The sorbonnic trots: staging the intestinal distress of the Roman Catholic church in French reform theater *.

Given that this current age so often has recourse to metaphors of illness to elucidate social and cultural troubles--so many collective rhetorical neuroses in an era of psychoanalysis, so many cancers eating away at the latter-day body politic--we should not be (and, in fact, rarely are) surprised to find earlier ages equally devoted to the figurative potential of mortal infirmity. Venereal disease (syphilis, gonorrhea) and melancholia are but two of the most familiar maux du siecle of the sixteenth century, to be joined by the less-fashionable epilepsy or "falling sickness," the haut real of later baroque poetry; ergotism and erysipelas (the redoubtables feu Saint Antoine of Rabelaisian curses); whooping cough, a versifying Pierre Gringore's coqueluche; the renal calculi made famous by Montaigne; the chaude pisse or "burnt piss" made equally famous by Rabelais; the antique but defiant leprosy of the fabliaux; and the eternal return of the plague. If they did not all necessarily affect the population in epidemic proportions throughout the sixteenth century, all nonetheless found their way into metaphor: so many real and symbolic marks of Cain, of humanity's fallen condition, of our exile from Eden, and of our distance from God. Although contemporary medicine by and large fulfilled the expectations of both its practitioners and patients--God willing, this cure will cure; God not willing, how can human intervention prevail?--it certainly could not successfully set that original fracture, cauterize that original amputation, purge that original madness. (2)

Such was rather the mediating role of the church, its celestial attending physician the Christus Medicus of Augustinian tradition, a spiritual roi thaumaturge; its temporal one Christ's vicar, the pope, the established head of a universal healthcare system whose staff's efficacy and competence were to come under--if not unprecedented then certainly unparalleled--fire in the sixteenth century:

   Paule, Leon, Jules, Clement
   Ont mis nostre France en tourment.
   Jules, Clement, Leon et Paule
   Ont pertrouble toute la Gaule.
   Paule, Clement, Leon et Jules
   Ont beaucoup gaigne par leurs Bules.
   Jules, Clement, Paule, Leon
   Ont fait des maux un milion.

   (Tabourot des Accordz, fol. 147r-v). (3)

So rhymes Estienne Tabourot, seigneur des Accordz (1547-90), revealing himself more a Gallic chauvinist than a heretic; and, to be fair, he appends to this in his Bigarrures of 1583 an equally scurrilous octet on the protesting papal counterparts, "Luther, Viret, Beze et Calvin." Nonetheless, "mis en tourment," "pertrouble," "des maux un milion"--those who should be looking after the spiritual health of Christianity are perceived in many Evangelical and Reformist quarters as torturing it, troubling it, making it sick.

This is the rhetorical trope we have chosen to pursue in this article, what late-medieval and Renaissance theater specialist Werner Helmich has defined as "la maladie et la guerison allegorique" (allegorical illness and cure) (1:xix). We shall pay specific attention to the ways contemporary polemical playwrights use illness as metaphor in a representative sampling of French-language plays. Which particular ailment or ailments did they use and why? How might we link them to concurrent social conditions and understandings of the body--its functions and malfunctions--the better to explain the choice and potential appeal of such a metaphor? We shall focus on four plays, the first three of which are thought to have been composed and performed in the 1520s and 1530s (though the latter point, of course, is harder to confirm), the last from the reinvigorated polemical stock of the 1560s when France slid inevitably toward internecine conflict. (4) All of them verifiably (or at least reasonably) are suspected to be by the hand of an active and experienced campaigner against the perceived abuses of the Roman church; all of them exploit to an appreciable extent the same durable motif as if in implicit synoptic dialogue with each other (and perhaps with a lost or misplaced French or foreign prototype). The trope central to all of them can be found in polemical works of other genres, both discursive and iconographic, down through the Wars of Religion, which must say something of its hold on the popular imagination. (5)

The early Farce des theologastres (The Farce of the Bad Theologians) will be our first consideration. (6) It has been convincingly dated to the first wave of French-language Lutheran material in the mid-1520s and attributed to the Paris Faculty of Theology's favorite whipping-boy and eventual victim, Louis de Berquin (1485-1529). (7) An economical 650-odd octosyllabic verses long, including the occasional macaronic Latin line and minimal but obvious stage directions, it both replicates established morality play conventions --primarily in its extensive use of allegory--and outlines the rhetorical scheme and figures that will characterize much of later Calvinist polemic in French, whether dramatic, oratorical, or merely discursive.

Briefly, an abysmally scholastic and incompetent Theologastre, together with his companion Fratres, seek to succor a moribund Foy or Faith, whose severe case of "colicque Sorbonique" (line 47)--the "Sorbonnic trots" of our title--can apparently only be cured by a purgative dose of the pure Texte de Sainte Escripture or Text of Holy Scripture, knowledge of which the popish theologian and monastic have not; they do not even know, in fact, where it is to be found. (8) Faith does, however: "Ou raison domine" (Where reason rules) (line 53); that is, in Germany. A personified though bloody and bruised Holy Scripture ("esgratine et ensenglante par le visage") enters, followed by Reason, neither of whom is known, of course, to Theologastre and Fratres. Together they lament Holy Scripture's abuse at the hands of the current church doctors, who have battered her mercilessly with glosses and syllogisms and allegorical readings, all of which, in the words of Reason, "he valent pas deux estrons" (are not worth two turds) (line 210). They set off in search of the man of the hour, the "Mercure d'Allemagne" (the German Mercury)--that is, Louis de Berquin--and persuade him to come to the aid of Holy Scripture, which he does, effecting her literal cleansing. Reason gives her a bath onstage: "Vela le texte fraiz et cler / Pour vous garir la souveraine" (Here is Scripture, flesh and clear, / To cure you, sovereign Faith) (lines 548-49), by which Faith is indeed restored to health. When the players take their leave, Reason is careful to specify in direct audience address that the farce has not been against theologians but rather against "theologastres" (lines 640-43). Among the latter were to be counted--made evident in an earlier passage--many of the leading lights of the contemporary Paris Faculty of Theology, specifically syndic Noel Beda (1470-1537). (9)

