Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This 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.

9780804773546

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

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE - The Heretic and the Book

TWO - Clean and Dirty Words

THREE - Scandalous Evidence

FOUR - The Kitchen and the Digest

FIVE - Priests, Poets, and Print

SIX - Fabricated Worlds and the Menippean Satire

SEVEN - Public Scandals, Withdrawn Readers

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Figures

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Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to the contributions of many. Well before the seeds of this project were sown, a graduate seminar on Montaigne offered 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 offered me their thoughts and comments in Baltimore, Cambridge, Paris, and Los Angeles during the past three years, I would like to extend my warmest gratitude: 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 suggested 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 University of Southern California. I thank in particular Peggy Kamuf, Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Rebecca Lemon, Peter Mancall, Claudia Moatti, Natania Meeker, Panivog Norindr, Karen Pinkus, Tita Rosenthal, and Bruce Smith for their collegial and professional generosity.

The final draft of this project was completed while in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. The Radcliffe Institute provided conditions for research and writing during the year of 2006–2007 that were nothing less than ideal, but the heart of the program was the people. Let me mention only a few names, for whose friendship 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 Southern 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 offensive, but it can also, when it appears in printed books, appeal to readers. The religious, rhetorical, affective, and political possibilities of reception, appeal, and offense are each negotiated differently in the satires disseminated in sixteenth-century France that I examine 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 reflexive accounts of the effect of offensive words on the public and who also intervene in their own manner—to mitigate the effects 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 polemical texts and their relation to those humanistic or otherwise elite works that form part of our literary canon, (2) a rhetorical one about the different 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 offending 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 offensive or satirical views that it spawns—appears in this book as a literary, rhetorical, and imaginary exercise allowing readers to inhabit different worlds that at times disturb or exceed the actual religious and political order of early modern France.

A LITERATURE OF VITUPERATION?

To define 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. The most common one among these categories is satire, but instead of rushing to Renaissance debates, inherited from Roman commentaries on the moral function of satire, we need to bear in mind the prevalence and popularity of what we can call low satire, a form that inspired Cotgrave to define satire as an invective and a vice-rebuking poem in his early-seventeenth-century French-English dictionary. This definition takes us right to the heart of the matter. The words satyr and satire were believed to be etymologically linked until the philologist Casaubon disentangled them in the early seventeenth century, and the unruly figure 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 promoting. 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). The same figure 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 always) by a group. The coarse and lewd figure of the satyr embodies the rhetorical force of the assertions (that the printing press only amplifies) and also the unrestraint and even pleasure that are permitted in asserting those truths.¹

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.

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

Charles Lenient, a nineteenth-century bibliophile who wrote the only comprehensive study on the subject, implemented the term militant literature. ² His book—predictably from a scholar who sees the significance 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. The textual fragments that he cites are supposed to convey to the modern reader the hostility and violence implied in mockery and derision, in which Lenient sees the common trait of an otherwise undifferentiated mass of words and images. He describes satires as scrap metal (mitraille) that the printing press, like a cannon, spews forth. Lenient’s powerful and graphic metaphor 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 specific goals, this corpus seems paraliterary, rather than literary—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 specific body of texts within the polemical corpus, which it defines 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, polemical works that avail themselves of satirical and literary techniques bear the traces, in a historical sense, of a rising bourgeoisie and of the growing prestige 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 aristocracy, 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 definite 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.

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.

This 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 defined 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 stellar 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 different ones, of the classical tradition and form elitist, dynamic practices based on emulative exercises of imitation and contribute 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 different uses of their respective humanist cultures. However, the poet and Genevan theologian Théodore 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 instead 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 scholars do in their rivalry for prominence. But the polemical genres inherited from scholastic and humanistic traditions are modified, 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. They 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) education with a view to social self-promotion and advancement. They also often remember the Renaissance commonplace about the superiority of the author 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 effort, they strive to establish communities of readers.

The relation of polemical literature to literary culture has formed the object 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 imitation (imitatio), variety (varietas), and abundance (copia). This corpus reveals 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 citation, 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 accuse 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 polemical works on ideological grounds, we can distinguish between them rhetorically. Catholic polemicists availed themselves of traditional theological 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 traditionally, 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 They 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 (Zwinglian 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. Significantly, Calvin denies that natural revelation could give access to divine reason, and this rigorous exclusion disqualifies 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 fiction—terms with which he disqualifies not only the corpus of classical and modern poetry but also human knowledge in general.⁸ However, although all these discourses are disqualified on the epistemological plane, they return in Genevan polemical print as rhetorical means for advocating biblical science or doctrine. The effect 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 polemicists like Pierre Viret, Théodore de Bèze, Conrad Badius, and the author of the Histoire de la mappe-monde papistique considerable latitude in adopting, creating, and manipulating texts to engage in literary adventures in search of an audience. In some cases, it makes them strangely more, not less, literary.¹⁰

This 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 Reformation (the situation in this respect is very different from that of Germany). Luc Racaut’s observation that Catholic polemicists were ultimately more successful in winning over the population because they adopted a rhetoric of exclusion and hatred is right on target. However, propagandistic success does not equal cultural prominence. The techniques of organization and citation honed by Calvinist authors—including their use of a broad culture of reading—distinguish their efforts 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 fictional—insofar as the reading public of these books never fully coincides with people who profess the theology they promote. One can argue that Menippean satire, 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 differ considerably and his journals aim at mitigating the violence of vituperation. Literary techniques and innovations thus ultimately do not bear ideological labels in the literature of vituperation.

