In his De l’origine des Bovrgongnons (1581), Saint-Julien, an important cleric and descendant of a noble house in the duchy of Burgundy, recounts how he gradually came to understand the true origins of the Burgundian people. Long ago, he explains, he had begun to write a Latin history of the Burgundians but soon became discouraged due to the different accounts he read in numerous ancient authors. Abandoning his attempts, he passed his writings and other research materials on to his close friend, Jean Bégat, at that time a judge (conseiller) in the Parlement of Burgundy at Dijon and subsequently its first president, who had himself expressed an interest in this kind of research.1 Saint-Julien only began to develop his current understanding of the subject several years later, when Bernard de Cirey, judge in the Parlement of Burgundy, invited him to pass some time at his country house. There, Saint-Julien found himself in the company of other learned men, including Guy Tabourot, royal auditor of accounts (auditeur des comptes du roi), who had been conducting some archeological fieldwork in the nearby fields of the “valley of Ongne.” On the information of the local farmers that ancient remains, including the foundations of buildings, had been turning up in this location for the last sixty years, Tabourot had set himself to digging and had happily discovered several ancient coins and a small statue of a Roman herald. The learned company set itself to discussing these findings and concluded that an important town of great reputation must once have existed on the site. Saint-Julien himself remembered that he had read several old French romances mentioning a Bourg d’Ongne (town of Ogne), and he wondered if this could have been its location.2
Sometime later back in Dijon, Saint-Julien had the opportunity to discuss his musings with the lawyer (avocat) Guillaume Tabourot, brother of Guy. By this time, Saint-Julien had come to doubt his original association of the site of the ancient finds with the memory of the Bourg d’Ongne, having reasoned that if a great town had once stood on the spot, Caesar or another ancient author would certainly have mentioned it. His interlocutor confessed to having entertained the same doubts, which he had dispelled by further digging in the area. This time, Tabourot’s men had found a green, transparent stone, which, when presented to François ii de Dinteville, bishop of Auxerre (in office 1530–54), was identified by this learned cleric as a fragment of some great work. Subsequent to this discussion, Saint-Julien had the opportunity to visit the library of the recently deceased Claude Patarin, first president of the Parlement of Burgundy. There, among other treasures, the cleric found and copied out for himself the extract of a chronicle regarding the Burgundians, which a previous first president of the Parlement of Burgundy, Humbert de Villeneufve, had made in 1513 when he was held prisoner in Geneva during the negotiations over the Swiss siege of Dijon.3 The chronicle related that long before Caesar, the Éduens and the Sennonais, two rival Gallic peoples, were involved in an intense struggle for territorial control, and that it was only with the help of the people of the Bourg des Dieux (town of the gods), a Gallic community within the lands of the Éduens, that the former gained victory over the latter. Reading this excerpted chronicle brought to mind for Saint-Julien an account of the Burgundians that Barthélémy de Chasseneux, once avocat du roi in the bailliage (mid-level royal court) of Autun and subsequently first president of the Parlement of Provence, had provided in his published work on the customary law of Burgundy. Chasseneux had argued that the people of eastern France were not originally called the Burgundians, but rather the Éduens, and that it was only once the Éduens had received help from the inhabitants of the Bourg de Dijon (town of Dijon) that they adopted their new name. Chasseneux’s identification of the city in question could not be accurate in Saint-Julien’s estimation, however, since he held that Dijon had been founded long afterward by the Romans. The previous author had made a simple mistake and interpreted the “Bourg des Dieux” mentioned in the chronicle for the “Bourg de Dijon.” In fact, this Bourg des Dieux was nothing other than the Bourg d’Ongne, the remains of which Saint-Julien had witnessed being discovered. Thus, the ancient Burgundians, far from being a tribe of Germanic invaders, were actually a Gallic people with their roots in the immediate area.4
Such a long and detailed relation of how Saint-Julien had arrived at his view of the local origins of the Burgundians was not an innocent anecdote of scholarly discovery but was rather designed for maximum persuasive power. Extremely conscious that his opinion contradicted established historical views, the author sought to ground his argument in an array of convincing proofs, including a series of archeological finds, the common opinion of local inhabitants, the judgments of learned men, and a matrix of written evidence, including manuscripts collected and preserved by two generations of presidents of the Parlement of Burgundy and highly respected published sources, including Chasseneux’s Commentaria in consuetudines Ducatus Burgundiae (1517). He cleverly placed the reader’s possible doubts in his own mouth, only to have them laid to rest by an interlocutor, and he later cited “the approbation of numerous important figures, whose solidity of knowledge and good judgment is taken as oracular in the resolution of all difficult questions” in support of his own conclusions.5 The prestige of such witnesses could only have been enhanced by the fact that most of them haled from a previous generation. Situating his interactions and developing conclusions regarding the Burgundians in the period just before 1551 (when President Patarin died), the long-lived Saint-Julien evoked learned discussions that had taken place in the reign of Henri ii (r.1547–59) in a work published decades later.6 The marked level of detail in mentioning people, times, locations, and connections served to reinforce the author’s own claims to authority by situating him within such a socially and intellectually prominent company.
Saint-Julien’s account of his own attempts to puzzle out the true origins of the Burgundians, whether entirely sincere or partially fabricated, offers an excellent window into the assumptions and practices of local history writing as they were developing in early modern French towns. It shows that already by the middle of the sixteenth century, a pronounced interest in local history had developed among a range of urban elites, ranging from royal officials and lawyers to clerics and princes of the church, even if few urban histories had actually been published by that time. It demonstrates that many of the methodologies that would become central to urban history writing, including interpretation of material remains, the collection of documents, and the juxtaposition of manuscript and published texts, had already begun. Finally, it suggests that these individuals did not pursue their interests in isolation, but rather formed communities of enthusiasts who discussed their findings with each other, collected and shared documents, unearthed ancient objects, and proffered them as gifts to important people. These networks of local scholars were not incidental to the historical enterprise, but at the heart of it. As Saint-Julien’s strategy to embed his argument within the exchanges of important local figures shows, these individuals’ social standing and reputation for learnedness were essential guarantors of the reliability of the author’s findings. History writing in the urban communities of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France was an intellectual endeavor, but it was also a social and political one.
