The French Book and the European Book World

Abstract

This excellent and unusually coherent collection of essays communicates some of the discoveries made and insights gained by Andrew Pettegree as he and his team from the University of St Andrews worked on their recently published inventory of sixteenth-century books in French (French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601, ed. A Pettegree, M. Walsby and A. Wilkinson, 2007). Five of the thirteen essays in this collection have never previously appeared in print. Most of the others are quite recent. After an initial essay sketching the history of the French Bibliothèques Municipales that were so important to the St Andrews project, the bulk of the volume is divided into three sections of four essays apiece. Part One, ‘Pamphlets and their readers’, contains essays reporting and contextualising some of the most exciting finds made by the St Andrews team. A recueil factice of 33 pamphlets discovered in the Bibliothèque Méjanes of Aix-en-Provence, composed primarily of news pamphlets published in Rouen between 1537 and 1544, brought to light a previously unknown ‘provincial news community in sixteenth-century France’. It serves as the basis for an essay illustrating the circulation of information about current affairs. The accumulation of new discoveries concerning evangelical or Protestant texts of the middle of the century demonstrated that, while (as was previously well known) Geneva presses overwhelmingly dominated the production of such works between 1539 and 1560, Protestant presses multiplied within France itself to such an extent in 1561 and 1562 that over the subsequent decade more than four out of every five Protestant books in French were published within the kingdom itself. This profusion of Protestant printing in France is examined in three essays: one on the output of three previously unstudied Caen printers in the years 1560–63, one on the Lyon printer Jean Saugrain who specialised in anti-Catholic songs and satires of a verbal violence that went well beyond anything published at Geneva at the time; and one sketching the overall contours of this publishing phenomenon.