EARLY MODERN SCANDALS

This abundant and protean literature of vituperation can be read (and even enjoyed) today with the help of a category, that of the scandal. The word scandal has a specific meaning in the sixteenth century, which is not carried by its modern, secular usage. Its rhetorical force originates in biblical passages (in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) concerning the stumbling block that are subject to interpretation and become invested with specific theological and legal significance 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 religious significance deployed in the polemics, its social and political effect of mobilizing and dividing. This effect 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 offense of moral theology and canon law) from the church fathers through medieval theologians to Reformers and Counter-Reformers, we can single out Thomas Aquinas’s succinct and elegant formulation: something less rightly said or done that occasions [one’s own or another’s] downfall.¹⁴ Although satires first poke fun at the adversary’s theological errors, their readers find 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.

The 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. The first remarkable text to arouse a massive response from different audiences was Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium or Stultitiae laus), first published anonymously in Paris, in 1511. The 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 superstitious 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 response to the theologian Martin Dorp, Erasmus claims that it was principally his concern with the dangers of his utterances and an effort 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 The Enchiridion. I intended to admonish, not to sting; to help, not to hurt; to promote morality, not to hinder it. Even such a grave philosopher 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

The Dutch humanist maintains that the mimetic lowering of the tone is merely a corrective device that also serves as a mask to mitigate the offensive potential of an utterance that is doing the necessary service of correcting 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 remains corrective, one that ultimately should be permitted, just as banquets in the Platonic tradition create a convivial atmosphere in which the participants can discuss and learn.

It is significant that more than a decade after first publishing the Encomium , Erasmus took Luther to task for failing precisely in these necessary 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 treatise 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 conflict with the Truth she is carried away into enunciating. For the reader, this rhetorical instability creates a paradox between prudence and faith that cannot be resolved (one cannot both enunciate a theology of grace and continue to speak prudently) 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. Significantly, the Dutch humanist’s ethical considerations of speech, his endeavors 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 offense among its readers. In the context of the French Reformation, one of the notable scandals of Erasmus’s mimetic modus loquendi is that it proves to be effective in converting 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 offense 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 offend. His satirical and theological utterances are performative utterances—in particular what in modern rhetorical analyses are called, after Austin, perlocutionary performative utterances, whose effects are not contained by social institutions and conventions, nor are they containable; 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. This 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. The literature of vituperation radicalizes and politicizes some of Erasmus’s rhetorical and moral concerns. All authors of polemical works wanted to avoid offending their ideal public. Their 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 offended (theologically and affectively) about others.

To understand the term scandal (and the specific 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 skeptic 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 The 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 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 affective 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 offended—in the affective sense.

Nor did reformers exempt themselves from censoring the spiritual failings of others—from the Catholic Church to those who professed unorthodox beliefs or led immoral lives. In the period of the Reformation, scandal is reinterpreted into a polemical notion by Reformers, who return 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 biblically inspired rhetorical performance of the scandal.²⁴ Calvin’s treatise De scandalis (1550) warns the faithful against several different scandals, from religious errors to flinching 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 considerable lowering of the register; responding to Protestant placards and to satire is yet another step down the slippery slope of polemics.

More careful and reflective authors also exploit the offensive 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 The suggestion that readers have ears of Midas and prefer the sound of Pan’s flute to that of Apollo’s lyre is a way of saying that a lower register and a cruder, less controlled language pleases them better. The French humanist Rabelais, for example, puts considerable pressure on Erasmus’s concerns for prudence and decorum by exploiting the scandalous 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 collective enjoyment and reflection allowing the reader to abstain from anger and offense—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 Theologastres 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 offending a religious community whose members have accepted scripture as the sole source of faith. Such writers as Rabelais, Pierre de l’Estoile, the authors of the Satyre Menippee and the libelle L’Isle des hermaphrodites politicize the scandal; that is, as partisans of the monarchy first and foremost (rather than of one or the other religious party), they retranslate religious scandals into political dangers.²⁷ They adopt satire, or, in the case of l’Estoile, adapt their language to the discourse of denigration, while allowing through such rhetorical procedures for the reader to reflect, learn, and enjoy. The 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 ineffective nature of censorship in early modern 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 sufficient 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 annihilated, would perpetuate the offense; and the printing press compounded the difficulties, since it provided an easy and inexpensive means of achieving mass circulation for harmful ideas.²⁸ Today, we read the traces that survived the fire 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 Annales 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 significances of verbal violence.

My investigations build on studies of print culture and the culture of reading.³⁰ The books and other (largely) printed materials analyzed in this study represent different 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 erudite from the popular in my analyses, however, I take into account the fluidity that characterizes, according to Roger Chartier, the reception