The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book

Andrew Pettegree, Paul Nelles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351881890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study comprises the proceedings of a conference held in St Andrews in 1999 which gathered some of the most distinguished historians of the French book. It presents the 16th-century book in a new context and provides the first comprehensive view of this absorbing field. Four major themes are reflected here: the relationship between the manuscript tradition and the printed book; an exploration of the variety of genres that emerged in the 16th century and how they were used; a look at publishing and book-selling strategies and networks, and the ways in which the authorities tried to control these; and a discussion of the way in which confessional literature diverged and converged. The range of specialist knowledge embedded in this study will ensure its appeal to specialists in French history, scholars of the book and of 16th-century French literature, and historians of religion.

CHAPTER ONE
The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book Project

Andrew Pettegree

The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book Project has many aspects, and many preoccupations, as the very varied papers that make up this collection make clear. But at its core is the question that remains central to the concerns of all those who study Protestant and Catholic Reformations. What motivated the movements of mass activism of the sixteenth century that inspired and lay behind the three generations of turbulent religious agitation that followed the eruption of Luther’s movement in Germany? In addressing such questions, France makes a particularly interesting case study. Here events in Germany certainly produced a strong resonance. Luther’s works were read and admired in France, but also swiftly criticized and condemned. In this, Europe’s most Catholic kingdom, the first evangelical generation of reform soon faltered in the face of determined resistance.¹ Perhaps earlier than almost anywhere else in western Christendom, and certainly in contrast to Germany, France’s Catholic heritage found eloquent defenders, prepared to carry the battle back to evangelical critics in the vernacular medium which in Germany church critics had largely commandeered as their own.² In France, the book was never evangelical property, as it is often thought to be in Luther’s homeland.³ Indeed, by the middle of the century the French evangelical movement seemed to have been fairly successfully contained, for all the sound and fury emanating from Geneva.

All of this changed, with quite astonishing rapidity, in a narrowly defined period between 1555 and 1562. From the first foundations of small, organized evangelical churches in the major French cities in the first of these years, a French Calvinist Church grew at a rapid pace – an unmistakable presence by 1559, by 1562 a Church of over 1000 congregations with a strong core of common belief and organization.⁴ What is as astonishing is the change of mood. The downtrodden and tiny conventicles had become articulate, confident and defiant, barely susceptible to the direction of their own exiled leadership, never mind the local political authorities.⁵ The emergence of public Reformed congregations inspired in its turn an angry reaction from loyal Catholics, furious that the Reformed should aspire to authorized public worship, furious too that the French government would consider compromising the Catholic identity of France for the sake of peace.⁶ By 1562 urban communities in many regions of France were rent asunder by deeply felt religious differences; war, when it came, was as much a consequence of this polarization as the machinations of the grands at Court.

These tumultuous events were accompanied on both sides by a feverish publishing activity – but the extent to which the published word lay at the heart of these events remains obscure. On both sides of the confessional divide, the connection between what was written and the actions of the broad mass of the population remains to be demonstrated. The apparent paradox is perhaps more obvious in the case of French Protestantism. Through the 1540s and 1550s Geneva dominated the French Protestant book world, a dominance reflected both in surviving copies and in the contemporary legislation of the French authorities, which sought to prohibit all contact with the heretical printing centre.⁷ But in the crucial years before the outbreak of the fighting a significant gulf opened up between the core teachings expressed in Calvin’s writings, and the activities of his followers in France. One of the many virtues of Jean Calvin was the consistency of his message – Calvin preached a doctrine of patience and resignation in the face of God’s will. But the members of the French churches seemed animated by a different spirit, bent on confrontation, determined to sweep away the old church. One might also ask how appropriate for the immediate purpose were the sort of texts Calvin was publishing in these years – on the whole long biblical commentaries and editions of the Institutes, rather than shorter polemical works.⁸ On the Catholic side, too, the well-known works sponsored by the Court to promote their policy of toleration and coexistence during the difficult period 1561–67 seem curiously out of joint with the determined, unyielding hatred felt by many French Catholics at this time. The carefully orchestrated campaign to promote the virtues of peace and social harmony was easily submerged in a tidal wave of angry polemics.⁹

