Le Livre réformé au XVIe siècle (review)

In this survey of the role of the printed book in the French-speaking Reformation in the sixteenth century, Jean-François Gilmont summarizes a vast amount of previous research in three fairly short chapters: the place of the printed book in the movement known as evangelism until 1540, the dominance of Calvin over the middle decades of the century, and the role of printing after Calvin’s death until the Edict of Nantes. Gilmont’s methodology as a historian of the book is thoroughly grounded in empirical data: hence, he is rightly circumspect about drawing too hasty a set of conclusions where data are likely to be missing, as is the case of evangelical books from the early decades of the sixteenth century. He also counts folio-printed sheets, as well as numbers of titles: this approach is the most reliable way of showing the volume of printing (an appendix presents this data in the form of graphs). As a whole, the book is very well presented, illustrated and referenced. It comfortably achieves its main aim of being a very thorough survey of this area of the history of the book. However, as a result of the sheer quantity of data Gilmont presents, it is hard not to get bogged down in the detail. Sometimes it is easy to forget that these books were matters not only of life and death (many people died for what was printed in these books) but that they were even more important than that, since eternal salvation was believed to depend on the ideas they debate. Moreover, the three sections point to an over-arching narrative but the detail shows how the reality was rather more complicated than this standard view implies. The difficulty of marrying the data with the need for narrative is in many ways implicit in the task of such a summary. There are many fascinating pieces in the detail including, for example, the brutal dismissal of Aneau and Dolet by their fellower Reformers, Bèze and Calvin (pp. 66–68) as well as Simon Goulart’s bowdlerization of what was already a rather innocuous song (p. 112). Such moments suggest a rather different book, one built around exemplary case studies rather than the attempt to do justice to too much data in too short a space. The book will not be suitable for most undergraduates, but as an introduction to the topic, to working methods in the history of the book and as a reference book, it will be of interest to postgraduates and to other specialists working on the French Reformation.