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

George Hoffmann’s ambitious study of Protestant militant writing during the French Wars of Religion straddles many disciplines, first and foremost literature, history, rhetoric, and cultural studies, which makes it even more valuable than its vast erudition and highlighting of oft-neglected texts suggests on the surface. Consequently, the seven chapters of the study strive to integrate reformed satirical and polemical writing into the larger literary, historical, and religious context of the sixteenth century, demonstrating effectively the far-reaching impact of militant writing in the large sense on major cultural and political developments of the time. This comprehensive and innovative approach enriches our understanding of the reformed project considerably, leading up to the convincing conclusion that France had become a culturally Protestant country in this period despite the objective confessional failure of the Reformation.

The main authors and texts discussed throughout the study constitute a fair selection of the essential directions that reformed writing had explored to participate in the polemical exchanges of the time: Pierre Viret, Henri Estienne, Simon Goulart, Théodore de Bèze, Conrad Badius, and the authors of the Mappe-monde nouvelle papistique stand out among others. One would have obviously liked to know how Hoffmann’s refreshing readings would have renewed our take on other essential texts that could have been included, above all the well-documented polemical attacks against Pierre de Ronsard, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Tragiques, or the capstone Satyre Menippee, all of which seem tailor-made for the study’s approach even though they would likely have doubled its length. The selection appears nevertheless coherent and varied, focusing on many lesser-known texts. All these texts, whether or not they made the cut, find common ground in their usage of the concept of alterity, which is analyzed more specifically within the framework of the “spiritual imperative” of alienation (67), of “ethnic and moral foreignness” (57, examples from Viret), and of what amounts to contemptible alterity. The juxtaposition of the ideal and real, a major satiric dichotomy, is a constant albeit latent presence throughout the discussion in this context. Through “self-conscious outsider styling” (65) and establishing parallels between unreformed Christians and barbarous Turks (63), reformers redefined the exotic in various ways and hoped to associate Christianity with a frame of mind rather than with a geographical place (152). Hence, in the first place, the well-chosen inclusion of travel literature (Léry). Hence, secondly, the emphasis on Menippean approaches in the Lucianic tradition, although one would argue that Juvenalian indignation occupies a more important place within this often violently polemical universe than the book seems to suggest, all the more so after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Fantasy, exoticism, and “vindictive pessimism” (75) constitute a perfect synthesis of the two major satirical traditions that are reflected in Juvenal and Lucian. It is this type of omnipresent ambivalence that Hoffmann’s study expertly problematizes throughout the seven chapters, an ambivalence, sometimes even an ambiguity, that is reflected, at times quite abstractly, in the concept of early modern satire and its various influences itself. Henri Estienne, as a “scholar, reformer, and moralist” (100) embodies the perplexing varietas of late sixteenth-century committed writing, especially in the intriguing treatise Apology for Herodotus. But if alienation is an end rather than a means, as Hoffmann appears to imply in his discussion of Estienne, then one would be tempted to conclude that satire’s main objective, to heal the ills of society, is being thwarted by such monological and overtly polemical attacks (contrasted, implicitly, with the fine discussion of Montaigne in chapter seven). This is probably the major issue where the author did not push his analyses far enough: the distinction between satire and polemic, and accessorily, the importance of satirical movere (for example in his inspired pages devoted to admiratio). Whereas it is true that satire and polemic overlap, sometimes even substantially, especially during conflicts such as the Wars of Religion, they are...