Although it makes less elaborate use of the medical trope than the other plays we shall be considering, the Farce des theologastres sets a pattern in French Reform-era theater for what apparently came to be considered a useful and seductive critical and polemical paradigm. It is an immediately accessible yet highly nuanced figure: the church is ill; she must be cured, all the more so as her illness threatens the spiritual health of those who have entrusted her with their salvation and who thus risk eternal death rather than the promised reward of eternal life. That Faith suffers from not just any illness but from a colique, ("a painful windinesse in the stomacke or entrails," to cite Cotgrave's early-seventeenth-century French-English dictionary), provoked by a surfeit of the Sorbonne's (i.e., the Paris Faculty of Theology's) exegetical gloss in place of a plain and healthy diet of pure Gospel, is important. It was, indeed, as later polemicists will draw out ad nauseam, something she ate: either, literally, the increasingly problematic consecrated and transubstantiated Host, or, figuratively, the teachings and practice of a papal authority that has strayed from those of the "primitive church." In fact, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the coming theological firestorm surrounding the Mass and transubstantiation could not be discussed in vernacular works destined for a mass audience without allusion to the metaphorical shorthand of consumption and elimination, whether the latter is provoked by illness (colic, bladder infection, diarrhea, or vomiting or medical intervention (diuretics and cathartics). It is as if the success of the Reformation hinged on one good, purgative, and--most importantly--collective bowel movement (and not just Luther's). (10)

Why this should be so is really not hard to determine. Even the most cursory glance at the legion of contemporary medical publications, themselves direct and often uncritical heirs to an ancient body of knowledge, allows us to appreciate the centrality of elimination to sixteenth-century notions of physical health and well-being. Complexion theory or humoral pathology--that is, the etiology of disease as an upset in the natural balance of humors--prevailed and was recognized as specific to the individual. This accounted for what we might today call ethnic (or racial) and gender variation as well as personal peculiarity in humoral balance, together with the particular effects of "non-naturals"--according to medical historian Nancy Siraisi, "a mixture of physiological, psychological, and environmental conditions held to affect health: air, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, food and drink, repletion and excretion, and the 'accidents of the soul,' or passions and emotions" (101). To effect a return to an individual's natural balance, medical practitioners relied almost exclusively on some form of evacuation to rid the body of the bad humor, whether a purgative (diuretics, cathartics, or emetics) or phlebotomy. Judging from the many vernacular polemical texts and images consulted, the latter practice of bloodletting--whose principal instrument, the lancet, dominates medical iconography to this very day--seems to have had little hold over the popular imagination in the sixteenth century, however much the derivatio vs. revulsio debate may have dominated the quarrels of the contemporary medical establishment. (11) The average man or woman on the street sought his or her doctor under another sign, that of the bladder-shaped urine flask, the principal diagnostic instrument for centuries and universal sign of the physician, versed in the art of uroscopy: the matula in Latin (figs. 1 and 2); the urinal in French; and much more colorfully rendered in sixteenth-century English as the fluvial-named "jordan."

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Which brings us to the second play under discussion, by renegade Dominican monk and Reformed Neuchatel pastor Mathieu (or Thomas) Malingre (d. 1572). (12) The 1533 Moralite de la maladie de Chrestiente (Morality Play on Christendom's Illness) shows how an allegorized and somewhat flighty Christendom (Chrestiente) falls in with Hypocrisy and Peche, or Sin, whose flattering company renders her deaf to the piteous cries of a blind beggar and his attendant. Annoyed and exhausted by the burdens of charitable conduct, she goes for a stroll in the countryside, where Sin gathers in and serves up a poisonous plate of salad greens. Despite Inspiration's best dissuasive efforts, Christendom tucks into the salad with gusto:

   Chrestiente. Le plat est beau, et j'en appette:
   L'herbe est belle a l'oeil, tendre au doigt
   Par ainsy inferer on doibt
   Quelle a bon goust et savoureux,
   Puis mon coeur en est amoureux:
   Pourtant certes j'en mangeray.
   Inspiration. Ha non!
   Chrestiente. Et si,
   Inspiration. Non,
   Chrestiente. Si feray
   J'en suis toute deliberee.
   Inspiration. Griefvement en serez navree,
   Si Dieu n'y met provision
   Croyez a l'inspiration,
   Que vostre bon dieu vous envoye. (13)

Christendom does not listen, of course, and falls gravely ill:

   Ha la teste, a l'ayde, a l'ayde
   Les espaules, les bras, et reins,
   Les piedz, les jambes, et les mains,
   Helas je ne scay plus que faire,
   N'a qui aller: pour me reffaire
   Je vueil avoir des medecines. (14)

She refuses to take the advice proffered by Bon CEuvre, or Good Works: "Ayez en dieu vostre esperance" (Put your hope in God), advice which has already been given to the audience several times by various intervening characters, including the frame narrator, a Reformed Theologian, and the Medecin, or Physician, who will shortly come to her aid. Christendom comes up with all manner of marginal, miracle-seeking plans, including consulting a sorcerer and making a pilgrimage to Rome for papal absolution. This, obviously, is the wrong kind of medicine from the wrong kind of practitioner in the wrong kind of place. A desperate Inspiration seeks the help of the Medecin Celeste, or Celestial Physician, a thinly-disguised Christus Medicus, whose diagnosis is accurate: she has been poisoned by Sin; whose prognosis is optimistic: however polluted she has become, "elle vivra" (she will survive); whose prescription is true: a jullep or syrup of "justifying grace" to be found in "permanent faith" (lines 872-933). Despite Sin's attempts to forestall her, Inspiration forces Christendom to drink, and the patient feels instant relief if not cure, for although the dose of grace has brought back her reason, it has also made her recognize her sin for which she must now seek forgiveness. Inspiration takes her prayer, together with a urine sample, back to the Physician:

   Je m'en iray luy reciter
   Tout vostre cas, et ensemble
   Vostre urine, et estat porter :
   Il vous aydera, ce me semble. (15)

This Christus Medicus, in his capacity as divine uroscopist or "piss-prophet," to use a contemporary if dismissive English term, proceeds to examine Christendom's urine sample. (16)

