In the late 1540s, a local Catholic lord assisted the bishop of Basel in disciplining members of the Jura community of Dombresson. The local inhabitants had grown enamored of a new preacher and “during these Christmas celebrations refused to receive Communion from their minister,” whom they no longer considered their pastor. The lord and the bishop had the new preacher removed and helped effect a reconciliation between the subjects and their proper pastor (State Archives of Neuchâtel, undated letter to René de Challant). This example of two Catholic leaders acting to support a Protestant minister rejected by his Protestant subjects demonstrates that heresy was sometimes absent where one might expect to find it in sixteenth-century francophone Europe. Representing Heresy is an essay collection based on a set of conference papers dealing with the ways in which heresy or religious difference was represented or experienced in France between the reigns of Francis I and Henry IV. While several of the contributions address heresy as a tool used to attack religious, political, or cultural opponents, a number of them have surprisingly little to say about it, suggesting that (as in the example cited above), sixteenth-century francophones were not as preoccupied with heresy as one might think, at least prior to the 1560s. Religious war then sharpened distinctions.

The editors’ introduction describes heresy as “a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint” (19), leading to some confusion about whether heresy is understood by the authors as unorthodox belief, practice, representation, or simply a rhetorical tool that could be used malleably to attack one's enemies. The volume's essays explore heresy from different perspectives, both directly and indirectly. While the goal of the collection was “to engage prominent scholars from a wide range of disciplines in exploring the conundrum presented by heresy as it intersects with” various academic fields (20), seven out of the ten contributors are literary scholars, two are art historians, and one a historian of religious culture. One or two more explicitly theological studies might have helped to sketch out contemporary normative understandings of the concept of heresy, as might have an essay focused on preaching.

The book's four chapters each include two or three essays: the themes are faith, gender, poetry, and history and politics. Lidia Radi examines a 1518 mirror-for-princes text, Guillaume Michel dit de Tours's Le Penser de royal memoir, whose mentions of heresy are employed to convince a young Francis I to govern with virtue. Nicole Bensoussan looks at pro-Catholic images (medals, enamel plaques, stained-glass windows, and engravings—wonderfully illustrated) to point out the multiplicity of strategies for defining heresy and defending orthodoxy. The gender essays first examine the role of Francis's consort, Queen Claude, as “an important if nearly invisible sustainer of Church reform” (93) (Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier), and then explain why published confessional histories depicted relatively few women being executed for heresy prior to 1560 (fewer than twenty, compared to over four hundred men) (Edith Benkov). Next, Robert Hudson shows how Clément Marot responded to the polemical attacks by François de Sagon, who accused him of heresy, by side-stepping the issue and engaging on humanist and poetic grounds. Gabriella Scarlatta examines sixteenth-century love poetry to show how religious struggles were represented by and informed poets’ depictions of the suffering endured by lovers—often in graphic and colorful detail. “Love is unreliable and cruel, just like the political and religious clashes” surrounding Jean de Sponde and other poets (207).

In the last chapter, Kendall Tarte identifies representations of the damages caused by heresy in the descriptions and maps in François de Belleforest's Cosmographie Universelle (1575). David LaGuardia discusses the “political heresy” of the Politiques as depicted in the 1589 pamphlet Le Pourtraict & description du Politique de ce temps. Valérie Dionne shows how reflections on Julian the Apostate helped thinkers like Montaigne and Charron work through notions of freedom of conscience and religious pluralism. In the afterword, Andrew Spicer traces the use of the hydra to represent heresy over the course of the sixteenth century, noting that by century's end its symbolism “had shifted from heresy to discord” (277). These essays all raise interesting questions, without as a whole defining a specific problématique of heresy.