Less Rightly Said Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France [Hardcover]

Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that corrected vices but spared the person yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas. By focusing on popular pamphlets along with more canonical works,Less Rightly Saidshows that the satirists did not simply renounce the moral ideal of elite, humanist scholarship but rather transmitted and manipulated that scholarship according to their ideological needs. Szabari identifies the emergence of a political genre that provides us with a more thorough understanding of the culture of printing and reading, of the political function of invectives, and of the general role of dissensus in early modern French society.

Ant?nia Szabari is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A thorough and often amusing history of 'scandals and readers in sixteenth-century France' is to be found inLess Rightly Saidby Ant?nia Szabari. She makes sense of a wide and motley collection of hitherto neglected examples of humanists fashioning facts and prejudices to serve as verbal weapons. This is an essential contribution to the study not only of comedy and satire and propaganda and politics but also to the newly emphasized studies of the book, publishing and reading . . . There has long been plenty on satire in English polemics in the religion and culture wars; here is good material on the French, very well presented and very valuable. One of this study's main virtues is to question the existence of a clear line of demarcation along rhetorical grounds between Protestant and Catholic polemics, showing rather their shared reliance on rhetorical strategies and the various possibilities of the printed page. A second virtue ilÃ4