Death of a Polemicist: Honour and Calumny in Early Modern European Religious Debate

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes a novel interpretation of printed religious polemic in the context of European religious struggle in the Age of Reformations. While recent scholarship has underscored the virulence with which controversialists waged their doctrinal debates, I argue that such work has not yet acknowledged the structuring, autonomous role played by honour in religious polemic. To this end, I consider the case of Guillaume de Reboul, a Protestant-turned-Catholic polemicist who left France to take up service in the Roman Curia, before his arrest and execution under mysterious circumstances. First, I argue that the vocabularies of honour and calumny with which polemicists such as Reboul fashioned their texts played a role at least as important as that of theology, providing the motors which drove debates forward and many of the rules of the polemical game. Secondly, I consider Reboul’s writings as tactical moves in a broader strategy of personal, professional and confessional advancement. As Reboul’s case illustrates, writing was only one weapon among many in the polemical arsenal, and such debates represented forms of social struggle that could entail considerably more dangerous forms of conflict. Thirdly, I reconstruct the ecclesiastical, political and geopolitical landscapes which made a career like Reboul’s possible—and which made it possible to put authors like him to death when expedient. Fourthly, I consider how Reboul and his opponents’ printed appeals conjured into being a reading public. I argue that the culture of honour represented a defining feature of the early modern public sphere.