This apparent paradox or disjunction between printed word and action has prompted many scholars in recent years to question the role of the printed word as a motor of mass activism. Could the book function in this way? To what extent were the core theological teachings of the conflicting faiths accessible to a mass movement? In the search for answers to these questions, scholars have wanted to explore other possible links to the popular mind – the sermon, for instance, or visual media.¹⁰ But all the signs suggest that we have not yet finished with the book. Perhaps below the level of the major theological tracts one can identify a significant sub-stratum of more popular works which helped shape popular opinion. And perhaps this search should also lead us to other branches of literature, less obviously theological, which nevertheless carried important messages about the relationships between God and man, and between conflicting faiths in troubled times.

It was questions of this nature that first inspired the establishment some years ago of the Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book Project. For if one believes that to have a real sense of what was believed and taught in any age, one must study the full range of its printed literature, then the student of France immediately runs up against an apparently insuperable problem. For there exists no complete list of French books for the sixteenth century – no equivalent of the English STC, or even of the German VD 16. Scholars who wish to take the temperature of the religious literature of these years have been forced to rely on the -admittedly massive – holdings of major collections such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and other major collections in Paris, or the British Library.¹¹ These give some sense of the range of work being published for French audiences during this era. But for true quantitative work, something more is required. Who are the most popular authors of each church and each generation? What is the relationship between substantial works of exegesis and pamphlets, between verse and prose, royal edicts and the manifestos of the political leaders? Does drama have a role to play – is history-writing an important polemical tool?¹² Can one deduce anything from the ebb and flow of publishing during the forty years of the religious wars? And what of the relationship between different publishing centres? Does Paris maintain its supremacy in the long rivalry with Lyon? What is the significance of publishing in the provinces, and how large a role is played by exile centres abroad?

It was the belief that this sort of quantitative analysis would provide significant insights into the reasons why ordinary French men and women acted as they did during this turbulent era that a group of us in St Andrews felt encouraged some years ago to begin the systematic collection of data. In the first instance we concentrated on logging books recorded in published sources – library catalogues and specialized bibliographies. That work goes on; there turn out to be a large number of useful sources of this type. But from an early stage we also started on a programme of library visits to examine in full the holdings of useful collections where no catalogue, or only the most basic of catalogues, exists. In the first instance this search has concentrated on libraries in Britain, the United States, and French libraries outside Paris. Our visits to French provincial libraries have perhaps been the most distinctive feature of this whole project, and certainly yielded the richest harvest of unexpected and rare materials. We began with an exploratory trip to Upper Languedoc (Montauban and Toulouse) and have since covered Normandy (principally Rouen, Caen and Valognes), Lower Languedoc (Nîmes, Montpellier and Avignon) and the Loire valley (Angers, Le Mans, Nantes and Tours). In the year 2000 we visited Lyon, Rouen and Burgundy, with La Rochelle and Bordeaux a logical destination for 2001.

Both aspects of this work – the search of published catalogues and library visits – are integral parts of the project. In global terms we now have logged information relating to some 25 000 editions published in French during the sixteenth century which fall within our terms of reference. The second part of the process is to translate these paper files into full bibliographical descriptions through inspection of surviving copies – a process we have already begun. Meanwhile the paper files situated in St Andrews, which consist essentially of records from published sources, and outline records culled from our library visits, remain for the time being the only complete record of information collected.

