in the course of the eighteenth century, while l’Estoile’s jour- nals were printed in digest fashion under the title Memoires pour servir à l’histoire de France (1719). Just prior to the revolution, these books were used to attack the church and the state. Figure 34, an illustration from 1607 that appears in several eighteenth-century editions of the Satyre Me- nippee, portrays Madame Montpensier enticing the monk Jacques Clem- ent to kill the king with the knife that is lying in front of him (bottom left); two caped fi gures, visibly Spaniards, who are engaged in a scheme next to a few sacks fi lled with money (bottom right); and busy clerics and aristocrats in the background. Th e central figure in this image is that of a preacher holding out in front of him the double cross of the League and wearing a mask suggesting that religious fervor serves solely to disguise fervent political ambitions. Jean Chastel’s failed attempt in 1595 and Fran- çois Ravaillac’s successful attempt in 1610 to assassinate Henri IV as well as Antoine-Joseph Damiens’s failed attempt to assassinate Louis XV in 1757 were viewed by many in France, especially by the parliamentaries, as his- tory repeating itself.⁴ Eighteenth-century editions of the Satyre Menippee often helped foster distrust in the Catholic clergy, in the Jesuits, and in devout Catholic practices and rites. In addition, they also contributed to the gradual corrosion of the sacred power of the absolutist state that relied on these rites and on an alliance with the church. Another image, this one appearing in the Memoires pour servir à l’histoire Figure 34. Madame de Montpensier. [Le Roy, Jean, and others], Satyre Menippee (Rouen, 1709). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.Sa836.1709. Figure 35. Madame de Montpensier. Memoires pour servir à l’histoire de France (Cologne, 1719). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.L5675.719m. conclusion 219 de France, also reactivates the clichés of the past. It shows Madame Mont- pensier in the center of a gathering of frenzied women (reminiscent of the Furies) with torches, one of whom has a snake twisted around her arm; Jacques Clément kneels in a supplicating pose in front of Madame Mont- pensier, and a clerical fi gure with disheveled hair eggs her on (Figure 35). An eighteenth-century editor celebrates the Satyre Menippee for its ability to lead to a new national self-recognition, perhaps of the kind that can bring about revolutionary changes: “Th e stage was erected and all was left to do was to fi ll the scene, to draw the Great and the People, and place in front of them all the follies that one believed to be supreme forms of wisdom in action: in other words, there was need for ridicule, to make the entire Nation blush at the sight of itself.”⁵ Th e re-emergence of the satiri- cal and vituperative models of the sixteenth century show that they were deemed highly useful and that the sixteenth-century satirists had created enduring themes and models of religious and political discourse compel- ling to later generations caught up in their own struggles for identity and power. Not only individual readers or communities but whole societies can get “taken in” by the scandalous rhetoric of religious and political satire and its eff ects, and the French society of the ancien régime became caught in that which l’Estoile aptly terms liberté françoise.

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. Th e 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 abomi- nable (“abominable”) to vulpin (“foxlike”). See Claude Postel, Traité des invectives au temps de la Réforme (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2004). Th e fi rst reader to draw at- tention 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 infl uence 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’infl uence 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. Th is expression has been chosen by students of Gérard Defaux to desig- nate 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. Th is 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.” Th ese authors are Marot, Rabelais, and the victims of persecution like Étienne Dolet and Louis de Berquin. Th e present study does not aim at describing the personal engagement of individual authors against the 222 notes to introduction

“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 ex- emplary study of Reformation “propaganda” and of the use of print to propagate ideas. Edwards remarks that by translating and printing the scriptures with pref- aces 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 sa- tirical 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 Me- nippee); as well as the editors of critical editions: Nicole Cazauran (Discours mer- veilleux de la vie . . . de Catherine de Médicis), Charles-Antoine Chamay (Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale), Claude Longeon (Farce des Th eologastres), 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 cor- rect 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 some- thing written, are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the im- pressions 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 Re- ligion, 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. “Th is far, indeed, we all diff er from each other, in that everyone appropri- ates to himself some peculiar error; but we are all alike in this that we substitute some monstrous fi ctions for the one living and true God—a disease not confi ned to obtuse and vulgar minds, but aff ecting 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 mes- sage stemming from divine reason to “weaker” human reason, has been much studied. Two noteworthy accounts of Calvin’s indebtedness to humanist rhetoric notes to introduction 223 are Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Étude de la rhétorique ré- formée (Geneva: Slatkine, 1992); and Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). 10. Literary critics often think diff erently. 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 “lyr- icism of fi lth,” the “explosion of satire,” and the “verbal delirium” that character- ize these poems. See introduction to La polémique protestante contre Ronsard, ed. Jacques Pineaux (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1973), 1: xxv– xxvi. 11. Th is data is cited by Natalie Zemon Davis in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1965; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 80. 12. Th e “Menippean satire” is a prosimetron form, a combination of prose and verse, and is a discontinuous collection of satirical pieces based on citations from other works. It is thought to originate in works by the Cynic Menippus, which were no longer extant in the Renaissance. Th e sole classical author whose works survived in fragments and serve as a model is Varro, but authors of menippean sat- ires make up their own literary genealogies. For example, the authors of the Satyre Menippee (1593– 1594) claim as literary predecessors Menippus, Varro, Macrobius, Juvenal, Petronius, Lucian, Apuleius, and Rabelais, all makers of “tasty mockeries and schoolboyish games.” See Satyre Menippee de la vertu du catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des estatz de Paris. Nouvelle édition. Revue sur le texte complet de 1594 & publiée avec un grand nombre de pièces supplémentaires rares ou inédites, des notes historiques & un index, ed. Éduard Tricotel (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1877–1881; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 2: 243– 244. In the French tradition, Henri Estienne’s eruditely eclectic defi nition of “sat- ire” (satyra) was also likely to contribute to the development of generic experi- ments with mixed genres (I analyze this defi nition in Chapter 4). For an analysis of the genre in the context of European humanism, see Ingrid De Smet, Menip- pean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581– 1655 (Geneva: Droz, 1996). 13. Th e philological and theological literature concerning “scandal” is vast. On the meaning of this word in the Hebrew Bible, see Th eologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1982), 367– 375 and 866– 868. Th e eschatologi- cal signifi cance of the word in the New Testament is fl eshed out in the article by Gustav Stählin, “skandalon, skandalizô,” in Th eologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1932–1979). Th is dictionary, written by German Protestant theologians, has been translated into English under the title Th eological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoff rey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–1976). On the treatment of “scandal” in medieval and early modern moral theology, see N. Jung’s article “le scandale” in Diction- naire de théologie catholique, ed. A. Vocant (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1930). 14. See iia iiae q. 43, a. 1, in Aquinas, Summa Th eologica. Complete English 224 notes to introduction

Edition in Five Volumes, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1920), 3: 1360– 1361. I slightly modify the translation. 15. It takes a reader well versed in Latin and familiar with the contemporary debates about religion to read and appreciate Erasmus’s book. 16. “Letter to Martin Dorp,” in Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. 17. On the intent to avoid insulting, see ibid., 142. 18. Victoria Kahn, “Stultitia and Diatribe: Erasmus’ Praise of Prudence,” Ger- man Quarterly 55: 3 (1982): 358. 19. It is possibly this eff ect of the Encomium that the author of the Satyres chres- tiennes de la cuisine papale alludes to when he recalls that he would have remained lost in the “abyss” of Catholicism, had it not been for the reading of certain “face- tious writings” that opened his eyes. One of these writings is probably the Enco- mium and the one who tells the story of his conversion is probably Th éodore de Bèze, Calvin’s successor as the head of the Genevan Church (see Chapter 4). 20. Recently, Austin’s concept of “performative utterances” has sparked inter- est from philosophical and rhetorical analysts. In particular, Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell have considered the perlocutionary “force” of speech, the ability of speakers to “do things” through words. “Perlocutionary” performative utterances, unlike “illocutionary” ones, are not embedded in institutions and conventions, and their eff ect cannot be determined according to set conventions but depends in each case on the particular context and circumstances of the utterance. It is to this contemporary rhetorical (and, as Butler argues, political) notion that I be- lieve the early modern “scandal” relates, through its ability to open up utterances to rhetorical and political eff ects. See Judith Butler, afterword to Th e Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages by Shoshana Felman, trans. by Catherine Porter (1983; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 113–123; and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Stanley Cavell, “Performa- tive and Passionate Utterance,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 155–191; and Cavell’s fore- word to Shoshana Felman, Th e Scandal of the Speaking Body, xi–xxi. 21. Alfred Soman has shown the ineff ectiveness of censorship in early modern France in his article “Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu,” Proceedings of the American Philological Society 120: 6 (Dec. 29, 1976): 439– 463. 22. Lucien Febvre, Th e Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: Th e Reli- gion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); originally published as Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942), 131. My reference is to the original publication. Natalie Zemon Davis, in her turn, convincingly shows the exaggera- tion in this account and argues that Febvre, writing and publishing his book in occupied France in 1942 and working under the heavy constraints imposed by the Propaganda Abteilung of the fascist government, projected his own struggles with notes to introduction 225 censorship upon the sixteenth century. With her, we have reasons to believe that “insulting” was not a simple and unidirectional tool of social repression in early modern French society and culture. See “Rabelais Among the Censors (1940s, 1540s),” Representations 32: 1 (1990): 1– 32. 23. “A scandall, off ense, occasion or cause of another mans sinning; also, an imputation, or slander, also a sturre, tumult, uproare; also, a plummet to sound at sea with,” says the Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues by Randle Cot- grave (London: Adam Islip, 1611). We fi nd the aff ective sense of se scandaliser in Rabelais’s books (see Chapter 2 for more detail). 24. Luther rode on the coattails of the German humanist movement and (be- sides mobilizing the lowest registers of German and Latin) exploited the injurious rhetoric that he found in the Bible, which he called a “war cry” and a “stumbling block.” For Luther, the Bible is a “scandal,” as it “off ends” those not attuned to its message—either bringing them to faith or making them irremediably “fall away” from it. Luther’s off ensive rhetoric in his polemical treatises serves the purpose of staging a scandal, which is no longer of the theological but of the rhetorical sort and whose implications are social and political. See Antónia Szabari, “Th e Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation,” in Political Th eologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham Univer- sity Press, 2006), 122– 136. 25. A comparison with the German Reformation is helpful here. Mark U. Ed- wards, in his Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, discusses the fear of Cath- olic theologians and priests of “scandal” (the deterioration of traditional piety) and of empowering laymen and laywomen by discussing theology with them (and thereby ultimately undermining their own position of authority). According to Edwards, this fear was one of the decisive factors preventing Catholic theologians in Germany (with the notable exception of those in the service of the Duke of Saxony) from responding to Luther in vernacular books. 26. Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, 10. 27. François I persecutes heresy when it leads to sedition. Henri II adopts a more traditional politics where heresy is persecuted and Catholicism is defended. After Henri II’s death in 1559, when the monarchy undertakes a politics of recon- ciliation, all forms of libelles diff amatoires are forbidden. Another genre, the libelles d’état, which are published by Catholics and Protestants alike to challenge the monarchy, are simply touched upon in this book, as that would require a separate analysis of the political theories that lie behind them. Noteworthy are, on the Protestant side, François Hotman’s Tigre (1560), the works of Simon Goulart, and the Reveille-matin des françoys, and, on the Catholic side, François de Rosière’s Stemmata Lotharingiae (1580) and the massive campaign of placards and libelles launched to dispute Henri de Navarre’s legitimacy to the crown. 28. Soman, “Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu,” 452. 29. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958) is a belated summary of the avid interest of the Annales school in print culture. Th is book studies the material, aesthetic, and economic culture of 226 notes to introduction the production and dissemination of the book, along with the techniques of cop- ing with information. In short, it introduces an essentially “modern” phenom- enon destined to expand the community of those involved in the consumption of printed materials. 30. I borrow the term “print culture” from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Th e Print- ing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). My use of the terms “reading culture” and “reading communities” is in- debted to Roger Chartier’s studies of ways of reading in the early modern period. In the context of the Reformation, historical studies on print culture are numer- ous. I will make reference to them as appropriate. 31. On the fl uidity that characterizes the practices of reading, see Roger Char- tier’s essay “Du livre au lire,” in Pratiques de la lecture, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Payot, 1985), 81–117. Chartier takes issue with the rigid distinction between the social elite seen as the sole readers of erudite books and the simple folk, who are usually described as the consumers of the printed materials peddled on the street (livres de colportage). 32. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). 33. Claude-Gilbert Dubois, L’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Presses Uni- versitaires de France, 1985), 60– 63. 34. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high defi nition.’ High defi nition is the state of being well fi lled with data.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Th e Extensions of Man (1964; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22. In the case of polemical print, this single sense is sight, and in- deed these works are fi lled with “data” concerning the other, the world, theology, current aff airs, and erudite culture. 35. Th e most superb example of such a world appears in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s portrayal in Les tragiques of France during the wars of religion from the detached, isolated perspective of a Huguenot after the Edict of Nantes. François Rigolot has called this book “quixotic” as it describes a world (based in the glories of resistance and persecution of the previous generation, of the “fathers”) that no longer exists as a result of the politics led by the monarchy to assimilate Huguenots. I have decided not to discuss this book as it has been the object of many scholarly inves- tigations lately, but for the purposes of this study, it is noteworthy that d’Aubigné fi nds himself in a curious position with respect to his readers. As his book trans- mits an ethos with which extremely few in France identify, the poet (who gives himself the name “Goat of the Desert”) writes for a virtually nonexistent public, or for one in the past. Rigolot is cited in Frank Lestringant, “La résistance hugue- not à l’Édit de Nantes: Le cas d’Agrippa d’Aubigné,” in L’Édit de Nantes revisité, ed. Lucienne Hubler and others (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 37. 36. Accordingly, Soman notes, “it was the highest placed author who was ca- pable of giving the greatest off ense, but who was at the same time the least vulner- able to the sanctions of censorship.” See “Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu,” 456. notes to chapter 1 227

Chapter 1 1. On medieval formulas of curses and anathemas in excommunications per- formed within the Catholic Church, see Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 33– 44. 2. A detailed account of his life and battles can be found in the French histo- rian Pierre Caron’s study Noël Béda, which shows Béda’s relentless campaign not only against humanists and reformers but also against the reform-minded theo- logians of the Sorbonne. Originally written in 1898 as a doctoral thesis at the École des chartes, Caron’s study (as Arnaud Laimé points out in his introduction) is anchored in a movement of modern historiography that championed scientifi c methods such as extensive archival research and promoted a secularist (and some- times anti-clerical) view of the past in accordance with the ideology of the Th ird Republic. Caron’s study predates the law of 1905 on the separation of church and state by only a few years. See Arnaud Laimé, introduction to Noël Béda. Précédé de “Le Diabolique Docteur et les saints érudits” by Pierre Caron (Paris: Belles Let- tres, 2005), 9–61. Cf. Michel de Certeau’s somewhat more generous evaluation of Béda’s conservativism, which points to its roots in the movement of the “poor clerks” of Montaigu, in his essay “La réforme dans le catholicisme en France au XVIe siècle,” Le lieu de l’autre. Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 135– 136. 3. Declaratio Th eologiae Facultatis Parisiensis super doctrina Lutherana actenus per eam revista in Charles du Plessis d’Argentré, ed., Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus (Paris: Coffi n, 1728), 1: 365b. On the authorship of Béda, see the argu- ments of M.-H. Vicaire, “Les albigeois ancêtres des protestants. Assimilations catholiques,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979): 28. 4. Both of them are condemned by Paul (1 Tim. 1:20 and 2 Tim. 2:17). 5. I am following the suggestion made by the art historian Jean Wirth in Lu- ther. Étude d’histoire religieuse (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 34. 6. Francis M. Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 48. 7. On the techniques of spatialization used in medieval manuscript books and in print in scholastic and humanist works, see Walter J. Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Th is classic study traces Ramism and its fondness for charts and spatial tools for learning and argumentation back to the manuscript and, later, print cultures of scholasticism and to authors such as Peter of Spain, Rudolph Agricola, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. 8. Higman notes that, while before 1540 the Sorbonne only censored a hand- ful of books, at times of confl ict—for example, during the trials of Berquin, the quarrel with the reformers of Meaux, the aff aire of the placards in 1534, and the publication of the “scandalous” Cymbalum mundi in 1538—after 1540, it made a “systematic attempt to record the full range of heretical literature in France.” Th is attempt, Higman also notes, was hardly ever carried out fully in practice. Th e 228 notes to chapter 1

fi rst campaign of 1540, for example, aimed at schoolbooks in Latin by Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, and Otto Brunfels. Each new index published subsequently included more and more vernacular books such as Lefèvre’s French translation of the New Testament, Calvin’s French Institutes, Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargan- tua, and books printed in Neuchâtel and Geneva. See Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne, 47– 68. 9. In Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity During the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), Luc Racaut argues that polemical books that resort to insulting, negative stereotypes to attack the reli- gious adversary are more eff ective in mobilizing social classes than eschatological literature, a prevalent genre in the period preceding and during the civil wars (1562–1598). Historian Denis Crouzet, who has analyzed this period, describes the eff ect of eschatological literature, warnings about the end of the world and imminent divine punishment, as a deep anguish, which he holds responsible for fuelling violence in sixteenth-century French society. For Crouzet, Calvinism provided a form of désangoissement. See Guerriers de Dieu. Les violences au temps des troubles de religion (1990; repr., Paris: Les Classiques du Champ Vallon, 2005). Indeed, Calvin exploited the power of eschatological language to provoke anxiety, if only to off er remedy for it; notably, Calvin used the image of the “stumbling block” to turn deviance into the frightening “evidence” of divine punishment in Des scandales, but even Calvin’s eschatological citation of the biblical “stumbling block” image is couched in a language of satire and caricature to which I turn in Chapter 3. Th e part of Racaut’s argument that concerns me most underscores the power of stereotypical images, culled from the long tradition of polemical writings in the Catholic Church, an early modern repertoire of hate speech, which, he argues, was singularly successful in fostering hatred toward those converted to the ideas of the Reformation. 10. Th is is how Higman describes the shift from medieval pious books (whose aim was to sustain faith in the reader) to Catholic books published after the emer- gence of the Reformation, which strove to make people understand faith and in- creasingly also to attack the religious other. See Francis M. Higman, “Premières réponses catholiques aux écrits de la Réforme en France, 1525–c.1540,” Travaux d’Histoire et de Renaissance 326 (1998): 497– 514. 11. Larissa Taylor provides an excellent analysis of the rhetoric of late-medieval and sixteenth-century preachers in France, including of their engagement against “Lutheran” heresy, in Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reforma- tion France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 12. Th e book was fi rst printed by Philip Le Noir in Paris in 1524. I have consulted the nineteenth-century reprint edition Le Blazon des hérétiques, ed. Charles-Claude-François Hérisson (Paris: Téchener, 1832). My references in this chapter are to Oeuvres complètes de Gringore, ed. Charles d’Héricault and Antoine de Montaiglon (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), 1: 295– 336. notes to chapter 1 229

