This book was not what I was expecting. In recent years, historians and literary scholars—including Philip Benedict, Denis Crouzet, Tatiana Debagi Baranova, Amy Graves-Monroe, Tom Hamilton, Cécile Huchard, and Luc Racaut—have delved into the polemical climate of the French Wars of Religion. Their work has demonstrated how the intense political and religious conflict led to a veritable explosion of writing in both manuscript and print, in which authors adopted loaded language, made use of rhetorical tropes, and deformed the arguments of the other side, all in an attempt to assert the truth of their position and to reveal the sinfulness and hypocrisy of their opponents. That approach to the French Wars of Religion, however, is not what one will find in this book, at least not in most of it. Rather, Haake presents a range of texts written and published during the civil wars as a response to what he identifies as a semiotic crisis that occurred in the first half of the sixteenth century, when movements such as the spread of nominalism, humanism, and Protestantism in France all led to a crisis of authority in the political and religious spheres.

In the introduction and first four chapters, Haake develops this idea of a crisis in meaning sparked by the Renaissance and Reformation and the attempts of writers of the succeeding generation or two to deal with it. The decline in previously agreed upon sites of authority, including the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church, left authors in the position of having to assert their own positions ever more forcefully, leading to the “rhetoric of extremes” (99) that characterizes many texts of the period. Because nothing could be taken for granted, writers “desire[d] to overcome the instability with absolutes” (133). They also felt that they could not rely on readers to interpret their works correctly and so set out to educate them through a variety of paratextual structures, including biblical citations, prefaces, and prefatory verse. Haake sees these paratextual elements as a “parallel conversation” (155) between the writer or publisher and the reader, in which readers were brought to the right frame of mind for understanding the text. One difficulty with this way of seeing these texts, however, is that it assumes a neutral reader—a figure almost entirely absent during the religious wars. If writers were concerned to signal to readers how to interpret their texts, it was more likely because prospective readers belonged to mutually opposed truth communities, and the writer's purpose was more to “shore up the base” (184) than to persuade the other side. Finally, Haake identifies the years beginning with the early 1560s as a moment in which the lack of public authority led specific authors—such as Ronsard—to move away from an approach common in early Renaissance poetry where an “I” is embedded within the text itself and instead to develop an authorial persona that exists at a level removed from the body of the text or even a representation of the author grounded in the historical reality of the writer. Faced with a crisis of authority, therefore, French writers offered themselves up as a new source of credibility and stability.

Many readers will be more inclined to see the polemical climate of the Wars of Religion as a product of the deep political crisis and ongoing state of warfare occurring at the time rather than as a delayed response to a crisis of meaning taking root in the generation of Rabelais. Nevertheless, Haake's work does offer many good and convincing analyses of particular works and textual phenomena. The discussion of the ways that biblical quotations, prefaces, and prefatory verse can signal and even influence the meaning of the main part of the published text in chapter 3 is especially important for those who may feel tempted to skip over this introductory material. Indeed, chapter 5 provides a first-rate discussion of the “Mémoire” of Advocate David, a publication seeking to discredit the Guise family first published in 1576, using these very techniques. Here, Haake clearly shows how small differences in word choice within the text itself, different titles, prefatory material, and other works published concurrently with the main text all significantly influenced the lesson that readers were to draw from this notorious affair. While a version without publication attribution made the point that the Guise family, as foreign nobles, posed a fundamental threat to the French monarchy and system of government, a version seemingly published in Lyon rather emphasized the threat to France from outside powers, including Rome and Spain. Further, these texts, first published at the time of the creation of the League of Péronne, usefully took on a second life in 1585 as the Catholic League got under way.

In discussing the effectiveness of these publications in developing a narrative of Guise ambition that would haunt the family up until the deaths of the Duke and Cardinal of Guise in 1588, Haake notes that their success was rooted in the fact that readers did not have to be sure that they were true but only that they were plausible (268). This judgment is certainly accurate, but unfortunately, it largely contradicts the tenor of the argument up until this chapter. In fact, the book takes two seemingly inconsistent approaches to the polemical texts of the French Wars of Religion: one rooted in an attempt to recover authority in a world where universals were no longer agreed on and the other based in tactical arguments suited to the specific historical moment. While the former approach may be more relevant to authors such as Ronsard, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and Jean de la Taille, all discussed within this frame, the latter approach would benefit from more attention to contexts—political, chronological, and of genre—than is provided in this work. Still, given the success of many of the specific readings that Haake provides, The Politics of Print during the French Wars of Religion does offer valuable analysis to experts in the field.