Wars Of Religion Research Articles

Collage, Architectural Inscription, and the Aesthetics of Iconoclasm in Jacques Perret's Des fortifications et artifices (1601)

Taking the case of a late Renaissance treatise on Huguenot architecture, this essay explores the potentials of collage as an expression of confessional contestation in the wake of the French Wars of Religion. The book's hybrid imagery bears a formal language of cutting, removal, and addition, which evokes the confessional violence that precipitated in this period at the scale of the built environment. Illustrated plates depict open-plan temples with their ceilings and floors cut away, as if to reenact pictorially the dismantling of rood screens and liturgical furnishings in Catholic churches during episodes of iconoclastic purification. The same pages feature Calvinist Psalms and pious sayings that were once chanted and sung by French Protestants, as well as inscribed and layered in abundance on the walls of their churches and homes. In this mixed verbal-visual form, the medium of early modern collage was operative in a plurality of sensory registers and at disparate physical scales.

“Et nulle autre me faict plus proprement homme que cette cy:” Michel de Montaigne's embodied masculinity

Writing in a period of considerable anxiety about gender roles, Montaigne (1533–92) developed a series of reflections on gender and masculinity in which he destabilized the gender and sexual hierarchies of early-modern France. First, drawing on an increasingly global archive of information about non-European societies, he argued that culture plays a major role in shaping the lives and experiences of women. Secondly, his understanding of nature enabled him to foster a notion of the equality of the sexes, even as he recognized that nature creates certain differences between men and women. Finally, on these foundations, Montaigne constructed a vision of masculinity that stresses it as an ethical value, one that he opposes above all to cruelty. Montaigne's sexual politics were, I suggest, at least in part a response to the Wars of Religion that had led to an excess of barbarity in early-modern France.

El Imperio Otomano y la política de alianzas: las relaciones francootomanas en el tránsito del siglo XVI al XVII

Although Western historiography considered the Ottoman Empire as a marginal and antagonist factor, the Ottomans were an integral component of the history of Early Modern age. The conscientious policy of balance of power towards the Christian powers made Ottomans a crucial element in the struggle for hegemony. The Franco-Turkish alliance that was established in the reigns of Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent mainly depended on mutual enmity against Spanish hegemony in Europe. In the late sixteenth century, after the death of Henry III the French Wars of Religion gave rise to a chaotic situation in which the Catholic King sought the opportunity to place France under its control. This could have caused an irreversible change in the balance of power in the Mediterranean, an unacceptable situation for the geostrategic interests of the Ottoman sultans. The Ottoman Empire played a major role in the French foreign policy against Spanish claims during the different phases of the reign of Henry IV. Even Clement VIII implicitly instrumentalized Ottoman- French friendship to strengthen both its own position as well as that of France with respect to the Spanish Monarchy. This article aims to demonstrate the limits and efficiencies of politics of alliance in the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century considering the role of England and the Republic of Venice.

“Måske vil vi engang glædes ved at mindes dette”. Om Giacomo Castelvetros håndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

“Måske vil vi engang glædes ved at mindes dette”. Om Giacomo Castelvetros håndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

The Wars of Love’s Labour’s Lost: Performance and Interpretation

This paper investigates the trope of war in relation to the critical and performance history of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The “civil war of wits” has long been recognized as central to the play’s linguistic texture, as has the “war against your own affections” that Navarre urges on his fellow academe-lovers. In addition to these linguistic and psychological threads, the play’s disputed debt between France and Navarre concerns the “wars” waged by Navarre’s father, while the four lords’ names point toward historical actors in the French wars of religion from the 1570s into the 1590s. Beyond these well-cited links, however, the play has an unusual history of being performed in actual war-time, or staged in a war-setting, as in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the Branagh film, and productions directed by Robin Phillips, Trevor Nunn and Corinne Jaber, among others. Publicity for the current RSC production describes the setting as just before the First World War, “conjuring up the carefree elegance of a pre-war Edwardian summer.” This paper explores why the play has so frequently been associated with war, and particularly the Edwardian period.

