Et non autrement: Marginalisation et résistance des langues de France (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) by Jean-François Courouau (review)

Perhaps we should be thankful for the European tradition of insisting that theses be published; this most recent book by Courouau comes out of his thèse d’habilitation (defended in 2007). In this volume, the scholar considers several issues relating to minority languages in sixteenth-century France. The first chapter examines the real versus perceived effects of the Edict of Villiers-Cotterêts—tradition has it that François I’s 1539 ruling marked the decline of regional languages, but Courouau makes a convincing case that major Occitan cities had begun to move to French, perceived as the language of prestige, well before then. By 1540, the damage was already done. The second chapter considers the use of regional vocabulary by a number of sixteeth-century French authors, almost all of whom reject regional variation in favor of the norm of the royal court. Courouau turns next to the specific case of the Catholic church and its efforts post Council of Trrent. Local missionaries in the Pyrenees were willing to use Occitan and Basque to bring lost sheep into the fold, even if Catholic higher-ups did not approve of this linguistic outreach. One positive effect of these pastoral efforts was that some of these religious works represent the first printed examples of these dialects and/or languages. The last chapter is a study of the use of specific poetic generic forms by a selection of Occitan poets; Courouau concludes that these authors were conventional in their use of the sonnet and found greater liberty using other forms. Ultimately, the Occitan poets showed the unique qualities of their language and used their skills within the constraints of forms imposed by the French poetic regime.

This book has several interesting analyses, but does not hold together as well as Courouau’s earlier Moun lengatge bel (2008). However, read in conjunction with the earlier book, readers understand well the linguistic and literary environments of sixteenthcentury Occitania.