EDITORIAL
Almost 430 years ago, on 1 January 1576, the French soldier-poet
Agrippa d’Aubigné sat in a carriage with the Sieur de Roquelaure and
Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre, plotting the latter’s flight from the
Valois court. Despite the enormous importance of the planned escape,
the King did not forget to demand from his companions his traditional
New Year’s gift, or étrennes. D’Aubigné had obviously come wellprepared and offered his sovereign a symbolic posy of olive, laurel and
cypress leaves (an allusion to the motto of Henri’s mother, Jeanne
d’Albret). The accompanying poem, J’estrenerai mon Roi…, explained
furthermore that Navarre was faced with only three options: to reign in
peace, to defend his crown through war, or to die:
…
Sage, brave, constant, mon Prince, fais ton conte
De regner, vivre, ou bien ne survivre à ta honte:
Si tu donnes la paix je te donne l’olive:
Si tu vaincs, saches qui, le laurier vient aprés:
Si tu meurs, le cyprés couronne l’ame vive;
Si non, rend tout, olive, et laurier, et cyprés.
[Be] wise, courageous and constant, my Prince; make it your
business to reign and live or else not to survive your shame.
Should you bring peace, I shall give you the olive branch; should
you be victorious, know which: the laurel wreath will follow;
should you die, then the cypress will crown your living soul –if
not, then return the lot, olive and laurel and cypress.
Readers of Warwick’s Renaissance Journal are more likely to be
sitting in libraries or offices than conspiring in horse-drawn carriages,
whilst a June issue may appear an improbable juncture to evoke a New
Year’s gift, albeit a Renaissance one. In this Foreword, however, we
share with d’Aubigné’s sonnet a sense of change and anticipation. For
this is the first time that the Renaissance Journal takes the route of a
themed issue. Even so, with this issue on Early Modern France freshly off
the press, there is still plenty to be festive about. As the University of
Warwick bedecks itself in posters, flags and bunting to celebrate its
‘Forty Years of Innovation’, it can look back on a rich tradition of
scholarship and expertise on the French Renaissance, in both the fields
of history and literature. But what marks Renaissance Studies at
Warwick above all else, is the enduring openness on the part of its
1
researchers to dialogue and comparative or interdisciplinary approaches.
It is with great pleasure, therefore, that the Renaissance Journal’s editorial
team proffer a verdant bouquet of short articles relating to both the
history and literature of sixteenth-century France.
Just as the laurel leaf of military valour, the olive green of peace
and the cypress crown of death intertwine in d’Aubigné’s étrennes, so
Amy Graves (University at Buffalo) has woven a garland around
‘memory, tragedy and history’ to study the poetics of d’Aubigné’s dual
(epic and historical) account of the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre
(on the occasion of which Navarre, by virtue of his Catholic conversion,
became a captive of the Valois court). Images such as that of the
hawthorn flowering out of season in the Cemetery of Saint Innocent in
the days following the massacre, argues Graves, are deployed as
mnemonic aids to conveying the raw lessons of history. The laurel
seems more emblematic than the olive branch or cypress, however, in
the case of Ronsard’s polemical poetry: exploring allusions to vines and
tares, to scorpions and locusts, Philip Ford focusses on Ronsard’s use
of biblical imagery as a deliberate rhetorical strategy in the fight against
the Huguenots to uncover … the very deficiencies of the poet’s chosen
weaponry. The difficult relationship between the pen and the sword
finds yet a different expression in the Commentaires of Blaise de Monluc,
as Kevin Gould (Nottingham Trent University) revalues this important
source for the historiography of the French Wars of Religion.
Economic stagnation and subsistence crises are all too frequent
by-products of war, but any historian will acknowledge the difficulty of
interpreting wealth, poverty or price fluctuation in a period which did
not collect economic statistics. Agnieszka Steczowicz’s (University of
Edinburgh) study of the controversy between the otherwise unknown
seigneur de Malestroit and the rather more famous Jean Bodin points to
a different, conceptual approach through an analysis of that wide-spread
figure of Early Modern thought, the paradox –as applied by Malestroit
and Bodin to discussions of the extraordinary price inflation which
France experienced in the middle of the sixteenth century. Finally,
Philippe Desan of the University of Chicago moves into the
seventeenth century to unearth yet further conflicting views, in the
reception this time of that more moderate amongst French Renaissance
authors, Michel de Montaigne. In his reaction to Jansenist denigrations
of the essayist, Guillaume Bérenger’s rare defense-cum-anthology of
Montaigne (1667), so Desan demonstrates, epitomizes itself the
manipulative, moralist readings that would skew interpretations of
Montaigne for so long.
Through combining literary investigations with historical ones, by
zooming in on the intersection between ideas and language, or between
politics and writing, each contributor to this issue offers his or her own
2
fresh view on their chosen aspect of Early Modern French culture and
thought. It is only befitting, therefore, that all authors should find
recognition here for the quality and innovative value of the work they
have submitted for publication. Thanks are also due to Jayne Archer
and to Sarah Knight (now of Leicester University) for the commitment
and effability with which they have put this Renaissance Journal together.
You, reader, whether you prefer olive, laurel, or cypress, are sure to find
something to your liking in this particular posy: tolle, lege!
Dr Ingrid De Smet
Guest Editor
3