The catalogue entries quite obviously are very varied in quality, depending largely on the age and the initial intention of those that put together the catalogues. Some specialist bibliographies are very good and hardly to be improved upon – one thinks here of the Gilmont Calvin bibliography, Screech’s work on Rabelais, the Bodin bibliography (though even here, we have usually been able to list additional locations of copies unknown to the bibliographer).¹³ Other published bibliographies, while useful to us for basic information, are far from complete or reliable: examples would be Chaix, Moeckli and Dufour’s elderly list of books printed in Geneva, or Charbonnier’s list of verse polemic.¹⁴

Library catalogues are similarly various. Adams on Cambridge libraries and the British Library’s STC French are quite accurate but offer very abbreviated descriptions; others, such as the catalogue of the fine collection of Marsh’s library in Dublin, seem to follow no known bibliographical principles.¹⁵ A major problem is presented by the large number of books that have no stated author or place of publication. Here users are entirely dependent on the expertise of the particular cataloguer or librarian; not surprisingly many books are in consequence described in various ways in different libraries. Descriptions of formats often reflect a shelving practice in the library, rather than the technical specifications of the book – this is particularly evident in the series of outline catalogues of the holdings of French libraries compiled at the end of the nineteenth century.

A particular challenge is set by the Répertoire bibliographique des livres imprimées en France au seizième siècle. In principle this might be thought already to have filled the gap identified by our project, since it offers, in 30 volumes, a place-by-place survey of French provincial printing.¹⁶ But on closer inspection this turns out to be far from the case. Excluded from its terms of reference are Paris and Lyon; the major Normandy presses, meanwhile, are treated in separate annex volumes. Work on these crucial centres of French printing lags far behind. The survey of Lyon printing, reworking the ground covered by Baudrier at the beginning of the twentieth century, has reached only 1544.¹⁷ The systematic chronological survey of Paris publishing in the sixteenth century has covered only the years 1500-35, which probably includes less than 10 per cent of the vernacular printing in the capital;¹⁸ the Normandy survey is also far from complete.¹⁹ Even with the other provincial centres, the organization of the project means that the quality of the individual volumes is inevitably very varied. In general terms the list of editions published in Bordeaux, Tours or La Rochelle, for example, will have been compiled by a local expert, drawing on the resources of libraries in those locations, the Paris BN, and published catalogues. Thus a book published in Troyes but now in Angers BM will quite possibly slip through the net.²⁰

The great strength of our project lies in the relatively random nature of our searches. Because we are not looking for anything in particular -the work of a particular author or printer, or works on a particular theme – we tend to find a great deal. Thus the field-work trips we have already accomplished will add new information to virtually all the volumes of the Répertoire bibliographique, and valuable additional information to most of the more specialist bibliographies.

Many of these gems have been unearthed in our progress round the major French provincial libraries. But we would also not have expected the number of important discoveries we have made in the collections of Britain and the United States. Here, perhaps because our work is more advanced, we have a much clearer view of the total scope of these collections. There are arou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book Project
• 2 Religious drama and the printed book in France during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
• 3 The sixteenth-century French emblem book as a form of religious literature
• 4 Books of hours
• 5 Religious instruction in the work of Jean Bouchet
• 6 Education and works of religious instruction in French
• 7 La naissance de l’historiographie protestante
• 8 Religion and the State: Joachim du Bellay’s views on the duties of the Most Christian King and his subjects
• 9 Jean de PEspine (c. 1505–97): écrire dans un temps de troubles
• 10 Satire, dramatic stereotyping and the demonizing of Henry III
• 11 Henry IV and the press
• 12 La réception de l’Édit de Nantes: illusions et désillusions de la ‘tolérance’
• 13 La censure au quotidien: le contrôle de l’imprimerie à Genève, 1560–1600
• 14 Rewriting Protestant history: printing, censorship by pastors, and the dimensions of dissent among the Huguenots – the La Popelinière case at La Rochelle, 1581–85
• 15 Three audiences for religious books in sixteenth-century France
• 16 A provincial perspective: Protestant print culture in southern France
• 17 A bookseller’s world: the ‘inventaire’ of Vincent Real
• 18 Private library as public danger: the case of Duplessis-Mornay
• Index