13. Employed at the court of two French monarchs, Louis XII and François I, Gringore was a propagandist involved in the organization of offi cial ceremonies and entries for the royal court. On these pageants and ceremonies designed by Gringore, see Anne-Marie Lecoq, François I imaginaire. Symbolique et politique à l’aube de la Renaissance française (Paris: Macula, 1987), 172, 266, 377– 391. 14. Pierre Gringore, Le jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, ed. Alan Hind- ley (Paris: Champion, 2000), 92. 15. Emilie Picot, “La sottie en France,” Romania 7 (1878): 236– 326. 16. Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 119. 17. François Cornilliat, Or ne mens: Couleurs de l’éloge et du blâme chez les “grands rhétoriqueurs” (Paris: Champion, 1994), 286. 18. D’Héricault and Montaiglon, Oeuvres complètes de Gringore, 1: 296. 19. Th is description is by Hérisson, introduction to Le Blazon des hérétiques, 34. 20. Claude de Seyssel, La monarchie de France et deux autres fragments poli- tiques, ed. Jacques Poujol (Paris: Librairie d’Argences, 1961), 121. 21. G. R. Evans, Brief History of Heresy (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 58. 22. Cornilliat, Or ne mens, 607. 23. On the debate of the “three Maries,” see Mann, Érasme et les débuts de la réforme française (1517– 1536) (Paris: Champion, 1934). 24. D’Héricault and Montaiglon, Oeuvres complètes de Gringore, 1: 332. 25. Gringore the rhetoriqueur poet was not alone in taking it upon himself to fashion an “artifi cial unity” of Christianity when he saw it threatened by the rise of Lutheran doctrines. As Burcht Pranger shows, “preserving” the biblical text re- quires an “artifi ce” produced through a “violent” practice of reading that relies on memorizing, an education in liberal arts, and a process of internalization of the word in medieval monastic reading culture. Pranger’s analyses concern the pains- taking practice of reading that is alone capable of bringing the word into har- mony with itself. Th is “violent” reading takes place in time, in the time that fi lls the space inside the walls of the monastery, the heavy, slow time of otium, time devoted to literary occupation. Burcht Pranger, Th e Artifi ciality of Christianity: Es- says on the Poetics of Monasticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 26. D’Héricault and Montaiglon, Oeuvres complètes de Gringore, 1: 329. 27. It is to be noted here that later Protestant satirists will develop striking images of gluttony, from excessive eating to anthropophagy and theophagy, to describe their Catholic adversaries. 28. Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne, 48. 29. On this eff ect of the medium of print, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Lit- eracy: Th e Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 79. Although in Germany Catholic pamphleteers condemned Luther for publishing his views in the vernacular and thereby causing “scandal” among the lay population, they too had to resort to the same tools to fi ght him, quite against their own conscience. 230 notes to chapter 1

See Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1994). 30. Th ese single sheets attacking the Catholic Mass were posted twice in French cities, in October 1534 and January 1535. I will discuss the placard as a po- lemical tool in greater detail in Chapter 3. 31. Th e fi rst edition of Contre les tenebrions was published by Jean Petit in Paris, in 1534. Th e second “amplifi ed” edition, which I cite in this chapter (held today in the library of the Musée de l’histoire du protestantisme, Paris), bears no date, so it can only be conjectured that it responds to the second posting of the placards in January 1535. On the fi rst edition of Hangest’s libelle, see Higman, “‘Il seroit trop plus decent responder en Latin’: Les controversistes catholiques du XVIe siècle face aux écrits réformés,” in Lire et découvrir. La circulation des idées au temps de la Réforme, ed. Francis Higman, preface Jean-François Gilmont, Tra- veaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 326 (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 515– 530. 32. Hangest, Contre les tenebrions, fol. iir. 33. Ibid., fol. iiiv. 34. Ibid., fol. v recto. 35. See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, preface by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 80. 36. James K. Farge, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Th eology, 1500– 1536 (Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 234. 37. Rabelais’s Pantagruel punishes the student from Limoges for “fl aying the Latin language” (escorche le latin) by making him “fl ay the fox” (vomit). See Ra- belais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 234. Para- phrasing the Latin passages from scripture into French rather than translating them probably presented a solution to the double bind of having to respect the ban on vernacular translations of the Bible issued by the Sorbonne in 1525 and also having to address an audience who could not read Latin. 38. Racaut argues that in France, unlike in Germany, Catholic authors matched Protestant ones in output. Hatred in Print, 21. 39. Related is the recurrent claim in the works of Catholic polemicists like Artus Desiré, Antoine de Mouchy, Gentian Hervet, Jean de la Vacquerie, Antoine du Val, Jean Gay, and Robert Céneau that Calvinists acted on their plaisir, their arbitrary will or desire, instead of obeying the laws of the church and the mon- archy. Th eir associations of the Reformation with a topsy-turvy world of libido rather than with reason and obeisance harbored a broad set of accusations from immorality to political rebellion. See Wylie Sypher’s article “‘Faisant ce qu’il leur vient a plaisir’: Th e Image of Protestantism in French Catholic Polemic on the Eve of Religious Wars,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1980): 59– 84. 40. Hangest, Contre les tenebrions, fol. v verso. 41. Antoine de Mouchy, Response à quelque Apologie que les heretiques ces jours passes ont mis en avant sous ce titre: Apologie ou deff ence de bons Chrestiens contre les ennemis de l’Eglise Catholique . . . (Paris, Claude Frémy, 1558), A2r. Cited in Fran- cis M. Higman, “‘Il seroit trop plus decent responder en Latin,’” 515– 530. notes to chapter 1 231

42. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental (Paris: Seuil: 2001), 196– 197. 43. Artus Desiré, Les Batailles et victoires du Chevalier Celeste, contre le Cheva- lier Terrestre, l’un tirant à la maison de Dieu, & l’autre à la maison du Prince du monde chef de l’Eglise maligne (Paris: Jean Ruelle, 1564), 23v. 44. See Montaigne, “Des prières,” Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 307. 45. Th is argument for broadening the notion of “readership” to include those who had access to reading although they could not write is summarized by Roger Chartier in his article “Du livre au lire” in Pratiques de la lecture, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Payot, 1985), 84– 87. His argument is based on data from seven- teenth-century England, where boys were sent to grammar school at the age of seven, before they had learned to read at home. Th e applicability of these data to sixteenth-century France remains a question, but similarities arguably existed. Chartier’s example for a female reader is Molière’s Agnès in L’École des femmes, who is given a book on the duties of wives by her wooer Arnolphe. In this play, women’s ability to write endangers men’s ability to control them (Arnolphe imag- ines that she may write to her lover, which in fact she does), but their ability to read does not. 46. Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that while Protestantism indeed in- creased female literacy by giving women access to the scriptures, it also subor- dinated women to the masculine authorities of the divine Father, the pastor, and the husband or other male members of the patriarchal family. Circles of women reading religious books and discussing theology were instead rooted in pious congregations that existed in the Middle Ages and continued to exist during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation within Catholicism, although they were constantly exposed to criticism by Catholic authorities. See her essay “City Women and Religious Change,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1965; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 65– 98. 47. Catholicism, especially in its Tridentine version, eventually found ways to extend practices of piety to women, although not in the branch of theology. Jesuit preaching was highly attended by urban men and women alike, and the peniten- tial orders that sprang up during the reign of Henri III involved women as well as men. 48. In For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Refor- mation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), Robert Scribner discusses the use of images in Lutheran polemical works in Germany. 49. Th e title of this re-edition is adapted to the historical moment of printing: La cronique des lutheriens & outre-cuidance d’iceux, de-puis Simon Magus, iusques à Caluin & ses complices & fauteurs Huguenotz, ennemis de la foy diuine & humaine (“Th e Chronicle of the Lutherans and of Th eir Arrogance from Simon Magnus to Calvin and His Huguenot Accomplices, Enemies of Both Holy and Human Faith”). 50. It is probable that at least two other pirated editions of the Blazon were 232 notes to chapter 2 printed. Héricault and Montaiglon report two such editions: one from 1573 (Paris: Mesnier) and another from 1585 (Paris: Christian Royer). Th ey admit that they have not seen them, nor have I been able to verify this report. 51. Héricault and Montaiglon, Oeuvres complètes de Gringore, 1: 338. I will dis- cuss Ronsard’s “Hydra” poems in Chapter 5. 52. Th e social hostility of generally poorer Catholics toward generally wealthier Protestants who often came from the groups of skilled craftsmen and merchants is expressed in many Catholic poems. Philippe Joutard, Janine Estèbe, Elisabeth Labrousse, and Jean Lecuir, eds., La Saint Barthélemy ou résonnances d’un massacre (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1976), 49.

Chapter 2 1. Victoria Kahn, “Stultitia and Diatribe: Erasmus’s Praise of Prudence,” Ger- man Quarterly 55: 3 (May 1982): 349–369. Kahn’s point of entry into Erasmus’s text is Luther’s criticism that in the Encomium Erasmus expresses views that are very similar to his. Luther, who presents himself as a “Stoic assertor” in the debate, had no interest in staying on a “skeptical suspension bridge.” Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle shows that Luther adopts the persona of the “Stoic assertor” and Erasmus that of the “Skeptic doubter” in their debate with each other in her Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 2. Th e Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969– 2006), 29: 326. 3. Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity During the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). 4. Analyzing the correspondences between Erasmus and Béda and Erasmus and Berquin, Mann presents a nuanced picture of Berquin’s activity as translator of Erasmus. In a letter penned in prison after his second trial, Berquin, apprehen- sive of the faculty’s desire to burn him along with Erasmus’s books, claims that the translations in circulation have been falsifi ed by his enemies and declares that he is ready to present his manuscripts as proofs of his fi delity to the originals. Mann’s analysis of three translations of Erasmus attributed to Berquin confi rm the presence of interpolations of the translator’s own words, of Farel, and of Lu- ther in them. Berquin’s method is both honest and deceptive: it consists in mark- ing the additions in the margin but integrating them completely into the fl ow of Erasmus’s text. See Margaret Mann, Érasme et les débuts de la réforme française (1517– 1536) (Paris: Champion: 1934), 118– 140. 5. Th e copy from the Biblitohèque royale de Belgique reproduced in Telle’s edition is not the unique extant copy of the Complainte as Telle assumes. I con- sulted a copy at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. 6. On the symbolic prominence of the marginal, see Stallybrass and White, notes to chapter 2 233

Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 20. 7. On the translation, see Emile Telle’s introduction to the facsimile edition of the Complainte de la Paix (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 53– 62. 8. Only in the early 1540s do the authorities catch up in the censorship of books without titles and books printed outside of the recognized boutiques d’imprimerie; Catholic pamphleteers often implore their readers, already as early as in the 1520s, to reject anonymous books without looking at them, for they no doubt contain nothing but “harmful teachings.” See Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne (Ge- neva: Droz, 1979), 50– 52; Higman, ed., Lire et découvrir. La circulation des idées au temps de la Réforme, pref. Jean-François Gilmont (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 497– 498. 9. Claude Longeon in his critical edition dates the Farce between 1526 and 1528. My citations are drawn from his edition, La Farce des Th éologastres, ed., intr. Claude Longeon (Geneva: Droz, 1989). 10. Melanchthon, Adversus furiosum Parisiensium theologastrorum decretum (1521). Berquin also wrote a Latin treatise with the title Apologia adversus calumnia- tores Lutheri, alias Speculum theologastrorum (1523). No extant copies of this book survive (no doubt because many copies were confi scated and burnt), and we know about its existence solely from the record of condemnation by the Sorbonne. 11. Jeff Persels interprets this diagnosis as an attack on the Eucharist (Faith has eaten something foul). But, although several decades later French Protestants use their dogmatic disagreements about the Eucharist to mark their diff erence, in these early years of the Reformation, the author of the Farce describes diff erence according to the opposition between scripture and tradition. See Jeff Persels, “Sor- bonnic Trots: Staging the Intestinal Distress of the Roman Catholic Church in French Reform Th eater,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 1089– 1111. 12. Nothing is more revealing about this essential diff erence between Eras- mus’s view of scripture and Luther’s than their debate over free will. In De libero arbitrio Erasmus declares that scripture is ambiguous at least on the surface, and requires the interpretation of a learned, rhetorically trained reader. In De servo arbitrio, Luther retorts that scripture is clear enough that even children can un- derstand it. 13. See “Christianisme et ‘modernité’ dans l’historiographie contemporaine” in de Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre. Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 23– 31. 14. In the Determinatio, Béda indeed remarks that he is judging Luther by the titles of his books. In this period in which polemical treatises were typically for or against orthodox dogma, titles (unless they were meant to conceal) did reveal much about the author’s point of view. When it came to polemical books, it did not take more than a brief look to see that they were unorthodox, and this was where the censor’s dealing with the book as such ended. See Charles du Plessis d’Argentré, Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus (Paris: Coffi n, 1728), 1: 365b. 15. It is chapter 16 in the fi rst edition published by Claude Nourry in Lyon, 234 notes to chapter 2 whose publication date is uncertain because the sole extant copy is without a title page. Rabelais made many additions to his book in the subsequent editions. My references are to Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Galli- mard, 1994). My references to ch. 16 can be found on pages 48–49 in this edition. On the dating, see ibid., 1056. 16. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 45. 17. Ibid., 48. I have slightly modifi ed Michael A. Screech’s translation of Rabe- lais from his Gargantua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 2006), 257. 18. Th e list of curses as it appears in the original edition is the following: Les plagues Dieu! Je renye Dieu! Frandienne! Vez tu ben! [Parisian pronunciation], La mer de! Po cab de bious! [Gascon], Das dich Gots leyden schend! [German], Pote de Christo! Ventre sainct Quenet! Vertus guoy! Par sainct Fiacre de Brye! Sainct Tregnant! Je foys veu à sainct Th ibault! Pasques Dieu! Le bon jour Dieu! Le diable memport! Foy de gentilhomme! Par sainct Andouille! Par sainct Guodegrin qui feut martyrizé de pommes cuyttes! Par sainct Foutin lapostre! Par sainct Vit! Par saincte Mamye, nous sommes baignés par rys! Rabelais softened or completely erased many of them in the subsequent editions. In 1542, he adds the emphatic phrase “some in anger, oth- ers for laughter’s sake” (les ungs en colere, les autres par rys). Ibid. 48–49; 1106–1107. I have slightly modifi ed Screech’s translation. See Gargantua and Pantagruel, 258. 19. Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 106. 20. Th e fi rst public “evangelical” sermon was preached by Gérard Roussel in the Louvre during Lent of 1533. Roussel was the chaplain of the king’s sister Mar- guerite and thus could be assured of her support and also the king’s. Th e Sor- bonne, pursuing its politics against “heretics,” sought to indict him and, in order to contravene the expected discharge, stirred up the population against the king while the Parliament was examining Roussel’s case. Th e Sorbonne’s accusation against the king was “leniency toward heretics.” Th e Sorbonne engaged preachers, posted placards, and staged comic plays. Some eyewitnesses even spotted the syn- dic Noël Béda on a mule inciting the preachers and the agitated crowd. Th e king responded by banishing Béda and two other theologians from Paris, and the Sor- bonne retorted with more popular riots. For more details about these events, see Pierre Caron, “Le Diabolique Docteur et les saints érudits,” in Noël Béda, ed. Ar- naud Laimé (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2005), 168. 21. Olivier Christin analyzes blasphemy and the relatively mild punishment meted out for committing it in the sixteenth century in “Le statut ambigu du blasphème au XVIe siècle,” Ethnologie française 22 (1992– 1993): 337– 343. See also Alain Cabantous, Histoire du blasphème en Occident. XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Al- bin Michel, 1998). Cabantous argues that beginning in the late sixteenth century, blasphemy was systematically transformed into a serious failing in the institutions of the church, the schools, the military, and the navy. Rabelais’s fi ction projects an entirely diff erent potential social use of this speech act. 22. Gérard Defaux suggests that Rabelais refers to these events in a pun, in which the two bells (cloches) of Notre Dame that Gargantua takes with him in notes to chapter 2 235 order to hang them on his mare’s neck stand for Béda, who was lame and limped (clocher in French). He fi nds the same pun in the next chapter in Janotus de Brag- mardo’s advice to his colleagues at the Sorbonne, “don’t limp before the lame” (ne clochez pas devant les boyteux), that is, do not try to outdo Béda in intolerance. “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre Dame,” Études Rabelaisiennes 9 (1971): 1– 28. 23. Claude de Seyssel, La monarchie de France et deux autres fragments poli- tiques, ed. Jacques Poujol (Paris: Librairie d’Argences, 1961), 116. 24. French kings were endowed with spiritual powers, among them the power of curing scrofula (escrouelles) or “the king’s evil” (tubercular infl ammation of the lymph glands). Ibid. 25. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 49. 26. Chantal Liaroutzos shows that by writing a legendary history of Paris, Corrozet’s book is fully in line with the importance given to the capital in an emerging national consciousness and in the centralization of power undertaken by François I. Le pays et la mémoire: Pratiques et représentation de l’espace français chez Gilles Corrozet et Charles Estienne (Paris: Champion, 1998), 23– 28. 27. Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 36– 38; Liaroutzos, Le pays et la mémoire, 62. 28. Cited by Liaroutzos, Le pays et la mémoire, 62– 63. 29. Oeuvres de Rabelais, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris: Champion, 1912), 1: 158–159; M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Islowski (Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press, 1984), 187– 195; and, for an interpretation of the topographic signifi cance of this scene, see Tom Conley, Th e Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 155. 30. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 48; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 258. 31. Sonnet 3, Les Antiquites de Rome, in Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquités de Rome et les regrets (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Librairie Minod, 1960), 4. 32. Leo Spitzer was the fi rst one to introduce the stylistic term “exaggeration” into Rabelais studies. He insists that an “exaggerated” and “grotesque” overstate- ment of fact distinguishes Rabelais’s style from “realist satire,” which attacks con- crete entities. Somewhat diff erently, I argue that exaggeration links Rabelais’s text to the political realm, not through reference, but in a performance of excess that pushes readers either to embrace its rhetorical and moral claims or to reject them. See “Le prétendu réalisme de Rabelais,” Modern Philology 37: 2 (November 1939): 139–150. 33. Glauser points to the importance of quantity (“number”) in the Rabelai- sian text in general. He points to a correlation between the large crowd and the enormous giant, and the excess continues in Gargantua’s oversized virile member, the overabundance of urine, the unbridled speech of the crowd, and the dire con- sequences of the “pissfl ood.” All this excess is embedded in the rhetorical and po- etic procedures of the text. See Alfred Glauser, Fonctions du nombre chez Rabelais (Paris: Nizet, 1982), 10. 34. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 161– 162. 236 notes to chapter 2

35. Walter Stephens, Giants in Th ose Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Na- tionalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 36. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 215. 37. Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, 10. 38. I evoke here the title of Judith Butler’s book on verbal violence in contem- porary American culture and public life, which, albeit in a very diff erent histori- cal and political context, investigates under what circumstances passionate speech can be politically not only harmless but also salutary. See Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 39. Benveniste remarks that “blasphemy” is a pure “emotive discharge” in which the social, pragmatic function of language is bracketed and language merely performs the transgression of a “taboo.” Moreover, “it does not transmit any message, does not open up any dialogue, does not provoke any response, [for] the presence of an interlocutor is not even necessary.” Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 2: 255–256. On the “burlesque” eff ect of using euphemisms in cursing, see ibid., 2: 257. 40. One, somewhat later example of these medical treatises is Laurent Jou- bert’s Traité du ris (1579). Joubert takes inventory of the distorting eff ects of laugh- ter: it wrinkles the face, and more: “in laughter the face is moving, the mouth widens, the eyes sparkle and tear, the cheeks redden, the breast heaves, the voice becomes interrupted; and when it goes on for a long time, the veins in the throat become enlarged, the arms shake, and the legs dance about, the belly pulls in and feels considerable pain; we cough, perspire, piss, and besmirch ourselves by dint of laughing, and sometimes we even faint away because of it.” See Laurent Joubert, Le Traité du ris (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973); translated into English as Trea- tise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 28. 41. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (1939; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6.3.7– 8. 42. Th e original publication date of Gargantua is debated because the only extant copy is missing its title page. Scholars place it in 1534, but it is not clear if it was published before or after the fi rst aff air of the placards (Oct. 17, 1534). Mi- chael Screech underscores that the second printing of the novel occurred after the second aff air of the placards (January 13–14, 1535), whose repercussions were far graver (and entailed, among other things, the ban on printing). Screech interprets the “scandal” as a gesture of encouragement to the persecuted evangelicals, and suggests that Gargantua was most likely fi rst written in the aftermath of the fi rst aff air of the placards. See Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1979), 201– 206. 43. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 3. 44. It is in this sense that Rabelais uses the word. For example, in the Tiers livre, the narrator affi rms that Pantagruel “was not scandalized” after his friend Panurge squandered the entire revenue of Salmigoundin that he had received from Pantagruel as a gift. notes to chapter 3 237