Though subtle and complex in theory and cloudy in interpretation, the practice of uroscopy involved fairly direct, simple technology: a urine sample, contained in the clear glass urinal, matula, or jordan--shaped in conscious and calculated replication of the human bladder--was "read" for signs of disease, measured against carefully calibrated charts of healthy urine that indicated variations in clarity, viscosity, color, smell, sediments, foreign matter, and, of course, taste. "One must recognize," admonishes Laurent Joubert (1529-82), Montpelier-trained physician and author himself of a De urinis (Lyon, 1571), "that urine conveys rather faithfully the state of the veins and arteries of the entire body, provided it is not bloated because of rheum [...] and provided that there is no foreign matter included in it which might change its color, odor, contents, and other natural qualities." (17) A reliable practitioner could be expected to read and accurately diagnose any sample provided, whether or not he actually saw--let alone examined--the patient in question. (18)

This is exactly what the Physician of Malingre's Moralite does, in a fascinating and complex rhetorical tour de force. Aided initially by Theologian's detailed glosses, the Physician establishes compelling analogies between the health of the microcosm as indicated in the urine sample and that of the macrocosm: that is, between the two "bodies" of Christendom. The character Christendom is the microcosm, the physical body subject to sin, decay, and the constraints of sixteenth-century mortality, but whose parts correspond to those of the macrocosm, the allegorical body of the faithful. Further, this latter body is considered both as body politic and body spiritual, Christendom as both temporal and eternal "states." Most strikingly, it is as if the Physician had the matula diagram of figure 1 or one of its ubiquitous reproductions and/or variations before his very eyes. Inspiration hands him Christendom's urine sample:

   Inspiration. Vueillez nous donc bien tost ouvrir,
     Ou se tient le mal qu'elle porte.
   Le medecin. Ace faire je me transporte:
     Et veulx selon les troys parties
     Qui sont en l'urine departies,
     (C'est la haulte, moyenne et basse)
     Declarer le mal qui la lasse.
     Je trouve en la partie haulte
     De l'urine, une grande faulte:
     Car le cercle qu'on dit nephile,
     Que est aux medecins facile:
     Est trop gras et trop enflamme,
     Estincellant, et allume:
     Cela denotte que le chief
     Et cerveau est plein de meschief.
     Hebete, trouble, et tout las.
   Inspiration. Qui est le chief?
   Le medecin. Sont les prelatz, ...

that is, the clergy, the First Estate. (19) He sees also redness in the middle regions of the sample--the Emaeoremata Sublimia--corresponding to chest, shoulders, arms, and fingers: that is, the Second Estate, la noblesse (lines 1545-46); and blackness in the lower regions of the sample--the Hypostases--corresponding to the thighs, legs, and feet: that is, the Third Estate, "Denottant bourgeoys, et marchantz, / Et laboureurs" (Denoting bourgeois, and merchants, /And laborers) (lines 1641-42). The diagnosis complete, Good Works marvels:

   O que voila tout bien notte
   L'urine, et toutes ses parties,
   C'est bien juge des maladies
   De Chrestiente languissante:
   Reste, que vostre main puissante
   Luy rende sa sante pristine. (20)

And it will. Having prepared Christendom with an initial dose of grace, the Physician prescribes the necessary purgative--Faith--to be administered in a holy church. The prescription for the purge, a more detailed (and meticulously glossed) version of the cure administered in the Farce des theologastres, consists of tongue of man, lion, bull, and eagle (that is, the Gospels) steeped in good white wine (that is, Divine Love). This is to be prepared by the Apothecary, who enters in singing a Clement Marot (1496-1544) chanson in the "evangelized" form published by none other than Malingre himself the same year as the Moralite, and set, one could reasonably suppose, to the 1530 music of Claude de Sermisy (1490-1562): "Tant que vivray, en eage florissant, / Je serviray le seigneur tout puissant." (lines 1716-60). (21) Suffice to say that the purge has its intended effect: a cursing Hypocrisy and Sin are driven out; Christendom, and thus Christianity, is restored to health, literally and figuratively cleansed as was the Holy Scripture of Berquin's earlier farce.

Malingre demonstrates a relatively intimate knowledge of the practice of uroscopy, evidently assumes his audience will identify with it, and certainly does not shy away from using it in a highly religious context. Now, where there is scatological detail, the modern reader normally expects invective. True enough, the reader often gets it in the ad hominem mud- and dung-slinging we have come to recognize as part and parcel, for better or for worse, of humanist debate tactics, be they Evangelical or civic. Malingre accordingly obliges, stooping to characterize the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church as "ordure" (filth) (line 290) and even "crapulation" (drunken excess) (line 1304), quick to co-opt for the Reformed Church what Catholic polemicists will exploit--though rarely so skillfully--in their turn for theirs: a monopoly on the immaculate. (22) But in the Moralite de la maladie de Chrestiente Malingre chooses, rather, a positive gloss on the scatological detail of everyday sixteenth-century existence, the intimate relationship with excrement that characterized the medical profession and the healing arts in general. Urine is a good thing because it allows Christ the Physician to diagnose accurately and treat effectively via recourse to standard therapeutic practices the most serious illness facing contemporary society, that of its soul. Urine is a good thing because it allows the popular imagination, via the very immediate medium of theater, to grasp the meaning and ramifications of that illness with relative ease, in terms with which the average individual would have already been familiar.

Let us consider a final "farce" from the 1530s, by an author whose family connections and success in other genres assured that her play would remain the most accessible of those under review here, Marguerite de Navarre's (1492-1549) Le mallade (The Sick Man), dated to around 1535. Considerably shorter and simpler than Malingre's 1600+ verse morality play, its links to and exploitation of current Evangelical expression, particularly that used by Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples (ca. 1450-1536) and Marguerite's confessor, the Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briconnet (1470-1534), were long ago suggested by V.L. Saulnier. (23) Briconnet made considerable use of the image o fan invalid church in urgent need of a physician-God's ministrations and of the Bible as a "livre de receptes medicinalles" (book of medicinal recipes):

Comme il est diversite de medecins qui par ygnorance ne scavent ne ordonnent ne applicquent les herbes selon les maladies, ainsy est-il des preconizateurs de la voix et parolle divine: dont procedent les pestes, cecites et maladies spirituelles presque incurables que voyons regner, et innumerables ames sans discretion mourir et se ruyner. La saintute doree ne faict le medecin, et moings le bonnet rond le docteur. (24)

Marguerite's play literalizes that image under the title and in the form of a sick man whose wife proposes popular folk remedies, whose physician dictates an official course of treatment, but whose servant prescribes what amounts to Evangelical faith healing.

