Scandal in Renaissance France

Abstract

At its origins, scandal is a biblical term encompassing anything that might cause Christians to sin or to waver in their faith. While the French term ‘scandale’ increasingly came to denote public shock and outrage during the Wars of Religion at the end of the sixteenth century, its theological acceptation was very much in play in the first half of the sixteenth century and figured prominently in the religious debates and literature of the French Renaissance. Reformers of various confessional stripes turned to scandal and to scholastic distinctions between different varieties of scandal when addressing controversies over Catholic rites and ceremonies they deemed superstitious or idolatrous. Scandal was one of the key concepts that distinguished schismatic Protestant religious thought from that of non-schismatic evangelicals and orthodox Catholics: while Protestants saw it as a test of faith and an opportunity to shock Catholic believers out of their superstition, evangelicals insisted that charity toward the infirm outweighed strict adherence to doctrine in matters not essential to the faith; for their part, orthodox Catholic theologians sought to portray scandal as a purely subjective phenomenon. At the same time, scandal played a major role in a misogynistic tradition of conduct literature for women whose roots may be traced back to patristic writings, and which remained prevalent in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This tradition identified women’s beauty and adornments as inherently scandalous incitements to lust and sexual violence for men and advised women to dissimulate or neglect their beauty not only in the interest of self-preservation, but also out of charity toward male believers. Women writers with a keen interest in the theological developments of the Reformation were able to appropriate the debate over scandal as a means of writing against this misogynistic tradition and its tendency to blame women for men’s sexual misconduct. Marguerite de Navarre’s collection of tales, the Heptaméron, embodies this effort. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, scandal became increasingly associated with affront and outrage in more general contexts. Montaigne’s project of self-portraiture in the Essais plays with scandalous indecency and illustrates scandal’s shift into the secular realm.