45. Medical theories of laughter presented by Rabelais’s contemporaries under- score the therapeutic function of laughter. Fracastor, a medical professor whom Rabelais could have heard in Montpellier, taught that pleasure moderates the ef- fect of anger in those who have too much bile and are irascible. See Roland An- tonioli, “Rabelais et la médicine,” Études Rabelaisiennes 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 356–357. Th is medical theory may be evoked in the scene. Of course, Rabelais did not write medical treatises on laughter, but rather fi ctions about the laughing body to refl ect on political scenarios. 46. On the “graphic unconscious,” see Tom Conley, Th e Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Chapter 3 1. See Donald R. Kelley, Th e Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15. 2. Th e fi rst posting of the Zwinglian placards against the Mass occurred in the night between October 17 and October 18, 1534. Th e second posting took place on January 13 of the following year, and provoked violent retributions and other measures from the crown, including the ban on printing, executions, and expia- tory processions. 3. See Dale K. Van Kley, Th e Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 23. 4. Th e sole extant copy has been reconstituted from fragments found in the binding of a sixteenth-century book. Robert Hari notes that the binding appears to have been made by the same Pierre de Vingle who was also the printer of the placards. See Gabrielle Berthoud and others, eds., Aspects de la propaganda reli- gieuse (Geneva: Droz, 1957), 114. Th e reconstructed copy is exhibited at the Mu- sée international de la Réforme in Geneva. Th e Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) owns a photograph of a copy that is no longer extant. 5. In Rabelais’s famous conclusion to Pantagruel, this participle inaugurates a series of other participles containing the syllable cul (“arse”) that designates the doctors of the Sorbonne who condemned “errors” and “heresies” in lengthy “ar- ticles” as “arse-wiggling slanderers.” Antoine Marcourt’s Articles veritables trans- forms this form of argumentation and condemnation into an iconoclastic tool against Catholicism. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gal- limard, 1994), 337. 6. Th e historian Lucien Febvre notes the importance of the blanks. “La Messe et les placards,” in Au coeur religieux du XVIe siècle (1957; repr., Paris: EHESS, 1983), 218. 7. Antoine Fromment, reformer and the author of a history of the Swiss Ref- ormation, observes the resemblance between placards and pasquinades (poems attacking particular persons that were posted upon a public statue in Rome that 238 notes to chapter 3 was popularly called Pasquino or Pasquillo). See Antoine Fromment, Les Actes et gestes merveillevx de la Cité de Genève, ed. Gustave Revilliod (1550; repr., Geneva: Guillaume Fick, 1854), 247. 8. Spitzer, “Le prétendu réalisme de Rabelais,” Modern Philology 37: 2 (No- vember 1939): 143– 144. 9. Th e printing press in Neuchâtel was founded in 1533 by Guillaume Farel, a “radical” from Meaux, and it operated until 1536. 10. Th e suggestion that Pierre de Vingle hides behind this name was made by the historian of the Swiss Reformation Eugène Droz; see “Pierre de Vingle, L’imprimeur de Farel,” in Aspects de la propaganda religieuse, 50– 52. 11. Gabrielle Berthoud, “Livres pseudo-catholiques de contenu protestant,” in Aspects de la propaganda religieuse, 143– 154. 12. Th e book appeared under a fi ctional printer’s name (“Pierre de Vignolle in the street of the Sorbonne”) and allegedly “with privilege.” 13. Among those disoriented by the book was the king, François I, who re- called Béda and his colleagues from their exile and, after they were proven not to have authored the book, enjoined them to preach “discreetly” in Paris against the “heresies” printed in the book. Béda was exiled again the next year and ended his life in exile. It is not surprising that François I, who by this time saw his power challenged both by conservative Catholic theologians and by reformers, ordered the destruction of this “heretical and scandalous” libelle. See Pierre Caron, Noël Béda. Précédé de “Le Diabolique Docteur et les saints érudits,” intr. Arnaud Laimé (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2005), 172, 175. 14. Joseph Leo Koerner, Th e Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 119. 15. Joseph Koerner notes that the eff ect of symmetry in the Passional is such that the pope’s church on the right side appears to usurp the biblical spaces on the left side, making the villainy of the former self-evident. Ibid., 120. 16. Ibid. 17. Max Weber, Th e Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1996), 104– 105. 18. Ibid., 104, 115. 19. Th e fi rst English translation that was prepared shortly after the fi rst edi- tion translates the title of the fi rst edition word by word: Th e boke of marchauntes, right necessarye unto all folkes. Newly made by the lorde Pantople right expert in suche busynesse nere neyghbour unto the lorde Pantagrule ([London]: [Th omas Godfroye], [1534]). 20. Two editions (1544 and 1547) show Marcourt’s name. See Gabrielle Ber- thoud, “Le Livre des marchans d’Antoine Marcourt et Rabelais,” in François Ra- belais. Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centennaire de sa mort. 1553– 1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953), 135. 21. For this reason, the Livre des marchans has been dismissed as an “imita- tion” of Rabelais by Berthoud, “Le Livre des marchans d’Antoine Marcourt et Ra- notes to chapter 3 239 belais,” in Aspects de la propaganda religieuse, 87. Cf. François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 16. 22. [Antoine Marcourt], Le livre des marchans ([Neuchâtel]: [Pierre de Vingle], 1534), 1. 23. Ibid. 24. Alfred Glauser shows that Rabelais presents his Pantagruel as a book to be sold at the fair, as an article of trade, and he too presents an argument about the profi t the reader is to expect from it. See Fonctions du nombre chez Rabelais (Paris: Nizet, 1982). 25. [Marcourt], Le livre des marchans, [1534], 2. 26. Ibid., 4. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Robert B. Ekelund and others, eds., Th e Marketplace of Christianity (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 29. Fol. A ijr–v, cited in William Kemp, “L’épigraph Lisez et puis jugez: Le libre examen dans la Réforme française avant 1540,” in Le livre évangélique avant Cal- vin / Th e French Evangelical Book Before Calvin: Original Analyses, Newly Edited Texts, Bibliographic Catalogues, ed. Jean-François Gilmont and William Kemp (Turnhout: Brepols; Brussels: Musée de la Maison d’Erasme, 2004), 243–273. Kemp argues that free judgment was a powerful ideological tool that led most readers who were willing to consider the arguments of a reformed booklet or plac- ard also eventually to embrace them. 30. [Marcourt], Le livre des marchans, [1534], 6. 31. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 27. 32. Ibid., 30. 33. Natalie Zemon Davis has pointed to the ambivalence with which both Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Lyon (the hometown of Pierre de Vingle) viewed trade. Fairs in particular were feared as sites of disorder and un- controllable human appetite during which the social body became open, bound- aries were breached, and foreigners and foreign goods fl ooded into the city. See “Th e Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past and Present 90 (1981): 45. 34. In another context, reading Columbus’s letters about the discovery of the Americas, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the word “marvelous” and the idea of the “marvel,” a stock element of medieval and early modern travel narratives, sim- ilarly mediates between a mercantile realm (commodifying the natives as slaves) and a spiritual one (their conversion). See Marvelous Possessions: Th e Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 52– 85. 35. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 9. 36. Marcourt, Le livre des marchans, [1541]: A7v. 240 notes to chapter 3

37. Ibid., C4v. 38. Ibid., D3v. 39. Th e pointing fi nger symbol did not have a standardized name in the early modern period. I borrow this term from William H. Sherman’s Used Books: Mark- ing Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 40. Calvin, Oeuvres choisies, ed. Olivier Millet (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 218. 41. Ibid., 191–192. 42. Max Horkheimer and Th eodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42– 43. 43. Th éodore de Bèze, preface to Jean Calvin, Recueil des opuscules (Geneva: B. Pinereul, 1566), fol. IIv. 44. Modern readers have also remarked upon Calvin’s exceptional talent for vituperating his adversaries. In his landmark analysis of Calvin’s polemical style, Francis Higman comes to the conclusion that “[i]t is in Calvin’s use of pejora- tive language that most fl exibility and variety are found: neologisms are frequent, and colour by means of concrete expressions and lively verbs of action is added.” Francis M. Higman, Th e Style of John Calvin in His Polemical Treatises (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 81. 45. Th e epistle is dated X Calendas septembres, that is, September 15, which cor- responds to August 23 [1535] in the reformed calendar. 46. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 1: 27– 28. 47. In the language of Calvinism, the word doctrine signifi es divine teaching as it can be found in scripture. “If true religion is to beam upon us, our principle must be, that it is necessary to begin with heavenly teaching, and that it is impos- sible for any man to obtain even the minutest portion [un petit goust] of right and sound doctrine without being the disciple of Scripture.” To have a “little taste” of religion thus required that one study diligently and in an organized fashion the scriptures. Ibid., 1: 66. For the French, see Jean-Daniel Benoit, ed., Institutes de la religion chrestienne: Édition critique avec introduction, notes et variantes (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 1: 89. 48. For an analysis of the epistle’s role in Calvin’s self-presentation as a theo- logian and an advocate, for his claim about the originality of his theology, see Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Étude de rhétorique réformée (Geneva: Slatkine, 1992), 464– 477. 49. Rudolph Altrocchi, “Th e Calumny of Apelles in the Literature of the Quattrocento,” PMLA 36: 3 (1921): 454– 491. 50. Des. Erasmi Rotterdami in Novum Testamentum . . . Annotationes (Ba- sel: [Johannes Froben], 1519). Th is copy partially “colored” by a reader is at the Houghton Library at Harvard University in the Philip Hofer collection. 51. On this “modern desire for fame,” see Jacob Burckhardt, Th e Civilization of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press; New York: Phaidon Press, 1950), 87– 93. notes to chapter 3 241

52. Burckhardt argues that the “corrective” for a “highly developed indi- viduality” was to be found in wit and ridicule. He sees “symbolical insult” and “symbolical outrage” as constitutive of the society of early modern Italy and Re- naissance satire, which distinguished itself from medieval satire by losing its mor- alizing, didactic tone. Detraction, pasquinades, and philosophical satire take on proto-Enlightenment qualities in Burckhardt’s description. “In the course of time calumny became universal, and the strictest virtue was most certain of all to chal- lenge the attacks of malice.” Ibid., 93–103. Peter Burke, in his discussion of the “political uses of works of art,” points to the important political aspects of detrac- tion and ridicule. Speaking of defamatory portraits, he explains that “[t]he most likely explanation of these paintings, however, given the importance of honor and shame in the value system of this society, is that they were executed to dishonour the victims and their families, to destroy them socially, to make them infamous.” See Peter Burke, Th e Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 137– 138. 53. Erasmus cites a list of biblical examples of the innocently accused: Job by Satan, Joseph by his brothers, Suzanne by the elders, Christ by the Jews, and Paul by his “Jewish enemies.” Th ese examples, along with those of Saint Chrysostome and Saint Jerome, both of whom were accused of heresy on account of their erudi- tion, serve to solidify Erasmus’s reputation as a Christian author on par with these scholarly fathers. 54. Th e Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969–), 29: 346. 55. Calvin, Institutes de la religion chrestienne: Édition critique avec introduc- tion, notes et variants, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 1: 28. 56. Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1: 28. 57. François I justifi ed the burning of six heretics in the aftermath of the aff air of the placards to the German princes (with whom he was seeking alliance) by stating that these men were punished for their seditious behavior. Donald Kelley points out that this justifi cation, just as François I’s treaty with the Turks in the previous year, signals the breaking up of Christendom and the substitution of politics for religion. Kelley, Th e Beginning of Ideology, 18. 58. Institutes de la religion chrestienne, 1: 48–49; Institutes of the Christian Reli- gion, 1: 20. 59. Michel de Certeau argues that 1540 was a turning point in the French Ref- ormation: in 1536 Matthieu Ory was named “General Inquisitor of Faith”; from 1538, royal policy switched from seeking reconciliation to combating “heresy”; Calvin’s position in Geneva was solidifi ed after the city’s government passed new ecclesiastical ordinances in 1541; and the French bishops arrived at the Council of Trent in August 1545. Michel de Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre. Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 143. 60. Th e four rhetorical functions Serene Jones locates in Calvin’s Institutes, the pedagogical, the consolatory, the apologetic, and the polemical, are at work in the polemical treatises, but the latter two, the apologetic and the polemical, dominate 242 notes to chapter 3 at the expense of the former two. Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 70– 73. 61. Ibid., 2. 62. Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1: 69. 63. Th is is the sense in which Calvin interprets Christ’s injunction that the faithful should tear out his right eye if it “becomes a stumbling block” (Matthew 18:8, Mark 9:43–47). “If we were so eager to avoid the scandal that we would not spare our own eyes, the trouble that I took to write this treatise would have been superfl uous,” says Calvin in Des scandales (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 226. At issue in this passage is not simply the devaluation of the body, the preference for self- maiming over sinning, but also the fact that the physical eye, intimately tied to the physical world, is a source of “scandal.” To have faith, one must see without the physical eye, mentally. Calvin is one of those who inaugurate the “denigration of vision” in modern European culture, according to Martin Jay. See Th e Down- cast Eye: Th e Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Th ought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 42– 43. 64. Calvin, Oeuvres choisies, 176– 177. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 177. 67. “Augustine argues that it is necessary that some sins go unpunished, for, if the wicked were always immediately punished, we would surmise that there is nothing reserved for the Last Judgment; conversely, if no sins were punished im- mediately, we would surmise that there is no providence.” Institutes of the Chris- tian Religion, 58. 68. Frank Lestringant suggests that the crucial role of the martyr in Calvinism has to do with the fact that the martyr is the one who testifi es (from the Greek word martyros, “eyewitness”) to a truth that remains invisible. He also shows that the cult of martyrs in Calvinism vies successfully with the Catholic tradition of martyrs from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. See La lumière des martyrs. Essai sur le martyre au siècle des Réformes (Paris: Champion, 2004). 69. Calvin, Th ree French Treatises, ed. Francis M. Higman (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 135, 147. 70. Historians have wondered who exactly were the “Nicodemites,” as there is no evidence of such a distinct group identifying with Nicodemus, although Carlo Ginzburg argued about the existence of a sect that proclaimed dissimula- tion. Th ierry Wanegff elen suggested that many in France chose rather to be “tem- porizers.” Most of those whom Calvin is attacking did not in fact dissimulate but accepted “faith alone,” some infl uenced by Lutheran doctrines, others by Lefèvre d’Étaples, or even by medieval mysticism and forms of libertine spirituality, and desired to stay within the Catholic Church. Th e king’s sister, Marguerite de Na- varre, was the most prominent representative of this “group,” often called “evan- gelicals,” which did not succeed in achieving doctrinal unity (and perhaps never attempted to). Calvin’s caricature through the term “Nicodemites” aims at giving sharp contours to a group that existed only in the unstable mode of “neither, nor” notes to chapter 3 243

(as Wanegff elen aptly puts it). In reality this group was rather diff use, and lacked precisely the kind of fi rm identity Calvin attributes to it. See Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo. Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del’ 500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Th ierry Wanegff elen, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fi dèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1997). 71. Th e only two biblical passages to mention Nicodemus are John 7:50 and 19:39. Th e New Oxford Annotated Bible. New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. An Ecumenical Study Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 72. “Now the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death” (Matthew 26:59). Th e New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 73. Calvin, Th ree French Treatises, 147– 148. 74. William J. Bouwsma analyzes Calvin’s extensive commentary and the abundance of dramatic additions that he makes to biblical texts, notably Cal- vin’s description of the unsupportable stench on Noah’s ark. See John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 75. Calvin, Th ree French Treatises, 138. 76. Ibid., 147. 77. Ibid., 148. 78. Jean Wirth, “‘Libertins’ et ‘épicuriens’. Aspects de l’irréligion au XVIe siècle,” BHR 39 (1977): 601– 627. 79. Because the Anabaptists and the Libertines develop an allegorical lan- guage in their own speech and writing, Calvin accuses them of “hiding in caverns of incomprehensible and dubious words.” See Jean Calvin, Brieve instruction pour armer tous bons fi deles contre les erreurs de la secte commune des Anabaptistes ([Ge- neva]: Jean Girard, 1545), 10. 80. Jean Calvin, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins, qui se nom- ment spirituelz, avec une epistre de la mesme matiere, contre un certain Cordelier sup- post de la secte: lequel est prisonnier à Roan ([Geneva]: [Jean Girard], 1547), 27. 81. Calvin, Contre la secte, 27. 82. Ibid., 38. 83. Luther and Melanchthon’s Deüttung der zwu grewlichen fi guren Bapste- sel zu Rom und Münchkalb zu Freyberg in Meyssen funden (Wittenberg: [], 1523) was translated into French and printed by Jean Crespin in Geneva under the title De deux monsters prodigieux . . . avec quelques exemples des jugements de Dieu en la mort espouvantable et desespoir de plusieurs, pour avoir abandonné la verité de l’Évangile (1557). Signifi cantly, the volume is amplifi ed with moralizing stories of actual people “erring” or “stumbling” in the face of adversity, monsters only in the spiritual and pedagogical sense in which Calvinism used this term. 84. Calvin, Contre la secte, 24. 85. William A. Dryness, Reformed Th eology and Visual Culture: Th e Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76. 244 notes to chapter 4

86. Dryness contrasts Calvin’s theology with the theology of Ignatius of Loyola, whose spirituality is “ecstatic,” directing the believer outside his own life toward the life of Christ. 87. Calvin, Contre la secte, 65– 66. 88. Ibid., 44. 89. Th is small, radical group represented an elite off shoot of the large human- ist movement. Because they attacked the bastions of French Catholic conserva- tism in their writings, they had been forced to depend on the generosity of certain highly placed fi gures in the French court who could off er them economic support and political sanctuary. Calvin too depended on the support of French nobility sympathetic to the Reformation. However, unlike Calvin, the basis of the radical reformers’ attack upon dominant powers in France “was as antiauthoritarian as it was religious.” Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, 126– 127. 90. Th e treatise was published shortly after its fi rst Latin publication in French. For a modern critical edition, see Jean Calvin, Des scandales, ed. Olivier Fatio (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 136. 91. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 520. 92. Timothy Hampton argues that Rabelais parodies Calvin’s rhetorical and theological use of monsters by showing that monsters are semiotic manipulations constituted by a slippage from the rhetoric of description by similitude to an iden- tifi cation of the thing with the description. See “Signs of Monstrosity: Th e Rhet- oric of Description and the Limits of Allegory in Rabelais and Montaigne,” in Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 179– 199. 93. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 614.