The Wife's suggestions, no sooner made than dismissed by her impatient husband, correspond to those collections of home remedies and nostrums often associated with illiterate women, and against which the medical establishment waged a constant and ultimately successful battle throughout the sixteenth century. She does not hesitate to set her opinion against that of the professionally-trained physician she is sent to fetch, which opinion the latter rejects, as we might expect, as that of a stupid woman. He will, in fact, later launch into a diatribe against the pernicious meddling of women in the affairs of medical doctors:

   La Femme. [...] Monseigneur, bien que du latin
     Vous ayez parfaicte science,
     Arsoir m'apprint la grant Cathin
     Une bien bonne experience:
     Monsieur, de merde d'un tout blanc
     Pigeon, me dist que bon bruvaige
     J'en feisse, qui ne couste ung blanc,
     Et si ne peult faire dommaige.
   Le Medecin. Par ma foy, vous n'estes pas saige
     Et vostre commere tant pouc,
     Car la facon de ce potaige
     Est deffendue en Languedoc. (25)

The neighbor's prescription reflects a long-held, widespread, but currently understudied European belief in the therapeutic virtues of urine and feces, human and animal, the various forms of which were most thoroughly catalogued in the succeeding century by German physicians such as archivist and historiographer Christian Paullini in his Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke, or Salutary Filth-Pharmacy. The belief and practice certainly reaches at least as far back as Greek physician Dioscorides' first-century herbal the De Materia Medica, of which there were at least ten editions from the 1470s to the 1520s, including a new Latin translation based on the "recovered" Greek text in 1518. (26) Its influence on such contemporary sciences as alchemy and on such alchemists as Paracelsus would be worth exploring further. Quite aside from any metaphorical use religious polemicists such as Louis de Berquin, Mathieu Malingre, and Marguerite de Navarre made of scatological matters, details such as the wife's homespun faith in Dreck-Apotheke hint at a more intimate relationship with and particular understanding of matters scatological than our more sterile and squeamish age might prepare us to appreciate.

The physician, of course, follows official protocol. Immediately upon arriving at the patient's bedside, he asks to see a urine sample: "Ca, baillez moy ceste urinal / Que je regarde son urine" (Here, hand me that jordan / So that I may examine his urine) (lines 176-77). And he is astonished to see that it indicates a man in excellent health. He has yet to learn that during the time it took the Wife to come fetch him, the Servant lectured the Sick Man on turning to the "sainct des sainctz, le grant maistre / Qui sanctifie pappe et roy" (saint of saints, the great master / Who sanctifies pope and king alike) (lines 75-76), the "best," the "sweetest," the "most powerful" doctor of them all, God, who, if confided in and submitted to, will purge the soul, for "all health comes from God" (line 116). Marguerite de Navarre is, fortunately, more discerning than the average modern televangelist and miracle-worker, for her Servant makes clear, while the Doctor is writing out a prescription, that constant faith and trust in the Lord do not so much promise physical well being as guarantee a spiritual health that values the body and its sufferings as so much "fiens," that is, dung (line 268).

At the close, the Doctor and the Wife learn what "prescription" the Servant has herself given the Sick Man, with its expected Evangelical bent:

   La Femme. Guary est, mais dictes vrayement
     Que vous luy avez donne?
   La Chambriere. Rien, sinon ung enseignement,
     Ainsi que Dieu l'a ordonne.
   La Femme. Esse a dire une patenostre,
     Ou a faire chanter des messes?
   La Chambriere. Ceste recepte va plus oultre,
     Car ouster peult toutes tristesses.
   La Femme. Qu'esse ?
   La Chambriere. Se fier aux promesses
     De Celluy qui jamais ne ment. (27)

Strong in the power of his profession, the Physician leaves in a huff, admonishing the Sick Man that should he really wish to be cured, he has only to follow the prescription he, the Physician, has left with the Wife. The farce concludes with the Sick Man lecturing his Wife on the vanities of human knowledge and presumption, and, seeing as God has seen fit to cure him, he begs all spectators to follow him into firm and unwavering faith.

To judge from the print record, French-language Reform theater seems to have followed the pattern of other genres of religious polemic. It dwindled considerably after the feverish 1520s and 30s, another probable casualty of political and ecclesiastical repression, until the pressure building from Calvin's Geneva-based proselytizing campaign resulted in a renewed and reinvigorated production that, quite naturally, recycled the successful figures of the early years. A noticeable increase in the publication of satirical and polemical works of all sorts--pamphlets, sermons, plays, and songs--marks the years immediately preceding the explosive events of 1562, among them a 1561 Comedie du Pape malade et tirant a la fin (Comedy of the Pope Who is Ill and Approaching the End), often attributed to the Calvinist convert and printer Conrad Badius (1510-ca. 1560). (28) It is similar in style to another notorious Badius publication from the previous year, the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale (Christian Satires on the Papal Kitchen), which tilts head-on and in familiarly "earthy" vernacular verse at the "scandal" of the Mass and its central trope of transubstantiation and ingestion of the Host.

Significantly, the trope of the original Sorbonnic trots undergoes a transformation between the 1530s and the 1560s. Polemical attention shifts away from an optimistic cure of an ailing, allegorized institution, characterized by the intervention of an active Christus Medicus and related figures, to a cynical deathwatch at the bedside of a corrupt, often starving pope and his self-interested followers, for whom even the therapeutic powers of an allied Satanas Medicus, as it were, are of no avail. (29) Badius, under the enigmatic but suggestive pseudonym of Thrasibule Phenice, tells us so in the brief preface: despite the "sweet and friendly" admonitions so often reiterated, "le mal est tellement creu, qu'il n'est plus question de medicamens lenitifs, ains de cauteres et incisions: encores est-il bien a craindre que le tout pourrisse, tant le mal est enracine" (195). (30) Although, as in both Malingre's Moralite and Marguerite's Mallade, Christ here is glossed as "le souverain Medecin" (the sovereign doctor) who brings "l'antidote et contrepoison de sa parole" (the antidote and counterpoison of his word) to heal those contaminated by Catholic doctrine (195), such will not be the uplifting plot of the play. It will please the converted, or so Thrasibule hopes, but displease those "qui se plaisent dans leur bourbier" (who are happy in their muck) (195). (31) Gone is any attempt at reconciliation; the hopeful, gentle, evangelizing corrective of a Marguerite de Navarre is now replaced by the defiant, martial rhetoric of a besieged minority with an established and growing history of martyrdom. Illness, here again primarily figured in the form of intestinal distress, is used as a pejorative at tack against the bloated, overweening church and its omnivorous head, the pope, a self-induced and self-indulgent ailment from which it is devoutly hoped by the Huguenot author and target audience neither the institution nor the office will ever recover.

