Hostile Humor in Renaissance France

Hayes Bruce Hayes

Description

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.

Sujets

• History of Europe
• French
• France

Informations

• Publié par: University of Delaware Press
• Date de parution: 23 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644531792
• Langue: English

Extrait

University of Delaware Press
© 2020 by Bruce Hayes
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2020
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
978-1-64453-177-8 (cloth)
978-1-64453-178-5 (paper)
978-1-64453-179-2 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
Cover art: Mado Hayes
To Tony Corbeill, my mentor and friend
CONTENT
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 · The Affaire des Placards and the Early Stages of Pamphlet Warfare
2 · Early Evangelical and Reformist Comic Theater
3 · Artus Désiré, Renaissance France’s Most Successful, Forgotten Catholic Polemicist
4 · Geneva’s Polemical Machine
5 · Abbeys of Misrule on the Stage
6 · Ronsard the Pamphleteer
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have many people to thank for helping me complete this book. Before getting to people, let me begin with my home institution, the University of Kansas. I have received tremendous support from my university, starting in the fall of 2011 when I was granted a sabbatical that allowed me to begin this new project in earnest. In the spring of 2011 I was awarded a Keeler Intra-university Professorship, thanks to the co-sponsorship of my department and the Classics Department. During that semester, it was a real treat to be able to sit in on Tony Corbeill’s Latin grammar class and Tara Welch’s graduate seminar on Roman satire, not to mention the helpful conversations I had with both of them about my project. Next came a Hall Center for the Humanities residential faculty fellowship in the spring of 2014 that gave me a semester to do some serious research and writing. (As a side note, it was my good fortune to have Jorge Perez and Laura Mielke as “fellow fellows” that semester.) My department has been incredibly supportive, and I would like to acknowledge in particular the course release that my chair Caroline Jewers secured for me in the spring of 2015. Further support for my research included a KU General Research Fund grant in 2014 and travel grants from the Hall Center and the Office of International Programs in 2015.
Since becoming department chair in 2016, two deans, Carl Lejuez and Clarence Lang, provided critical support and cheered me on as I completed the manuscript under less than optimal circumstances. Also, I have loved having my colleague and dear friend Kim Swanson as my “study buddy”; we make a good team, encouraging each other and keeping each other accountable. Let me conclude my thanks to people at KU by acknowledging all the terrific people from KU Libraries that have helped me, from Fran Devlin, who is always willing to do whatever she can to provide support, to Lars Leon, who makes sure that the service provided by KU’s interlibrary loan is always exceptional; from Karen Cook and Elspeth Healey at the Spencer Research Library to Pam LeRow, who can format, collate, and bring order to a chaotic manuscript with efficiency and ease. I feel fortunate to work where I do.
Next, I want to acknowledge the important external support I have received that allowed this project to move forward. The short-term fellowship I received from the Newberry Library in the fall of 2011 enabled me to begin seriously reading polemical pamphlets, including the one I refer to in the introduction. At the Newberry, Carla Zecher and Karen Christianson at the Center for Renaissance Studies were particularly supportive. The following summer, thanks to a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, I was able to travel to Lyon, Geneva, and Paris to read dozens and dozens of pamphlets. I appreciated the help I received at the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon and the Bibliothèque de Genève. In Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France provided me with a wealth of materials and the occasional helpful librarian. Without a doubt, my favorite place to work in Paris has been the Bibliothèque du protestantisme français, a charming and intimate space I have returned to each summer since 2012, overseen by the inscrutable Mme. Poinsot, who scared me at first but who is in fact kind and generous.
I would like to thank colleagues and friends at Brigham Young University, the Virginia Military Institute, Wichita State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Vermont who invited me to their campuses to give talks related to this book. There are too many wonderful people in my field to mention who have been incredibly supportive and who inspire me. Let me try a partial list: Kitty Maynard, Bob Hudson, Scott Francis, Charles Morand-Metivier, Mary McKinley, Cathy Yandell, Gary Ferguson, Jeff Persels, Dora Polachek, Jessica DeVos, and I could go on. Special thanks to Jeff Persels and Mary McKinley, who generously read early chapter drafts and provided invaluable feedback. Julia Oestreich at the University of Delaware Press is a consummate professional and I have very much enjoyed working with her. I was fortunate to have three readers who provided extremely useful feedback; one in particular, and he knows who he is, went above and beyond to help make this a better book. All three readers caught mistakes and provided helpful suggestions. All remaining faults and shortcomings are mine.
Finally, I am grateful for family and friends. Despite the fact that my wife often jokes that she has no idea what I do for a living, she is a real sport, not to mention an incredibly generous and giving person whose tireless ability to help others puts me to shame. In that way that only parents can do, my parents think that their son is a genius who can do no wrong. However untrue that is, it is still nice to have such unconditional support and love. As for friends, I cannot believe my good fortune to have people in my life who lift me up, who motivate me by their example, and who keep me smiling (and laughing). This book is dedicated to one of those friends who has played a special role in my life that started shortly after this book project began. He has since left the University of Kansas for greener fields, and I continue to feel the loss.
Part of chapter 2 was published as “‘De rire ne me puys tenir’: Marguerite de Navarre’s Satirical Theater,” in La Satire dans tous ses états , edited by Bernd Renner (Geneva: Droz, 2009), 183–200.
Part of the introduction and chapter 1 were published as “The Affaire des placards , Polemical Humour, and the Sardonic Laugh,” French Studies 70, no. 3 (2016): 332–47.
Introduction

