As the title of this collection indicates, Simon Goulart was a man of wide-ranging interests and abilities. Best known among historians of the French Reformation for his huge collections of materials from the civil war years, Goulart was also an accomplished poet, an avid translator, and a thoughtful editor of other people’s works. He fitted this alongside his responsibilities as a pastor and, between 1607 and 1612, as moderator of the Company of Pastors in Geneva, a post that cannot always have sat easily with his own sensitivities and interests. Ready, willing, and more than able to put almost all of the latest literary trends of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century to use in the service of his faith, Goulart nonetheless often trod a very fine line between propagating and polluting his faith, at least in the eyes of some of his critics.

Goulart’s prolificacy should assure him some continued fame, yet following Lester Chester Jones’s 1917 “biographical and bibliographical” study, work on Goulart has been more fragmented until relatively recently, with the appearance of monographs by Cécile Huchard and Amy Graves Monroe in the last decade. This rich collection of essays brings us a step closer to understanding this complicated man, although those wanting a simple introduction to his life and times will find this a very steep introduction. A good level of knowledge about where Goulart came from and the events of his life is presupposed, with the focus firmly on what he thought and how he wrote. The lengthy “presentation” by editor Pot unpicks the scholarly disregard of Goulart to date, and introduces each of the succeeding essays in fine detail; while this is an excellent overview, a comparable conclusion drawing some of the key themes together could have been very helpful.

As noted by Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (93), Goulart read a lot and worked hard to make texts he considered to be spiritually and indeed practically useful available in French. He was particularly sensitive to the precarious situation in which French Protestants found themselves at the turn of the seventeenth century and how this might be assuaged through reading. Jan Miernowski and Jean-Raymond Fanlo demonstrate how Goulart hoped to use history to alleviate some of the despair he sensed among his co-religionists, particularly after the end of the Wars of Religion in France; while all the authors help us understand his motivations and thought processes, Irena Backus’s essay on his version of Mathias Flacius Illyricus’s Catalogus is especially insightful in this regard. He was also a talented practitioner of the arts of book production. Several essays present case studies of how Goulart edited and presented the texts he chose to develop and, in doing so, show the depth of his knowledge and erudition, as well as his appreciation of the reader. Goulart used all the options available to him at the time — indexes, paratexts, and commentaries, to name but a few — to guide readers through what could sometimes be very challenging works, and he applied these methods to an astonishing range of texts, from his own editions of Amyot’s translations of Plutarch to contemporary works by people like Osório and of course Montaigne. The sheer breadth of his printing interests is outlined in the masterful essay by Jean-François Gilmont and the accompanying bibliography of Goulart’s Genevan impressions. The collection is also valuable for highlighting other aspects of Goulart’s work, ones that might be less familiar or even less expected of a Protestant pastor; although he was not alone in experimenting with poetry or music as a worthwhile contribution to Protestant experience, that side of his work is given much more detailed attention here than it has been previously.

The collection’s colloquy origins are quite obvious throughout, which does, however, allow for a lot of useful cross-referencing between papers and themes: his relationships with particular authors and particular works, most notably his work on Montaigne’s Essais, and the imagined relationship with his readers are mentioned frequently. Given that Goulart was so concerned with making his texts accessible and useful for his readers, it would have been helpful to have a bit more supporting apparatus to explain the significance of the various annexes included, in particular the selection of images. But overall, the essays in this collection more than do justice to a complicated man, a pastor at the heart of the Calvinist system who owned a crystal ball, and to the varieties of experience that Reformed Protestantism could allow as it entered a challenging century.