This chapter aims to delve into this lively urban historical culture, in which local elites were becoming increasingly concerned to delineate past events, recount local traditions, and therefore to elaborate a compelling historical identity for their community. Although the period of 1560–1660 has traditionally been seen as one of transition from a cooperative relationship between the monarchy and the bonnes villes (significant towns) to an increasing subordination of local concerns to the authority of the crown, a significant number of works have begun to demonstrate that the greater integration of local elites within the apparatus of the royal administration by the mid-seventeenth century did not lead them to abandon their pride and involvement in their local communities.7 The sheer number of manuscripts devoted to local historical subjects and the development of urban historical writing over the period go far to confirm this assertion. As we will see, a wide variety of inhabitants of French communities, hailing from important cities to small towns, produced an abundance of writing, of which a considerable amount was dedicated to local history, either directly or indirectly. Of this great amount of literary and scholarly production, only a minority was ever published, so that what has survived in printed form or even in manuscript (especially from the sixteenth century) forms little more than the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
This local historical culture was by no means limited to the most educated urban elites but was in many ways a shared culture within individual towns—one way in which they should be seen as “historical communities.” Almost always written in French rather than Latin, urban histories were meant to be accessible to a relatively broad audience, even if the first level of readership was certainly composed of other prominent inhabitants with scholarly interests and reputations for learning. These publications’ interpretations of the urban past were rarely completely new. Instead, they frequently commented on preexisting historical traditions as they were elaborated in the oral tradition, inscribed in the physical structure of churches and civic buildings, or enacted in processions and celebrations in public space.8 Just as in the early modern England studied by Daniel Woolf, a sense of the past permeated French society, and scholars interacted with people of lower status to help define historical objects and explanatory narratives.9 In addition, urban histories cannot be viewed as an isolated, self-contained genre. Just as urban communities were porous, admitting travelers for business and pleasure to their midst, so was the genre of local history in dialogue with many other kinds of publications. Geographies and cosmographies, maps with historical commentary, histories focused on the French kingdom, books of privileges, descriptions of royal and noble entries, and increasingly in the seventeenth century, travel guides all borrowed from and shared material with urban histories. The varied but overlapping audiences for these related works thus gained increased access to the historical claims of any one community.
Although urban histories began to appear regularly by the mid-sixteenth century, the practice of local history writing underwent considerable development over the following generations. As the genre became more fixed in its expectations by the seventeenth century, so too were authors increasingly required to base their arguments on original documents, to correct received opinion, and to cite their sources. These evolving technical requirements inevitably led to what we may call the “politicization” of urban history writing. As the importance of original documents and their direct citation increased, historians found it necessary to cultivate a series of contacts in order to gain access to sources. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were no public archives. The treasuries of city governments, church chapters, and local monasteries were all reserved for current members, as were royal judicial and administrative records. Local families often preserved significant chests of documents for their own use, but none of these collections was available without the goodwill and approval of the individuals concerned. Historians, therefore, spent a great deal of time collecting manuscripts and trading access to documents, leading the predilections of their benefactors and the points of view of the sources they were able to consult to influence their subsequent writing.10 These interactions, in conjunction with the developing requirements of historical argument, inevitably encouraged and reflected a growing community of local experts, who over time came to constitute the first and most influential audience for historical works and who all had their own scholarly views and personal interests to defend. Since many of these local savants were also in contact with historians of national reputation who populated the French arm of the Republic of Letters, local history writing came to serve as a key location for the practice of erudite history in France. Not only did this genre of writing help to link the practices of the “perfect” history of the late sixteenth century with the increasingly sophisticated focus on diplomatics and the great historical projects of the late seventeenth century but it also contributed to the growing sense that a complete history of the French kingdom was dependent on a full understanding of local conditions.
What was written in local histories thus mattered to a significant group of people, and published texts could receive a great amount of criticism for perceived failings. At the local level, much of this criticism focused on genealogical details, since how one’s ancestors were represented was of prime concern to the local elites who perused these texts. In addition to these personal concerns, however, intense disagreements emerged over the more general meanings and implications of the urban past. These controversies could focus on such questions as how the locality had experienced the divisive period of the Wars of Religion, as we will explore in chapter 9, or whether its long-held sacred traditions could be corroborated by historical evidence, as the intense arguments over St. Julien, the reputed apostle and first bishop of Le Mans, will illustrate in this chapter. These controversies help to demonstrate that urban history writing was far from an isolated, academic enterprise, but rather held significance for large numbers of people within the civic community. As the controversy over St. Julien will particularly illuminate, these disputes not only opposed historians and interest groups within a single community but also drew on wider avenues of erudite scholarship from the provinces to Paris, thanks to the relevance of local arguments to broader historical concerns.
1 Historical Writing in Sixteenth-Century Le Mans
In France in the second half of the sixteenth century, historical works increased dramatically in number and importance, and urban histories closely mirrored the general trend. Long ago, Vivanti drew attention to the impressive number of histories published and republished in France during the period of 1560–1610 and remarked on the significant role that history writing played in the development of national sentiment during this time. Of the 271 first editions he counted, fifty were devoted to local historical subjects. This regional focus on towns, provinces, and seigneuries did nothing to undermine the unity of the kingdom, he asserted, but rather contributed to a royalism that was if anything stronger at the end of the Wars of Religion than it had been at the beginning of the century.11 Following Vivanti’s lead, Dolan examined the number of French urban histories, excluding those focused on local churches or monasteries, produced during the early modern period and cataloged at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. With her more stringent requirements, she found a total of fourteen such histories published in the sixteenth century, to be followed by the considerably greater total of seventy-six in the seventeenth century.12
Projects to count the number of publications produced, or at least currently available, certainly help to suggest the increasing level of interest in local history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, these numbers convey a very partial impression of the vitality of the enterprise and the sheer number of texts written and read, since so many urban histories and works with local historical content remained in manuscript, were circulated via informal scholarly networks, and, especially in the sixteenth century, were subsequently lost. Indeed, if we were to accept Dolan’s figure of fourteen urban histories published in the sixteenth century, it would be possible to identify more manuscripts subsequently lost than published. To be sure, it is no easy matter to take stock of all these lost works and the social and scholarly connections that gave rise to and resulted from them. To gain an idea of the magnitude of the interest in local historical materials, however, we may take advantage of a particularly valuable source of information on the subject: the Bibliothèque françoise (1584) of François Grudé de la Croix du Maine. In this work, La Croix du Maine sought to report on every author who had written a work in French, either published or in manuscript, and thanks to his particular intellectual horizons and methods of gathering material, he proved a particularly good informant on works produced in his native city of Le Mans and the surrounding province of Maine in western France.
La Croix du Maine’s Bibliothèque françoise offers an excellent window into the extent and practices of urban history writing in sixteenth-century France thanks to the interests and aims of the author. La Croix du Maine set out to produce an alphabetical dictionary of every individual who had composed a text in French and relied on his own extensive library, his connections with other men of learning and other friendships, and a prospectus he published in 1579 soliciting news of such works in order to compile it.13 Since he spent much of his adult life until 1582 in his native city of Le Mans, at which time he packed up his voluminous collection of books and papers and departed for Paris, his working methods made him especially knowledgeable about works produced in Maine and surrounding areas.14 An impassioned compiler and enthusiast of letters, he was just as willing to mention and praise the works of Protestants as of Catholics. Indeed, this proclivity to speak well of Reformed individuals and texts has frequently led commentators to assume that he was, at the least, a Protestant sympathizer.15 His connections with the very Catholic circle of René de Voyer, viscount of Paulmy, and close associations with ardent Catholics, such as Belleforest, however, strongly argue against this conclusion. Rather, he applied his passion for information to all texts, with the one limitation that he refused to detail works of religious controversy in his dictionary. Yet, while La Croix du Maine was almost omnivorous in his zeal to demonstrate the power and versatility of the French language through his list of authors and their writings, it is to be presumed that history formed one of his special interests. In his 1579 “Discovrs,” he professed the ambition to write a volume for each of the different regions in France following the model of the work he had already drafted for Le Mans. This text included the region’s antiquities, the lives of the counts of Maine and bishops of Le Mans, the lives of the illustrious men and genealogies of the noble houses, the annals of the region’s history and the privileges of its inhabitants.16 Further, when the author proposed to King Henri iii (r.1574–89) in 1583 to compose ten thousand manuscript volumes on 107 subjects, he claimed already to have compiled one hundred volumes on the spiritual and temporal characteristics of France and the lives of all of the French kings.17 Of the extremely ambitious list of his writing and research projects, therefore, the first he had completed included a history of his native province and a work on the succession of French kings.