Chapter 4 1. See iia iiae q75, by Aquinas, Summa Th eologica: Th e Complete English Edition in Five Volumes, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westmin- ster, MD: Christian Classics, 1920), 1502– 1504. 2. “Préface des Disputations Chrestiennes de P. Viret,” in Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, A. Cunitz, and others (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwtschke, 1863– 1900), 9: col. 863. 3. Ibid. 4 Ibid., col. 865. 5. Viret’s books, of which he published over fi fty, were sold in Europe in En- glish and Dutch translations. Between 1542 and 1550, his books make up 5 percent of the printed pages in Geneva. Th is gains him a second place behind Calvin, whose books, making up 29 percent of printed pages, dominate the market. See Jean-François Gilmont, Le livre réformé au XVIe siècle (Paris: BnF, 2005), 55. notes to chapter 4 245

6. Claude-Gilbert Dubois analyzes the theme of corruption prevalent in some of Viret’s Dialogues (notably, in Le monde à l’Empire and the Dialogues du désor- dre, both often reprinted) and argues that while representing the world through the images of overall decadence, Viret in fact propagates the idea of a reformed, improved order. See “Quand empirent les empires. . . . Imaginaire et idéologie de la decadence au XVIe siècle d’après Le Monde à l’Empire de Pierre Viret,” Eidôlon: Décadences (Oct. 1979): 47– 63. 7. Ibid., 47. 8. Pierre Viret, La Physique papale, faite par maniere de devis, & par dialogues (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1552), 17. 9. Translated into English and cited in H. M. Baird, Th eodore Beza: Th e Coun- sellor of the French Reformation, 1519–1605 (1899; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipfl and Stock, 2004), 182. 10. On the Catholic side, Guillaume Budé publishes his De transitu hellenismi ad christianismum to combat Protestantism with a synthesis of classical and Chris- tian learning produced with the new methods of humanism and philology. For Budé’s defense of the Eucharist, see De transitu hellenismi ad christianismum, ed. and trans. Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie and Daniel F. Penham (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), 109– 114. 11. Th is term originates in the hermetic philosophy of Pico della Mirandola, who praises ancient theologians for protecting their mysteries with a poetic veil from the vulgar masses. In Viret’s interpretation, “poetic theology” denotes the use of pagan culture in Catholic theology to confuse the believer both by deny- ing him access to theological truths and by feeding him untrue fi ctions in the name of religion. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (1965; repr., Indianapo- lis: Hackett, 1998), 27. 12. Viret here (and elsewhere) cites passages from Cornelius Agrippa von Net- tesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia; see Th ree Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. (London: R. W. for Gregory Moul, 1651), 3: 41, 484– 485. 13. Pierre Viret, Deux dialogues. L’Alcumie du Purgatoire. L’homme naturel, ed. Jacques Courvoisier (Lausanne: Bibliothèque Romande, 1971), 22– 23. 14. Michel de Certeau, “Ethno-graphie, l’oralité, ou l’espace de l’autre: Léry,” in L’ écri ture de l ’ histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 245– 283. 15. Viret, Deux dialogues, 76. 16. Ibid., 84. 17. “Epistre au Roy, du temps de son exile à Ferrare,” in Clément Marot, Oeu- vres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Garnier, 1993), 84. 18. I borrow this comparison from François Rigolot; see Poésie et Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 107. 19. In the preface to his critical edition of the Satyres chrestiennes, Charles- Antoine Chamay suggests that Calvinist rhetoric, which recommends staying “in the middle,” avoiding both forced joking and excess, “explodes” in this book. See 246 notes to chapter 4 preface to [Th éodore de Bèze], Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, ed. Charles- Antoine Chamay (Geneva: Droz, 2005), xii–xiii. Parenthetical references in the body of the text in this chapter will be made to this edition. 20. “Look . . . to our adversaries . . . their belly is their God, and their kitchen their religion [leur ventre leur est pour dieu, la cuisine pour religion]; and they be- lieve, that if these were away they would not only not be Christians, but not even men. For although some wallow in luxury, and others feed on slender crusts, still they all live by the same cauldron, which without that fuel might not only cool, but altogether freeze.” See Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 1: 7; Institutes de la religion chrestienne: Édition critique avec introduction, notes et variantes, ed. Jean- Daniel Benoit (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 1: 32– 33. Calvin revisits a cliché of Protestant propaganda, the “papal cauldron.” On the prevalence of the theme of the “Roman cauldron” in German Protestant and Hu- guenot literature, see Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la Réforme française, 1520–1562 (Paris: Sedes, 1996), 355–357; Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Pop- ular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 89– 91. 21. [Bèze?], Satyres chrestiennes, 5. 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Henri Estienne, Dictionarium, sev linguae latinae thesaurus (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1536), 1460b. 24. Chamay makes a similar suggestion in his introduction to [Bèze?], Satyres chrestiennes, 2005, lxvii. 25. Pierre Viret, Instruction chrestienne, cited in Georges Bavaud, Le reforma- teur Pierre Viret (1511– 1571). Sa théologie (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1986), 227. 26. On the images of “digestion” and “chewing to pulp,” see Quintilian, In- stitutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 4: 13. Th ese images are cited by Terence Cave, who notes: “Th is notion of incorporation or consubstantiality transfers to language a possibility of a process by which alien, external materials may be transformed so that they may re-emerge as a function of ‘nature,’ and more specifi cally of the speaker’s nature.” See Th e Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1979), 37. 27. Th e sun was a symbol that Calvin often used to describe the intervention of divine agency on earth. “If, at midday, we either look down to the ground, or on the surrounding objects which lie open to our view, we think ourselves endued with a very strong and piercing eyesight; but when we look up to the sun, and gaze at it unveiled, the sight which did excellently well for the earth [cette grande vivacité qui se monstroit en terre], is instantly so dazzled and confounded by the re- fulgence, as to oblige us to confess that our acuteness in discerning terrestrial ob- jects is mere dimness when applied to the sun. Th us too it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities.” See Th e Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1: 38; Institutes de la religion chrestienne, 1: 52. “And whence, I pray, the foetid odor of a dead body, notes to chapter 4 247 which has been uncoffi ned and putrifi ed by the sun’s heat? All see that it is excited by the rays of the sun [cela vient des rais du Soleil ], but no man therefore says that the foetid odor is in them. In the same way, while the matter and guilt of wicked- ness belongs to the wicked man, why should it be thought that God contracts any impurity in using it at pleasure as his instrument?” See Th e Institutes of Christian Religion, 1: 188; Institutes de la religion chrestienne, 1: 242– 243. 28. Calvin denies the validity of the Epicurean theory of atoms precisely be- cause, he argues, the contingent movement of “little riff -raff (petites fanfreluches) fl ying in the air like grains of dust” cannot produce organic unities: “Let Epicurus tell us what concourse of atoms, cooking meat and drink, can form one portion into refuse and another portion into blood, and make all the members separately perform their offi ce as carefully as if they were so many souls acting with common consent in the superintendence of one body.” See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1: 53; Institutes de la religion chrestienne, 1: 72. 29. Th e Calvinist satirist Henri (II) Estienne describes “satire” in this way (mots forgés à plaisir). See Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote. Satire de la so- ciété au XVIe siècle, ed. P. Ristelhuber (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 1: 34. 30. [Bèze?], Satyres chrestiennes, 6. 31. Terence Cave defi nes imitation as a practice in which “the activities of reading and writing become virtually identifi ed. A text is read in view of its tran- scription as part of another text; conversely, the writer and imitator concedes that he cannot entirely escape the constraints of what he read.” Th e Cornucopian Text, 35. On “innutrition” and “digestion,” see ibid., 36– 37. 32. Michel Jeanneret analyzes the “feast of words” both as an idea and as a rhetorical procedure embraced by humanists in his book Les mets et les mots (Paris: Corti, 1987). He describes the feast as a place where dishes and words are simul- taneously consumed and enjoyed, a symbol of a culture of conversation where the abundance and variety of ideas vie with the abundance and variety of dishes, and a rhetorical practice that cultivates abundance and variety of both words and ideas. Th e Satyres chrestiennes recognizably belongs to this tradition, but, Jean- neret argues, it also perverts the rhetorical procedures by lowering the register to the language of cooks. My analysis shows that the rhetorical procedures of the book are not only characterized by debasement but also by a systematic rejection of humanistic practices via citation. 33. [Bèze?], Satyres chrestiennes, 4. 34. “Letter to Martin Dorp,” in Erasmus, Th e Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (1979; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. 35. Yves Giraud lists a number of words that one can fi nd in the Quart livre of 1552. Th is suggests that the author was a devoted reader of Rabelais who read all his books. See “Le comique engagé des Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale,” in Studi di letteratura francese 10 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983), 52– 72. 36. See L. Sainéan, L’infl uence et la reputation de Rabelais (Paris: Libraire Uni- versitaire J. Gamber, 1930), 203– 204. 248 notes to chapter 4

37. See Giraud, “Le comique engagé.” 38. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 351. English translation by Michael A. Screech, in Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 2006), 410. 39. François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 155. 40. Eugenie Droz was fi rst to propose Bèze; J. Lindeboom speculated that its author was the printer Conrad Badius. For an overview of the history of attribu- tions and arguments for Bèze’s authorship, see Charles-Antoine Chamay’s intro- duction to [Bèze?], Satyres chrestiennes, xlvi– lxiii. 41. Ibid., lv. 42. Th éodore de Bèze, Harangue des ministres de la parole de Dieu faite en l’as sem- blee de Poissy, le nefi ème de septembre, mil cinq cens soixante et un ([]: [], [1561]), B v. Cotgrave gives the meanings “freely, plainly, bluntly, thoroughly” for rondement. 43. “As for me, consider me gone, / For to what purpose does one preach to and entreat / A stomach that has no ears” (8: 108– 110). 44. Charles Lenient, La satire en France au XVIe siècle. La littérature militante au XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1877), 2: 212. 45. By the time of the fi rst publication of the Epistola Magistri Benedicti Pas- savanti in 1553, Pierre Lizet had taken symbolic grandeur to be the archenemy of the Reformation. Lizet’s roles include avocat du Roy, fi rst president of the Parlia- ment of Paris, and the author of a virulent Latin pamphlet against Calvin’s follow- ers. Later on, in 1547, he became the mastermind behind the infamous chambre ardante established by Henri II for “the extirpation of heresy.” For Bèze’s Latin satire, see the translator and editor J. L. R. Ledegang-Keegstra’s introduction in Th éodore de Bèze, Le Passavant (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 3– 249. 46. Natalie Zemon Davis analyzes the diff erent conceptions held by Catho- lics and Protestants of sixteenth-century Lyon of sacred and secular spaces in her article “Th e Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past and Present 90 (1981): 40– 70. 47. Th e nineteenth-century bibliophile Anatole de Montaiglon republished several of the short, anonymous Huguenot poems, which were originally pub- lished in Lyon in 1562 and 1563, in the Recueil des poesies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858– 1878). Th e following pieces have specifi c relevance to the Reformation and the restructuring of the sacred and secular spaces of the city (with short titles): Discours de la vermine et prestraille de Lyon (Lyon, 1562) (vol. 7); La Polymachie des marmitons ou la gendarmerie du pape (Lyon, 1562, 1563) (vol. 7); La desolation des frères de la robe grise, pour la perte de la marmite qu’est renversée (Lyon, 1562) (vol. 7); Le Blason du gobellet (Lyon, 1562) (vol. 13); Le Blason du platel- let (Lyon, 1562) (vol. 13); and L’adieu de la Messe (Lyon, 1562) (vol. 13). 48. Discours de la vermine et prestraille de Lyon ([Paris]: 1562), 10– 12. 49. Hent de Vries analyzes the theological and philosophical aporias of the sa- cred as both invocation and leave-taking from Aquinas through to Levinas as es- sentially tautological in “Tautology and Heterology: Tout Autre est tout autre,” in Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 175– 187. notes to chapter 5 249

Chapter 5 1. Marshall McLuhan remarks in Understanding Media: Th e Extensions of Man (1964; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) that one medium can recapitulate another by incorporating it and off ers the example of Edison’s electric light bulb, which contains light, the medium of sight. 2. Frank S. Giese, Artus Desiré: Priest and Pamphleteer of the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1973), 76. 3. Wylie G. Sypher, “Faisant ce qui leur vient à plaisir: Th e Image of Protes- tantism in French Catholic Polemic on the Eve of the Religious Wars,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1980): 79. 4. Giese’s conjecture that Desiré had patrons in the ultra-Catholic wing of the Parisian parliament may explain why he had such a long career in publishing anti-Calvinist invectives and especially why he escaped treason with the relatively mild sentence of an amende honorable and fi ve years of seclusion in the Chartreux monastery near Paris. Giese, Artus Desiré, 27– 28. 5. Le Miroer des francs Taulpins, autrement dictz Antechristz, et de la nouvelle alliance du tresmiserable et reprouvé Luther (Paris: Jean André, ca. 1546). Cited in Giese, Artus Désiré, 80. 6. Les Combatz du fi delle papiste, pélerin romain, contre l’apostat priapiste. . . . Ensemble la description de la Cité de Dieu assiégée des hérétiques (Rouen: R. and J. Du Gort, 1550), fol. 21. 7. Les Disputes de Guillot le Porcher, et de la Bergere de S. Denis en France, con- tre Jehan Calvin Predicant de Geneve, sur la verité de notre saincte Foy Catholique (Paris: Pierre Gaultier, 1559), cited in Giese, Artus Desiré, 97. 8. He was imprisoned in 1561, after being caught with a petition he was carry- ing to the Spanish monarch asking him to intervene on the side of the Catholic party in France, and he was banned in 1564 (probably for four years), after inciting the Parisians to arm themselves in sermons. His last direct political intervention occurred in 1568, when he addressed a letter, written in eight-syllable quatrains, to King Charles IX urging him to stop the politics of reconciliation and to ex- terminate all religious dissenters. Th is letter was never published. Giese, Artus De siré, 101. 9. Alice Hulubei, L’éloge en France au XVIe siècle époque des Valois (1515– 1589) (Paris: Droz, 1938), 152. 10. Luc Racaut describes this strategy at work in the publications of Catho- lic theologians who undertook to write books discrediting “heresy,” such as Ed- mond Auger, René Benoist, Robert Céneau, Jean Gay, Gentian Hervet, Antoine de Mouchy, Jean de la Vacquerie, and Antoine du Val, in Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity During the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). 11. In the fi erce Genevan satire Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale (1560), which I discussed in the previous chapter, the Passavant parisien is attributed to 250 notes to chapter 5

Antoine du Val. Giese attributes the book to another polemicist, Anthoine Catha- lan, against whom Calvin wrote an annihilating treatise entitled Réformation pour imposer silence à un certain belître nommé Antoine Cathelan jadis cordelier d’Albigeois (“Reformation, In Order to Impose Silence upon a Certain Tramp Named An- toine Cathalan, Formerly Franciscan from Albi”). Th e toponymy “Albi” associates this Franciscan monk with the Cathars. See Calvin, Oeuvres choisies, ed. Olivier Millet (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 257– 272. See also Giese, Artus Desiré, 56. 12. Le Passavant, trans. J. L. R. Ledegang-Keegstra (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 160. 13. Ibid., 182. 14. Bèze’s satire claims that, even though Robert Estienne, the Parisian printer who converted to Calvinism, was burnt “in effi gy” in Paris, in person he “ridicules the magistri nostri of the Sorbonne and taunts them with “many mockeries” call- ing “magister noster Picardus,” for example, a “chatting magpie.” Ibid., 180. 15. [Desiré], Passevent parisien respondent à Pasquin Romain (Lyon: [], 1556), 32r. 16. Ibid., aiii. 17. Th is new form of “publicness” is termed res publica in the articles presented in a recent volume that takes up the notion of the “public” with an emphasis on things (res) that create public spaces. Th is volume considerably expands the notion of “publicness” beyond the historical and conceptual boundaries of the Kantian- Habermasian notion of the “public sphere” (Öff entlichkeit). Among the contribu- tors, Joseph Koerner examines the reformed church as the concrete material site of the early modern assembly, focusing on the physical spaces where Protestants assembled in Germany, whose sanctity depends on delocalizing, detachment from consecrated space, and attachment to the Word only. Koerner argues that the re- formed assembly radically transforms the ideas of “publicness” and openness by placing the proclamation of the Word at the center of public life, as that which defi nes and creates communities, and makes publicity “profoundly elastic, encom- passing everything from one Christian reading to his neighbors to an offi cially installed minister sermonizing to an audience of all members of his parish.” See Joseph Koerner, “Reforming the Assembly,” in Making Th ings Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 404. 18. Artus Desiré, Les grandes chroniques et annales de Passe par tout, Chroni- queur de Geneve (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud and Jean Saugrain, 1558), 6. 19. In Hugo’s vision this passage prophesies the replacement of the “great book” of gothic cathedrals by another “universal book,” the novel. For Desiré and the other militant Catholics, printed books seem to be better than cathedrals as means to fi ght for the preservation or the restoration of the unity of the church. 20. Desiré, Les grandes chroniques, 13– 14. 21. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 246– 250. 22. Edwin Duval suggests that Panurge’s lesson is not only moral but borders notes to chapter 5 251 on the ecstatic mysticism of Paul: “Th e paradox of Panurge is thus a perfect evangelical one. Th e apparently godless stranger encountered so unexpectedly by Pantagruel in the midst of the sapience cycle is actually a crafty, ironic, Pauline agent of God, speaking in strange tongues to teach the New Law of caritas with- out partiality to a people who hear but do not listen.” See Th e Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 71. 23. Desiré, Les grandes chroniques, 26. 24. Terence Cave, Th e Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Re- naissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 193. 25. Cave, Th e Cornucopian Text, 36. Desiré only imitates insofar as he appro- priates what he has read as part of his own text, without accepting the other text as a constraining model. In fact, his practice consists in rejecting such a model. 26. One may wonder if such crude “borrowings” from Rabelais stem from a profound understanding of the popularity of Rabelais’s Pantagruel. Although M. A. Screech estimates that Rabelais’s books were read by a relatively small seg- ment of the population, “an educated minority, a class that excluded most of the nobility and most of the people,” the estimated numbers of copies sold before the sixteenth century suggest a much wider readership, and this is especially the case for Rabelais’s fi rst novel, Pantagruel, which is considerably less erudite and more indebted to the popular chapbook and the almanac than Rabelais’s subsequent books. Desiré can then be seen to exploit, in an aggressive fashion, a property already extant in Rabelais’s fi rst book. Cf. Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 12. 27. Erich Auerbach discusses the mixing of styles in Rabelais’s prose in his chapter “Th e World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” in Mimesis: Th e Representation of Re- ality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, intr. Edward Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 271– 272. 28. As a character in Roman culture and humanist priapic poetry (for exam- ple, Mussato’s and Bembo’s obscene invectives), Priapus naturally belongs to an erudite humanist culture, but as a reference to the “lower body,” his fi gure is easy to incorporate into the low humor that pervades early modern popular culture. 29. Artus Desiré, Les Batailles et victoires du Chevalier Celeste, contre le Cheva- lier Terrestre . . . (Paris: Jean Ruelle, 1564), 8r–v. 30. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 267– 272. 31. Cited in Sypher, “Faisant ce qu’il leur vient à plaisir,” 75. 32. Artus Desiré, Les Combatz du fi delle papiste, Kiiv. 33. Th e sales peaked in 1562, when next to 9,000 copies of the Genevan Bi- ble, 20,000 copies of Erasmus’s Colloquies, and 30,000 copies of the Psalter were sold; see Donald R. Kelley, Th e Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 235. See also Francis Higman’s very noteworthy comments in the section “Th e French- speaking Region” in Piety and Religious Print in French: 1511–1551 (Aldershot, UK: Scholar Press, 1996), 139– 140. 34. To raise the status of the Catholic Bible was, however, a tricky business 252 notes to chapter 5 because of the Sorbonne’s ban on translation. In 1566 René Benoist published his French translation of the Bible—whose cumbersome folio format belies the attempt, so explicit in Desiré, to make information accessible, fast, and ubiqui- tous—which earned this Parisian parson the condemnation of the Sorbonne. 35. Desiré, Combatz du fi delle papiste, fol. 14v. 36. Michel Jeanneret, Poésie et tradition au XVIe siècle. Recherches stylistiques sur les paraphrases des psaumes de Marot à Malherbe (Paris: Corti, 1969), 189. 37. Artus Desiré, La singerie des Hvgvenots, marmots et gvenons de la nouuelle derrision Th eodobeszienne: contenant leur arrest & sentence par jugement de raison naturelle (Paris: Guillaume Jullien, 1574), Aiiir. In the Batailles, Desiré repeats the pun by stating that the Calvinists eat their scripture “raw,” without cooking (25r). 38. See Daniel Ménager, Ronsard. Le roi, le poète et les hommes (Geneva: Droz, 1979), and François Rigolot, “Poétique et politique: Ronsard et Montaigne devant les troubles de leurs temps,” in Ronsard et Montaigne: Écrivains engagés? ed. Michel Dassonville (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1989). 39. According to Jürgen Habermas, the early modern, prebourgeois public sphere (Öff entlichkeit) is dominated by the state and the church and by the repre- sentations of their power. Jürgen Habermas, Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Th omas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). A diff erent and his- torically more nuanced view of what is “public” is traced by Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala, who distinguish among three senses of the seventeenth-century French word public (noun and adjective): the adjective designating everything pertaining to the aff airs of the state; the adjective designating “public” places (ac- cessible to all) such as the street, the public square, the church, and the crossroads (the places where news was cried, and printed wares were sold, where executions and processions, festivities and fairs took place); and the noun “public,” the col- lective crowd and the public of books and spectacles. All these senses of the word are related to another derivative of the word, “publication,” which, Jouhaud and Viala argue, provides primary access to the early modern public space. Printed materials of all formats and sizes were implicit in all three senses of the word: they circulated in public spaces; they appealed to publics as much as they were seized by publics; they treated—increasingly so in the second half of the sixteenth cen- tury—of matters of the state, and the state and the church, along with the legal authority of the Parliament, tried to control their circulation. We can add that already in the sixteenth century, Ronsard’s Discours, especially when published as individual brochures, circulated in the hands of an anonymous public beyond the elite of the educated and the nobility whom typically Ronsard’s poems addressed. De la publication: Entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 10– 13. 40. Like Machiavelli and Seyssel before him and Bodin and Montaigne af- ter him, Ronsard attributes fi rst and foremost a political and civic function to religion, namely, that it assures the links between people in a society. See Daniel Ménager, Ronsard: Le roi, le poète et les hommes (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 167–183. Th e notes to chapter 5 253 same reasoning is followed by Nuccio Ordine in Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la religion (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), 56. 41. Th e original versions of Ronsard’s Discours have been published in Pierre de Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Garnier Flam- marion, 1999). Th ese verses (lines 114– 116) can be found on page 56. For the ver- sion of the poems in the Discours as they appear in the last edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres in his lifetime (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1584) and the variants, see Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 2: 989–1098. Th e Élégie appears there under the title “Discours à G. des Autels,” and these lines (106– 108) can be found on page 1013. 42. Rigolot, “Poétique et politique,” 60. 43. Lines 21–22 in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 53; “Discours à G. des Au- tels,” lines 19– 22, in Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 1011. 44. Lines 13 and 224, in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 53, 59. On the diff er- ent versions of the famous lines in the Elegie, see Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 1581. 45. Line 14, in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 53. 46. Both Daniel Ménager and Nuccio Ordine emphasize the consciously adopted tone of moderation in these poetic gestures. 47. “Instruction pour l’adolescence du Roy thres-chrestien Charles IXe de ce nom,” lines 69– 70, in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 69. 48. Nuccio Ordine has highlighted the affi nity between Ronsard and Gior- dano Bruno, both artists of veiled truths. Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la religion, 227–235. 49. For the details of this myth, see the “Hymne de la Justice” and “Hymne de l’Or,” in Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 473– 485, 580– 594. 50. Lines 128– 148, in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 76– 77. 51. Line 152, ibid., 77. 52. Lines 314– 315, ibid., 103– 104. 53. Line 115, ibid., 76. 54. Lines 117– 118, ibid. 55. Ibid., 119. 56. Ronsard, Discours des miseres de ce temps, lines 121– 122, ibid., 76. 57. Lines 5– 6, ibid., 81. 58. Line 441, ibid., 93. 59. In his catalogue of the extant copies of the poems of the Discours, Jean- Paul Barbier estimates the average number of copies printed for each edition to be three hundred, which makes a total of about twenty-fi ve hundred authorized copies for just one single poem, the Discours des misères de ce temps. Bibliographie des Discours politiques de Ronsard (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 4. 60. Rigolot, “Poétique et politique,” 66. 61. Lines 348– 50, Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 90. 62. Barbier lists three editions in Toulouse (numbers 10, 34, 49 in his inven- tory), a region where reformed doctrines reached many, and two other editions printed in Troyes (35 and 61), and he suggests that in the latter city the conver- 254 notes to chapter 5 sion of Bishop Antoine Carraciolo to the Reformation could have provoked the pirated edition. Bibliographie des Discours politiques de Ronsard, 25– 26, 77– 78, 109–110. 63. Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 121. 64. “Response aux calumnies contenues au Discours et Suyte du Discours sur les Miseres de ce temps, Faits par Messire Pierre Ronsard, jadis Poëte, et main- tenant Prebstre,” in La polémique protestante contre Ronsard, ed. Jacques Pineaux (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1973), 1: 85. 65. Ménager, Ronsard, 214. 66. Lines 1035– 1036, Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 150. 67. Line 1063, ibid., 151. 68. See items 11, 22, 36, 50, and 70 in Barbier, 1984. Barbier lists two editions allegedly printed in “Angers” suggesting that they were made on the basis of the Protestant series printed in Lyon (items 37 and 51). 69. “Response aux calumnies,” La polémique protestante contre Ronsard, 1: 42–44. 70. Ibid., 1: 45. 71. Already in the “Epistre au lecteur” (“Epistle to the Reader”), prefi xed to his Trois livres du recueil des nouvelles poësies, Ronsard uses the argument of artistic freedom and, before the rise of the notion of intellectual property, a form of own- ership of his poetry to justify his abandoning of the polemical style:

