Hostile Humor in Renaissance France. By Bruce Hayes

Abstract

Bruce Hayes’s book on the use of humour in French-language religious polemics of the sixteenth century grapples thoughtfully with a topic of enduring concern, and one that seems particularly pertinent in the current moment. The volume focuses on the decades leading up to the explosion of armed conflict in the 1560s and culminates in a refreshing and recontextualized presentation of Pierre de Ronsard’s contribution, on the Catholic side, to the war of words with Calvinist Geneva. That so much of the humour employed by religious polemicists on both sides of the confessional divide relied on — and further developed — misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic tropes that, while offensive to a modern sensibility, are sadly still found in ostensibly comedic contexts, serves to emphasize both the alterity and the depressing familiarity of this aspect of early modern culture. Hayes deals with this problem carefully and tactfully, acknowledging that the jokes he analyses are, to an overwhelming degree, no longer funny to the modern reader. He nevertheless engages respectfully with the sense of humour that generated and originally consumed these jokes while preserving a protective critical distance for himself and his own readers. In so doing, he maintains a dual focus on the kind of aggressive satirical humour referred to in the period as ‘sardonic’ and on the growing criticism of it by contemporaries as irreligious or even blasphemous. Sixteenth-century readers, especially those on the receiving end of ‘jokes’ that, for instance, called for Huguenots to be burned at the stake en masse, were well aware of the potential of humour to act as a justification or a trigger for violence; Hayes draws out this dimension effectively and accounts persuasively for the disrepute into which the risus sardonicus fell even as religious conflict intensified in France. A further valuable aspect of Hayes’s book is its refreshingly varied and catholic corpus, which includes — and has the merit of taking seriously — both lesser-studied works of major writers (such as the plays of Marguerite de Navarre) and texts that enjoyed a wide diffusion in the sixteenth century but are virtually unknown today (such as the works of the bloodthirsty Artus Désiré, whom Hayes dubs ‘Renaissance France’s most successful, forgotten Catholic polemicist’, p. 55). Chapters on the Affaire des placards, evangelical and reformist comic theatre, Désiré, Calvinist propaganda and the theatrical works of the sociétés joyeuses of Paris and Rouen provide a rich diachronic context for Hayes’s concluding analysis of Ronsard’s Discours des miseres de ce temps, whose own humour — itself by turns playful and aggressive — emerges more clearly against the backdrop of the bloodcurdling satirical barbs that preceded it and that it itself elicited from Ronsard’s Calvinist adversaries. Whilst this book is unlikely to change our understanding of the way that humour functioned in the sixteenth century — its theoretical underpinnings are rather too briefly sketched to allow this — it does enable the modern reader, under the tutelage of a prudent guide, better to appreciate what was at stake in both the political and the poetic conflict.