A full examination of La Croix du Maine’s Bibliothèque françoise testifies both to a wide range of authors native to or living in Le Mans and a significant number of manuscripts composed in the immediate area. George Huppert, who used this work to delineate the professions and social background of authors who made a “significant” contribution to French culture between 1540 and 1584, found that of the 319 individuals he selected, there were 178 magistrates, forty-six beneficed clerics, twenty-eight pedagogues, twenty-six physicians, twelve military men, fourteen craftsmen, and sixteen secretaries to the king. Of the 288 individuals whose true social status he ferreted out, moreover, 80 percent were reportedly robins (royal officials).18 In our sample, much more limited in geographical terms but deliberately inclusive in terms of amount or quality of writing, we find that a total of seventy individuals living in or very near Le Mans in the sixteenth century (up to 1584) produced a total of 187 works in French (published and in manuscript), of which nineteen authors turned their hand to twenty-three works with obvious local historical content. These writers reflected the range of social elites residing in the provincial capital, including eleven judicial officials and gens du roi (attorneys and solicitors general), fourteen avocats, seventeen canons of the cathedral and other secular clerics, six monks and friars, nine bourgeois rentiers (men living off investments) or gentilshommes (petty nobles), and twelve others, including one medical doctor, one surgeon, one publisher, and three pedagogues. Of the would-be historians, six were lawyers, two were judicial officials, four were members of the secular clergy, and three were local gentilshommes, a seemingly representative distribution.19
La Croix du Maine’s concern to mention every author in French of whom he was informed, combined with his method of seeking out these individuals through his existing acquaintances and his desire to demonstrate his own position within humanist circles by naming these connections and praising his particular friends, makes it possible to glean some of the networks of association organized around the writing and consultation of historical manuscripts in Maine in the sixteenth century. First, La Croix du Maine himself owned a number of important manuscripts, including an “Oraison ou remonstrance, prononcée … en la cour de Parlement, en la présence du Roi François I, à son retour des Espagnes” of Charles Guillard, native of Maine and president of the Parlement of Paris in 1521; many of Guillaume Postel’s works written in his own hand; copies of Pierre Le Baud’s unpublished “Chronique de Victray” and “Discours de l’origine & antiquité de la ville de Laval”; and copies of some of the manuscripts of Paschal Robin du Faux, whom La Croix du Maine described as a “great historian and poet, who above all has a true knowledge of the history of France, and especially of that of his native province of Anjou, being blessed with a wonderful quickness of mind and a remarkable memory.”20 He also traveled to consult manuscripts held in the collections of his patrons and associates, including an autograph copy of Postel’s “Confessions de foi” held in the library of the viscount of Paulmy and fifty other autograph manuscripts of Postel previously owned by André de la Serre.21 La Croix du Maine also owed much of his information on historical manuscripts written in Le Mans either to his relations with the authors themselves or their descendants. He could thus indicate that many of the relatives and friends of Jean Ory, lawyer at Le Mans during the reign of François i (r.1515–47), reported that he had composed an account of the antiquities of Maine; among these relatives was Ory’s grandson, Michel Bourrée, lawyer in the presidial court of Le Mans, who had published several poems in honor of St. Julien, first bishop of Le Mans, and an “Ode panégyrique du Maine,” printed in Angers. Additionally, Bourrée had composed numerous odes and panegyrics in honor of the local nobility and an ode on the death of François de Guise that remained in manuscript.22 La Croix du Maine also took the opportunity to praise the magnificent library of Jean Taron, judge in the presidial court at Le Mans, and the unparalleled knowledge of his good friend, Georges du Tronchay, of Greek and Roman medals and other antiquities. His close association with Tronchay likely led him to speak sympathetically of his younger brother, Louis du Tronchay, who, although killed for his Reformed beliefs during the civil wars, “was one of the most learned and most knowledgeable young men in France and one of the most devoted to letters.”23
It is also clear from the Bibliothèque françoise that many published authors of the sixteenth century composed a large reserve of other manuscripts that never made it into print. For example, La Croix du Maine reports that Nicolas Bergeron, a lawyer in the Parlement of Paris, published a list of all the treatises he had composed and published. At the time that he drew up this list in 1584, Bergeron had published six works in French, ranging from his local historical work Le Valois royal (1583) and a Table historiale (1584) summarizing the most illustrious individuals and memorable events that had occurred since the beginning of the world to the present day, to editions of works of legist Jean Papon, theologian Claude d’Espence, and philosopher and mathematician Peter Ramus. Yet, La Croix du Maine could also name twenty-four other manuscripts that Bergeron had in hand, not counting small pamphlets, translations, epitaphs, epigrams, and of course, all of Bergeron’s Latin works. Although Bergeron’s interests ranged broadly from law and judicial practice, to educational theory, to the French language, many of his unpublished manuscripts were historical in nature. He had thus reportedly written a history of the Palais Royal in Paris, a delineation of the most illustrious families of the world, and a treatise on the origins and early history of the French people, not to mention the full account of the history of the house and province of Valois of which his Valois Royal was merely an excerpt.24 The same observation holds true for La Croix du Maine’s friend, Robin du Faux. Of the twenty-one works by Robin du Faux listed in the Bibliothèque françoise, only eight had been published by 1584. Significantly, although the Angevin had published a Brief discovrs on the history of Anjou in 1582, the history and chronicle of the duchy of Anjou of which the discourse was merely a foretaste remained in manuscript, as did his collection of the memorable epitaphs of the churches of Angers.25
Although numerous individuals in sixteenth-century French towns eagerly wrote on a whole variety of subjects, with local history forming a noticeable focus of interest, a good deal of this work was subsequently lost. Limiting our vision to the one town of Le Mans and to La Croix du Maine’s nearby associates, we can still identify a good dozen lost writings on subjects pertaining to local history. At the top of this list must stand La Croix du Maine’s own volumes on the history of the county of Maine. Although his grandiose plans for redacting ten thousand volumes led some to question whether La Croix du Maine wrote anything at all, it is clear that he had in fact composed the volume on Maine mentioned in his 1579 “Discovrs.”26 His friend Robin du Faux independently made reference “to the diligent research on all of Maine, even on all of France, drawn up by the sieur de la Croix Grudé of Le Mans, my friend and one of those who most excel at this time in these national antiquities,” and Belleforest, another close associate, made use of his historical memoranda on the city of Le Mans in his Cosmographie universelle.27 The historical works of Robin du Faux fared no better. Although Belleforest had also used his history of the duchy of Anjou in his section on Angers in the Cosmographie universelle, this manuscript no longer survives, a fate shared by Robin’s collection of epitaphs and the work he did on an unpublished map of the duchy of Brittany commissioned by François i in 1546.28 In addition to these historical works by La Croix du Maine and his friend, the Bibliothèque françoise also testifies to the existence at one time of a large range of historical works produced in Le Mans. These include: memoranda on the antiquities of Maine composed by Ory during the reign of François i; Gabriel Tamot’s “Antiquités de la ville & cité du Mans” (c.1540); a collection of the lives of the bishops of Le Mans by Jean Brouiller, canon of the cathedral; a history of the events that occurred during the lifetime of Jean Le Voyer, who lived during the reign of François i; an account of what had transpired in Maine during the last religious troubles, drafted by Pierre Olivier, sieur du Bouchet; the history of the Wars of Religion that Louis du Tronchay was in the process of writing when he was killed at La Charité and his manuscript stolen; and an “Histoire des premiers troubles de la relligion, & de ce qui arrriua de plus memorable en l’année mil cinq cens soixante & deux, lors de l’inuasion de la ville du Mans par les relligionaires,” by Gervais Le Barbier de Francour, a prominent Reformed diplomat, which La Croix du Maine mentioned as existing in manuscript but which Claude Blondeau, a seventeenth-century lawyer and savant, identified as having been lost.29 Although it is possible to identify numerous other urban histories and related manuscripts that did not survive the early modern period, this sample from the unexceptional town of Le Mans in the sixteenth century should give an idea of the level of enthusiasm for local historical subjects that gripped contemporaries but has sadly left little permanent mark. The instability caused by the Wars of Religion was particularly detrimental to the survival of historical manuscripts.