[Y]ou should know, reader, that, having bought my pen, my ink, and my paper, by right they are mine, and I can honestly do whatever I please to with that which is mine. And since I am not an overseer of the melancholic verses, lunacies, and fantasies of my calumniators [ je ne suis contrerolleur des melan- cholies, des songes ny des fantasies de mes calomniateurs], neither should they be overseers of mine, for I do not at all care for what they say, what they do, or what they write. For just as I never read their works, I never wonder if they read mine, nor am I interested in their lives and actions. (Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 1086.)

72. Ronsard’s Hercule chrestien (1553) is a curious piece of Christian lyric po- etry, an unicum in the midst of the “pagan” hymns, which may have been con- ceived by Ronsard to please his patron, Odet de Coligny, cardinal of Chastillon, a sympathizer of the Reformation. 73. Ordine, Giordano Bruno, 128. 74. Th e Lernean Hydra proves to be a particularly popular allegory in polemi- cal satire in sixteenth-century France. In the Satyre Menippee (which I discuss in greater detail in the following chapter), the “Hydra” is the ultra-Catholic League and Hercules is Henri IV in the harangue of Monsieur d’Aubray, the representa- tive of the Th ird Estate. See Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris, ed. Martial Martin (Paris: Champion, 2007), 120–121. notes to chapter 6 255

75. “De l’experience,” Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Th ibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1046. François Rigolot notes Montaigne’s rejection of the “false reconciliation” off ered by allegory and his choice of his- tory. Th e allegorical image of the hydra as Montaigne uses it, depriving it of its power to name the enemy, exemplifi es this rejection. See Rigolot, “Poétique et politique: Ronsard et Montaigne devant les troubles de leur temps” in Ronsard et Montaigne, 67. 76. Lines 156– 157, Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 1077. 77. Lines 71– 74, Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 1080. 78. Ménager, Ronsard, 194. 79. He did not have it printed until the Oeuvres of 1578. Neither of the “Hy- dra” poems circulated in plaquette form, but Ronsard published the fi rst poem, L’Hydre desfaict, in 1569 in a collective volume entitled Paeanes. See Ronsard, Oeu- vres complètes, 2: 1603. 80. See Remonstrance, line 527, in Ronsard, Discours, derniers vers, 109. 81. See, for example, two anonymous poems, both distributed on the streets of the capital in the aftermath of the massacre: Elegie satyriqve svr la mort de Gaspar de Colligny . . . autrement appelez carmes serpentins and Coq a l’asne des hvgvenotz tuez & massacrez à Paris le xxiiij iour d’Aoust. 1572. 82. As an accomplished philologist, Dorat was familiar with Sophocles. Dorat’s offi cial title was “royal interpreter” (interpretus regius) and that is what he does in this poem: he interprets through the allegory of Oedipus the death of Coligny in a royalist vein. See the section Interprétation in Geneviève Demerson, Dorat en son temps: Culture classique et présence au monde (Paris: Clermont-Ferrand, 1983). 83. Oeuvres poetiqves de Iean Dorat poete et interprete dv roy, ed. Ch. Marty- Laveaux (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1875), 31. 84. I am citing Robert Fagles’s translation; see Sophocles, Th e Th ree Th eban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus (London: Penguin, 1984), 183. I thank Anna Grace for suggesting this citation to me. 85. Jean-Antoine Baïf speculates that Rhadamanthys devised as punishment for Coligny to be deprived of “eternal rest” (repos) for disturbing the peace of the kingdom (repos publique). Th e poem “Sur le cors de Gaspar de Coligni gisant sur le pavé” was fi rst published in his Passetemps in 1573. See Evres en rime de Ian Antoine de Baif (Paris: L. Breyer, 1572– 1573; repr., Paris: Charles Marty-Laveaux, Pléiade françoise, 1882– 1887), 4: 219.

Chapter 6 1. Th ese versions are: L’Isle Sonnante (printed in 1562/1563), the Cinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et dicts Heroïques du bon Pantagruel (whose fi rst extant printed copy is from 1564), and a manuscript from the sixteenth century that was found in the nineteenth century. 2. Michel Simonin argues that the pamphlet L’Isle Sonnante was published be- 256 notes to chapter 6 tween the massacre of Vassy (March 1, 1562) and the Edict of Amboise (March 19, 1563) (as the old calendar that was in use at the time permits a publication before the Easter of 1563), which determines its polemical purpose. She also suggests that the editor of L’Isle Sonnante may have been E. Gibier, a printer in Orléans, who also published virulent attacks on the Catholic faction under the title Mémoires de Condé, disseminated in 1562 and 1563 in the aftermath of the massacre of Vassy. Michel Simonin, “L’édition de L’Isle Sonnante (1562–1563),” Études Rabelaisiennes 40 (2001): 55– 62. 3. See Huchon’s comments on the genesis of the various versions of the “Fifth Book” in Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1601–1604. For a more elaborate analysis, see her Rabelais grammairien. De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité (Geneva: Droz, 1981). 4. Among the defenders of the “inauthenticity” argument, we need to men- tion Alfred Glauser. Glauser asks: “[S]ince Gargantua, each novel is dominated by a particular theme; why would a ‘Fifth Book’ not have an organizing theme?” Le Faux Rabelais, ou, de l’inauthenticité du Cinquième livre (Paris: Nizet, 1975), 20. 5. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 727, 726. For an English translation, see Mi- chael A. Screech, in Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 2006), 887. 6. Ibid., 348. 7. Th is second type of copia as copy in turn indicates the fi ctional status of the text and its ambiguous moral and epistemological status. See, for example, Cave’s interpretation of the tonneau fi ctil (“barrel made of clay”) as also a barrel that be- comes the metaphor for Rabelais’s own “fi ction,” and, I would add, this metaphor points to the fabricated nature of the text. Th e Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writ- ing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 193n9. 8. Eskrich was part of the Protestant diaspora from Lyon to Geneva along with the printer Pierre de Vingle. Th e Histoire is usually attributed to Giovan Battista Trento, who moved to Geneva from Vicenza in the late 1550s. Th e book was printed twice, in 1566 and 1567, both times anonymously, under the comic pseudonym “M. Frangidelphe Escorche-Messes.” For a more detailed account of Trento’s probable authorship and other possible authors, see Dror Wahrman, “From Imaginary Drama to Dramatized Imagery: Th e Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique, 1566–67,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 186–205. 9. Ibid., 186. 10. On Eskrich’s use of a map of the city of Rome engraved in 1557 by Nic- colo Beatrizet and copied by Sebastiano di Re, see Frank Lestringant’s “Une carto- graphie iconoclaste: ‘La Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique’ de Pierre Eskrich et Jean-Baptiste Trento,” in Géographie du monde au Moyen-Âge et à la Renaissance, ed. Monique Pelletier (Paris: Éditions de C.T.H.S., 1989), 99– 120. 11. See Frank Lestringant’s article “Le gouff re et l’atlas, ou la cosmographie infernale de Jean-Baptiste Trento et Pierre Eskrich: La Mappe-Monde Nouvelle notes to chapter 6 257

Papistique de 1566,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 2007. 571. 12. On imagines agentes, see Frances A. Yates, Th e Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1966), 101. 13. Natalie Zemon Davis makes a similar suggestion in her essay “Th e Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past and Present 90 (1981): 69. 14. See [Jean-Baptiste Trento], Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique . . . com- posée par M. Frangidelphe Escorche-Messes. Imprimé en la ville de Luce Nouvelle par Brifaud Chassediables ([Geneva]: [François Perrin], 1567), 1. 15. Frank Lestringant notes that Trento takes advantage of the cosmographic scheme that allows the author to “glide” along latitudinal lines to establish cor- respondences like the one between the “Province of the Mass” and Brazil and the one between the soldiers of the pope and the conquistadors. Lestringant, “Une cartographie iconoclaste,” 105. 16. Frank Lestringant underscores the iconoclastic function of text and image in both of his articles cited previously. More specifi cally, he points to the fact that the two heaps of broken idols and relics towering behind the cross that is being toppled by Musculus correspond to Mount Testaccio (“Hill of Broken Pots”) on the map of Rome, which Eskrich moves from its actual location in the upper-left region of the city toward the center, that is, into the proximity of the Capitolium. By placing these ruins in the center of Rome, the image also prophesies the ruin- ation of Catholic Rome. “Le gouff re et l’atlas,” 585– 586. 17. Th e presumed author of the Histoire, Giovan Battista Trento, tried by legal means to force Eskrich to complete the engravings in time and in a satisfactory manner. Court records of a trial between September 17, 1562, and July 16, 1563, in Geneva suggest that Trento accused Eskrich of not delivering his work on time, while Eskrich demanded additional payment for his work (which he obtained); see Natalis Rondot, “Pierre Eskrich, peintre et tailleur d’histoires à Lyon au XVIe siècle,” Revue du Lyonnais 31 (1901): 95– 96. 18. No revisions to La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique were apparently ever made. Th is fact, however, did not prevent it from functioning as a powerful po- lemical tool in its own right. 19. [Trento], Histoire, 30. 20. Ibid., 50– 51. 21. Th e text and the map recycle images, among them the “King of Free Will,” an alter-ego of the pope whose empire is based on the false doctrine of the free- dom of the will, from the Tragedie du Roy Franc-Arbitre (printed by Jean Crespin in Geneva in 1558 and 1559), translated from Italian. On the citations, see Wahr- man’s “From Imaginary Drama to Dramatized Imaginary,” 191– 199. 22. [Trento], Histoire, 59. 23. Ibid., 133. Frank Lestringant notes this cosmographic manipulation in “Une cartographie iconoclaste,” 104. 24. Th e comparison is made by Northrop Frye and is cited by Tom Conley, 258 notes to chapter 6 who also succinctly writes about Th evet’s books that “[f ]act and fi ction are so confused that the barriers between things real and imaginary are eroded.” See Th e Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 188. 25. Frank Lestringant notes about the role of a “mythologics” of Brazil in Th evet’s Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557): “By virtue of the cosmo- graphical model, which brought together extremes and marked off , according to the circles of the heavens, lateral equivalences from Orient to Occident or vertical oppositions from north to south, Brazil became the universal standard of com- parison allowing one to describe the variegated unity of nature and of the na- tions that fi lled the earth.” See L’atelier du cosmographe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), translated into English as Mapping the Renaissance World, trans. David Fausett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 54. 26. Natalie Zemon Davis suggests that the Mappe-monde depicts the Calvinist subject who sets out to destroy icons of the sacred in order “to plant the seeds of industry and the seeds of the Gospel in landscapes which had been denuded of their shrines and sanctuaries,” in “Th e Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth- Century Lyon,” 69. 27. Four extant copies of the Mappe-monde (held in libraries in London, Flor- ence, Wroclaw, Poland, and Sondershausen, Germany) point, as Frank Lestrin- gant suggests, to two distinct sixteenth-century uses: assembled into a wall map and colored (the copies in Wroclaw and Sondershausen), they functioned as peda- gogical tools, while in loose sheets that could be bound into a book (the copies in London and Florence), they invited a closer study from a curious reader. In the latter format, they could also be transported and sold. A fi fth copy, held in Paris, attests to the fascination and manipulations of a bibliophile collector from the late eighteenth century, who had the sheets elegantly bound as a sign of his ap- preciation of this rarity. See Lestringant, “Le gouff re et l’atlas,” 586– 588. A critical edition of the Histoire and the Mappe-monde prepared by Frank Lestringant and Alessandra Preda (forthcoming from Droz in 2009) will hopefully shed more light not only on the visual and textual details but also on these copies and their uses. 28. [Trento], Histoire, 133– 134. 29. Ibid., 49. 30. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, 236– 241. 31. Cotgrave translates librairie as “a studie, or shop, full of bookes.” 32. [Trento], Histoire, 167– 168. 33. Ibid., 168. 34. Ibid., 169. 35. I borrow this phrase from Denise Riley, who in a philosophical and lin- guistic reading of Lucian’s dialogues points to this stubborn and comic resistance to forgetting of the former “great,” whose selfi sh chatter reveals their unimpressive selves, in “‘Th e Wounded Fall in the Direction of Th eir Wound’” in Th e Words of Selves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 114. 36. [Trento], Histoire, 187. notes to chapter 6 259

37. [Trento], Histoire, 190. Cotgrave gives “a long-skirted jacket, Coat, or Cas- socke” for saye. 38. Although no evidence of such use of the Histoire survives, these albums were common in the sixteenth century, often prepared as a montage from col- lections of texts and images and handwriting. Famous collectors were Augustin de Th ou, Henri de Mesmes, Claude Dupuy, Jacopo Corbinelli, and Pierre de l’Estoile. Th e journals of Pierre de l’Estoile, which I discuss in the next chapter, are excellent examples of this sort of book. Th is practice of copying and pasting continued during the early modern period. Roger Chartier cites the example of Chavatte, a textile worker in Lille during the reign of Louis XIV whose personal journal was a montage of hand written entries and clippings from canards, the popular, sensational publications that fl ooded the streets of cities. Chavatte not only appropriates the images from the canards but also reproduces their style in his own writing. Roger Chartier, ed., Pra tiques de la lecture (Paris: Payot, 1985), 94– 95. 39. See Daniel Ménager, “Dieu et le roi,” Études sur la Satyre Ménippé, ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Ménager (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 201– 226. 40. [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Menippee de la vertu du catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris. . . . Plus le regret sur la mort de l’Asne Ligueur d’une Damoyselle, qui mourut durant le siege de Paris ([Paris]: [], 1593), 381. 41. Th ese “supplements” have not yet received much critical attention. Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors off er their own “medley” with con- temporary documents of their own selection. Th e recent critical edition of the Satyre Menippee prepared by Martial Martin provides an excellent overview of the various stages in the genesis of the book. See [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des estats de Paris, ed. Martial Martin (Paris: Champion, 2007), xxviii– xlvi. 42. Th e French counterpart, the man of the “Holy League,” is represented by the house of Lorraine selling “fi nely-ground nonsense” ( fi n s g a l i m a t i a s ). 43. Frank Lestringant has shown that the Satyre Menippee exploits rhetorical techniques that were also used by the Jesuit preachers preaching for the ultra- Catholic League. See “Une topographie satirique: La Satyre Ménippée,” in Études sur la Satyre Ménippée, ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Ménager (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 55– 84. 44. [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du catholicon d’Espagne, ed. Martial Martin, 47– 48. 45. Martial Martin alludes to this tension. See ibid., xxviii. 46. [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Menippee de la vertu du catholicon d’Espa- gne. . . . Nouvelle édition. Revue sur le texte complet de 1594 . . . , ed. Éduard Tricotel (1877– 1881; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 2: 382. 47. In a very diff erent context, Michel Foucault devoted some of his last lec- tures at the Collège de France to this important term in Greek philosophy and political discourse. Th ese lectures, given between January 5 and March 9, 1983, have been published under the title “Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Le 260 notes to chapter 7 courage de la vérité,” in Cours au Collège de France 1983–1984 (Paris: Gallimard/ Seuil, 2008). He translates parrhesia into English as “fearless speech” in the lec- tures given at the University of California, Berkeley. Th e transcriptions of the Berkeley version of the lectures, given later in the same year, have been published as Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). 48. Simon Goulart, Mémoires de la Ligue contenant les événemens les plus re- marquables depuis 1576 . . . (Amsterdam: Arkstrée & Merkus, 1758), 1: 126. 49. See Edict et declaration du roy, sur la reduction de la ville de Paris soubs son obeyssance (Paris, 1594), 11–12; cited by Barbara B. Diefendorf in her article “Wag- ing Peace: Memory, Identity, and the Edict of Nantes,” in Religious Diff erences in France: Past and Present, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006), 20. Henri IV does not simply forbid recalling the injuries of the past but also pre- sents himself as the agent of bringing about forgetting in people’s minds. Th e author’s allegedly “close relative” and fi ctional mouthpiece claims that God alone can enact this. See [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Menippee de la vertu du ca- tholicon d’Espagne. . . . Nouvelle édition. Revue sur le texte complet de 1594 . . . , ed. Éduard Tricotel (1971), 250. 50. [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Menippee (1593), 386. 51. Th e fi ctional author of the book is not only hard to fi nd but, according to his “relative,” “expects no fame or praise” for the book. Ibid., 387. 52. Ibid., 400. 53. Ibid., 401. 54. Ibid., 390. 55. Ibid., 406. 56. Ibid., 387. 57. François de Dainville has pointed to the similarities between the satirical spaces of the Satyre Menippee and the satirical geography of Bougureau’s Th eatre François (published in Tours in 1594). Th e latter, the fi rst atlas to be published mapping Henri IV’s political realm, fi gures the Touraine as the patriotic center of France, and the Lorraine (which was not in fact part of the monarchy) as its inimical outside. See François de Dainville, La cartographie refl et de l’histoire (Ge- neva: Slatkine, 1986), 309–311.

