Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron

Few readers of these pages will have any difficulty recognizing the author of Montaigne et l'humour and Henri III, A Maligned or Malignant King? or placing the authors of the contributions to this Festschrift, but they may not have been aware of Cameron's second career, as an indefatigable worker on behalf of a supranational European identity, especially as editor of Europa. This collection thus unites Cameron's two enthusiasms, but I am not entirely persuaded by Cowling's presentation of the early modern view of European unity. Cowling points to the Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye by Lemaire de Belges at the dawn of the sixteenth century, which proposed pan-European unity against the quintessential Other of the time, the Ottoman Empire. It became increasingly clear over the first half of the sixteenth century, however, that the project for European unity was likely to be led by the Holy Roman Emperor, who also commanded the formidable resources of early modern Spain. A faction of the French aristocracy, led by the Du Bellay brothers, worked to gain more freedom of maneuver for their king, in part by seeking a closer alliance with his ancient rival across the Channel.

The choice for these nobles, and for those working for them (such as Rabelais), was not simply between greater or lesser loyalty to the King of France, as opposed to a vague notion of European unity, but between greater or lesser emphasis on religious orthodoxy. The choice, put most baldly, was between a securely orthodox Europe under Hapsburg tutelage or a more variegated collection of principalities and sects. European unity, in short, was a partisan choice during the sixteenth century.

Jean Balsamo contributes a useful reminder that European humanists were unified above all by their shared desire to solidify their membership in a pan-European caste. Balsamo shows the humanists working to persuade their readers and patrons that they belonged to such a caste, in imitation of such aristocratic writers as Ronsard and Montaigne. Ian Morrison reviews Rabelais's presentation of Christendom less as a religion than as a political idea, and finds it fading before a new vision of Europe "as something more than a geographical area." Margaret McGowan inserts a plea for a wider audience for Blaise de Vigenère, who argued in his writing for a wider role for the vernacular. David Trotter offers an original and provocative analysis of the relative importance of Gascon, Latin, and French in the Pyrenees after the Villers-Cotterêts ordinance of 1539. He finds Gasconisms surviving into the eighteenth century and textual quotations from different languages for different purposes across the late Middle Ages and early modern period. He shows that the choice of language was always a matter of audience and context, as much before Villers-Cotterêts as after.

Yvonne Bellenger writes on Du Bartas's epic poem about the battle of Lepanto, itself translated from King James I's poem on the same subject. Bellenger remarks on the paradoxical nature of a Protestant poet collaborating on an epic commemoration of the Hapsburg (therefore Catholic) victory, while Marie-Madeleine Fragonard retraces the convoluted history of Agrippa d'Aubigné's efforts to support the Protestant cause in England. Yvonne Roberts, a doctoral student of Cameron's, publishes an article derived from her dissertation on de Baïf's political verse and his temporary alliance with Michel de l'Hospital against the Guises, while Michael Heath contributes a survey of (Christian) European representations of Turks during the sixteenth century. Like several other contributors, Heath remarks on the scandal of the Franco-Turkish alliance in apparent innocence of the Hapsburg-Persian alliance, which was formed in response to it.

Françoise Charpentier reviews the themes of voyage and discovery in Rabelais's fourth and fifth books and finds a rich meditation on French social life in the middle of the sixteenth century, while Frank Lestringant returns, in conclusion, to a subject on which he has contributed many of the most original insights of the last thirty years: early modern Europeans' consistent but unacknowledged use of others to arrive at a clearer understanding of themselves. This volume is a worthwhile addition to the study of the development of the idea of Europe, and a well-deserved tribute to the career of one of its early advocates.