The 1600+ octosyllabic verses represent a rather jumbled parade of explicitly designated historical characters--L'Outrecuide (the Proud Man) is none other than controversial French colonialist and Catholic polemicist Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon; L'Affame (the Starving Man) is actually strident Catholic apologist Artus Desire--mixed with such more traditional allegorical figures as Truth and the Church. (32) Given the express effort to address "les simples" and "les pauvres fideles" (the poor faithful), Badius gives them a great deal of credit for keeping abreast of the latest controversies and their key players. It is, however, the staged illness of the pope that opens the play and retains our attention here.

Quite literally sick at the prospect of appearing before God for judgment, the moribund pontiff, suffering from a hardening of the liver and an obstructed spleen, his ritual prayers and recourse to the Mass offering no relief (as was likewise the case, we shall recall, for Malingre's earlier, misguided Chrestiente), is visited by his friend and benefactor Satan, come to "luy eschauffer le courage / A tenir bon par monts et vaux / Contre ces maudits Huguenaux" (To strengthen his will / To defend hill and dale / Against these cursed Huguenots) (lines 104-06). He finds the pope "ladre, pourry, vieil, et casse / ... Qui tousse, qui crache et se plaint" (leprous, rotten, old and broken / ... Who coughs, who spits and complains) (lines 102, 138)--a general breakdown that really began, the pope himself recalls, with Luther, though Hus and Wycliffe had already done some damage. The pope declines rapidly before our, and Satan's, very eyes, reeling off as a distressed paterfamilias a list of children lost to him, gone or going over to the Reform, including "ma fille France / Qui m'a tousjours porte obeissance" (my daughter France / Who always obeyed me) (lines 335-36).

   Je n'en puis plus que l'on me couche,
   Et que l'on me metre en la bouche
   Un morcelet de pain beniz,
   Ou le saint corpus Domini,
   Et quelque goutte d'eau benite. (33)

The deathbed scene is farcical in its parody of last rites, both medical and ecclesiastical. Satan fears the pope's farts, accurately diagnoses sin as the illness (though he takes no urine sample), and prescribes fanciful antidotes: the ground bark of a Salve sifted through a nun's habit and mixed with the juice of a traditional prayer of indulgence, the Obsecro te (lines 465-70). The attending priests call for an enema made of "breviary grease"; the monks suggest a purge in the form of confession: "Vous recouvreriez l'appetit, / Apres avoir jette dehors / La poison qu'avez dedans le corps" (You would get your appetite back / After casting out / The poison that you have within you) (lines 498-500). So he does, most onomatopoeically--"Ouah, ouah"--ultimately vomiting up human flesh and blood (of orphans and widows) together with an inexhaustible and noxious stream of objects and practices long censured by Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine (lines 515-49). Only the throne of Saint Peter sticks in his craw (line 554). Feeling better, he will sleep but not before sending Satan out to recruit support from among the non-Christian "barbarians" (Turks, Jews, Moors, and Tartars), a final gesture of cultural, political, and confessional betrayal (lines 561-70). Satan goes forth seeking defenders of the faith, which leads him to encounter the parade of contemporary figures and targets of Huguenot wrath such as Villegagnon and Desire. The Comedie ends with Satan's return to witness the projected death of the pope, both Truth and the (Reformed) Church providing a satisfying moral gloss on the play.

The title's emphasis on comedy is significant, as Badius himself takes care to explain. In his preface, he makes an historically-conscious appeal to a pre-Christian theatrical tradition, one which betrays both his intent (polemical satire) and his generation's humanist education and preoccupations, whatever his overt appeal to the "simple." Apologizing for not respecting the letter of classical comedy ("la mode des anciens Comiques"), obliged as he is to appeal to an audience unfamiliar with the genre and thus likely to be impatient with its conventions, he counters that he does respect its spirit:

   par ce que le definement de la Papaute qui est prochain, apporte
   apres meints troubles et persecutions repos et consolation a
   l'Eglise de Dieu, au milieu de laquelle Jesus Christ, apres
   queil en aura deschasse cest Antechrist, regnera par
   sa parole: et lots il y aura matiere de joye, comme c'est le
   naturel des Comedies d'avoir commencement fascheux, et issue
   joyeuse. (34)

The pope's own end, his "definement"--the choice of words is telling, redolent as it is of "pining, consuming, wasting" away (Cotgrave); the spectacle of his suffering is as important as his ultimate demise--is not tragic but comic, the happy ending comedy promises by classical definition. The pope and his church will not be purged and thus healed; they will die and be "run off" ("deschasse[s]"), purging and thus healing the world they have sickened.

If the Sorbonnic trots, however epidemic in the early years of the Reform, were once treatable--the diagnosis was alarming but the prognosis was good--for Badius as for other, often anonymous, polemicists and pamphleteers, they had become fatal by the 1560s. (35) Polemical literature resorting to this trope modifies the notion of healing (and thus saving) the original allegorical corpus ecclesiae or body of the church--represented by Berquin's Faith and Holy Scripture, Malingre's Christendom, Marguerite's Sick Man--to that of predicting and hastening the death of a distinct, hopelessly corrupt corpus ecclesiae, the body of the pope, identified with his--that is, the Catholic--church. Christendom, in effect, again has two bodies, but these are portrayed differently from the ultimately purged, cured, and reintegrated bodies of Malingre's character of that name. Here the papal or Catholic carpus is mortally poisoned by consumption of the fantastically transubstantiated corpus Domini and, in turn, infects the true, Reformed corpus ecclesiae (not to mention reipublicae) via perpetuation of this blasphemous anthropophagy or, more precisely, theophagy. Testing urine, prescribing diuretics, cathartics, or emetics may have been the efficacious protocol for treating the wayward church of the 1520s and 30s. By the 1560s even forcing the pope to vomit up a terrestrial kingdom's worth of subjects and objects cannot save the patient, and can only be interpreted as an accurate prognosis of his and his institution's imminent death. This death, both attended and assisted by a perverted Satanas Medicus, is to be understood as the sign and promise of the return of the true Christus Medicus and his restoration of the true corpus Christi, of whom the thus cleansed and restored faithful would be the deserving parts. The sacrifice of the papal or Catholic corpus has become necessary to the salvation of the true corpus ecclesiae; the body or body part that offends must be cut off and cast away.