The Freedom of the Gospel: Aquinas, Subversive Natural Law, and the Spanish Wars of Religion

The Freedom of the Gospel: Aquinas, Subversive Natural Law, and the Spanish Wars of Religion

La Beauté de la haine. Essais de misologie littéraire

Jan Miernowski. La Beaute de haine. Essais de misologie litteraire. Geneva: Droz, 2014. Pp. 280. La Beaute de haine turns critical attention away from the causes of hatred towards the noyau dur de l'odieux, haine plus pure qui echappe a nos tentatives de rationalisation (9). Under study here is thus not the hatred addressed by, for example, the social sciences or politics, a hatred that can be analyzed and as if explained away, but a hatred that is defined by its autosuffisance, by being autotelique, and which becomes principe de creation esthetique (10) and a moteur du discours (11). Miernowski makes his focus clear by turning to Aristotle who distinguishes anger (which exists and can be negotiated in discourse) from hatred (which is irrecuperable [13]). The book's chapters thus set out to examine this passion that, in its seeming exclusion from rhetoric, ends up turning against itself and against the texts that express it, resulting in the opposite of philology, i.e. misologie ou art d'abhorrer litterature elle-meme (10). This is a wide-ranging study, chronologically and methodologically, ranging from Renaissance love poetry to the writings of contemporary authors such as Amelie Nothomb. The following summary surely cannot do it justice. The first chapter asks how the culture [...] erocentrique and the philo-logues of Renaissance France might also give voice to hatred. The initial proposal is expressed via a comparison: hatred haunts Renaissance harmonies like the anamorphic skull in Holbein's famous Ambassadors--La haine y constitue une dechirure qui met en question les proportions harmonieuses de cette civilisation de l'amour (23). Miernowski explores this hypothesis most notably in the period's love poetry (Eros, Anteros, Anti-Eros, etc.) and in the Wars of Religion. Chapter two turns attention to the seventeenth century and la haine tragique (75), offering close readings in particular of Corneille's Rodogune (whose Cleopatra Corneille himself calls tres mechante), Medee (Je ferai par haine), and Racine's Thebaide. Miernowski argues that le vrai heros [cornelien] is incapable d'assumer un pretendu devoir de haine, allowing him to revendiquer son identite ethique (91) and concludes that unlike Renaissance literature, seventeenth-century texts aim especially to donner du plaisir, un plaisir d'autant plus intense qu'il est nourri d'admiration et qu'il peut etre assaisonne d'une douce culpabilite (124). …

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance

Phillip John Usher and Isabelle Fernbach (eds.). Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance, Gallica, 27. London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012. Pp. 260. Scholars of the French early modern period have not ignored the relationship between Renaissance poetics and the reception of Virgil. It is striking, though, that there has not been much general work on Virgil reception of the sort that the late Philip Ford provided for Homer. This edited volume brings together work by an impressive collection of specialists. It will prove a valuable addition to the literature (complementing important, although venerable, work in French by Alice Hulubei, now more than eight decades old). The collection opens with an elegant, brief foreword by Timothy Hampton and an informative introduction by the two editors that presents a well-structured justification for the project, evoking the medieval Rota Virgilii and its tripartite distinction between the bucolic, the georgic, and the epic modes. The collection groups pastoral and georgic under one rubric (the first section) and the Aeneid is in its own (second) section. An index of authors and their writings is provided; a more compendious index would have been appreciated. Particular standouts include Philip Ford's piece on Virgil reception in Neo-Latin and vernacular humanist circles. Ford's comments about Virgil as the national poet of transnational Latin humanism (at the end of his section on Scaliger) are apt and well articulated. His is a voice much missed. The pieces by Valerie Worth-Stylianou and Todd Reeser are also excellent: the former presenting the results of careful work on Virgil translation, combining elegant close reading and broader comparisons between vernacular editions; the latter, on translating nation, offering a fascinating discussion of the links between literary and national projects in Joachim Du Bellay's writing. Reeser could, in a longer piece, explore the links between mimesis, history, and poetry more broadly. The comments about history and poetry in the posthumous 1587 preface to Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade would be relevant to his argument, for example in the context of the Renaissance reception of Aristotle's Poetics. (I find the emphasis on representation a bit old-fashioned, but this is perhaps a matter of taste.) In the first section, Bernd Renner returns to the question of poetic identity in Clement Marot (and to the well-known Maro/Marot pun, as well), also recently discussed by Florien Preisig and Gerard Defaux; Margaret Harp contributes a good piece, focused on one author, Jacques Yver (it might have been good to have more on Virgil reception during the Wars of Religion in the volume). Michael Randall is very much in his element in his considerations on Rhetoriqueur poetics and particularly Jean Lemaire de Beiges; his article resonates with Stephanie Lecompte's essay, which is a learned (and idiomatically translated) account of the temple of Virtue in French writing of, primarily, the first half of the sixteenth century. …