2 Local Audiences and Historical Traditions
I earlier spoke of the amphitheater, and since many men, especially those who are not familiar with [Latin] letters, although they see the circuit, roundness, and foundation of the one they call “the pit of the arena,” do not know to what it was dedicated and destined, I have decided that it would be improper to pass on without giving some small explanation. [This is] for the contentment of the artisans and plebeians of our city who are neither adept nor instructed in letters, so that they may understand what honor, excellence, and heights of dignity the structure and building of these theaters, amphitheaters, and circuses brought to towns in antiquity.32
Although it is unlikely that “artisans and plebeians” could afford the prices of urban histories published in folio and quarto editions, publishers did take steps to make these works identifiable and appealing. Simon Millanges, for example, placed an image of the arms of the city of Bordeaux on every publication relating to local history, meaning that a person strolling into his bookshop from the 1570s to the 1620s could immediately locate the works pertaining to Bordeaux and its surroundings.33
Much of the content of urban histories was familiar to local audiences, at least in outline, since these works drew on existing historical traditions inscribed and enacted in public space. Although historians frequently sought to argue against “popular opinion,” that there was an oral tradition to contradict meant that inhabitants indeed discussed and traded historical views. Evidence of a town’s history surrounded its residents, whether in the ancient remains and medieval fortifications that authors such as Vinet and Chaumeau were careful to describe, the antique statuary and coins that were continually being unearthed and sometimes displayed in public places, or the inscriptions and epitaphs that crowded the walls of churches and civic structures. For example, when Martin Donzeau, lieutenant particulier (leading judicial official in civil cases) of the sénéchaussée of Bordeaux, unearthed three large antique statues in white marble, several marble inscriptions, coins, and medallions on July 21, 1594 and the days following, the mayor and jurats (city councilors of Bordeaux) had all these pieces gathered up, moved to the town hall, and set up for display, “in memory of the antiquity and greatness of this city.”34 Similarly, when Abraham Gölnitz, a learned German traveler, made his tour of France in 1630–31, he was careful to note many of the epitaphs and inscriptions that gave evidence of the character of the places he visited. For Lyon, Gölnitz remarked that since the city sported more medals, inscriptions, tombs, and other ancient remains than everywhere else combined, he would describe at length the six weeks he spent there examining all of these ancient monuments. Yet his tour of the city also produced a large number of inscriptions in French, such as the one he transcribed from the fortifications bordering the Rhone River, announcing that they had been completed in 1622 on the order of the king and under the authority of Charles de Neufville, sénéchal of Lyonnais, Forêts, and Beaujolais.35 In Clermont, these kinds of memorials made direct reference to the city’s historical and political pretensions, as was the case for an inscription that Gölnitz noted at one of the gates (admittedly in Latin), holding that Clermont, having been favored with privileges granted by Catherine, queen of France, had been restored to its ancient splendor.36
One of the richest examples demonstrating how urban historical traditions could be simultaneously shared in public space and elaborated in print pertains to the memory of Jeanne d’Arc and her lifting of the siege of Orléans in 1429. Andrew Spicer has indicated how in Orléans the memory of this siege became associated with the town’s successful defense against the forces of Attila the Hun in 451 and subsequently also came to be linked with Orléans’s resistance to attempts to overtake it during the Wars of Religion. He notes that after a statue of the Maid, erected on the bridge over the Loire River in the early sixteenth century, had been destroyed during the Reformed occupation of Orléans in 1567, it was one of the first Catholic monuments to be replaced after the hostilities. Further, the entire population of Orléans celebrated the lifting of the English siege annually on May 8, when the inhabitants processed around the town, stopping at various churches and other sites to sing songs in honor of the event.37 The cult of Jeanne d’Arc and celebration of the lifting of the siege was one explicitly promoted by Orléans’s municipal government, as Saturny Hotot, publisher for the corps de ville (municipal governing body), indicated in the dedication to the mayor and aldermen (échevins) of Orléans preceding his publication of the Histoire et discovrs av vray dv siege qvi fvt mis devant la ville d’Orleans, par les Anglois, le mardy 12. iour d’octobre 1428 (1576). Hotot relates that the account of the siege that he was then publishing came from an old manuscript kept in the municipal treasury, and indeed, a long manuscript note on the copy held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France explains that the municipal treasurer was authorized to pay Hotot sixty-seven livres, five sous out of common funds for the edition.38 Although this account of the siege, usually combined with Léon Trippault’s “Antiquitez de la ville d’Orleans & choses plus notables d’icelle” (1570), was extremely popular, the inhabitants of Orléans did not have to depend on published texts to understand the importance of Jeanne d’Arc for their town.39 As François Le Maire, a seventeenth-century historian of Orléans, was careful to record, motets sung during the annual procession gave ample testimony to the Maid’s significance. On a stage hung with tapestries before the church of Notre Dame des Miracles de Saint Paul, the clergy, bourgeois, and good merchants of Orléans were called on to thank God and the Virgin that long ago, on this same day, their English enemies had been chased away and the duchy saved. More explicitly: “At the sweet prayer / That the King prayed / Came the shepherdess Maid / Who fought for us[.] / Through divine help / She so crippled the English / That she put them to flight / And raised the siege.”40 When a historian such as Le Maire carefully elaborated how Orléans’s resistance to numerous sieges, including those of Attila, the English, and the Huguenots, had marked the town as fundamental to the preservation of the French kingdom, he was thus drawing on a range of physical monuments, celebratory enactments, and officially sanctioned texts that all spoke to Jeanne d’Arc’s role in the city’s salvation.41
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French towns were thus permeated by their past, and this history was of interest not just to lettered elites but also to inhabitants from all walks of life. One of the best indications of this state of affairs arises from the testimony of visitors—official travelers and tourists. By the sixteenth century, what we may identify as “historical tourism” was already in evidence, but by the seventeenth century, once the disorders of the civil wars had ended, an early Grand Tour was being established and a growing number of travel guides sought to orient visitors to the sites of Paris and French provincial towns.42 Indeed, travel guides had become such an important informational genre that treatises instructing authors how to order their observations had become readily available.43 When travelers arrived in a community eager to see the sights and examine its most important sacred and civic monuments, they generally relied on the knowledge and theories of inhabitants to inform them about the local past. Acting as a royal commissioner to collect material on French provinces and cities in the 1560s and 1570s, Nicolay was clearly dependent on orientations provided by local residents to record the information he sought. When Nicolay arrived at the small town of Souvigny in Bourbonnais, for example, he was told that it was the oldest town in the province. The community had once been considerably larger, as all the ruined buildings attested, but after the bourgeois refused to allow their lord to extend the walls of his castle up to the walls of the town, he left for Moulins, where he built a great tower still visible in the château and established his seat.44