As in so much vernacular campaigning against Catholicism and for the Reform (Evangelical, Lutheran, or Calvinist) the drama, whether comedie, farce, or moralite, was most suitably played out in terms that, serendipitously or otherwise, wed the substance and expression of everyday sixteenth-century life to the Gospel and Pauline rhetoric that itself had sprung from the substance and expression of everyday first-century life and the centuries of Patristic commentary that followed. The underlying scripture references are legion; neither Paul nor the evangelists doubted the appeal of the body and its functions as an effective rhetorical figure for pitching their own brand of reform. Nor was this lost on those who now sought to effect a return to that "primitive" confession. The Sorbonnic trots are not just funny; their grounding in the way sixteenth-century men and women lived their lives and their and in the way these interacted render them as apt as any metaphor for figuring confessional distress and its relief, in terms any one of the "simple" was evidently considered astute enough to grasp.

Reform theater, at least in the French tradition, remains under appreciated and under studied, primarily for reasons of aesthetic caecitas or blindness, to borrow a recurrent metaphor (and one again implying physical and spiritual infirmity) from Melanchthon's Decretum, cited earlier (159). (36) With the current renewed interest in Reformation polemic, however, the high-quantity, low-quality expression of and appeal to an arguably far larger and diverse public than that of a Ronsard's odes or a Montaigne's essays, we can perhaps look forward to new and infinitely more-accessible editions of works that only our nineteenth-century forebears saw fit to revive and re-edit. (37) If not great works in an absolute sense, these are decidedly great works of moment, and to study them may well help us understand that moment better.

To conclude appropriately enough with an idiomatic expression borrowed directly from the contemporary science and practice of uroscopy: Nous voudrions bien voir de leur urine (We would really like to see their urine); that is to say, "By their urine shall we know them." Indeed, by their urine, and, more specifically, by the rhetorical use they made of that urine, that excrement, shall we know better the sixteenth century.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

* An early version of this article was given as a paper at the 2000 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Cleveland, OH. I wish to thank the following for source suggestions, constructive advice, and translations of German material: Mary McKinley, Joseph Tate, Russell Ganim, George Hoffmann, Josef Schmidt, Eva Sanger, Anne Schutte, Karen James, my colleagues in French at the University of South Carolina, the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia, and the Yale University Harvey Cushing / John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

(1) "Une question se pose devant nous, comme elle s'est posee devant la conscience des Huguenots. Le theattre est-il en soi corrupteur et incompatible avec la dignite de la vie chretienne? Ou bien serait-il capable de servir la cause de la morale et de la religion?" Bonet Maury, 221. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are my own. Spelling and punctuation of original passages have been modernized (e.g., resolution of i/j and u/v, addition of acute accent on final tonic e) only where needed to improve readability.

(2) For the expectations of both practitioners and patients, see Siraisi, 42-47. For recent surveys of European medicine, see Siraisi; Wear et al.; and Conrad et al.

(3) "Paul, Leo, Julius, Clement / Have put our France in torment. / Julius, Clement, Leo and Paul / Have upset all of Gaul. / Paul, Clement, Leo and Julius / Have gained much by their Bulls. / Julius, Clement, Paul, Leo / Have done a million evil deeds."

(4) Theater is, of course, the quintessentially ephemeral genre--the surviving scripts merely ghosts or, at best, skeletons of vanished live performances. Rare extratextual reference to actual stagings or more common intratextual stage directions are often the only "proof" we have of the performance history of works prior to the rise of a "theater establishment" in seventeenth-century France, particularly when it is a question of "popular" or "polemical" theater such as that studied here. Were these plays performed? For whom and how often? Did they succeed in converting any spectator to the Reformed faith, confirming any wavering souls in their new confession, or provoking an outraged Catholic to respond in kind? It is unlikely that we shall ever know for certain.

(5) The first modern survey of these "moralites polemiques," itself polemical in its insistence on the importance of a hitherto neglected body of theatrical texts, is Emile Picot's series of five articles published in the Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme francais from 1887 to 1892--still a valuable resource. As historian and president of the society, Nathaniel Weiss noted in a footnote to the first of the series: "Le nombre meme, de plus de vingt pieces pour le XV[I.sup.e] siecle seulement, que M. Picot a reussi a decouvrir, prouve que l'on s'est souvent servi de ce moyen pour populariser des critiques, exprimer des besoins, traduire des aspirations qui etaient au fond de bien des coeurs" (The sheer number of plays that Picot managed to uncover, more than twenty for the sixteenth century alone, proves that this medium was often used to spread the criticism, express the needs, translate the aspirations that were at the bottom of many hearts) (Picot, 1887, 169, n.1).

(6) The title doubtless owes much to Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) and his Adversus furiosum Parisiensium theologastrorum decretum (1521), a rebuttal of the Paris Faculty of Theology's Determinatio censuring Luther and published the same year. Although theologastre, formed by the simple addition of the pejorative suffix (-astre or -atre) to theologian, may be taken at face value, as the farce's only English translator Charles Garside does, it is nonetheless tempting in the context of much later wordplay--either coined or popularized by Evangelicals and Calvinists alike--to speculate that at least some contemporaries might have understood more than that. Ought we to see in the Theologastres "those who worship or idolize theology"? Similarly, are Berquin's targets ancestors of Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) and his belly-worshipping "Gastrolatres" in the 1548 Quart livre? The semantic barriers between theology and gastronomy--not to mention theophagy--were breached early by polemical writers, encouraged by none other than Paul himself in Romans 16:18: "huiusmodi enim Christo Domino nostro non serviunt sed suo ventri et per dulces sermones et benedictiones seducunt corda innocentium" (For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple). On food, eating, and cooking imagery see Persels.

(7) For the most recent discussion of the attribution of the Farce to Louis de Berquin, as well as its coverage of contemporary theological issues, see Claude Longeon's introduction to his critical edition (9-40) and notes. The Faculty of Theology condemned Berquin's lost Apologia adversus calumniatores Lutheri, alias Speculum theologastrorum, seized in 1523. Some have speculated that this might have been an original Latin version of the Farce; see Garside, 45-82. The article includes Garside's English translation used in this essay.