Chapter 7 1. Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La conception de l’histoire au XVIe siècle (Paris: Nizet, 1977), 199. 2. [Jean Leroy and others], Satyre Menippee de la vertu du catholicon d’Espa- gne. . . . Nouvelle édition. Revue sur le texte complet de 1594 . . . , ed. Éduard Tricotel (1877– 1881; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 2: 70– 71. 3. Daniel Ménager, “Dieu et le roi,” in Études sur la Satyre Ménippé, ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Ménager (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 201. notes to chapter 7 261

4. L’Estoile never had time to take the same care with the journal document- ing the reign of Henri IV. A critical edition of this text is still awaited. After his death, all his manuscripts and collections were scattered and were not re-edited until the eighteenth century. He collected several albums or recueils, among which is Les belles Figures et Drolleries de la Ligue, preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Les belles Figures today contains only 142 pieces, even though l’Estoile reports to have gathered more than three hundred documents for this album. 5. Th e editors note their awareness of this similarity in the preface to l’Estoile, Registre-Journal du règne de Henri III, ed. Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenck (Geneva: Droz, 1992– 2003), 1: 35. 6. Th ese layers are: 1582 (“A”), 1588 (“B”), and the additions that were hand- written by Montaigne on the margins of his own copy of the Essais of 1588 (“C”). 7. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 1: 53. 8. L’Estoile thus enlists himself among those historians who saw history and, in particular, their time as one of decadence according to Claude-Gilbert Dubois in La Cconception de l’histoire. 9. In early modern France, three institutions exercised the power of censor- ship: the state, the church, and the Parliament. Alfred Soman notes that in the period between 1550 and 1620, “anything which gave rise to scandal or threat- ened to disturb the peace was impermissible” and subject to censorship; however, censorship was ineff ective and most transgressive discursive media and situations (sermons, conversations, gatherings, correspondences, theatrical performances, and printed publications of all sorts) remained uncensored. “Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120: 6 (Dec. 29, 1976): 442. 10. L’Estoile withdraws as an individual almost completely from his journal, so this “art of containment” is not a tool for the auto-poiesis of the self that is dis- played and deployed in and through writing, as in the case of Montaigne’s books (according to Tom Conley, from whom I borrow this term). Nonetheless, selves are formed through l’Estoile’s chronicles, but these selves are moral selves who situate themselves in a political domain, rather than in the domain of learning or in that of the body. Tom Conley, Th e Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 152. 11. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 1: 89. 12. Pierre de L’Estoile, “Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne de Henri IV et le début du règne de Louis XIII,” Oeuvres diverses, ed. Louis-Raymond Lefèvre and André Martin (Paris: Gallimard, 1948– 1960), 2: 214. 13. Th e possibility is not to be excluded that l’Estoile is the author of some of the anonymous libelles copied in the journals. 14. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 270. 15. See Edwin Duval’s review of the critical edition of Fragments des recueils de Pierre de L’Estoile published in Th e French Review 52: 1 (October 1978): 157– 158. 16. I borrow Cotgrave’s English translation of the verb gourmander. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 210. 262 notes to chapter 7

17. Ibid., 5: 202. 18. Ibid., 6: 31– 39. 19. Ibid., 6: 74. 20. Ibid., 6: 89. 21. Ibid., 6: 131. On the publication of the virulent libelle that has been attrib- uted to Th éodore de Bèze, see ibid., 1: 85–86, 110– 111. See also Nicole Cazauran’s introduction to her critical edition of the pamphlet under the title Discours mer- veilleux de la vie, actions et deportement de Catherine de Médicis (Geneva: Droz, 1995). 22. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 6: 132, 140. 23. Dubois, La conception de l’histoire, 208, 218. 24. See Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Waging Peace: Memory, Identity, and the Edict of Nantes,” in Religious Diff erences in France: Past and Present, ed. Kath- leen P. Long (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006), 18–49; Mi- chel de Certeau, “La réforme dans le catholicisme en France au XVIe siècle,” Le lieu de l’autre. Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 139–140; and J. H. M. Salmon, “French Satire in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Renais- sance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (1987; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73– 97. 25. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 212. 26. Ibid., 6: 199. 27. Th e text of the “Declaration” can be found in Simon Goulart, Mémoires de la Ligue . . . (Amsterdam: Arkstrée & Merkus, 1758), 1: 123. 28. Th is “counter-trench” is an early predecessor of the theological conferences that took place in Nantes and Saint-Denis in 1593, shortly before Henri de Na- varre’s conversion to Catholicism. 29. For the “Sonnet d’un Evesque,” see l’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 205. 30. For the Huguenot “Response,” see ibid., 205– 206. 31. In this way, l’Estoile’s Journals belong to the domain investigated by Gé- rard Defaux of the sixteenth-century obsession with writing as “presence.” See G. Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’écriture comme présence (Paris: Cham- pion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1987). 32. For the entry “Th e death of Le Breton in Paris,” see l’Estoile, Registre- Journal, 5: 206– 207. 33. L’Estoile’s portrait of Le Breton is much more moderate than that given by Jacques-Antoine de Th ou, who describes him as “a man tainted by madness” running on the street “like a Bacchante,” who has had several other relatives simi- larly deranged; de Th ou further describes his pathological conduct as a lawyer who could not accept losing a trial, and shows him to be used by the Duke of Mayenne, one of the leaders of the League, who understood his mental illness to be a useful weapon. According to de Th ou, the king made a mistaken judgment by refusing to pardon him despite the proofs of insanity provided by the judges and the man’s mother, because he was so afraid of the manipulations and dis- simulations of the “great princes” that he wanted this time to appear vigilant. See notes to chapter 7 263

Histoire universelle de Jacques-Antoine de Th ou depuis 1543 jusqu’en 1607 (London: [], 1734), 9: 612– 615. 34. Simon Goulart reproduces a pamphlet entitled “Brieve response d’un Catholique François, à l’apologie ou défense des Ligueurs & Perturbateurs du re- pos public, se disant faussement Catholiques unis les uns avec les autres.” Goulart, Memoires de la Ligue, 1: 340– 354. Th e eighteenth-century (Calvinist?) editor of the book believes that a Huguenot author is hiding here behind a Catholic mask. Du Plessis-Mornay authored letters allegedly written by a “Catholic.” 35. Th is image is not reproduced in Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenk’s critical edition. 36. L’Estoile copies this libelle, which takes up seven full pages in the Registre- Journal, at the end of the year 1587, under the rubric of Ramas de folies, pasquils, et Escrits divers, and he notes that it was “published [publié ] in Paris and at the court, where the corruption was such that calumny and slander were reputed to be truth.” L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 357. 37. Ibid., 5: 349. 38. Ibid., 5: 293. 39. Ibid., 5: 350. 40. Ibid., 5: 297. 41. Ibid., 5: 354. 42. Ibid., 5: 240. 43. Ibid., 5: 356. 44. Ibid., 5: 45. 45. Ibid., 5: 356. 46. Ibid., 5: 306. 47. Ibid., 6: 12– 13. 48. Ibid., 5: 346– 347. 49. Ibid., 6: 145. 50. Ibid., 6: 145. 51. Ibid., 6: 146. 52. Montaigne, “De l’art de conferer,” Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Galli- mard, 1962), 900. 53. Ibid. 54. David Quint terms this disengagement from violence an “ethics of yield- ing,” in Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Th emes in the Es- says (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 55. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 6: 175. Th e images in question are from the col- lection Les belles Figures et Drolleries de la ligue. 56. Th e New Oxford Annotated Bible. New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. An Ecumenical Study Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 57. L’Estoile copies this poem by Étienne Pasquier into his journal. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 87. 58. Journal de l’Estoile, 2: 164– 165. 264 notes to chapter 7

59. On the political signifi cations of the word “hermaphrodite,” see Dubois’s introduction to [Artus Th omas], L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, ed. Claude-Gilbert Du- bois (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 7–12. Cf. Guy Poirier, L’homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 1996), 142. 60. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 237. 61. “What seems to menace dogmatically ordered French society is the accep- tance that there may be more than one perspective on any issue. Acceptance of Protestantism puts the “truth” of Catholicism into doubt—two religious truths cannot exist in one and the same time. . . . Both religions cannot contradict each other and still be true, yet this is purportedly what the politiques want to believe.” See Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 220. 62. L’Estoile’s account is the only reference to the author of this anonymous, enigmatic libelle. It was originally published without indication of author, date, place, or printer under the title L’Isle des Hermaphrodites nouvellement descouverte, avec les moeurs, loix, coustume et ordonnances des habitants d’icelle (“Th e Island of Hermaphrodites Newly Discovered, with the Conduct, Laws, Customs, and Ordinaces of Its Inhabitants”). We know little of Artus Th omas (sometimes Ar- thus Th omas or Th omas Artus). His Catholicism is not an established fact, but a glance at his publications somewhat confi rms this claim: a treatise Contre la mesdisance, showing him as a moralist taking issue with slander; a collection of emblems prophesying the fall of the Ottoman empire and published along with his “continuation” of the Histoire générale des Turcs (a fi fteenth-century history of the Byzantine empire by Laonikos Chalkokondyles translated into French by Blaise de Vigenère), indicating his passion for enigmas and description; a few pre- liminary epigrams in the French translation of Philostratus’s famous ekphrastic Images; and a partial translation of the Annales ecclésiastiques of Cardinal César Baronius, a Catholic work. 63. Th e praise of Henri IV at the beginning of the text could have been in- serted later. 64. [Artus], L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, 66. 65. Ibid., 79. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 81. 68. Ibid., 93. 69. Ibid., 137–138. 70. Ibid., 186–187. 71. Ibid., 87. 72. Ibid., 115–116. 73. Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, 41. 74. I borrow the conceptual oppositions “theatricality” and “absorption” from Michael Fried, who analyzes them in the context of eighteenth-century French paintings in Absorption and Th eatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Di- de rot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Eighteenth-century paint- notes to conclusion 265 ings depict an emotive refl ection that occurs in the private realm that is not yet thematized in the sixteenth century, but the idea of a refl ectivity that is semi- autonomous has its origin in the period. 75. Th e title of the essay in question is “Du démentir.” Th is French word de- notes self-contradiction, as in stating the opposite of that which one stated earlier. For Montaigne, démentir is the most explicit form of lying, which involves the act of denying one’s lie (dé-mentir), a hyperbolic form of untruthful speech. Mon- taigne, Oeuvres complètes, 649. 76. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 5: 228. 77. “Mixed spaces” are at once private and public, and it is upon these spaces that “the monarchy relies when it controls them, but combats them when they resist it.” See Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala, introduction to De la publica- tion: Entre Renaissance et lumières, ed. Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 17. 78. Journal de l’Estoile (Henri IV ), 2: 214. 79. L’Estoile, Registre-Journal, 6: 174.

Conclusion 1. Reconciliation among opposing factions during Henri IV’s reign clearly failed: after his assassination the Leaguers and the politiques found themselves opposed again, albeit under diff erent names. Th e former congregated in devo- tional societies and supported absolutism, the latter defended Gallicanism and attacked the Jesuits. 2. I borrow the notion of the “agonism” and “agonistic” from the political theories of Chantal Mouff e. Mouff e’s theory is applied to democracies, whose basic structure she sees as permanently confl ictual and antagonistic, rather than consensual (Habermas). Within such a political structure, “agonism” denotes the ideal “relation where the confl icting parties recognize the legitimacy of their op- ponents, although [they] acknowledg[e] that there is no rational solution to the confl ict.” Turning the antagonistic structure of a civil-war society into a menip- pean satire would indeed mean to create a forum, albeit an imaginary one, for recognizing the legitimacy of the other’s claim and point of view—without the idea of negotiating a common ground, however. As a rhetorical form, menippean satire tries to accommodate diversity through the medium of lists and digests even before political pluralism becomes thinkable. See Chantal Mouff e, “Some Refl ec- tions on an Agonistic Approach to the Public,” in Making Th ings Public: Atmo- spheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 805. 3. Providing a brilliant example of the former approach that analyzes polemi- cal literature in the context of the social and economic aspects of its production and diff usion, Christian Jouhaud examines the most famous polemical literature of seventeenth-century France, the Mazarinades, in the context of their social and 266 notes to conclusion material production and diff usion in Mazarinades: La fronde des mots (Paris: Au- bier, 1985). 4. Dale K. Van Kley develops these parallels between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. He also suggests that the anti-clericalism fostered through these returns to the sixteenth century and to the images of the League ultimately weaken the sacredness of absolutist power. See Th e Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560– 1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 160– 170. 5. Grosley, “Vie de Pierre Pithou.” Cited in Simon Goulart, Memoires de la Ligue contenant les évenemens les plus remarquables depuis 1576 . . . (Amsterdam: Arkstrée & Merkus, 1758), 5: 469. Bibliography

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Page numbers in italic refer to fi gures. agonism, 215, 265n2 219, 217-218, 223n12, 254n74; Satyres chres- Agrippa von Nettesheim, 101 tiennes de la cuisine papale [attr. to Bèze], A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 36 4, 102– 119, 172, 250– 251n11; La Verité ca- “Alchemy of Purgatory, Th e.” See Disputa- chee, devant cent ans, 69; La Vie de Saint tions chrestiennes (Viret) Katherine, 192 Amboise, conspiracy of, 140, 142, 150– 151, Antichrist, depictions of, 41, 42, 71– 74, 158 72– 74 America (Bry), 167 Antinature (Antiphysie), 95 Americas, 162, 166– 167 Antiquités de Rome, Les (du Bellay), 58 anagnostes, 206 Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, 29 anaphora, 124 anus and feces, as symbols, 118 Angelic Doctor, Th e. See Aquinas, Apelles’ Slander, 84, 87 Th omas of Apollo, 13, 106– 107, 110– 113 Anjou, Henri d’ (Duke of Anjou), 152– 155 Aquinas, Th omas of, 10, 25, 96. Works: anonymous publications, 233n8, 248n47, Summa contra gentiles, 25 264n62; Articles veritables [attr. to Mar- aristocracy, 32, 94, 134, 140 court], 66– 68, 237n5; Complaint of Peace Articles veritables [attr. to Marcourt], 66– 68, [attr. to Erasmus], 46– 48, 47, 52; Confes- 237n5. See also placards, Zwinglian sion de Beda, 69– 71, 70; Declaration de Artus, Th omas. See Th omas, Artus la Messe [attr. to Marcourt and Viret], Assembly of the Estates (1593), 176– 177 77; Discours de la vermine et prestraille de atoms, 111, 247n28 Lyon, 123– 125; Discovrs svr la mort de Gas- audience for polemical books: aristocracy, par de Coligny, 155– 157; Elegie satyriqve svr 88; bourgeoisie, 6, 40, 214; common peo- la mort de Gaspar de Colligny, 255n81; Epis- ple, 28, 35– 37, 122, 127– 128, 142, 252n39; tola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii [attr. diligent readers, 80; France, 122, 140, 150; to Bèze], 121, 129– 130; Les Faictz de Jesus future generations, 143– 144; ignorant, Christ et du Pape, 71– 74, 74, 167; La Farce malleable people, 28, 37, 40, 142; king, des Th eologastres, 14, 19– 20, 44– 53; His- 66– 67, 69, 83, 88, 95; moderate human- toire de la mappe-monde papistique [attr. ists, 89; new readers, 48; Parisians, 55, 178, to Trento], 161, 166– 175, 256n8; L’Isle des 185– 189, 208; people willing to laugh, 10, Hermaphrodites [attr. to Th omas], 208– 62–63, 121– 122, 185– 186; readers of other 214, 264n62; L’ Isle Sonante, 159– 160; Le books, 194; “riotous mob,” 142; royalists, Livre des marchans [attr. to Marcourt], 75- 140; urban dwellers, 18, 28, 39, 130– 131; 78, 80-81, 98, 172; Passevent parisien re- women, 37– 40, 38, 48, 231nn45– 47. See spondent à Pasquin Romain [attr. to De- also communities of readers siré], 128– 132; Satyre Menippee [attr. to Auerbach, Erich, 135 Leroy, et al.] 159-160, 175-184, 186, 188, 215- Austin, J. L., 12, 25– 26, 224n20 284 index

Badius, Conrad, 2, 4, 15, 102, 104, 248n40 Briçonnet, Guillaume, 29 ball, rolling like a, 95, 106, 120– 121 Bruno, Giordano, 153, 253n48. Works: Ex- ban on printing, 35, 62– 63, 65, 238n13 pulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 153 Barricades, Day of the, 179, 183, 187, 192 Bry, Th eodor de. Works: America, 167 Batailles du Chevalier Celeste, Les, (Desiré), Buon, Gabriel, 145, 146 135 Burckhardt, Jacob, 86, 241n52 Béda, Noël: confession (false) of, 69– 71, 70; Burke, Peter, 86 life of, 227n2, 234n20, 238n13; on Luther, 26, 53, 233n14; response to death of, 127; Calvin, John: encouragement of exile or as subject of ridicule, 46, 49, 53, 59, 64, martyrdom, 89– 92, 242n68; on meth- 234– 235n15 ods of criticism, 97; personality attributed belly, as symbol, 61, 102, 115– 118, 117, 124, to special grace, 82; on poetry/fi ction, 8; 246n20 portrayed in other works, 130– 131, 137; Benveniste, Émile, 61 on Rabelais, 94– 95; on relics, 80– 82; self- Bernard of Luxemburg, 23– 27, 24. Works: description, 83, 103; strategy of writing Catalogus haereticorum, 23– 27, 24 of, 87– 90, 240n44. Works: Contre la secte Berquin, Louis: as character in Farce des phantastique et furieuse, 92– 93; De scanda- Th eologastres, 48– 54; life of, 45, 46, 48, lis (Des scandales), 13, 94, 115; Excuse de Je- 232n4; translations of Erasmus, 46, 48, han Calvin, 90– 92; Institutes of the Chris- 232n4. Works: La Complainte de la Paix tian Religion, 83– 84, 89, 102, 111; Petit (translation), 46– 48, 47, 68 Traité monstrant, 89; Traité des reliques, 80 Bèze, Th éodore de: on Calvin, 82; on Cath- Calvinism: compared to Lutheran Reforma- olic theology, 99; copied in other works, tion, 75; and cosmography, 106– 107; crit- 137– 138; portrayed in other works, 130, icism of, 131; and “doctrine,” 240n47; and 168; as possible author of Satyres Chres- nature, 111; and primitive culture, 100; tiennes, 120– 121; as translator, 136; use of and purgatory, 99; and the sacred, 82 drunkard imagery by, 115– 116. Works: cannibalism, as symbol, 100, 166– 167, 170, Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii 172, 222n5 [anon. pub.], 121, 129– 130; Vrais Pour- Casas, Bartolomé de las, 167 traits, 107 Casaubon, Isaac, 2 Bibliothèque de Madame Montpensier Catalogus haereticorum (Bernard of Luxem- (l’Estoile), 198– 203, 199, 202 burg), 23– 27, 24 blasphemy. See cursing Catherine de Lorraine, 198 Blazon des heretiques (Gringore), 28– 35, 31, Catherine de Médicis, 120, 127, 155– 156, 192 42, 127, 153 Catholic ceremonies: fasting and breaking blowers, as symbol, 23, 30, 161 fast, 116, 134, 202; images of, 74, 112– 114, body, symbols involving: anus and feces, 118; 216– 219, 217– 218; Introibo, 113; League use belly, 61, 102, 115–118, 117, 124, 246n20; of, 193; as source of coronation ceremo- eyes, 242n63; feet, 157; heart, 33– 34; pass- nies, 121. See also Eucharist ing wind, 131; tongue, 45, 60; urine, 59– Catholic church: and classifi cation and in- 61, 185, 235n33; vomit and putrefaction, ventory of heresies, 25; as continuation of 113– 114, 116 pagan culture, 99– 100, 110; and role in body/bodies: Christ’s, 66, 80– 82, 90– 92; salvation, 75; and role of print in spread- Coligny’s, 155– 157; de Guise brothers’, ing heresy, 28. See also pope and papacy, 204, 205; emperor of Spain’s, 177; God’s, symbols of 61; heretic’s, 30– 32, 31; Hydra’s, 153– 154 Catholic League. See League, Catholic books: marketing of, 122; as means to im- Catholicon metaphor, 176– 177 print common people, 142, 252n39; se- Cave, Terence, 160, 246n26, 247n31, 256n7 ductive power of, 37, 39; as symbols, 25, Cavillon, François (Pierre de Vingle), 68, 75, 30, 32, 42, 115. See also militant literature; 237n4, 238n10, 256n8 printing/printing press; typographical de- censorship: ban on printing, 35, 62– 63, 65, sign and organization 238n13; eff ectiveness of, 19; and heretic Bouwsma, William, 91 lists, 17, 25– 27, 227– 228n8; l’Estoile on, index 285