Of Labels and Situations: Revisionisms and Early Stuart Studies

The “Revisionist” controversy grew from England’s frayed postwar consensus. Historians had sought socioeconomic causes of the civil war, but Conrad Russell brilliantly asserted the political and the short term. What then of underlying pressures? “Revisionism” soon fractured amid implausible assertions of consensus, but while Russell attributed disruption to England’s neighbors, others explored the exuberance of England’s “political culture,” or stressed the Reformation century’s religious passions. But was England’s civil war a “war of religion”? Such claims attend neither to England’s political assumptions, nor to the nature of violence or human motivation, nor to the role of language.

Gnadengewalt und höchstrichterliche Gewalt im frühneuzeitlichen Frankreich (ca. 1550 bis ca. 1715)

The following contribution aims to outline the multiple ways of asking for mercy and the king’s role as bestower of grace and justice in early modern France from the eve of the Wars of Religion to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Initially, the article considers procedures, terms, and forms resulting in royal acts of grace. In a second part, it presents contemporary conceptualisations of royal power focused on the king as “roi justicier” and discusses the place of bestowing grace in the context of this ideal vision. Finally, the functions and limits of asking for mercy and bestowing grace in early modern France are analysed. It is argued that these interactions constituted a common form of communication between the king and his subjects which, in many cases, benefited both the crown and the subjects who addressed the king. On the other hand, the costs of this system closely related to the Old Regime’s system of patronage should be taken into account.

Philosophical about Marriage: Women Writers and the Moralist Tradition ASECS Presidential Address, 2013

Philosophical about Marriage: Women Writers and the Moralist Tradition ASECS Presidential Address, 2013 Julie Candler Hayes (bio) When we think of early modern women’s intellectual and cultural production, we are probably more likely to think of genres other than moralist writing—letters and novels, translation, even history and science. Women left their mark in all of these domains. Moralist writing, however, possessed an innate cultural capital derived from the authority of Montaigne, a modern classic, and classical antecedents in Cicero and Seneca, yet it eluded the increasingly pejorative connotations, especially for women, of “erudition”—however erudite the moralist’s allusions might be—by assuming a worldly, detached form of spectatorship. Thus, even as other genres, notably the novel, were assuming the moralist role of social commentary and analysis of the human heart, the novel explicitly blurred the lines between subject and object, between the spectator and his or her world, lines that moralist discourse sought to maintain. By writing in this older mode, women writers engaged with a distinguished tradition and claimed for themselves the right to observe and to analyze. Thus, the choice of genre is in itself a statement on women’s participation in intellectual life and their relationship to the production of knowledge. William Reddy and Jerrold Seigel have commented on the fraught nature of interpersonal relationships, “laced with intrigue and a wounding struggle for preeminence,” as Seigel puts it, as a distinctive feature of élite [End Page 1] French social life under the ancien régime.1 Classical moralist writing has indeed been one of our chief means for imaginatively recreating this world through the eyes of François de La Rochefoucauld and Jean de La Bruyère. Eric Méchoulan has argued that moralist writing comes into its own in the wake of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, the retreat of the Church as guarantor of state morality, and the new location of personal morality within the individual.2 The moralist practices the courtier’s “art of prudence” both as a form of self-regulation and, through deeper understanding of their motives, as a means to control or surpass others. In the longer project of which this is a part, I look at the ways in which women take on some of the great topoi of traditional moralist writing: friendship, the passions, old age, knowledge of oneself and of the world. One topic, however, runs through their works far more prominently than in those of their male interlocutors and predecessors: marriage. Classical moralist thought, whether ancient or modern, has remarkably little to say on the subject of marriage. Montaigne describes a good marriage as “representing” the conditions of friendship—as analogous to friendship, in other words, but not quite the same. He tells us that one marries not for oneself, but rather for one’s posterity, one’s family. Under ideal conditions, marriage can be a source of profound happiness, but it is not to be confused with love. “These things are distantly related [ont quelque cousinage], but they are very different.”3 The leading moralists of the following century are less nuanced on the subject, and indeed not particularly interested in it. As usual, in his one maxim on marriage, La Rochefoucauld sums up the thinking of an era with devastating concision: “Il y a de bons mariages, mais il n’y en a point de délicieux.”4 La Bruyère scatters reflections on marriage in various chapters of Les Caractères, where it is invariably linked to questions of wealth, social advancement, and hypocrisy. Among eighteenth century moralists, Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, and Chamfort both take a jaundiced view of marriage, seeing it simply as a “commerce” of material interests, and hardly conducive to personal (masculine) happiness. Take Chamfort, for example: “Le mariage et le célibat ont tous deux des inconvénients: il faut préférer celui dont les inconvénients ne sont pas sans remède.”5 Much of the 17th and 18th century iconography of marriage further suggests ways in which the topic lent itself to comic, misogynistic, or sentimental representations. Not surprisingly, marriage is a subject on which the female moralists...