Of course it’s a joke, just not a very funny one.
—Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones , “Mockingbird” (S4 E7)
To begin, a word about the title of this book. “Hostile humor,” a phrase meant to highlight my focus on the increasing use of aggressive satire by religious polemicists in Reformation-era France, tells only part of the story. The other side to this, also important in understanding this phenomenon, is the accompanying emergence of hostility toward certain types of humor previously considered acceptable. At the start of this project, the alliterative phrase I used was “castigating comedy.” 1 I remember sharing with a colleague in classics this provisional title. She asked me what part of speech “castigating” was. Her question was as simple as it was astute: Was it the comedy that was doing the castigating, or was it comedy that was being castigated? This question proved the impetus for one of the more surprising discoveries in my research. My initial intent was to focus on humor that castigates—attacks, satirizes, and reproaches—within the context of growing religious conflict in sixteenth-century France. The further I went in my research, however, the more I realized that there were just as many examples in the material where satire itself was castigated, rebuked, and censured as a form of irreligion and blasphemy. This makes sense, of course, since so often the targets of polemical humor were people or practices considered sacred by the other side.
In the early years of the religious conflict in sixteenth-century France, there emerged a particular form of satire that was deliberately harmful and destructive and that, in its most extreme manifestations, could even be characterized as not funny. The purpose of this book is to understand this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict and to see what it reveals about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire. 2 I am interested in aggressively hostile jokes and satire, as well as the accompanying backlash against certain types of humor in sixteenth-century France. I am looking at plays and pamphlets, two of the most popular vehicles of propaganda during these sectarian fights. Pamphlets, frequently referred to as libelles , represented an entirely new medium, which allowed for the quick dissemination of polemics. The sectarian clashes in Europe saw the first such use of the relatively new technology of the printing press.
While many types of laughter are explosive and unrestrained, and can therefore be described as liberal or generous, the particular form of laughter that is the focus here, sardonic laughter, is a forced laugh that is acrimonious and resentful, as well as aggressive. In considering the role of humor during the turmoil leading up to the Wars of Religion, I am trying to answer this question: At what point are laughter and satire so dominated by invective and diatribe that the destructive subtext smothers all forms of laughter except the sardonic laugh? While humor and laughter can interrupt and even defuse anger, they can also be used detrimentally to incite acts of violence. Drawing upon some of the same pamphlets and plays examined in this study, Antónia Szabari has proposed the concept, connected to but distinct from traditional modes of satire, of a literature of vituperation. 3 Building on this, I focus on a particular form