189– 190; nature of literary crimes, 65; or- 62, 234n21; in L’isle des Hermaphrodites, gans of, 261n9; purpose of, 190 209; purposes of, 13– 15, 234n21, 236n39 Charles IX, 42, 141– 142, 155– 156, 249n8 Charon, 172–174, 173 Day of the Barricades, 179, 183, 187, 192 Chartier, Roger, 15 de Certeau, Michel, 51, 100, 192, 227n2, choice, sense of, 102 241n59 Christ, depictions of: with Guise brothers, decontextualized citation, 99, 101, 107– 108, 203– 206, 205; in Les faictz de Jesus Christ, 111–112 71– 74, 72, 74; in Livre des marchans, 76– Defence and Illustration of the French Lan- 77, 80; Mercury as, 52; with Nicodemus, guage (du Bellay), 140 91– 92; as “sweet odor,” 105 deixis, 89– 90 Christian logos, 46– 47, 53 des Autels, Guillaume, 140, 143 Cicero, 62 De scandalis (Des scandales) (Calvin), 13, 94, classical antecedents of Christianity: Apollo, 115 13, 106– 107, 110– 113; Gringore on, 34; Desiré, Artus: anonymous books in style of, Hercules, 153; Mercury, 50, 52– 53; Oedi- 128; imitated by Rabelais, 186; imitation pus, 157; Ronsard allegories on, 143, 153– of Rabelais by, 132– 136; life of, 8, 127– 128, 154; Viret on, 99– 100 249nn4; portrayal of female reader by, “clean” rhetoric, 45, 54 37–40, 38; Ronsard’s parodies of, 8; writ- Clément, Jacques, 216– 219, 217–218 ing style, 127– 128. Works: Contrepoison, clothing, as symbol: lavish, 207, 209; mot- 136; La singerie des Hvgvenots, 139– 140; ley, 30; serpents hiding in, 30, 143; torn, Les Batailles du Chevalier Celeste, 135; Les shabby, 132– 133 grandes chroniques, 131– 132; Plaisants et ar- Coligny, Gaspar de, 94, 153– 157 monieux cantiques, 136– 139, 138 Colloquy of Poissy (1560), 99, 120– 121, 159 Des monstres et prodiges (Paré), 206– 207 communities of readers: ideal, 63– 64, 121– deus absconditus, 125 122, 147, 212– 214; shaping of, 7, 17–18, 43, devils, as symbols, 23, 24, 40, 41, 161–162, 171, 175; withdrawal creating, 186, 203, 168 212–213, 215–216 Dialogues of the Dead (Lucian), 172– 173 Complaint of Peace (Erasmus), 46– 48, 47, 52 Diefendorf, Barbara, 180, 192 Complainte de la Paix, La (Berquin trans. of “dirty” rhetoric, 45 Erasmus), 46– 48, 47, 68 Discours de la vermine et prestraille de Lyon Confession de Beda (anon.), 69– 71, 70 (anon.), 123– 125 Conley, Tom, 235n29, 237n46, 257-258n24, Discours des miseres de ce temps (Ronsard), 8, 261n10 139– 140, 143– 145, 146, 152 Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse (Cal- Discovrs svr la mort de Gaspar de Coligny vin), 92– 93 (anon.), 155– 157 Contre le trait des ans, Continuation (Ron- Disputations chrestiennes (Viret), 97, 98– 100 sard), 145, 147 distribution of printed material: by crier, 15, Contre les tenebrions lumiere evangelicque 16; eighteenth-century reprints, 216– 219, (Hangest), 35– 36 217– 218; at fairs, 122; by posting, 66; pri- Contrepoison (Desiré), 136 vate circulation, 188, 213– 214; smuggling, coq-a-l’âne poems, 43, 102, 156, 191 66, 97 Cornilliat, François, 29, 33 doctrine (personifi ed), 83, 87 Corrozet, Gilles, 57, 235n26. Works: La Fleur doctrines. See Eucharist; purgatory des antiquités, 57, 236n26 dogs, as symbols, 46– 48, 47, 115 cosmographic writing, 161– 163 Dorat, Jean, 143, 156– 157 Cosmography (Th evet), 166, 258– 259nn24– 25 drinking, praised as convivial, 11, 115 Cotgrave, Randle, 2, 12– 13, 51 drunkard, as symbol, 113, 115– 116, 117, 137 Council of Trent, 116 Dryness, William, 93, 244n86 counter-trenches, 193– 195, 262n28 du Bellay, Joachim, 58, 96, 140, 191. Works: Cranach, Lucas, 71– 74, 72– 74 Defence and Illustration of the French Lan- cursing: of crowd in Gargantua, 54– 57, 60– guage, 140; Les antiquités de Rome, 58 286 index

Dubois, Claude-Gilbert, 17, 187, 245n6 fabricated worlds, 159– 161, 168– 169, 172– Duval, Edwin, 192, 250– 251n22 179 “facetious writings,” 103, 115, 181, 224n19 ears of a donkey, as symbols, 95, 113 Faictz de Jesus Christ et du Pape, Les (anon.), eclipse, as symbol, 106–107, 108– 109 71– 74, 74, 167 Edict of Amboise, 127 Faith (personifi cation), 49–50 Edict of Écouen, 120 faith and prudence, balancing, 10– 14, 44– Edict of January, 127 45, 50, 52 église (personifi ed), 88 false accuser archetype, 46 Elegie sur les troubles d’Amboise (Ronsard), Farce des Th eologastres, La (anon.), 14, 19– 140 20, 44– 53 Elemens ennemis de l’hydre, Les (Ronsard), Farel, Guillaume, 46, 65– 66, 168– 169, 169, 154– 155 238n9 Encomium moriae. See Praise of Folly feces, as symbol, 118 (Erasmus) feet, as symbol, 157 engaged literature, 5, 221n3 “fi ctions” as false knowledge, 99– 100 Epistola Magistri Benedicti Passavantii “fl aying” of Latin, 36, 230n37 [Bèze], 121, 129– 130 Fleur des antiquités, La (Corrozet), 57, Erasmus, Desiderius: on ambiguity of Scrip- 236n26 ture, 52, 233n12; on balancing prudence fools, licensed, 29 and faith, 10– 11; on crowd and preach- France: and French character, 190; mapped ers, 60; and “folly,” 44– 45, 48, 55, 63, to Geneva, 134; as prey of Hydra, 153– 154; 209; on poetic “ragout,” 114– 115; on pur- as realm of Gaster, 121; societal transfor- pose of satire, 10– 11, 96; and Slander, 84– mation in sixteenth century, 32. See also 87, 85–86 ; and tongue symbolism, 45, 60. Paris and Parisians Works: Complaint of Peace [anon. pub.], Franciade (Ronsard), 156 46–48, 47, 52; Lingua, 45, 51, 86; New Tes- François I: addressed by reformers, 66– 67, tament . . . Annotations, 84– 87, 85–86 ; Po- 69, 83, 88, 95; and attitude toward reform- ludaitia, 114; Praise of Folly, 10, 44, 55, 60, ers, 29, 56– 57, 95, 225n27, 238n13; and Ber- 115, 209 quin, 46, 48; and burning of heretics, eschatological literature, 27, 228n9 241n57; and confrontation with Sorbonne Eskrich, Pierre, 161– 169, 256n8, 257n17. (1533), 54– 56, 234n20; lack of piety of, 56– Works: See Mappe-monde nouvelle papis- 57; printing ban issued/repealed by, 35, tique, La (Eskrich) 62– 63, 65, 238n13 Essais (Montaigne), 39, 189, 203, 212 François II, 127, 140 Estienne, Henri, 223n12 Fratres (dramatic character), 49– 53 Estienne, Robert, 250n14. Works: Th esaurus French Caviller (Pierre de Vingle), 68, 75, Linguae Latinae, 103– 104 237n4, 238n10, 256n8 etymologies, false: Paris from parrhesia, 56– 57; Paris from par rys, 60; satire from sa- Gargantua (Rabelais): cited in other works, tyr, 2. See also wordplay 178– 179; compared to Erasmian “folly,” Eucharist: defense of, 245n10; importance of 44– 45; epigram, 62– 63; and Great Chron- disagreement on, 120, 233n11; portrayed icles, 59; historical setting of, 55; Paris and as cannibalism, 100, 167; proto-Cartesian Parisians in, 55– 62, 185– 186; prologue, argument against, 66, 81 115; publication date of, 236n42; synop- excommunication, ritual of, 25– 26, sis of, 54– 55 227n1 Gaster (dramatic character), 116, 118, 121 Excuse de Jehan Calvin (Calvin), 90– 92 Genette, Gérard, 61 Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Bruno), Geneva: Catholic depictions of, 130– 135; 153 community of polemicists in, 121– 122; external inscription, 19, 33– 34, 43, form of satire in, 97, 102, 129; images 126 banned in, 162; reformation via placards, eye, as symbol, 242n63 66; Ronsard on, 149 index 287 gestures, pointing, 23– 25, 24, 71, 72, 88– 89, Ignatius of Antioch, Saint, 33 92–94 illness, as symbol, 45, 50– 52. See also body, gestures, word, 51 symbols involving gestures of accusation/rejection, 20, 92, 119 Illustrations des Gaules (Lemaire de Bel- gestures of deixis, 89– 90 ges), 57 gestures of repetition, 51 images. See typographical design and gestures of teaching/preaching, 23– 25, 24, organization 42, 71, 72 imaginary library, 171 gestures of unbelief, 112 imitation, contrasted with copying, 160 Giese, Frank S., 127, 249n4, 250n11 imprime, 142 Glauser, Alfred, 59, 235n33, 239n24, 256n4 indulgences, 74, 74, 77 “God of dough,” 120, 167 inscription, external, 19, 33– 34, 43, 126 Grandes chroniques, Les (Desiré), 131– 132 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), Gringore, Pierre, 29, 229n13. Works: Blazon 83– 84, 89, 102, 111 des heretiques, 28– 35, 31, 42, 127, 153 Instruction pour l’adolescence du Roy (Ron- Guise brothers, 150, 156, 176, 187, 192– 207 sard), 142 passim, 205 invisible spiritual realm, 66– 67, 71, 78, 81, 89– 90, 94 Hangest, Jérôme d’, 35– 37, 126– 127. Works: “iron age,” 143, 145, 154– 155 Contre les tenebrions lumiere evangelicque, Isle des Hermaphrodites, L’ (Th omas), 208– 35– 36 214, 264n62 Harangue des ministres (Viret), 99 Isle Sonante, L’ (anon.), 159–160 Hell: connected to Spanish rule, 177– 178; connected with Catholic League, 183– Jeanneret, Michel, 137, 247n32 184; connected with pope, 71, 73, 161– 162; Jones, Serene, 88– 89, 94, 241– 242n60 mythical location of, 99– 100; symbol- judgment vs. wit, 211– 213 ized by papal kitchen, 4, 102– 107, 112– 114, Julius II, Pope, 29 188– 122; as symbol of heresy, 23 Jupiter, 143, 155 Henri II, 29, 95, 120, 225n27, 248n45 Juvenal, 104– 105 Henri III: in l’Estoile’s journals, 191– 208 passim; reign of, 158, 179, 187– 189 Kahn, Victoria, 11, 44, 232n1 Henri IV (Henri de Navarre), 158– 159; assas- king. See monarchy, French sination of, 265n1; in l’Estoile’s journals, King of Free Will, 161, 164– 165, 165, 257n21 187– 188, 194– 198, 197, 206–207, 212–213; kitchen, as symbol, 4, 102– 107, 112– 114, movements toward Catholicism of, 193– 188–122 194; reign of, 158– 159; 175– 183, 187– 188, knowledge, true and false, 25, 27, 99– 101, 111 216, 265n1 Koerner, Joseph, 131, 238n15, 250n17 Hercules, 153 heretics/heresies: characterized as sedition, las Casas, Bartolomé de. Works: Short Ac- 65, 88; indexes and lists of, 17, 25– 27, 227– count of the Destruction of the Indies, 167 228n8; polemicists’ need to study, 25; sym- Latin, use of, 11, 26, 36– 37, 46, 48 bols of, 23– 31, 24, 31; tree of, 40– 42, 41 laughter: excess of, 61, 236n40; God’s, 94; hermaphrodites, as symbols, 22, 206– 214 insights imparted by, 186, 204, 206; in- Hilary (dramatic character), 98, 100 toxication from, 116; king’s, 213; l’Estoile Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique [attr. and, 204; Rabelais and, 61– 64, 119, 185– to Trento], 161, 166– 175, 256n8 186, 214; sardonic, 112, 119, 129; therapeu- Holbein, Ambrosius, 84– 89, 85, 86, 94 tic, 237n45; and vomit, 114 host, the. See Eucharist Lazard, Madelaine, 189 Huchon, Mireille, 159– 160 League, Catholic: actions of, 176– 180, 188– Huguenots, defi ned, 97 189, 265n1; portrayed in Registre-Journal, Hulubei, Alice, 128 191– 204, 197, 216, 217; portrayed in Satyre Hydra, 42, 152– 155 Menippe and supplements, 176– 178, 183– Hydre desfaict, L’ (Ronsard), 153– 154 184, 254n74 288 index

Le Breton, François, 195– 196, 262– 263n33 Lyon polemicists, 122– 125 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques, 26, 29 lyre, as symbol, 13, 112– 113, 141 Lefranc, Abel, 68 Lemaire de Belges, Jean. Works: Illustrations Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (Villon), 110 des Gaules, 57 male imagery, 46 Lenient, Charles, 4– 5, 121 Mann, Margaret, 46, 232n4 Leo X, Pope, 25– 26, 86 Mappe-monde nouvelle papistique, La (Esk- Lernean Hydra, 153 rich): analogy with New World discover- l’Estoile, Pierre de: on carnivals, 202–203; as ies, 162, 166– 167, 177; Charon’s ferry in, compiler and collector, 9, 187– 188, 190– 172– 174, 173; depictions of militant liter- 191, 214, 259n38, 261n13; on inevitability of ature, 167– 168, 168– 170; details of, 164– expression, 189– 190; on League, 191– 198, 165, 164–165 ; organization of, 161– 162; re- 202– 203; on Le Breton, 195– 196; life of, lation of map to accompanying text, 161, 187– 188; and mechanisms of citation and 163–165, 174–175 arrangement, 191– 198, 201– 204; on satire, maps, 134, 161– 169 193– 194; and “showing,” 198. Works: Bi- Marcourt, Antoine, 66– 67, 75, 77, 237n5. bliothèque de Madame Montpensier, 198– Works: Articles veritables [anon. pub.], 203, 199, 202; L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, 66–68, 237n5; Livre des marchans [anon. 208–214, 264n62; Memoires-Journeaux pub.], 75– 80, 98, 172. See also placards, d’un curieux, 189; Memoires pour servir à Zwinglian l’histoire de France, 216; Registre-Journal Marguerite de Navarre, 92, 94, 234n20, d’un curieux, 187– 193, 261n13 242– 243n70 Lestringant, Frank, 222n5, 226n35, 242n68, marketplace, as symbol, 76– 80, 98, 169, 256nn10-11, 257nn15-16, 258n25, 258n27, 170 259n43 Marot, Clément, 39, 101–102, 122, 136– 137 l’Hôpital, Michel de, 127, 141– 142 martyrs: Calvin on, 89– 90, 94, 242n68; liberté françoise, 189– 190, 195, 219 Guise brothers as, 203– 204, 205 Libertines, 92– 93 Mary, Virgin, 33 “liberty” of female reader, 37– 39, 38 Mayenne, duc de, 192, 262n33 Lingua (Erasmus), 45, 51, 86 McLuhan, Marshall, 17 literacy rates, 40 Meaux, reformers of, 29, 52, 65, 227n8, 238n9 literary crimes, 65 Medusa, as symbol, 196– 198, 197, 213 Livre des marchans, Le [attr. to Marcourt], Melanchthon, Philipp, 42, 48, 93 75– 80, 98, 172 Memoires-Journeaux d’un curieux (l’Estoile), Lizet, Pierre, 121, 129, 248n45 189 Lorraine, cardinal of, 192 Memoires pour servir à l’histoire de France Louis XII, 29, 32, 57, 229n13 (l’Estoile), 216 Louis XV, 216 memory: artifi cial, 28, 34, 162, 171; creating Lucian of Samosata, 84, 86, 172– 173, a collective, 182– 183; erasing, 179– 182, 186, 258n35. Works: Dialogues of the Dead, 260n49; repetition to aid, 173– 174 172– 173 Ménager, Daniel, 139, 150, 155 lute, as symbol, 141, 156 menippean satire, 18, 103, 175– 176, 182, 215. Luther, Martin: on clarity of Scripture, See also Satyre Menippee 233n12; excommunication of, 25– 26; por- Menippus, 175, 223n12 trayals of, 143; regarding spiritual and Mercury, 50, 52– 53 ethical realms, 44; ridicule of papacy by, Mere Sotte (dramatic character), 29 46; on Scripture as sole authority, 53– 54; Midas, King, 13, 60, 84, 112– 113 superstitious fear of name, 51. Works: Pas- militant literature: books as weapons in, 5, sional Christi vnnd Antichristi (with Cra- 141, 144– 145, 152; in La mappe-monde, 167, nach), 71– 74, 72– 73 168–170 , 174; Lenient on, 4– 5; l’Estoile “Lutheran” (as term for doctrine and follow- and, 194; verbal shield against, 30 ers of Luther), 25, 52– 53 Minerva, 155 index 289 mirror, as symbol, 30, 31 other, the: Béda as, 69; creating, 17, 51, Misoquene, Agnoste (fi ctional author), 178 226n34; repudiation of, 35, 112; self and, mixed space. See space, public and private 32, 62, 124– 125, 137 monarchy, French: criticized by Catholics, 127, 147; identifi ed with Catholic cere- Pan’s fl ute, 13, 112– 113 mony, 121; identifi ed with Parisians, 56– Pantagruel (Rabelais), 75– 76, 102, 132– 135, 57, 62, 183–184; king’s healing power, 56, 171, 239n24, 250– 251n22 235n24; politics of reconciliation, 127– “Pantople.” See Marcourt, Antoine 128, 141; portrayed as religious judges, 87– Panurge (dramatic character), 133– 135, 88, 94– 95; power desacralized in placards, 236n44, 250– 251n22 66; power struggles with Sorbonne, 55– papacy, symbols of. See pope and papacy, 56, 87– 88; relationship to heretical books, symbols of 213; Ronsard’s defense of, 139– 142. See also Paré, Ambroise. Works: Des monstres et individual monarchs prodiges, 206– 207 monks, 26, 115, 119, 123– 125, 132– 133 Paris and Parisians: fi ckleness/unruliness monsters, 93– 94, 143, 244n92 of, 54– 57, 179, 183, 185– 192; legends of or- Montaigne, Michel de, 39, 153, 189. Works: igin of, 57– 58, 60, 178– 179; in l’Estoile’s Essais, 39, 189, 203, 211– 212 journals, 188– 189, 192, 208; portrayed in Montpensier, Madame de (dramatic charac- Gargantua, 55– 61, 185– 186; portrayed in ter), 198– 203, 216– 219, 217– 218 Passevent parisien, 130; portrayed in Satyre moon, as symbol, 106– 107, 108– 109, 172, Menippe, 178– 179; portrayed in Satyres 183–184 chrestiennes, 119 Mouchy, Antoine, 37 parrhesia, 56– 57, 61, 178– 181, 185– 192 passim, 259– 260n47 natural memory, 34 Pasquin (dramatic character), 128– 130 natural revelation, 8 pasquinade, defi ned, 237– 238n7 nature: Epicurean, 111; inauthentic, 111; op- Passepartout (dramatic character), 131–135 posed to Antinature, 95 Passevent (dramatic character), 128– 132 negative ontologies, 9, 98, 120, 158, 169 Passevent parisien respondent à Pasquin Ro- negative worlds, 9, 158, 169, 201 main [attr. to Desiré], 128– 132 neologisms, 67, 240n44 Passional Christi vnnd Antichristi (Luther Neuchâtel: anonymous books from, 68– 69, and Cranach), 71– 74, 72– 73 70; placards, 66; press, 238n9; printers of, patrimony, 57 67– 74, 72– 74 Peace (personifi cation), 46, 47 New Testament . . . Annotations (Erasmus), peddlers, 15, 16, 55 84– 87, 85–86 Pellêve, Nicolas de, 177– 178 New World, 162, 166– 167 performative utterances, 12, 26, 180, 224n20 Nicodemites/Nicodemus, 90– 92, Petit Traité monstrant (Calvin), 89 242– 243nn70– 71 phallus and phallic symbols, 125, 200 nobility, 32, 94, 134, 140 Philip Augustus, 113 Notre Dame cathedral, 54– 56, 59, 132, 136– Physique papale, La (Viret), 98– 99 137, 234– 235n22 piety, internal and external, 33– 37, 75, 137 Nouvelles des Regions de la Lune (anon.), 176, pirated editions: of Gringore’s Blazon, 42, 178–180 231– 232n50; of Ronsard’s work, 147, 148, Nyuerd, Guillaume de, 42 151, 253– 254n62 placards, Catholic, 203, 234n20 Oedipus, 157 placards, Zwinglian: authorship of, 66, 77; Oeuvres (Ronsard), 152 Calvin’s response to, 83, 88; chronology Ong, Walter, 17 of, 237n2; design/content of, 6, 36, 66– 68, onomastics, 25– 27 81, 237– 238n7; events surrounding, 35– 36, Opinion (personifi cation), 143 62, 65– 66, 230n30, 237n2, 241n57; Hang- Ordine, Nuccio, 153, 253n46, 253n48 est’s responses to, 36– 37, 126– 127, 230n31 290 index

