Performing Protestant Identity Through Obscene Poetry

Abstract

When the increasing success of the printing press reconfigured the European mediasphere during the sixteenth century, the uses of personal handwritten collections changed. Semi-private manuscripts reflected their owners’ literary tastes and offered to selected groups a new cultural “common stage.” This chapter aims at demonstrating the roles played by Protestant collections in the dissemination of obscene poems targeting the abuses of the Roman Church at the dawn of the French Wars of religion. It offers the first extensive survey of a codex unknown to the historians until now: the Grenet collection, conceived and copied between 1543 and 1565 by Gilbert Grenet, Bourgeois of Geneva. An avid reader of the polemical literature published by Calvinist writers and printers, Grenet nevertheless differed from other Protestant collectors, such as the Parisian intellectuals Rasse des Noeux or L’Estoile. What did obscenity mean when a merchant integrated transgressive texts into his family book? By shedding light on the various uses of obscene poetry in different manuscripts and printed books, this comparative study demonstrates how literary obscenity allowed French Protestants, inside and outside the realm, to share their political and spiritual commitments while exploring their different ways of networking.