Nicolay was a royal geographer, but the taste for travel and learned tourism tempted many in the early modern period. In 1582, when Jacques-Auguste de Thou was returning to Paris from time spent in Guyenne, he deliberately made a tour of southern France on his way home. At Lectoure, he spent the entire day viewing the town in the company of the governor, taking the time to examine how Blaise de Montluc’s army had been disposed when he laid siege to the city in September 1562. He also viewed inscriptions on stones once belonging to an antique temple showing that the Romans had sacrificed bulls in honor of the mother of the gods there and visited the château where the count of Armagnac was assassinated during the reign of Louis xi (r.1461–83). At Narbonne, his guide was particularly knowledgeable about ancient inscriptions, since he had drawn up a complete list of them.45 Three decades later, Pierre Bergeron (son of Nicolas) also made a tour of Spain and southern France and kept an extensive record of his travels.46 His account dating from 1612 demonstrates that most major urban monuments were open to visitation, perhaps with the right connections, and that local guides were eager to impart historical information, not all of it credited by the recipient. At Bordeaux, Bergeron gained entry to the royal château de Trompette, allowing him to view a beautiful old tapestry depicting the Triumphs of Petrarch, and to the hôtel de ville, where he could study the ancient marbles, statues, and inscriptions deposited there in 1594.47 When visiting the cathedral, he was informed about St. Martial, first Christian evangelist of Aquitaine, and about St. Gilbert, first archbishop of Bordeaux, but noted the contradiction that the archbishop had reputedly lived before the apostle. At the collegiate church of Saint-Sernin, the traveler was equally bemused by the common report of a thoroughly sealed tomb, in which water rose and fell with the phases of the moon. Reporting that “they say that they have observed this from all time” and that “they hold that it is the sepulcher of a saint,” he persisted in observing doubtfully that this phenomenon “would be a marvel worthy of exercising the understanding” if it were true.48
The testimony of Justus Zinzerling confirms the impression that travelers to French cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries toured the sights and gained information about local history from the inhabitants. Zinzerling acquired many historical details about the towns he visited from informal sources and common report. At Orléans, for example, he was able to see what the cathedral of Sainte-Croix had looked like before it was destroyed by Protestants in 1568 by observing a drawing of its previous appearance available for viewing at a house near the hotel, L’Écu de France. Zinzerling also reported that the city of Orléans had been besieged many times, including by Attila the Hun, the English in 1428, and the duke of Guise in 1563, following up this information with a recommendation to visit the statue of Jeanne d’Arc on the bridge over the Loire River.49 It is easy to imagine his gaining this crucial historical background from an inhabitant, just as he reports that he “transcribed from the mouth of the people [du vulgaire]” a quip by Holy Roman Emperor Charles v (r.1519–56) describing La Rochefoucauld as a bourg, Poitiers as a garden, Orléans as a town, and Paris as a world.50 Composing a travel guide, Zinzerling certainly relied on published urban histories to round out his information on particular cities, but he also gives evidence that visitors might find historical texts at their disposal on a more informal basis. At Vienne, Zinzerling instructs the reader that “the innkeeper [of the Coupe d’Or] will show you a book in which the antiquities of the town and its surroundings are described. I will relate the main ones for you, although I very much doubt that they are what the inhabitants claim.”51 Travelers were able to learn and then impart information about the history of early modern French towns because their inhabitants were themselves interested in this subject and willing to inform strangers. As Zinzerling and others began to publish their travel guides, frequently in Latin but sometimes in French, this kind of writing joined the related genres of urban histories and cosmographies as a complementary source of information on urban history.52
3 The Politics of Historical Erudition in the Duchy of Burgundy
Despite generally resting on a preexisting cushion of historical speculation and civic tradition, the genre of urban history witnessed a noticeable evolution in its technical requirements. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, even before the more formalized venues of discussion such as provincial academies and savant journals had been established, a growing emphasis on the necessity for documentary evidence emerged in tandem with the need for greater skill and skepticism in interpreting it. This process was clearly at work as successive generations of historians wrote on the Burgundian towns of Mâcon and Chalon-sur-Saône, from the Chroniqve de la ville de Mascon (1560), edited by Philibert Bugnyon but originally written in Latin by François Fustailler sometime in the 1520s; to Saint-Julien’s Devx livres des antiqvitez de Mascon (1580) and his Discovrs des antiqvitez de la ville, et cite de Chalon svr Saone (1581), both published with his De l’origine des Bovrgongnons (1581); to Father Claude Perry’s Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, ancienne et moderne de la ville et cité de Chalon svr Saone (1659).53
Fustailler, lawyer at Mâcon, set out to provide a reliable and well-documented history of Mâcon, including the lines of its bishops and counts and their relations with each other, using an enchained cartulary from the cathedral as his principal evidence.54 This reliance on charters could, in Fustailler’s view, correct many false impressions about Mâcon’s past. For example, although common opinion held that Charlemagne had founded the cathedral, the letters patent of King Charles ii the Bald (r.843–77), dating to the mid-ninth century and granting Bishop Brandanic funds to repair the church, clearly demonstrated this view to be false but went far to explain the misconception.55 In general, Fustailler expressed great skepticism concerning stories commonly told about local historical persons and events. Regarding Othon, canon of the cathedral in the tenth century, the historian related that Bishop Adon appointed him abbot of Saint-Pierre and further granted the abbey oversight of three churches within the episcopal see for the upkeep of the monks, thus initiating an enduring friendship between the clergy of the cathedral and the monastery. Nevertheless, Fustailler complained, the citizens of Mâcon recounted fables about Othon, according to which he aggressively asserted that his horses would soon eat good oats on the altar of the cathedral and was miraculously punished for his claim by having his neck turned backward. This story, though, was entirely false, and “our people … have certainly had the nerve to dream up and surmise all of this in order to keep the common people in fear and religious obedience.”56 Still, Fustailler’s own command of historical verisimilitude and chronology left much to be desired. For instance, he speculated that a certain Casticon, mentioned by Caesar in his Commentaries, was the founder of Mâcon, and that Casticon’s father, Catamandale, had possessed the kingdom of the Burgundians as a vassal of the French crown, seriously conflating the Gallic and Frankish periods of domination of eastern France.57
in comparing this catalog [of Saint-Pierre] with what is printed in Latin and French under the title of Chronique de la ville de Mascon, it is easy to notice how they differ. And it is possible that Fustailler made a mistake when he listed as counts those whom the aforementioned book and cartulary only qualify as viscounts.