La très politique religion de Bertrand Barère

The religion of Barère (1755-1841),whowas the rapporteur of the Committee of Public Safety, provides an analytical tool to study the relation between private opinion and the state under ten different regimes. He advocated religious and press freedom on the grounds of both principle and personal experience. His eclecticism enabled him to consider Rome as the historical and affective educator of people, and the England of the minor Romantics, such as Young, as the educator of their hearts. From the Voltarian bible, he retained only a hatred of wars of religion of all kinds. His attitude towards the people as a whole is one that inserts into the common civic order those who are excluded from the realm of capacity. This was a philanthropy straight out of the Counter-Reformation tradition of Giovanni Botero. Ultimately, Barère became a southerner who wanted a spargite flores tombeau suitable for a provincial notable.

The Catholicisms of Coutances: Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789, by J. Michael Hayden

The Catholicisms of Coutances: Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350-1789, by J. Michael Hayden. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xvi, 368 pp. $100.00 Cdn (cloth). Scholars of Early Modern Europe certainly will appreciate this ambitious and convincing contribution to the study of the history of religion. The book complements the author's extensive work on the Catholic reform in France that he co-authored with Malcolm Greenshields, 600 Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190-1789 (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). From there, Hayden has changed the lens to focus on one diocese, Coutances, from 1350 to 1789. This book takes the reader to the varieties of (or Catholicisms) that evolved in the diocese over several centuries, peering deeply into the multiple layers of belief, behaviour, and practice. Hayden stresses the importance of to Early Modern people, as purely a central defining element in a person's identity. Religious belief and practice were shaped by historical events across this period: the Hundred Years' War, the Protestant the Wars of Religion, the two Catholic Reformations, and to a lesser extent the Enlightenment. Of these, what shaped Catholicisms the most is what is called the Second Catholic Reformation, a movement that was launched by the Council of Trent and then gained momentum and a distinct national character in France in the seventeenth century. Rather than positing a dichotomy between elite religion and popular religion, Hayden delineates a symbiotic relationship between official Catholicism and the variety of Catholicisms that contained aspects of that official religious expression but were coloured by various traditions and myths. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, the ecclesiastical efforts to reform lay Catholic beliefs and practices had succeeded in forming a not-uncritical but stalwart loyalty to the Catholic one that allowed for variants. Hayden investigates a large area of ecclesiastical territory and he is sensitive to the regional variations in the diocese. Religious belief and practice were less intense in some areas, a factor he attributes to the penetration of the Protestant faith (although he notes the difficulty in determining which was cause and which was effect: weak Catholic devotion or Protestant infiltration). The book can be divided into several parts. The first part contains two foundational chapters, one outlining the diocese's basic features: its physical and linguistic geography, its history as well as the precarious condition of the common people. The other chapter sketches the official Catholic belief structure and the devotional expectations that upheld it, all of which lay atop a pre-existing layer of unofficial belief that revolved around nature and the various approaches to propitiate it. The next part comprises four chapters on the Catholicisms of the clergy: i) the bishops: all adherents of the main tenets of official but in practice evolving generally from a group of worldly, non-resident men in the later Middle Ages, to a series of Tridentine-inspired reforming bishops, and then a group of competent but complacent bishops in the eighteenth century; ii) the cathedral chapter and the archdeacons, the former concentrating on maintaining their privileges and the latter rooting their in a devotion to reform; iii) the religious orders: their credibility and survival into the later eighteenth century depended on the extent to which they could attach their to reform and to engagement with the laity, either through preaching or teaching; iv) the secular priests: they became increasingly separated from the laity but still aligned more neatly with reform by the eighteenth century, in spite of their lower socio-economic condition and lifestyle relative to their superiors. …

