Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris (review)

Satyre Menippee, or Catholicon Espagnol, was the name given to a pamphlet written in Paris at the time of the Estates-General, convened in 1593 by the “Holy League,” which, after the assassination of the last of the Valois kings in 1589, was intent upon selecting a Catholic successor to the throne. The work circulated first in manuscript, and then in print with some modifications that included allusions to historical events dated in 1594. The princeps was soon followed by several other editions that show numerous variants that reflect the stages undergone by the original text in its profuse circulation. The pamphlet’s historical background —the Wars of Religion that shook France from 1562 to 1598, as well as the following crisis of succession of the monarchy — is closely examined by the editor in his excellent introduction. After the death in 1584 of François de Valois, brother of Henri III and heir to the throne, following the dictates of the Salic law the king designated as his successor the Protestant Henri of Navarre. Rejected by the Catholic party, the Princes of Guise and Lorraine forged an alliance with Philip II of Spain for the defense of Catholicism, which gave birth to the Holy League (“Sainte Ligue”). Popes Sixtus V and Gregory XIII would support the League later, including Philip II’s attempt at establishing his daughter Isabel Clara Eugenia as heir to the French throne. In 1588 the Duke of Guise started a revolt, which was successful in a great number of provinces. He entered Paris, with the support of a majority of the population, who had raised barricades in the city. The king escaped to Blois, called the Estates-General there, and condemned the Duke of Guise to death, as well as his brother, the Bishop of Lorraine, in 1588. Yet he himself was assasinated by the monk Jacques Clément in 1589. Henri of Navarre, who had proclaimed himself king at that point, needed five years to make it effective by relying on the support of the moderates, the party of the “politiques,” who accepted his conversion to Catholicism as a condition to becoming King of France.

Although edited more than once in the nineteenth century, this work’s text had not been rigorously established, a task now fulfilled by M. Martin, who edits that of the 1595 print, with a list of significant variants, in addition to the transcription of the first manuscripts that preceded the princeps, while also adding a descriptive table of the editions kept at the Bibliothèque nationale of Paris. In his introduction and thorough interpretive endnotes Martin examines literary references and allusions to historical news, some derived from other pamphlets and gazettes that circulated at that time, questions of genre, literary models, sources, structure, attributions, and the work’s fortune, to which a glossary, a chronological table, indexes, and a bibliography are added.

Satyre Menippée is based upon the literary model of classical Menippean satire, which was reintroduced in the sixteenth century first in Neo-Latin literature —witness the works of Erasmus and of Justus Lipsius — and then in other European literatures, as demonstrated by the satires of Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), who kept a copy of this French work in his personal library, and of other seventeenth-century satirists. The genre has received considerable attention lately, so that Bakhtin’s older remarks on Menippean texts in relation to fiction seem to be now in need of revision, in particular, the very concept of the carnivalesque, which is applied to the satirical text under review. Satyre Menippee’s structure is linear. The version printed by Martin includes versified compositions that are interwoven with the prose text. The pamphlet is framed by two addresses to the reader in prose, ascribed...