Therefore, Saint-Julien felt that the history of the counts of Mâcon was too confused to ascertain with certainty, and he could not pronounce in favor of Fustailler’s Chronique de la ville de Mascon since the documents he had immediately before him did not agree with it.60
[Saint-Julien] was one of the first to begin to use charters and documents as proofs of history and cleared a landscape quite covered in brambles and thorns. And even though he did not succeed as much as one would since desire, nevertheless, just as it is much more difficult to make new openings in an area that has been long neglected than on a well-cultivated parcel, in the same way it is much easier to work in the footsteps of those who have first cleaned it up and to add decoration to their mind’s invention.61
In correcting some of Saint-Julien’s errors, Perry could rely on a much greater range of historical research and edited texts than had existed in the sixteenth century. For example, in regard to St. Didier, Perry explained that he had originally been at a loss to offer any proof of his existence as bishop of Chalon, although Saint-Julien, following Pierre Naturel, had placed his episcopacy immediately preceding that of St. Sylvestre (c.517–26). This lack of any proof had led the brothers Sainte-Marthe to exclude St. Didier from their list of the bishops of Chalon in their Gallia christiana (1656). However, Labbe’s publication of the manuscript life of St. Arigie offered strong evidence both that St. Didier existed and that Saint-Julien’s placement of him before Sylvestre had to be wrong. As the life of this saint explains, Arigie was baptized by St. Didier, bishop of Chalon, at the altar of the cathedral, Saint-Vincent. Since the cathedral only took on its dedication to St. Vincent in 525, during the episcopacy of Sylvestre and the reign of Childebert, it was not possible for St. Didier to have preceded Sylvestre.62 Likewise, although Saint-Julien had identified Gislebert, count of Autun, Chalon, Avalon, and Beaune, as duke of Burgundy in 944, Duchesne’s Histoire genealogiqve de la maison de Vergy (1625) clearly demonstrated that he did not obtain this title until his brother-in-law, Hugues, duke of Burgundy, died in 950.63
Thus, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the historical field was more crowded than it had been a few generations before, and individuals interested in local history could benefit from a much greater support structure of erudite scholarship on the early French kings, French ecclesiastical history, and the genealogy of noble houses. Yet, with the greater availability of sources, greater collective abilities in interpreting them, and the advantages of scholarly comradeship and consultation also came enhanced expectations of competency and greater scrutiny on the part of colleagues.
By the mid-seventeenth century, therefore, urban historians generally took considerable care to situate themselves and their works within a network of likeminded scholars, whose own erudition and reputations for honnêteté could vouch for the author’s and whose reactions would form the first level of judgment concerning the value of the work. In discussing the evolution of historical scholarship focused on Lyon, for example, Stéphane Van Damme has noted how by the second half of the seventeenth century, local historians engaged in extensive correspondence with scholars of international renown, and an important figure such as Father Claude-François Ménestrier, S.J., had developed a circle of contacts and contributors that drew in savants from Lyon, but also the mid-sized towns of Lyonnais, Burgundy, and Dauphiné. This kind of circle could serve not only as a source of information and exchange of useful documentation but also as a site of reception for works of erudition that was necessary to ensure their success. Further, in Van Damme’s view, this greater integration of local and national researchers encouraged a growing sense of provincial identity and collective work on historical projects, just as it provided a venue for varying political concerns to impact their scholarship.64
Father Perry of Chalon was one such erudite Jesuit scholar of the mid-seventeenth century who had largely mastered the politics of local historical writing. In the preface to the reader of his Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, ancienne et moderne de la ville et cité de Chalon svr Saone, he was careful to thank a broad range of erudite scholars from his hometown and from throughout the duchy of Burgundy who had contributed their resources and friendship to the work. First in precedence came the well-known erudite scholars of Dijon, the provincial capital. Thus, Jean Bouhier and Philibert de la Mare, judges in the Parlement of Burgundy, had loaned Perry books and manuscripts from their considerable collections, and La Mare had taken the trouble to transcribe many interesting documents. He also thanked Étienne Pérard and Étienne Lantin, maîtres des comptes (masters of accounts) at the Chambre des Comptes of Dijon. In naming these men in his preface, Perry was signaling his association with an important intellectual community resident in the Burgundian capital. La Mare, in particular, was then in the process of forming close associations with erudite scholars in Paris and of amassing a very large collection of books and manuscripts focused on Burgundian history. By the beginning of 1676, he had conceived a plan to draft a work on the historians of Burgundy, and by 1677, Antoine Vyon d’Hérouval, auditor of the Chambre des Comptes of Paris and close associate of the Maurist scholars of Saint-Germain des Prés, was assuring him that his knowledgeable friends in Paris all agreed that La Mare would be doing a great service to publish it and promised to send documents that could be included.65 When La Mare’s Historicorum Burgundiae conspectus was finally published posthumously in 1689, it testified to the Dijonnais’s extensive knowledge of works focused on the history of his native province, his connections with a wide range of scholars in the duchy and in Paris, and the extent of his own collection of books and manuscripts.66 La Mare may also have served as a link between Perry and erudite scholars in Paris, since in 1678 Vyon d’Hérouval asked the judge to pass on his thanks to the Jesuit for the latter’s kind praise of him in his work.67
In addition to acknowledging erudite colleagues in Dijon and elsewhere in Burgundy, Perry was also careful to thank important individuals from Chalon who had greatly aided him in his work. Within the urban milieu, access to sources was not a given but depended on the would-be historian’s social status, reputation for learnedness, and general ability to draw on connections to gain access to archives and to encourage acquaintances to share the important papers and memoranda that most elites preserved in family coffers. Perry thus signaled his firm position within the social and intellectual elite of Chalon and in a sense proposed guarantors for his history by naming an assortment of colleagues who had assured access to books and documents. Particularly emphasizing his connections within the cathedral of Chalon, he thanked the previous bishop (Jacques de Neuchèze), who gave him the keys to his archives and lent him the cartulary of the bishopric; the recently deceased dean of the cathedral chapter who had provided him with documentation, including the cartulary and necrology of the chapter; and the current dean and treasurer of the chapter, who had done likewise. Also sharing in Perry’s thanks were Father Louis Jacob, royal almoner and author of the De claris scriptoribvs cabilonensibvs libri iii (1642), a biographical dictionary of the illustrious men of Chalon; Jean-Christofle Virey, whose extensive library Jacob had singled out for praise in his Traicté des plvs belles bibliotheqves pvbliqves et particvlieres (1644); and above all Pierre d’Hoges, “grand Gruyer” of Chalonnais.68 In the dedication of his history to the mayor and aldermen of Chalon, Perry claimed that when d’Hoges had served as mayor for the first time, he had proposed to the city council that such a history should be written and that they had then pressed the author to undertake it. Mayor once again in 1659, d’Hoges publicly associated himself with Perry’s history by contributing a Latin epigram to the author.69 However, the council’s support of the work may not have been as assured as Perry later asserted, given that when he asked the aldermen for a monetary contribution in 1651, they decided to put off making a decision until they had seen the completed manuscript. Still, by 1658 the municipal government was eager to see the history in print, since the aldermen viewed it as an important support for the rights of precedence of their town in the provincial estates of Burgundy.70
during this time and before this day, people did not cease to ask me if I had written anything regarding the entry and conveyance of [the body of] the departed cardinal of Lorraine [in 1574], in order to ascertain what ceremonies had been conducted at that time in order to do the same now.
