When Henry III wished to know who had written the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, he asked the redoubtable Genevan pastor-publisher, Simon Goulart. Along with pastoral duties and intense engagement in local and international Protestant communities, Goulart translated and published ancient authors, expurgated and published Montaigne to his fellow pastors’ satisfaction, edited and published music, completed and edited Crespin’s Martyrologie, prepared textbooks, and of course, by his astute accumulation and editing of contemporary documents, almost singlehandedly established the deeper narrative of French political history during the Wars of Religion. Goulart’s documents accomplished what Jean de Serres, in his Histoire did not do.
Goulart has recently attracted considerable interest. The volume edited by M.-M. Fragonard and J. Berchtold, La Mémoire des Guerres de Religion (2007), appeared several years after Amy Graves-Monroe’s first publications on Goulart, confirming rather than initiating her approach to a typical but particularly significant late sixteenth-century Protestant polymath. While departing from L. C. Jones’s Simon Goulart (1917) and Cécile Huchard’s D’Encre et de sang: Simon Goulart et le Saint-Barthélémy (2007) (see my review in RQ 61.4 [2008]: 1268–70), Graves-Monroe focuses on the construction of a historicized atrocity that henceforth shaped the thought of the Protestant community. Goulart’s (and Huchard’s) framework is legal-humanist, largely as Donald Kelley proposed in his Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (1970).
In the volume under review, the first priority has been the bibliographical work on Goulart’s multiple works and editions, and their temporal contexts. This tedious but very valuable work makes this book indispensable for Goulart’s future readers. Lack of space here does not permit a full listing of Goulart’s major works, but it must be noted that there is a catalogue of all the texts in the Mémoires de la Ligue based on the editions of La Rochelle, 1587–89 and that of 1590. Readers, Goulart suggests, should be like bees that take nectar from many different flowers, a variant on the venerable florilegium topos.
Johann Wolf’s published excerpts were certainly influential for Goulart’s project, but from the beginning the latter would have its own strong originality. Legal vocabulary is an important frame, probably humanist-inspired; but there often was no more legal terminology than in Cicero or Quintilian. Goulart’s familiarity with Bodin’s Methodus is certain, because he published an excerpt from it; yet it is doubtful that he adopted much from the Angevin’s thought. Similarly, although Goulart exchanged letters with Voisin de La Popelinière, with the exception of a difference of opinion about the need for complete recall in a historian (Goulart’s view) versus a preference for forgetting to bring some events into greater relief (La Popelinière’s view), again there seems to have been little impact on the pastor’s projects. Goulart could also have read Patrizzi about history and future time, as announced by a prophet, but it is not certain that he did. Like Calvin, Goulart believed that prophecy was for all time and all peoples.
In his use of the terms history and time, Goulart does not seem preoccupied with constraints from either antique or contemporary notions of genre. Classicizing rules about genre may have been known, but they lacked the tyranny they would exert over historians in the next century. Thus close readings of Goulart’s titles are not particularly revealing. The exception is the Histoire du Présent, a particularly rewarding analysis because the public craved information, and because Duplessis-Mornay needed to attract readers to his vision of current political and religious conditions. These factors came together to force conceptual change and were a response to a need to know, as time and history. Equally important was the need to remember, not merely to live the past, but for posterity. Indeed, lack of confidence in memory haunted Goulart all his life.
In the Mémoires de la Ligue, Goulart’s last great editing project, he sought to reach out beyond the Protestant communities to modern Catholics and foreign readers. This is a mélange of official documents such as royal letters and edicts, along with “discours” that sometimes came from unidentified gentilhommes. The result probably is a greater number of “witnesses” to events than in Jean de Serres or La Popelinière, making comparisons with Pierre de l’Estoile and Étienne Pasquier particularly suggestive. Immediacy played a very important part in the selection of texts, so Goulart’s œuvre serves as a precedent for the Mercure de France and, later, the Gazette de France, which were probably published at a time more distant from the event than Goulart on the League. There is practically no discussion of what texts Goulart possessed but chose not to publish, while at the same time the shadows and presence of Duplessis-Mornay and Henry of Navarre become more apparent.
The importance of what might be called informed information remained a cardinal belief throughout Goulart’s long and active life. He did not dumb-down in order to attract more readers or increase sales. At the same time, the ways of Providence remained mysterious in thought and deed, particularly in the community of believers inspired by Calvin and Beza and nourished in their faith by reading Crespin on the martyrs. Not the Word alone, but also knowledge of history and the present time were therefore important; but did not the signs of a visible God also appear in the crystal ball and crystal triangle that were found among Goulart’s possessions after his death?
