This critical edition of one of the most unusual pamphlets of the Genevan Reformation provides modern readers with an insight into the mechanisms of polemics and the world of verbal warfare that quickly spread from the early centers of the Reformation in Germany and Northern France over all of Europe in the course of the sixteenth century. Published in 1567, the Mappe-Monde Papistique, a large-format satirical map depicting the world of Roman Catholicism, and the Histoire, the accompanying book-length pamphlet that presents itself as a description of the map but is in reality a virulent invective on the religious adversary, represent an ambitious attempt to combat post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. The critical edition that distinguished scholars Frank Lestringant and Alessandra Preda have now produced is welcome, as both the book and the map are rarities: ten copies of the 1567 Histoire and its 1568 reprint exist in rare-book collections over the world, from Rouen to Cambridge, MA, while only five extant copies of the map are preserved in Florence, London, Paris, Sonderhausen, and Wroclaw.

The Histoire and the Mappe-Monde Papistique unite the combative rhetoric perfected in countless Reformation pamphlets in the vernacular with the cartographic imagination that throve during the period of geographic discoveries and expansion. The “Papist mappa mundi” is both a spectacular satirical map of the city of Rome being attacked by armies of reformed nations outside and individual reformers inside and a map of the world drawn on the Ptolemaic grid placed in the mouth of the devil, where the Ptolemic Oceanus has been replaced by the saliva dribbling from the beast's mouth, and, instead of cherubs, four devils blow wind. Both the presumed author, Italian-born Calvinist Jean-Baptiste Trento, and the French engraver Pierre Eskrich — who seems to have hesitated between Calvinism and Catholicism during his lifetime and worked for both camps, which suggests that craftsmanship rather than simply religious zeal drove him to complete the map — drew on and manipulated textual and visual sources. What Lestringant and Preda's critical introduction does especially well is to provide rich and useful information on these sources, which in turn helps the modern reader-viewer gauge their polemical and pedagogical clout, their power to produce new “anti-papist” ways of seeing the world or solidly ground the already converted in their ideological position. An excellent example is the mythical ferryman Charon's raging-but-hilarious invective against Catholic clergy at the end of the Histoire that imitates and transforms (into a more raucous invective) Erasmian humanist Alfonso de Valdés's milder Due Diloghi inspired by the erudite hellenist satirist Lucian of Samosata. Engraver Eskrich similarly plunders cartographic depictions of Rome (such as Nicolo Beatrizet's of 1557), fantastic cosmographies from the Middle Ages, and biblical and Reformed iconography to transform Rome into a desolate and ruined landscape.

Readers of Lestringant and Preda's edition can now study the craftsmanship that both artists put into their visual and textual blows on Catholicism. Their manipulative, disrespectful treatment of sources recall to the modern reader not only the lighter currents of humanism (Rabelaisian and scatological overtones appear in both text and map) but also pop culture. (Lestringant and Preda aptly compare the work to a comic book.) The reader can also appreciate the editors’ brief reflection on the possible uses of the map preserved in three different formats (as mounted, assembled map, loose sheets arranged in an album, and bound, comic-book style). In the end, one wishes that the editors had turned up more information about the reception of the book or that they had examined the effectiveness of imaginary topographies like the Mappe-Monde Papistique. They remark upon the grotesque and alienating landscape the iconoclastic map creates, but is its significance exhausted by its iconoclasm? The craft of the authors to maximize the effect of the invective is exercised to such an extent that words and images lose their referential value as they are chosen for their singular ability to injure the adversary. As a result, the reader is transported into a fictional world, where only the boundaries between self and other are real and tangible. It is a poetic world of invective and abuse that recalls linguist George Lakoff's argument about the linguistic constitution of political consciousness. Perhaps the most stunning figures in the map are the images of Reformers clad in Bibles used as armors and thrusting forward swords and lances that are wrapped in Bibles. Lestringant and Preda explain that, although these icons of the Word depicted as weapon go back to the biblical (especially Pauline) figure of the Word as a spiritual sword, they are a hapax in Reformation literature. The creators of the satirical map were aware that the importance of orienting audiences in a social and political world outweighed even their theological education. This non-theological turn of the Reformation, whose larger implications remain somewhat overlooked in the introduction, makes the book relevant for modern readers who are interested in the origins of modern political campaigning rather than just for scholars of the Reformation.

Lestringant and Preda have done great justice to a remarkable pamphlet of the European Reformation. They have made available these materials for further study and provided an excellent example of the usual scholarly apparatus (introduction, appendices, index, and bibliography) along with a full reproduction of the map and some of its visual sources.