Pussot explained that he had failed to record the original entry and burial ceremonies because not only was he a young newlywed at the time but also they had caused a scandal among the people.74 That Pussot was keeping an unusually detailed account of what happened in Reims was thus well known in his lifetime, and his decisions about what to include or exclude from his writings could then inform historical accounts after his death.
A member of an established family in Chalon that had supplied several aldermen to the corps de ville over the preceding decades, Perry made active use of his local connections to obtain valuable sources for his history of Chalon and was careful to acknowledge the importance of these texts and their contributors. For the period of the early Wars of Religion, the Jesuit relied heavily on the memoranda of André Clerc, bailli de l’évêché (administrator of the bishopric), whose chronicle of events had been given to him by Clerc’s descendant, Antoine Clerguet, similarly bailli de l’évêché, so that it could be communicated to the public.75 This active use of Clerc’s account meant not only that his perception of the events of the first three civil wars in Chalon became the dominant one but also that his personal experience and participation in them were highlighted.76 In 1567, for example, Clerc was reportedly instrumental in preventing the Huguenots from seizing control of Chalon. Most inhabitants had left town for the harvest, but “Monsieur Clerc, alderman, who had his ears tuned and his eyes on guard quickly learned news” of their machinations and consulted with the chief judicial officer of the bailliage court. He had not yet returned to his lodgings, however, when the captain of the citadel approached him to warn that “the Huguenots certainly had some design on the town and the citadel.” The Catholic inhabitants then took up arms, and thanks to the care of the noble captains, the diligence of the magistrates, and the resolution of the bourgeois, the town of Chalon was preserved from attack.77
Perry’s association with Clerguet was also likely instrumental in his special focus on the actions of his acquaintance’s father, Salomon Clerguet, lawyer, Latin poet, close associate of Bishop Pontus de Tyard, and one of the principal politiques of Chalon during the League period. Although Clerc’s memoirs ended in 1569, Perry was still able to paraphrase fully Salomon Clerguet’s written response to Reformed demands to be accorded a place of worship in 1582, a charge that he fulfilled “with the zeal and judgment expected from a wise magistrate.”78 Similarly, when Clerguet’s nomination to serve as one of Chalon’s deputies to the Estates General of 1588 was under dispute, Perry provided a long description of the nominee’s actions to gain the support of the delegates of the first and second estates in Dijon, which must have come from a personal account. The historian was also careful to explain the purported reasons for the opposition to Clerguet and to comment that they were not well founded.79 Interestingly, although the opposition to Clerguet and his fellow-nominee, François de Thésut, was principally owing to the fact that they were noted politiques when local partisans of the duke of Mayenne had hoped to send their own supporters to the Estates General, Perry said nothing about this important political context.80 Although he condemned the Catholic League in no uncertain terms, he may have hesitated to document the political tensions that opposed the inhabitants of Chalon against each other.81
Indeed, Perry found himself in the delicate situation of describing Chalon’s long adhesion to the Catholic League and the duke of Mayenne from the vantage point of the reign of Louis xiv. Further, although he was able to provide considerable information, including the texts of letters, concerning Tyard, the town’s strongly royalist bishop, he also relied heavily on two historical accounts penned by individuals who had spent much or all of the League period in Chalon, the “Memoires Penessot” and the “Memoires Muguet.”82 Where Muguet’s loyalties were unclear, Penessot was certainly a supporter of the Catholic League. He was most likely the Jehan Penessot who was an alderman of Chalon in 1581–82, shortly before Penessot’s “Memoires” began in 1583, and again in 1593, when he was chosen as a delegate to the Estates General of the League and after which Perry’s references to the “Memoires Penessot” cease.83 Unlike in the case of Clerc’s account, Perry says nothing about how he obtained these writings, but since the historian’s mother was named Philiberte Penessot, it is to be presumed that they were preserved within his own (extended) family.84 In fact, Perry may have been a particularly good choice to draft the history of Chalon given that, in addition to his erudite skills and learned connections, he could balance his personal sympathies and access to documents that favored the town’s royalist minority during the eighth civil war with a familial past colored by an adherence to the Catholic League. Since the historical accounts of Clerc, Penessot, or Muguet no longer survive, Perry’s choice of how to use them also stands as the only evidence for what these individuals actually wrote.85 There was thus a politics to urban history writing: one’s standing within the immediate community influenced what sources would be available, and the kinds of sources obtained and the necessity of acknowledging their providers affected the history’s content and point of view.
4 Historical Disagreement and Community Identity in Seventeenth-Century Le Mans
Navigating the concerns of appropriate documentary evidence, the right social positioning, and acceptable interpretations of the historical record was important, since many readers approached urban histories with a critical eye. One of the acknowledged purposes of these histories throughout the period was to confirm the pride that readers felt in their ancestors, so that it was wrong for a citizen to be ignorant of “the memorable events and antiquities of his town, especially of his forebears.”86 As the preoccupation with demonstrating nobility increased and the related practice of genealogical history developed in the seventeenth century, readers seem to have become particularly preoccupied with how their progenitors were identified and depicted in local historical writing. Yet criticism of urban histories also went much further than these matters of family pride. Rather, it could embrace questions central to the town’s historical identity and thus reveal profound disagreements within the urban community regarding the fundamental attributes of the town’s past.
