Temps, Culture, Religions: Autour de Jean-Pierre Massaut (review)

Gathered together from his students and colleagues, this collection of twenty-five articles honors the distinguished scholarly career of Jean-Pierre Massaut, a foremost expert on religious and intellectual life in sixteenth-century France. Among the many distinguished scholars contributing to this volume are Jean Delumeau, Marc Venard, Nicole Lemaître, Jean-François Gilmont, and Bernard Dompnier. The quality of scholarship is consistently good, and in some cases very strong indeed. To begin, however, it seems appropriate to introduce Massaut himself. Both the prologue and the first article, written respectively by Carl Havelange and Marie-Elisabeth Henneau, paint a portrait of a man who is, to say the least, complicated and even paradoxical. While modest about his own achievements, solitary by nature, and extremely generous with his students, the erudite Massaut also possessed a corrosive sense of humor and was anything but retiring in intellectual debate. Critical of institutions as nurseries of "hypocrisies" and corruption, Massaut nevertheless considers them as essential for preserving societal order and values. Henneau emphasizes the pedagogical and methodological influence of Massaut upon his students. Massaut trained his students to be critical examiners of sixteenth-century sources, in part by reminding them that they were "strangers" visiting a society long dead.

Subsequent articles develop three areas of investigation that define Massaut's scholarly achievements: French Humanism, religious institutions, and spiritual reform. Given the brevity of this review, I will focus on a few of the meatier articles that explicitly concern European religious life. One of the most interesting is Dominique Rigaux's "L'Écrit dans l'image." Rigaux shows that the choice of vernacular and Latin reflected different spiritual agendas. She nevertheless argues that different languages on the same painting do not necessarily mean different levels of meaning so much as they point to a shared culture. Jacques Le Brun in "La scène de l'interprétation. Notes sur l'interprétation de la scène Évangélique des pèlerins d'Emmaüs" turns his critical skills to the New Testament.

Two articles look at Josse Clichtove, a figure who lies at the center of Massaut's early scholarship. Jean-Pierre Delville argues in "Josse Clichtove et l'interprétation des paraboles" that Clichtove's preaching reflects a traditional scholastic formation: disinterest in humanist investigation on the Bible and philological skills in place of reliance on the summa. He nevertheless sees Clichtove's clear expostulation on the patristics as one sign of his originality. Nicole Lemaître also makes an intriguing case for Clichtove's place as an intellectual figure located between scholastic and humanist studies in "Le prêtre, la femme et la messe. Un misogne conséquent." She argues that his misogyny reflects a concern about preparing good priests. Clichtove's work is unusual in that it narrows the distance in expectations between the secular and regular clergy. In this regard, Lemaître suggests that his concerns foreshadowed the Council of Trent. Four articles provide an intriguing glimpse into early modern monastic life. Jean-Marie Le Gall's "La Moniale, ange et l'hérétique. Un aspect de la controverse en 1528" underscores the difficulties monastic reformers faced when trying to distance their own reform endeavors from Lutheranism after 1521. Extremely critical of monastic abuses, these reformers nevertheless struggled to assert the essential viability of traditional Catholic practices and beliefs including the monastic life. Jean-Pierre Gilmont analyzes publishing in Geneva, and discovers that polemics were the most popular text during the sixteenth century, and Calvin the most popular author. In "Ce n'est pas moi, c'est l'autre!" Dominique Deslandres seeks to understand the missionary mentality of the Jesuits sent to the New World. Deslandres makes the intriguing argument that for the Jesuits, God, rather than the indigenous populations, was their true "other." Dompnier discusses the historic Franciscan controversy over the issue of lay voting in "L'Humilité, égalité, [End...