Reforming French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers by George Hoffmann (review)

Structured loosely along the lines of a 'lives of the Reformers', this book spotlights a prolific half-dozen of the key polemical crusaders 'of the religion': in order, Conrad Badius, Pierre Viret, Henri Estienne, Simon Goulart, Jean de Léry, and Théodore de Bèze; all of whom, with somewhat unexpected yet ineluctable logic, lead to Michel de Montaigne. In admirers of George Hoffmann's previous work, this provokes, of course, a knowing smile, given that the author of an earlier, similarly learned volume, Montaigne's Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), has constructed his own career on — but far from limited to — illuminating close readings of that ur-essayist. Fittingly, the current study works as something of a counter-intuitive prequel in that its closing meditation is a smooth recontextualization of Hoffmann's early, enlightening riff on the most celebrated (and studied) essay, I, 30, 'Of Cannibals' ('Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne's "Cannibals"', PMLA, 117 (2002), 207–21): some surprising roads lead to Montaigne. If telling biographical detail fleshes out these readings, however, it is principally as useful context for Hoffmann's more ambitious thesis, which, as the book's subtitle hints, is none other than a serious reconsideration of received notions of the import and intent of satire, specifically of the French Reformation variety, as rhetorical strategy. His control of this unruly mass of French prose and verse ephemera, as heteroclite as it is heterodox, daunting in its seemingly unchecked proliferation and prolixity, is impressive, as are both his appreciation for the work of other modern readers who have attempted to come to grips with it and his command of its classical and neo-Latin underpinnings. Central to Hoffmann's thesis is the notion of estrangement, which, at the grave risk of oversimplifying what is in truth an artfully subtle argument, he demonstrates was as much a modus operandi of the reforming proselytizers and polemicists as it became a modus vivendi of those they reformed: the former used mordant satire, among other devices, to alienate the all-too-familiar faith of their fathers; the latter lived as strangers in a (newly) strange land or exchanged it for another through exile. Both these practices and circumstances resulted, with a nod to Paulinian paradox, in new forms — that is, 'reformed' forms — of community: 'Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord' (1 Cor. 5.6). Hoffmann's finely tuned reading thus offers a way out of the ostensible dead end of much reformist polemic and restores to it some of the value — to contemporaries, at least — its sheer volume would suggest. He does this in part by linking it to works by 'canonical' authors long accorded more respect, for example, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and, of course, Montaigne, for whom the sense of estrangement provoked his enduring life's work. In so doing, Hoffmann both broadens and nuances our understanding of a curious and curiously large early modern corpus; one which played a critical role in the period's momentous spiritual and political dynamics.