(8) James K. Farge has drawn our attention to the all-but-enshrined historical error of confusing the Sorbonne with the Paris Faculty of Theology. If such confusion was rare in contemporary documentation, polemical authors such as Malingre, or even Rabelais, almost invariably conflate the one with the other. See Farge, 3-4.

(9) That Beda got as good as he gave is well documented in both primary and secondary literature. To him would be falsely and maliciously attributed in 1534 a Confession et raison de la foy, in which the indefatigable foe of the Reformed faith at last claims that God has "opened his eyes," leading him to "confess" point by point in the ensuing twenty-two chapters "la parolle de Dieu ... sans ancune gloses combien puissent elles estre magistrales ou anciennes" (the word of God ... without any commentary however authoritative or ancient) (Aiiii v). On Beda and the Paris Faculty of Theology at the time of the Farce des Theologastres, see Farge, 160-219.

(10) For recent studies of the centrality of the Eucharist in Reformation debates, as well as of its treatment as an act of sacred or sacrilegious consumption and digestion, see especially Lestringant, 1996b; Elwood; and Persels.

(11) On phlebotomy and its role in late-medieval medical practice, see Voigt and McVaugh's concise, informative introduction and notes, 1-34. That bloodletting was primarily a therapeutic and prognostic procedure (though it could play a role in diagnosis) may account--at least in part--for its absence from polemical works such as those we discuss here. Uroscopy, principally a diagnostic and prognostic science, and purgation, together with phlebotomy as the most common (not to mention scatological) therapy, evidently served much more readily the rhetorical strategies of the popular satirist.

(12) Helmich includes a facsimile of the 1533 Neuchatel edition, 3:13-108, and reviews what is known of its performance history (3:xi). Passages cited here are from that edition. See also Picot's detailed summary (7:342-55), which includes a biographical sketch (352-54).

(13) "Christendom. The dish is lovely and looks good to me: / The salad is beautiful to the eye, tender to the touch / From this one must conclude / That it is tasty and savory / And my heart desires it. / And so I'll certainly eat some. / Inspiration. Oh, no! Christendom. Oh, yes. Inspiration. No. Christendom. Yes, I shall. / I have determined to do so. / Inspiration. You will really regret it / Unless God intervenes. / Believe me, Inspiration, / Whom your loving God has sent you" (lines 616-27).

(14) "Ah! my head, help, help, / My shoulders, my arms, and my back, / My feet, my legs, and my hands, / Alas, I don't know what to do, / Nor to whom to turn. To cure me / I want to have medicine" (lines 680-85).

(15) "I'll go back and tell him / Your case, bearing both / Your urine and state of health. / He will help you, it seems to me" (lines 1182-85).

(16) See Brian; Tate.

(17) See Joubert, 1989, 149.

(18) From late antiquity through the Renaissance, the medical manuals and textbooks devoted specifically to urine and its analysis--in Latin translated from the Greek and the Arabic and in the vernacular translated from the Latin--are legion. Every publishing practitioner worth his salt, on both sides of the medical divide--university-trained physician or apprenticed surgeon--was obliged to address the topic, most often in a distinct work. Aside from the authoritative De urinis by Johannes Zacharias Actuarius, a Byzantine physician of uncertain dates (anywhere from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries), published in Paris and from which the figure 1 matula plate is drawn, we cite here from among those contemporary authorities perhaps better-known to the lay reader: physician Laurent Joubert's Latin De urinis, 1571; the French CEuvres of surgeon Ambroise Pare (1517-90), 1575; and the French Traite de chirurgie by physician Jacques Dalechamp (1513-88), 1570.

(19) "Inspiration. Please tell us soon / Where her illness is located. / The Physician. I'll get right to it; / And I want, according to the three parts / Which are displayed in the urine / (That is, the upper, middle and lower), / To diagnose what ails her. / I find in the upper part / That the circle one calls "nephalien" / Which for doctors is easy [to read] / Is too oily and too inflamed / Sparkling, and flushed. / That denotes that the head / And the brain are hurting, / Dull, troubled, and very weary. / Inspiration. Who is the head? The Physician. That is, the clergy ..." (lines 1379-96).

(20) "Good Works. 0 see how well examined is / The urine, in all its parts / How well diagnosed are the ailments / Of languishing Christendom. / It remains only that your powerful hand / Return her to her original health" (lines 1661-66).

(21) "As long as I live in my prime, / I shall serve the all-powerful Lord." Compare Malingre, 1533b. It has since been reproduced in Bordier, 22-25.

(22) For a sample of Catholic retort in the same vein, see the still relatively inaccessible works of the prolific priest Artus Desire (ca. 1500-ca. 1579). His popular attack on Clement Marot's psalm translations, the 1560 Contrepoison, has been given an excellent facsimile edition by Jacques Pineaux; the bulk of his polemical output, thoroughly catalogued and outlined in Giese, awaits a modern editor. Much the same may be said for the works of other Catholic champions perhaps less talented than Ronsard but decidedly more committed, such as Edmond Auger (1530-91), Thomas Beaulxamis (1524-89), and Rene Benoist (1521-1608).

(23) On Marguerite's theater, see Saulnier's introduction, vii-xxv, as well as notice on Le mallade; also, Reynolds-Cornell; and Aulotte. On Marguerite's theology in general, see, most recently, Thysell.

(24) Cited by Saulnier: "As there are a variety of doctors who out of ignorance neither know nor prescribe nor apply herbs appropriate to the illness, so it is with preachers of the Divine Word who are responsible for the plagues, blindness and almost incurable spiritual ailments that we see all around us, and for the countless souls dying and being destroyed indiscriminately. The gold sash does not make the physician, and even less the round cap the theologian" (7).

(25) "The Wife. Sir, although of Latin / You've a perfect knowledge, / Last night Big Catherine taught me / A really good bit of wisdom: / Sir, with the shit of a pure white / Pigeon, she tells me that a good potion / Can be made, which would only cost a penny, / And it can do no harm. / The Doctor: By my faith, you are not wise / And your gossip even less, / For the making of this soup / Is forbidden in Languedoc" (lines 133-44).

(26) On the importance of Dioscorides, particularly to contemporary writers such as Rabelais, see Antonioli, 50-51.

