The Politics of Print during the French Wars of Religion: Literature and History in an Age of ‘Nothing Said Too Soon’. By Gregory P. Haake

Abstract

Gregory P. Haake’s premise is that in the sixteenth century ‘crises of representation, interpretation, and authority ultimately lead to who has the authority to speak and to influence in literature’ (pp. 323–24) and onto this long-familiar idea he grafts, over six chapters, a pleasing corpus of political texts by Simon Goulart, Pierre de Ronsard, Agrippa d’Aubigné, François Hotman, and others, nicely balanced by less familiar writers as well as by some anonymous pamphlets. Haake sees these authors, along with the printers who served them, as controlling their readers’ reception and understanding of what they presented as historical accounts by imposing particular interpretations of events and by the choice of paratexts to support their stance. Such rhetorical and material devices were designed to bolster their credibility and indeed to create new centres of authority in the face of semiotic uncertainty and the weakening of traditional reference points such as the monarchy...