This is a collection of nine essays by literary scholars followed by an afterword by the Reformation historian Andrew Spicer. The volume publishes the collected papers of a series of panels at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2012 and includes twenty-six colour illustrations. The strength of these essays is to challenge any fixed definitions of ‘heresy’ and to show the variety of ways in which sixteenth-century French writers and artists created shifting representations of religious pluralism. The essays cover cartography (Kendall B.Tarte), manuscript illuminations (Nicole Bensoussan and Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier), martyrology (Edith J.Benkov), poetry (Robert J.Hudson and Gabriella Scarlatta) and polemical libels (David LaGuardia). They range from canonical authors such as Michel de Montaigne (Valérie M.Dionne) to lesser known figures such as Guillaume Michel (Lidia Radi). As an exercise in the cultural history of representations in Reformation France, the volume acknowledges its debts to the work of historians who have worked extensively in this field such as Denis Crouzet, Natalie Zemon Davis and Luc Racaut. The essays work particularly well when they use the artistic and literary qualities of the sources to reveal how painters and writers challenged, inverted or evaded the straightforward label of heresy (for example, Radi on Michel, Hudson on Clement Marot, or Wilson-Chevalier on manuscript illuminations commissioned by Claude de France). For the contributors, heresy was a contested category whose very imprecision proved a stimulus for artists and writers to explore the central issues of their time. Overall, the volume carries significant findings for literary scholars seeking to move beyond the canon of established authors in this period. However, historians more interested in the dynamics of the Reformation and Wars of Religion in France might find the focus on visual art and literary texts somewhat restrictive.
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