(27) "The Wife. He is cured, but tell me truly / What did you give him? / The Servant. Nothing, except a lesson / As God ordained it. / The Wife. Do you mean to say a Pater Noster, / Or to have a mass said? / The Servant. This recipe goes even further, / For it can oust all sadness. / The Wife. What is it? The Servant. Trust in the promises / Of The One who never lies" (lines 340-50).

(28) References are to the facsimile of a 1561 Rouen edition in Helmich, 3:191-264. One is tempted to see in this play a more fully-developed version--whether a sequel or a "prequel"--of an anonymous satirical pamphlet, La polymachie des marmitons (The Scullions' Polymachia), the only surviving copies of which date from 1563. This single-leaf octavo "proclamation" features some of the same characters (Satan, the Pope, the Clergy), each lamenting in turn the upending of the marmite papale or papal cooking pot, and crying out for vengeance against the Huguenots who had thus deprived them of a free lunch. The Comedie's argument suggests an even more direct link between the two by direct reference to a plot point of the Polymachie: "Mais le temps est venu qu'il faut que les marmites / Grasses soyent mises sus, et ce grand cuisinier / En enfer par Satan soit mene prisonnier" (The time has come for / The greasy cooking pots to be upended and for this great cook / To be taken by Satan as a prisoner to Hell) (prologue, lines 40-42). At any rate, familiarity with the marmite motif is obviously assumed. For a catalogue of polemical works of the first half of the century, see Higman.

(29) An anonymous octavo pamphlet apparently first printed in Lyon in 1561, L'extreme onction de la marmite papale (The Last Rites of the Papal Cooking Pot), stages this final vigil most explicitly. It invites the reader to witness the death rattle of the Catholic Mass: "Portez la croix, portez les chandelles, disons les paroles: elle est au dernier souspir, elle tire a la mort. Voila tout faict, retirons nous au nom de Dieu, il faut que quelque Evesque la confesse, mais elle a perdu l'oye, et la parole, elle est outre, s'est faict d'elle, Allons" (Bring the cross, bring the candles, pronounce the words: she is gasping her last breath, she is approaching death. Now all is done, let us withdraw in the name of God. We need some Bishop to confess her, but she has lost hearing and speech, she has passed on, it's over for her. Let us go) ([D.sub.ii] r).

(30) "The evil has grown so much that it is no longer a question of using painkillers, but rather cautery and incisions: even then it is to be feared that the whole will rot away, so rooted is the evil." The pseudonym Thrasibule Phenice can perhaps be understood in a number of ways: Thrasybulus was the name of both a clever Milesian tyrant, cited by Herodotus, and an Athenian naval commander who shared in the democratic victories over the Four Hundred and the Thirty Tyrants. Neither had much, if anything, to do with Phoenicia, but phenice (or phenice) was a common French term for the expensive crimson dye originally produced in the Phoenician city of Tyre, and the color most readily associated with the papacy. Does Badius then sign ironically as the "Crimson Tyrant" or, more likely, heroically as the "Crimson Liberator," he who will overthrow the papal tyrant whose inevitable demise is the subject of the Comedie?

(31) Badius' choice of the words antidote and contrepoison, although not without precedent and certainly suggested by the extended medical metaphor, must have resonated with audiences on both sides of the French religious divide by 1561. One of the most successful pieces of vernacular Catholic rebuttal, referred to above (n. 22), Artus Desire's Contrepoison des cinquante deux Chansons de Clement Marot, a polemical contrefactum of the psalm translations which circulated widely in the 1550s, had been published in Paris and Rouen the preceding year, again in Paris in 1561, and a number of other times throughout the 1560s. A Protestant response, the Singulier Antidot contre la poison des chansons d'Artus Desire (Excellent Antidote to the Poison of Artus Desire's Songs), signed by an as-yet-unidentified J.D.D.C., appeared in 1561. The fact that Desire appears as a character in the Comedie would seem to underscore the connections the audience was supposed to make. See Giese and the Pineaux critical edition of the Contrepoison.

(32) On Villegagnon and Fort Coligny, the disastrous French colonial misadventure in Brazil (1555-59), and the role of both in political and religious events leading to the Wars of Religion, see Lestringant, 1996a, cited earlier.

(33) "I can't go on, put me to bed / And put in my mouth / A morsel of holy wafer / Or the holy body of the Lord, / And a drop of holy water" (lines 405-09).

(34) [B]ecause the demise of the pope, which is nigh, will bring peace and consolation to the Church of God after so many troubles and persecutions. And once he has rid the Church of this Antichrist, Jesus Christ will reign by his word, and there will be much rejoicing, just as it is the nature of comedy to have a troublesome beginning and a joyous ending" (196).

(35) See works mentioned in nn. 28 and 29 as well as songs and verse collected in Montaiglon, Bordier, and Tarbe. Vaudois pastor Pierre Viret, one of the more prolific satirical polemicists of the Calvinist wave represented by Badius, especially delights in this trope: see especially his 1554 Actes des vrais successeurs de Jesus-Christ, among other works. Even Desire's 1560 Contrepoison, cited above, parries by characterizing Calvin, Geneva, and the misled Genevans as sick, starving, and wasting away even as they try to poison the Catholics in both their individual and collective, or institutional, body. He goes so far as to "authenticate" this description by claiming it is his own eyewitness account. If Badius' Comedie is the best truly theatrical working of this trope, other authors, versed in other, equally "public" genres, evidently took it up with alacrity.

(36) He seems, in fact, to have no better way to express his frustration with the Paris Faculty of Theology's condemnation of Luther's writings to date, rewriting Ecclesiastes 1. l: "Caecitas caecitatum et omnia caecitas" (Blindness of blindnesses, all is blindness). Later he joins in the scatological fray: "O infelicem Galliam, cui tales contigere censores sacrarumque rerum arbitri, digniores, qui cloacas agant, quem qui sacras literas tractent" (O unhappy Gaul, from whom such censors conceal sacred things, worthies who spew sewage, how they mistreat Holy Scripture!) (160).

(37) See, for example, Enders, 1999 and 2002, both of which contribute to the significant case for paying closer attention to Medieval and Renaissance "popular" theatre. With rare exceptions, such as those cited in this article, the reader interested in the polemical literature

of the French sixteenth century but without access to archives must still rely on such monuments to nineteenth-century bibliography and bibliophilia as Montaiglon's, Bordier's, and Tarbe's anthologies.

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