Plaisants et armonieux cantiques (Desiré), prudence and faith, balancing, 10– 14, 44– 136– 139, 138 45, 50, 52 Platina, 104 public space. See space, public and private plural form, use of, 49 purgatory, 26, 99– 100, 161 poetic theology, 20, 99– 100, 245n11 putrefaction, as symbol, 113– 114, 116 poetry of combat. See militant literature pointing: gestures of, 23– 25, 24, 71, 72, 88– Quart livre (Rabelais), 94– 95, 101, 116, 160 89, 92– 94; hand symbol (manicule), 80, Quignet, Pierre du, 132 240n39 Quintin du Hainaut, 93– 94 politiques, defi ned, 207, 265n1 Poludaitia (Erasmus), 114 Rabelais, François: on Calvin, 95; “Fifth pope and papacy, symbols of: Antichrist, Book” (reuse by other authors), 132– 135, 46, 71– 74, 72– 74; Bacchus, 104; cauldron, 159– 161; and laughter, 119, 185– 186; mock 123– 124, 246n20; Celestial Knight, 136; catalog of Saint-Victor, 171, 198; refer- edifi ce, 99, 103; fairground, 75–80, 239n33; enced in other works, 75– 76, 115– 116, Gaster (stomach), 118; hell/purgatory, 120, 186. Works: Pantagruel, 75– 76, 102, 132– 161– 162, 174– 175; King of Free Will, 161, 135, 171, 239n24, 250– 251n22; Quart livre, 164–165, 165, 257n21; kitchen, 4, 102– 107, 94– 95, 101, 116, 160; Tiers livre, 94, 160, 112– 114, 188– 122; marketplace, 76– 80, 98, 236n44. See also Gargantua (Rabelais) 169, 170; monk calf, 93; New World, 166– Racaut, Luc, 9, 21, 27, 228n9, 230n38 167; snowman, 110 rats, as symbols, 30 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 10, 44, 55, 60, 115, readers: instructions to, 13– 14, 62– 63, 105, 209 115, 174– 175; non-writing, 40, 231n46; as preachers, street: as Catholic allies, 57, 177, participants/inhabitants, 93, 158– 159, 172– 188– 189, 216, 217, 234n20; compared to 175; withdrawn, 211– 213; women, 37– 40, peddlers, 55; manipulating crowd, 188– 38, 48, 231nn45– 47. See also communities 189, 192, 216, 217; rhetoric of, 28, 35, 127, of readers 228n11, 259n43 reading: as choice, 102, 122; compared to di- Priapist (dramatic character), 135– 136 gestion, 107, 110, 114; “violent,” 229n25 printers: Badius, Conrad, 2, 4, 15, 102, 104, Reason (personifi cation), 49–50 248n40; Buon, Gabriel, 145, 146; Es- register/tone: deliberate lowering of, 13, 61, tienne, Robert, 103– 104, 250n14; Gibier, 106, 128, 225n24, 247n32; mixing of, 97, E., 256n2; of Neuchâtel, 68– 74, 72– 106, 135; reasons for lowering, 11, 103, 128, 74; Nourry, Claude, 68, 75; Nyuerd, 131 Guillaume de, 42; “Pierre de Vignolle” Registre-Journal d’un curieux (l’Estoile), (fi ctional), 238n12; of Troyes, 147; “Ty- 187–193 pographe” (fi ctional), 179– 181; Vingle, relics, 80– 82, 135, 167, 204, 257n16 Pierre de, 68, 75, 237n4, 238n10, 256n8 Remonstrance (Ronsard), 143, 145 printing/printing press: as cannon, 5; com- Responce aux injures et calomnies (Ronsard), petition for readers, 40; declared scandal- 144 ous, 62; François I ban on, 35, 62– 63, 65, res publica, 131, 250n17, 252n39 237n2, 238n13; impact of, 14– 15, 28, 35; as retreat/withdrawal, position of, 186, 203, iron pen, 144– 145, 151; literary crimes, 65. 212–213, 215–216 See also distribution of printed material; rhetoric of abundance, 7, 111, 118 typographical design and organization rhetoric of accusation, 20, 92– 93 private space. See space, public and private rhetoric of allegory, 143 prose, 15, 36, 76, 102– 103. See also prosime- rhetoric of amplifi cation, 36 tron form rhetoric of anaphora, 124– 125 “Proserpine,” 120 rhetoric of “cleanness” and “dirtiness,” 45 prosimetron form, 104, 105, 223n12 rhetoric of decontextualized citation, 99, proto-Cartesian argument, 66, 81 101, 107– 108, 111– 112 Proust, Marcel, 36 rhetoric of description, 94, 102– 105, 113 index 291 rhetoric of dialogue and argumentation, 98– 155; L’Hydre desfaict, 153– 154; Oeuvres, 152; 99, 102, 191 Remonstrance, 143, 145; Responce aux in- rhetoric of disgust, 118 jures et calomnies, 144 rhetoric of distance and refl ection, 216 Roussel, Gérard, 234n20 rhetoric of epideictic oratory, 88 rhetoric of evidence, 66– 69, 77, 79, 97– 99 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 42– 43, rhetoric of excess and exaggeration, 59– 61, 126, 141, 153, 155– 157, 180 67– 68, 76– 77, 113, 115, 235n32 Saint Ignatius, 33– 34 rhetoric of exclusion, 9, 19, 45 Sainte-Geneviève (hill), 54– 55 rhetoric of exposure, 92– 93 Salmon, J. H. M., 192 rhetoric of imagination, 177– 178 salvation, 75– 77, 79, 110 rhetoric of imitation, 7– 8, 63, 111, 135– 136, satire: false etymology from satyr, 2; “high,” 139 96; later, 214; “low,” 2; menippean, 18, rhetoric of inventory, 17, 67, 77– 82, 171, 190, 103, 175– 176, 182, 215; purpose of, 96, 97– 198 98, 158– 159; “satyre” defi ned, 103– 104 rhetoric of parrhesia, 56– 57, 61, 178– 181, 185– Saturn, 2, 3 192 passim, 259–260n47 Satyre Menippee de la vertu du Catholicon rhetoric of praise and disgrace, 155 d’Espagne: Catholic League portrayed rhetoric of ridicule/insults, 241n52; Calvin in, 176– 178, 183– 184, 254n74; eighteenth- and, 89, 97– 98; Charon and, 172-173; cre- century editions, 215– 219, 217–218 ; as ating sense of community, 174; Desiré model for debate, 18; Paris and Parisians and, 128– 129; directed at Béda, 46, 49; portrayed in, 178– 179; political stance Erasmus and, 115; l’Estoile and, 187, 198; of, 188 Rabelais and, 62, 186 Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale [attr. rhetoric of satire, 96– 97 to Bèze], 4, 102– 119, 172, 250– 251n11 rhetoric of simplicity, 76 satyrs, 2, 3–4 , 15, 104 rhetoric of the digest, 122, 201, 209–210 scandal, defi ned, 9– 13 rhetoric of variety, 7, 115, 122 Schrenck, Gilbert, 187–191 rhetorical functions, 241– 242n60 scissors, as symbol, 201 rhetoriqueurs, 33, 42 Scripture: Calvin’s dramatization of, 91; as rhyming, 52, 122, 127, 195 cannonballs, 166; detaching sacred from rhythm, 124, 172 physical places, 131; as literal truth, 46, 50; Rigolot, François, 118, 139– 140, 145, 147, as medium of spiritual profi t, 75, 78– 79; 226n35 providing vision/light, 8, 89, 105, 107; and Roche-Chandieu, Antoine de la, 149– 150, reason, 52, 97; and rivalry with fi ction, 151– 152 59, 96– 97, 99– 100, 151; as sole authority, Rome, cosmography of, 161– 162 8, 46, 51, 65, 66, 240n47; as spectacles, 8, Ronsard, Pierre de: accused of imitation, 8, 89; synonymous with doctrine, 96– 97, 149– 151; on artistic freedom, 254n71; bor- 240n47; as wholesome food/drink, 89, 105 rowing from, 149– 150, 155– 156; on classical sense of choice, 102 antecedents of Christianity, 143, 153– 154; serpentine verse, 43, 156 and Hydra symbolism, 152– 155; and mili- serpents, as symbols, 30, 143 tant poetry, 144– 145, 151– 152; pirated edi- Seyssel, Claude de, 32, 56 tions of, 147–149, 148; poetic persona of, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies 139– 141, 145– 146, 147; reformist responses (las Casas), 167 to, 149– 152; tailoring for audience by, 145. simulated reality, 68 Works: Contre le trait des ans, Continua- Singerie des Hvgvenots, La (Desiré), 139– 140 tion, 145, 147; Discours des miseres de ce Sixteen, the, 178, 188, 192 temps, 8, 139– 140, 143– 145, 146, 152; Elegie “skeptical suspension bridge,” 11, 44, 232n1 sur les troubles d’Amboise, 140; Franciade, Slander (personifi cation), 84–87, 85–86 156; Instruction pour l’adolescence du Roy, Sociétés joyeuses, 29 142; Les Elemens ennemis de l’hydre, 154– Soman, Alfred, 14 292 index

Sophocles, 157 three estates, 32 Sorbonne: ban on translation by, 252n34; Tiers livre (Rabelais), 94, 160, 236n44 Calvin on, 87; confrontation with Fran- tone. See register/tone çois I (1533), 54– 56, 234n20; Determinatio tongue, as symbol, 45, 60 of 1521, 26, 48, 233n14; index of forbidden topography, 121, 162– 169, 178– 180 books, 27; l’Estoile on, 192; ridicule of, toponymy, of Paris, 54, 57– 58, 60 48; and street preachers, 57, 234n20; tech- Tordesillas, Treaty of, 166 nical language of, 75– 76 Traité des reliques (Calvin), 80 “Sorbonnic colic,” 50 translatio, 110 space, public and private: in Gargantua, 60– Trans-substantiation (personifi cation), 167 61; invisible spiritual realm, 66– 67, 71, tree of heretics, 40– 42, 41 78, 81, 89– 90, 94; of laughter, 185– 186; Trento, Jean-Baptiste (Giovan Battista). in Livre des marchans, 79– 80, 81– 82; in Works: Histoire de la mappe-monde papis- Lyon, 123; place of memory, 180– 181; pri- tique [anon. pub.], 161, 166– 175, 256n8 vate space, 204, 211, 214; “publicness,” 131, Trompillon (dramatic character), 110– 111 250n17, 252n39; public realm of monarchy, Troy, Geoff rey, 57 139, 190; public space, competition for, Troyes, printers of, 147 193– 196, 203, 211; public space and Refor- Truth: personifi ed, 88, 94, 167; property of mation, 131; semi-private/mixed, 185– 186, Time, 4, 15; satyr as revealer of, 2, 104 189, 213; separate public realms, 180– 183; Tupinamba tribe, 166– 167 withdrawal for contemplation and refl ec- “Typographe” (fi ctional printer), 179– 181 tion, 186, 203, 212– 213, 215– 216 typographical design and organization: Spain, 167, 176– 178, 216, 217 chapters, 128; chronological arrange- spectacles of scripture, 8, 89 ment, 196; compilation, 101, 159– 160, 176; spiritual realm, 66– 67, 71, 78, 81, 89– 90, 94 design changes in pirated editions, 147, Spitzer, Leo, 67– 68, 235n32 148; digests, 122; ekphrastic descriptions, Stallybrass, Peter, 78 208, 210; footnotes, 17; framing narrator, stereotypes, 27, 35, 130, 228n9 207– 208; juxtaposition of elements, 26– Stultitiae laus. See Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 27, 171, 191, 196, 201– 204; marginal notes stumbling blocks: Calvin on, 81– 82, 89, 94, and ornaments, 17, 80, 103, 128; mystery 228n9, 242n63; and etymology of “scan- play format, 69; octavo format, 127; or- dal,” 9– 10, 13; Luther on, 225n24; visual dered catalogue, 26– 27, 101, 171, 227n7; depiction of, 163, 164, 167 parataxis, 163, 169– 174; quartos (pla- Suitte du Catholicon d’Espagne (suppl. to Sa- quettes), 145; reuse of images, 46– 48, 47, tyre Menippee), 176 70, 71; use of false covers, 69– 71, 70, 72; Summa contra gentiles (Aquinas), 25 wall map, 169 sun, as symbol, 106– 107, 108– 109, 189– 190, 246– 247n27 ultra-Catholic League. See League, Catholic Supplement du Catholicon (suppl. to Satyre unity, visions of: artifi cial, 33, 229n25; in Menippee), 176, 178– 180 Christian language, 51– 53; national, 176– Sybils, 34 178, 186, 212– 214; political, 141, 153, 160, 202– 203; religious, 143 Text (personifi cation), 49–50 urbanitas, 62, 178, 214 Th eologastres (dramatic character), 48– 54 urine, as symbol, 59– 61, 185, 235n33 Th eology (personifi cation), 151– 152 utile dulci, 97 theophagy, 100, 222n5, 229n27 utilitarian model, 77 theriac, 170– 171 utopian community of laughers, 62– 64, 214 Th esaurus Linguae Latinae (Estienne), utopian community of readers, 20, 45, 171, 103–104 215 Th evet, André, 166, 258– 259nn24– 25. Works: Cosmography, 166, 258– 259nn24– 25 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 104, 175– 176, Th omas, Artus, 206– 207, 264n62. Works: 223n12 L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, 208– 214 verbal violence, 1, 46, 52– 53, 187, 236n38 index 293 verbal wit, 221n1 reader, 37– 39, 38; as personifi cation of vérité (personifi ed), 88 Christian logos, 46– 48, 47 Verité cachee, devant cent ans, La (anon.), 69 Word, the. See Scripture vernacular, use of, 8, 13, 28, 36– 37, 48, 76, word-gesture, 51 229n29 wordplay: articulant, 67; brouillars, 107; Vie de Saint Katherine, La (anon.), 192 cloche and clocher, 234– 235n22; crues Villey, Pierre, 189 and crus, 137, 252n37; cuyder, 93; raison Villon, François, 110– 111 and desraison/déraison, 51; dire and mes- Vingle, Pierre de, 68, 75, 237n4, 238n10, dire, 204; Dorat and d’or, 156– 157; elire 256n8 and lire, 194; evangile, 95; fl a y L a t i n and violent reading, 229n25 fl ay the fox, 230n37; in Gargantua epi- Viret, Pierre, 97, 98– 101, 122, 130, 244n5, gram, 64; gaster and -gastre, 48– 49; gaster 245n6; on classical antecedents of Chris- and tout gaster, 118– 119; gras-buez, 113; Le tianity, 99– 100; portrayed in other works, Breton and bretonner, 196; lisez and scan- 130, 168– 169, 169. Works: Disputations dalisez, 64; livre, lisez and elire, 64; Luther chrestiennes, 97, 98– 100; Harangue des and luter, 34; Marot and marotte/marotter, ministres, 99; La Physique papale, 98– 99 136; matins and mastins, 137; monstrer and voice, incorporating into print, 76, 127– monstre, 203, 204; monstres and mons- 128 trum, 93; Noé and Noël (Béda), 69; Oedi- vomit and putrefaction, as symbol, 113– pus, 157; parrhesia and Parrhesians/Parre- 114, 116 siens, 57, 179, 188; par rys/par ris and Paris, Vrais Pourtraits (Bèze), 107 54, 60, 62, 119, 178– 179; Pasquin and pas- quinade, 130; Passavant and Passevent, 130; Weber, Max, 75, 78, 94 picquelardons, se picquer à and picquer, 119; White, Allon, 78 Quignet and quignet, 132; retraits, 113; rire wind, as symbol, 23, 50, 106, 129, 161 and ris, 64; salade and saladines, 113–114; wine barrel, as symbol, 115– 116, 117 sale and salé, 107; in Satyres chrestiennes, Wirth, Jean, 92 112; se scandaliser, 63, 236n44 withdrawal/retreat, position of, 186, 203, 212–213, 215–216 Yates, Frances, 162 wit vs. judgment, 211– 213 women: as audience for books, 37– 40, 38, Zamariel, A. (Antoine de la Roche- 48, 231nn45– 47; eff ect of female persona, Chandieu), 149–150, 151–152 12, 37, 40, 46, 201; “liberty” of female Zwinglian placards. See placards, Zwinglian