Dissensus: pratiques et représentations de la diversité des opinions (1500–1650) ed. by Florence Alazard, Stéphane Geonget, Laurent Gerbier, Paul-Alexis Mellet (review)

This edited volume takes a deliberately and productively anachronistic idea, that of dissensus, which the editors gloss as diversity of opinion, as a frame to read political and ethical texts and visual culture from early modern France, England, the Netherlands, and Italy. In doing so, it sketches a range of associated terms that had more contemporary purchase: heterodoxy, diversity, variety, and opinion are among them. The book is divided into three parts: 'User du dissensus', 'Penser le dissensus', and 'Représenter le dissensus'. In the first part, Catherine Secretan gives a broad and useful survey of the culture of discussion that arose in the new republic of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century; Anne Rousselet-Pimont writes lucidly about the hostility of the Paris Parlement to legislative innovation; and Olivier Spina writes about the plurality of opinion in Henrician England. In the second part, Filippo Del Lucchese examines Machiavelli as the foundation of a theory of constituent power; Laurent Gerbier explores the medical metaphors of homeopathies and contraries in Sébastien Castellion's Conseil à la France désolée (1562); Andrea Frisch's chapter is a persuasive examination of the work of Louis Le Roy from the perspective of international relations; and Marino Lambiase returns productively to Le Roy as a possible precursor of the Enlightenment notion of 'progress'. In the final part, Laurence Riviale traces the complex history of patronage behind the stained-glass windows of a Netherlandish and a Norman church; Charlotte Bouteille-Meister examines the ways in which the French theatre of the religious wars worked to defuse and neutralize diversity of opinion; Fabien Simon examines the images of diversity that arise from the language collections of Conrad Gesner and Claude Duret; and Natalia Obukowicz gives a convincing account of the rejection and condemnation of dissensus in the polemic of the Wars of Religion. The book covers a wide range of contexts and cultures, and readers will inevitably be guided by their specialist interests; while the collection does indicate a European culture of dissensus, the contexts are so diverse that this glimpse is stimulating rather than exhaustive. That said, all chapters return to some common themes: religious wars, resistance, tolerance, and their representations. Often, the material studied actually points towards the political impossibility of dissensus in early modern culture—particularly in France—or the importance given to the resolution of conflict. While a clearer picture of the coherence and unity of the volume in the Introduction would have been welcome, the individual chapters provide illuminating insights into a fractured political culture.