Religion Around Shakespeare by Peter Iver Kaufman (review)

Peter Iver Kaufman. Shakespeare. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. iii + 256. $34.95. Peter Iver Kaufmans appears as first installment in a series called Religion Around, of which Kaufman is general editor. series intends to bring religious background into foreground for cultural icons. For as recent to in studies suggests, this is no small task. difficulties, as Kaufman sees them, are first, that criticism has attended to the religion of Shakespeare rather than the religion around him (1); and second, that the ways plays are read (as laments for a religion that was lost or as intrigued, bemused, or cleverly critical reactions to religion found around him) often determine ways in which contexts are patched together (2-3). Kaufmans remedy is to begin by ignoring plays and reconstructing late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century religious milieu, and then by imagining what kind of religious views (and news) may have encountered, first in Stratford and then in London. Only after Kaufman has isolated times' religious character does he turn to Shakespeare's plays, but even here Kaufman insists he is uninterested in new dramatic interpretations, but instead docks evidence drawn from some plays alongside evidence left by preachers, churchwardens, vestrymen, polemicists, theologians, and diarists (4-5) to recover circumstance (5). Circumstance, Kaufman assures us, --the religion around playwright, not his faith or plays' proper interpretations--is my subject (5). Two chapters, Religion and Around Shakespeare, comprise book's first section. Religion begins in 1558 with establishment of a reformed church that owed due obedience to Queen Elizabeth and her bishops--a demand that challenged consciences of Catholics and Calvinists alike. Kaufman attempts to avoid contagious logophobia among historians of this contested Elizabethan Protestantism by adopting Charles Prior's choice of conformist and reformist--defined by degree of satisfaction with English church's state of reform--with caveat that puritan is useful for Calvinist pietists who internalized their dissatisfaction with reform by emphasizing their co-religionists' prodigality through excessive sermonizing and devotional literature (11). conformist/reformist binary envisions Jacobethan religion as conflicted both within church and between Protestants and Catholics. This chapter, then, considers both doctrinal differences (the efficacy of sermons versus sacraments, tensions between episcopacy and laity) and religious, or quasi-religious, political confrontations: Elizabeths conflict with Archbishop Grindal over prophesying; Pope Pius Vs excommunication of Elizabeth; Mary Queen of Scots' Catholic claim to succession; Alencon's courtship of Elizabeth framed by French wars of religion; Jesuit mission to England; Spanish threat, including Dutch Revolt, Armada, and earl of Essex's preemptive strikes against Spain and subsequent fall; and continuity into James I's reign of attitudes associated with these events, beginning with Hampton Court Conference and culminating in Gunpowder Plot. Kaufman skillfully weaves into his narration of these events their reception by Catholics, reformists, and conformists identifiable through sermons and printed texts. In considering such public responses, Kaufman is cautious about what could have known--as, for example, regarding Essex's fall, he notes, The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally non-aligned playwright living in London at time is hard to gauge (37). next chapter, Around Shakespeare begins in Stratford, where despite Shakespeare's family's possible fondness for old religion, power of local reformist notables like Robert Dudley, Thomas Lucy, and Edwin Sandys would have made outright expression of Catholic positions politically unwise. …

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europe's wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.

