Calvin the mimic: Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545)

Abstract

This essay examines some instances of mimicry in Jean Calvin’s Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545). Calvin’s denunciation of the spiritual libertines, an obscure antinomian sect which had recently spread from the Low Countries to northern France, is made all the more vehement by a fear that others might confuse some aspects of their theology with his. Mimicry of his opponents’ Picard dialect is one way among several of marking off their voices from his own. Although Calvin shows himself elsewhere capable of trenchant humour (for example, in the Traité des reliques) examples of speech-parody are rare in his work, possessing a farcical quality more readily associated with Rabelais (the episode of the ‘écolier Limousin’) or Molière (Nérine in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac). The blending of heretical voices with regional ones raises broader questions of language and nation, just four years before the publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549).

KEYWORDS:

• Jean Calvin
• spiritual libertines
• voice
• mimesis
• comedy; Picard dialect

Notes

1 Origen, Contra Celsum, ed. and trans. by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

2 Tertullian, Contra Marcionem, ed. and trans. by Ernest Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

3 Epiphanius, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis Book I (Sects 1–46), trans. by Frank Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2009), III.42, pp. 294–363.

4 Michael Moriarty, Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 267–70.

5 An adjacent case might be that of Remy de Gourmont, who claims to have been baffled by Bacon’s Novum Organum until he read its hostile distillation in Joseph de Maistre. See Remy de Gourmont, Promenades philosophiques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), p. 23.

6 Photius, Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius, trans. by Edward Walford (London: Henry G Bohn, 1855), Book II, ch. 2. My thanks to Mark Smith for this reference.

7 The theoretical origin of this distinction is Plato, Republic 3.392c–395b; for a recent discussion, see Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 51–54.

8 Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 101.

9 On the later importation of discernement into seventeenth-century discussions of (literary and other) taste, see Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 57–58, 60–61.

10 Henceforth Contre les libertins. Unless otherwise stated, all references are to the edition by Mirjam Van Veen (Geneva: Droz, 2005). Page numbers are included in brackets in the main text.

11 For a recent ‘reconstitution’ and study of Poque’s treatise, see Luce Albert, ‘ «J’appelle ce brouillon un cocq à l’asne»: reconstitution d’un texte libertin transmis par Calvin’, Bulletin de La Société de l’Histoire Du Protestantisme Français 155 (2009), 55–76.

12 Aside from Pocque (sometimes called Pocquet), Marguerite de Navarre also took in Perceval and Quintin. On Marguerite’s association with spiritual libertinism, and its possible influence on her theatre, see the introduction to her Comédie de Mont de Marsan in Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane, ed. by Verdun L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1946), pp. 242–52. On tensions between Calvin and Marguerite during the 1540s, see Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) and her evangelical network, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009), II, 553–63.

13 Guillaume Farel takes aim at another lost libertine text, entitled Le Bouclier de la defense, in La Glaive de la parolle veritable (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1550). Farel’s counterattack is largely a repeat of Calvin’s, minus the brevity and verve.

14 J.-C. Margolin, ‘Réflexions sur l’emploi du terme libertin au XVI^e siècle’ in Aspects du Libertinisme au XVI^e siècle, ed. by M. Bataillon (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 1–33.

15 On this question, see Louise Daubigny, ‘Calvin et les libertins spirituels’ in Calvin: Naissance d’une pensée, ed. by Jacques Varet (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2012), pp. 59–66.

16 Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by G. Baum et al., 59 vols (Brunswick and Berlin: Schwetschke, 1863–1900), XII, c. 64–68.

17 Chapter 7.

18 See art. ‘Aleman’ in Randle Cotgrave, The Dictionarie of French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611): ‘Il n’en entend que le haut Aleman, ’Tis as Greek unto him, he understands no part of it; he is never a whit the wiser by it.’

19 On Calvin as a precursor of French classicism, see especially Francis M. Higman, The Style of John Calvin in his French Polemical Treatises (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

20 On Calvin and sermocinatio, see Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: étude de rhétorique réformée (Geneva: Slatkine, 1992), 361–66.

21 ‘Pot cassé’ is an allusion to 2 Cor 4:7 (‘We hold these treasures in earthen vessels)’; ‘usurier’ refers to Matthew’s previous career as a moneylender. On sixteenth-century Picard, see especially Louis-Fernand Flutre, Le Moyen picard d’après les textes littéraires du temps (1560-1660) (Amiens: Musée de Picardie, 1970). For ‘sottelet’, see p. 345.

22 Moi > my (see Flutre, 505); ça a été > cha esté (Flutre, 503–505); ce n’est pas moi > che ne suis-je mye (Flutre, 410); fait > foit (Flutre, 263)

23 Flutre, 486 (ma); 514–15 (appris > aprins).

24 Flutre, 510 (vais > voy); 427 (pomme > pumme); 482 (garde > vuarde or warde).

25 For a recent study, see Anne Dagnac, ‘Le picard de Nérine: moyen picard, ou picard moyen?’, Littératures classiques 87.2 (2015), 135–47.

26 David Hornsby, ‘Picard: a mal aimé among regional languages?’, Journal of French Language Studies 29 (2019), 169–88.

27 Colette Demaizière, La Grammaire française au XVIème siècle: les grammairiens picards, 2 vols (Paris: Didier, 1983). Note, however, the Parisian and Calvinist Henri Estienne’s criticisms of the picardismes in Antoine Cauchie’s Hypomneses (Demaizière, I. 369–406).

28 Unconvincing attempts have even been made to draw out textual picardismes of Calvin’s own. See Charles Guerlin de Guer, ‘Sur la langue du picard Jean Calvin’, Français moderne 5.4 (1937), 303–16; Higman rejects these findings (Higman, 57–58).

29 For a recent study of Calvinist hostility to the local, see Spencer J. Weinreich, ‘An Infinity of Relics: Erasmus and the Copious Rhetoric of John Calvin’s Traité des reliques’, Renaissance Quarterly 74.1 (2021), 137–80 (166).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy Chesters

Timothy Chesters is a specialist in sixteenth-century French literature and thought at Clare College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), as well as of a number of articles on early modern French demonology, Ronsard, and Montaigne.