Religion, Reformation, and Repression in the Reign of Francis I. Documents from the Parlement of Paris, 1515–1547: Vol. I: Documents 1515–1543; Vol. II: Documents 1544–1547 ed. by James K. Farge (review)

This carefully selected and edited collection of documents concerning the Parlement of Paris’s treatment of “matters of religion” (p. xiii) during the reign of Francis I is a great gift to scholars of the Reformation and of sixteenth-century France. It clarifies not just what the magistrates of the Parlement did during their workdays but also how they conceived of their duty—their religious duty, one might say—as judges of the Most Christian King of France. James Farge’s introduction is limpid, building on decades of the research by himself and others. Documents are presented chronologically, with the exception of those consigned to the appendices for reasons explained in the introduction. Each document is numbered and described with a heading. Textual variants and explanations are given in footnotes. The bibiliography and index are detailed and helpful. Farge’s immense labors have created a resource that is well put together.

But it must be used with an awareness of editorial choices, principally how Farge delimits “matters of religion.” He observes that “the Parlement of Paris was always ready to move matters of religion to the top of its agenda” (p. xiii). The footnote shows this to be a paraphrase of how Pierre Lizet, the king’s avocat, claimed in 1525 that “la Court s’est tousjours monstree . . . prompte a . . . donner les premieres audiences aux choses concernans observantiam cultus divini et religionis.” Farge elsewhere notes that “religio” in this period often referred to particular religious orders (p. xxvii, n53), but here Lizet’s equation of the cultus divinus and religio approaches modern usage. However, Lizet, who later headed the court, and the other magistrates understood matters of religion broadly: prior to the appearance of Protestantism, they sought to suppress the heretical ecclesiology they believed to be manifested by the Concordat of Bologna. Farge consigns the court’s resistance to the Concordat to an appendix, “because the Concordat was more a political matter than a doctrinal or religious one” (p. xviii), and explains that disputes over benefices between those appointed by the king in virtue of the Concordat and those elected in virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges are “not . . . included . . . in this collection because they are concerned with status and income, not with religion” (p. xxiii). Apparently only theological and liturgical issues are religious, in contrast to merely political debates over the form of the Church.

Yet if “politics and religion were inextricably mixed” (p. xxv), it is hard to justify segregating disputes over the Concordat. The judges certainly viewed the suppression of Protestant heresy as a religious duty, explaining to regent Louise of Savoy in December 1525 that they could not obey her order to cease prosecuting certain suspected heretics “without greatly offending God and violating the debt of our offices” (“sans grandement offenser Dieu et violer le deu de noz offices,” p. 233). They likewise believed that their “debt (deu, debitum)” to God, to the king, and to his subjects entailed the suppression of ecclesiological heresy: in 1489 one avocat had even asserted that France’s adherence to the Pragmatic Sanction meant that “the kingdom of France has never strayed and knows not monsters [sc of heresy], and thus the true Church is in the kingdom of France” (“le royaume de France na jamais erre et non novit monstra [sc haeresis], et sic la vraye eglise est ou royaume de France”).¹ Why, then, exclude from the collection such cases as the politically and religiously motivated harassment of François de Rohan, bishop of Angers and an intimate of the regent appointed in virtue of...