The death of Charles IX Valois: an assassin's or a martyr's blood?: The image of kingship during the French Wars of Religion

The purpose of this article is to analyse works connected to the death of Charles IX Valois. In particular, we will focus on the image of the blood of the dead king. Analysis of Charles’ autopsy, as well as the account of the court intrigue characterizing the last months of his life, provides the context in which this flow of propaganda took place. Catholic sources, especially funeral sermons by court preacher Arnaud Sorbin, cast light on the image of the blood of Charles IX as the blood of a ‘saint’ and a ‘martyr’ king. We will also show how Sorbin’s sermons related to Henri III’s succession to the throne given the tense situation at court. Finally, analysis of Reformed sources, both contemporary to Charles’ death and later, outline how Calvinists tried to dishonour the ‘tyrant’ through references to his blood and by characterizing his death as divine justice.

The Protestant Reformation in Counter-Reformation Italy, c. 1550–1660: An Overview of New Evidence

This article aims to open up and overview some key questions surrounding the Italian Reformation. It argues that the Italian Reformation cannot be viewed as a closed book after the conclusion of the Council of Trent; instead there emerged new forms of engagement between Italy and Protestantism, both within and outside the peninsula. In particular, this article considers Protestant propaganda: the efforts by communities of exiles, especially the Genevan Italian congregation, in printing materials to send into Italy, and also sending personnel at critical junctures, all extremely sensitive to political and religious contexts. The French Wars of Religion provided an immediate model for what could be attempted in Italy, and so addressed sometimes delicate issues such as nicodemism and martyrdom, while also providing practical advice and support to Protestants in Italy. As such, this article shows that Italy was not partitioned by some religious “Iron Curtain” from the rest of Europe, but rather was still viewed as a potential battleground for international Calvinism.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Rural Engagement During the French Wars of Religion: the Case of Brittany

AbstractIn 1589, French rural communities in Brittany committed themselves in the last of the wars of Religion. Their community reality, officering, weaponry and forms of action showed that the integration of rural parishes into the “political body” of the kingdom was then both active and militarily functional. They had no specific agenda on the socio‐economic level. Their choice of a political camp in that civil war seemed to be a mere consequence of their defensive engagement against a direct aggression. The main purpose of that rural mobilization, as many others, was then reestablishing order and security in their country.

The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland. Edited by Michael J.Braddick and David L.Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. xxxv, 312 pp. £62.00. ISBN 9780521868969;England's Wars of Religion, Revisited. Edited by Charles W.A.Prior and GlennBurgess. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2011. xiv, 335 pp. £67.50. ISBN 9781409419747.

The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland. Edited by Michael J.Braddick and David L.Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. xxxv, 312 pp. £62.00. ISBN 9780521868969;England's Wars of Religion, Revisited. Edited by Charles W.A.Prior and GlennBurgess. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2011. xiv, 335 pp. £67.50. ISBN 9781409419747.

'Remarque en toy telle marque': Etienne Jodelle's Parisian Inscriptions and Epitaphs in the French Wars of Religion

This article considers the various inscriptions and epitaphs written by Etienne Jodelle (1532–1573) during the French Wars of Religion. Jodelle asserted his identity as a Parisian with an urban poetics that inscribed a pro-Catholic and pro-royal narrative upon the city itself. He sought to make Paris a readable, royal, Catholic space through his inscriptions, particularly those he composed for the Croix de Gastine, a monument erected in 1569 to commemorate the execution of a family of Protestants on the rue Saint-Denis. However, Jodelle’s attempts to inscribe a narrative of royal power onto the city highlight the difficulty of creating such a narrative within the contested space of Paris at the end of the sixteenth century. The policies of oblivion of the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (August 1570) led to the removal of the Croix de Gastine. However, despite the poet’s disappointment in these policies, he continued to make his work public through monumental writing in Paris. By means of this direct, material encounter with his public, Jodelle sought to preserve collective memory of royal power, appealing first and foremost to the minds of his readers in the hopes of leaving an inscription that would remain after its material source disappeared.