Calvin the mimic: Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545)

Abstract

This essay examines some instances of mimicry in Jean Calvin’s Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545). Calvin’s denunciation of the spiritual libertines, an obscure antinomian sect which had recently spread from the Low Countries to northern France, is made all the more vehement by a fear that others might confuse some aspects of their theology with his. Mimicry of his opponents’ Picard dialect is one way among several of marking off their voices from his own. Although Calvin shows himself elsewhere capable of trenchant humour (for example, in the Traité des reliques) examples of speech-parody are rare in his work, possessing a farcical quality more readily associated with Rabelais (the episode of the ‘écolier Limousin’) or Molière (Nérine in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac). The blending of heretical voices with regional ones raises broader questions of language and nation, just four years before the publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549).