Pierre de L’Estoile’s journals are one of the most remarkable and valuable primary sources for the later Wars of Religion in France, covering as they do the reigns of Henri III and Henri IV (1574–1610) and the so-called wars of the Catholic League. This magnificent in scale and beautifully produced volume marks the culmination of the most recent critical editions of L’Estoile’s Registres-Journaux, which has been an extremely welcome and valuable undertaking by Gilbert Schrenck and his collaborators over the last twenty-five years or so. Here we are focusing on a much more concentrated period, from 1589 to 1594, the years when the league dominated both the city and the presses of Paris. It underlines the importance of Pierre de L’Estoile as a collector of printed ephemera, including handbills, pamphlets, placards, poems, and images, many of them satirical, which were circulating in the streets of the French capital in his day. Most significantly, many of these do not survive in any other form and would have been lost to us, but for L’Estoile’s assiduity.

Selective extracts from the texts and images and a full inventory have been produced before, but this is the first facsimile edition of the full forty-six folios. These treasures are reproduced as faithfully to the originals as possible, including foldout prints and reproductions, as well as full transcriptions. As a result, the work is four times the scale of the journals published in the same series, making it a hefty product. By Schrenck’s assessment, about a third of the 150 pieces are official texts without illustrations, alongside poems and popular songs addressing contemporary events. Another third are engravings with bits of explanatory texts or poems, including portraits and images of monstrous births. The final third is made up of L’Estoile’s own handwritten entries, passages in manuscript, much like his journals, which lend the volume its unique character. Most striking are the images of penitential processions, the Guise assassinations, and monsters of various sorts.

In his introduction to the volume, Schrenck helpfully places the texts and the iconography of the images in historical context and provides a full bibliographical and scholarly apparatus through which the reader might further explore and problematize the issues raised. He also discusses the origins of some of the pieces, such as the five drawn from the work of the Catholic propagandist Richard Verstegan. Schrenck guides the reader through how the collection came together, quoting references in L’Estoile’s journal to where in Paris he picked up the various works, as well as discussing his career in royal service and links to sympathetic figures, such as Pierre Pithou, both of which ensured the survival of his compilation. In particular, he guards against seeing these prints as telling the full story of the league years or in some way neutral or haphazard in their elaboration. They are, above all, propaganda: originally for the league and now used against it in order to bolster the new reign of Henri IV. L’Estoile was a royalist and Gallican, so his choices, ordering, and method of presentation were shaped by these preferences. Indeed, his purpose to mock and denigrate the league is clear from the outset and immortalized in the title he gave to the work itself, as well as in his satirical commentary.

What may seem like a rather hybrid and heterogeneous collection, Schrenck argues, was in fact carefully ordered by L’Estoile in an attempt to bring some clarity to a disordered world. The images, for instance, are presented in such a way as to evoke the tragedy of the league years, especially in their depictions of inhuman violence, adding up to a collage of cruelty. Equally, monstrosity is a recurring theme, reinforcing this aspect of the league’s rule. This is a message, therefore, shaped for posterity; a mirror put up to the trauma of these years; the memorialization of a regime that should never be repeated. At the same time, L’Estoile’s endeavors have resulted in a volume that provides early modern historians with a rich source for understanding a dimension of the world of print and propaganda and how such sources might be manipulated and used by both friend and foe.