Many criticisms and corrections of urban histories focused on what we would consider small points of detail, involving the names, dates, occupations, and genealogical relationships of individuals mentioned throughout the text. By the mid-seventeenth century, it was becoming common to provide a section on the “illustrious houses” of the city or the region, but attention to how individuals or families were identified throughout the work was a chief concern of readers throughout the period, desiring to see their own familial pretensions acknowledged and those of their neighbors debunked. Thus, when Claude de Rubys criticized the earlier work of Guillaume Paradin in his Histoire veritable de la ville de Lyon (1604), he charged that his predecessor had failed to check the authenticity of documents that he received from individuals and “that were mostly given to him by people, who seeing how credulous he was, were perhaps quite happy to take advantage of him.”87 Roughly a century later, when Gougnon determined to point out all the mistakes and misconceptions of Thaumas de la Thaumassière’s Histoire de Berry, he focused largely on the historian’s genealogical errors. These mistakes were not innocent, however, since Gougnon accused the historian of taking bribes to exaggerate people’s status in his work. He was particularly annoyed that Thaumas de la Thaumassière had inflated the position of the family of Gabriel Labbé, describing its members as écuyers (nobles) when this was not warranted, and commented, “if all of the gifts that La Thaumassière has received or has had given to him were put into print, this would make several large volumes.”88 Some of Gougnon’s pique no doubt arose from his belief that his own family’s ancient standing and honorability had been slighted. After criticizing Thaumas de la Thaumassière’s account of the business practices and trial of Jacques Coeur, the famous financial official of Charles vii (r.1422–61) and a native son of Bourges, Gougnon clarified the chief source of his objections. The Histoire de Berry described Vilquin and Antoine Gougnon, father and son, as Coeur’s lowly factors, engaging in trade, when in fact Vilquin had held the position of lieutenant général at St. Pierre-le-Moûtier before Coeur’s lifetime, and Antoine had been the financier’s brother-in-law, not his subordinate. Thaumas de la Thaumassière, in Gougnon’s view, had deliberately slighted his ancestors out of vengeance and jealousy, not wanting any family to enjoy a higher standing than his own.89 His accusations may have been justified, since Nicolas Catherinot, a close friend of Thaumas de la Thaumassière, had celebrated the close connections of these Gougnon ancestors to Coeur in a pamphlet of 1672, even commenting that he thought he remembered seeing the Gougnon arms represented in Coeur’s magnificent house.90
There could thus be much at stake personally for urban historians and their readers, but deep disagreements also arose over historical issues of more general concern. These debates were significant, often revolving around historical traditions that had been promoted over several generations. Even when the material interests of specific groups within the community were not overtly at stake, the question of what forms of authority should be privileged in supporting local memory or in reconstructing an alternative understanding of the urban past could draw intense dispute. Such disagreements became so heated and were followed by significant sectors of the urban population because historical narratives were integral to creating and supporting specific understandings of community identity. They drew even more heat when the issues at stake overlapped with historical controversies of import to historical communities throughout France.
Such was the case in Le Mans in the mid-seventeenth century, when Antoine Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s Histoire des evesqves dv Mans (1648) sparked an intense controversy over the century in which St. Julien, the reputed apostle to the province of Maine, had arrived in Le Mans to convert the area to Christianity and to serve as the city’s first bishop.91 The tradition of the church of Le Mans held that St. Julien had taken up his apostolate to Maine in the first century, as other disciples of Christ were spreading the Gospel to all the known corners of the world. Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, by contrast, insisted that St. Julien could not have arrived in Le Mans before the third century, thus placing in doubt a sacred history of the city that linked it with apostolic times and the founding of the Roman Catholic Church. As Alain Tallon has argued, this view of the Gallican church as founded in the apostolic tradition and as the oldest in Western Christendom after Rome formed an important component of French national sentiment, as it was understood in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This national feeling was by no means in opposition to the multiplicity of local traditions but rather incorporated them in “a plurality of relationships that unite[d] a broad human community … and that create[d] the feeling of a common destiny.”92 Although Tallon and Jean-Marie Le Gall identify individuals in the sixteenth century, such as Claude Fauchet, d’Espence, and Pasquier, who questioned the founding myths of the French church, a major debate on the subject, focused on the apostolicity of St. Denis, evangelist of Paris and the patron saint of the French monarchy, was launched in the first half of the seventeenth century.93 In observing how this debate over St. Julien was conducted in Le Mans, we will see how important such questions were for the local community. In addition to the point-counterpoint of textual arguments, it demonstrates the intense opposition that could develop within a town over this kind of historical disagreement, how networks of supporters could be martialed on both sides, and further, how by the mid-seventeenth century, tighter connections were emerging between local historical disputes and the concerns of the wider community of savants in Paris and the rest of France.
To all of these objections, one could reply that in the first place, tradition (except that which we hold from God and from the church) is usually uncertain, corrupted, and without authority; that stories and fables are often handed down to posterity as if they were true histories; [and] that the passage of time and people’s bad intentions ruin, obscure, and alter the truth of past events.
Thus, local manuscripts cannot always be relied upon, because they display many barbarous errors and their authors often drafted them for their own particular purposes.98
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s claims deeply upset Dom Jean Bondonnet, Benedictine monk at the abbey of Saint-Vincent on the outskirts of Le Mans, and he took up the task to refute them and to provide what he viewed as an accurate version of the town’s episcopal history in his Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées (1651). In this work, Bondonnet firmly upheld the tradition that St. Julien was a Roman gentleman, converted to the Christian faith by St. Clement and then sent by this pope on an apostolic mission to Maine in the year 95. After all, this was the view reported in the most recent breviary and the documents held in the cathedral of Le Mans, including the “Pontifical” (i.e., the ninth-century “Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium”) and “the Manuscript” (i.e., Jean Moreau’s “Nomenclatura seu legenda aurea pontificum Cenomanensium,” likely completed in 1572).99 In contrast to these local sources, the ones on which Le Corvaisier de Courteilles had relied to support his view were unreliable or misinterpreted. Gregory of Tours was not as authoritative as often claimed, since he contradicted himself in several places and drew on documents that were themselves corrupted; Letaldus lived centuries after the events described and based his views on neither tradition nor the registers available to him. Further, none of these authors agreed with each other.100 Instead, Bondonnet established the belief that St. Julien had evangelized the province of Maine during the pontificate of St. Clement as a tradition of the Roman Catholic Church requiring faith. If the cartularies were creditable concerning the miracles of the first bishops of Le Mans, then so were their chronological claims, and the centuries that had elapsed between St. Julien’s mission and the present day, in which no-one except Letaldus and Le Corvaisier de Courteilles had ever questioned this chronology, constituted a unity of belief that was the very definition of religious tradition. Further, it was a matter of faith that the apostles had spread Christianity throughout the known world and that Gaul had received the Gospel in these early days. Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s arguments thus not only contradicted the tradition of the church of Le Mans but also of all the oldest towns in France.101 On the question of whether there had ever been a vacancy in the episcopal see of Le Mans, Bondonnet asserted that he believed that none had ever existed but that there were certainly gaps in their current knowledge of the identities of all of the early bishops. Luckily, the Jesuit Jean Bolland’s recent publication of documents describing the ninth-century translation of the relics of St. Liboire to Paderborn revealed the identities of two of these bishops who had previously been forgotten.102
This disagreement about the evangelization and early bishops of Le Mans did not rest within the pages of two competing urban histories but inspired a great amount of controversy within the community. Even before Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s Histoire des evesqves dv Mans was published, a sarcastic verse predicted a bad outcome.103 The historian may have determined early on that his arguments would not be welcomed in some quarters, likely leading him to solicit a long introductory letter dated May 1646 from his uncle, Jean Vasse, then lieutenant criminel (leading judicial official in criminal cases) in the presidial court of Le Mans, praising his manuscript and declaring that “I find nothing in it that does not satisfy me.”104 If Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s charges are to be believed, unknown individuals then sought to tamper with his manuscript as it was being composed and printed in Paris by Sebastien and Martin Cramoisy. According to the letter he sent his publisher on April 24, 1647, as Le Corvaisier de Courteilles received back the proofs for his work, he noticed that changes and additions had been made to what he had written. When he insisted on the return of his manuscript for the unprinted sections, he found it so altered that he had to re-transcribe the text.105 Even though none of these additions or changes had anything to do with Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s controversial historical arguments, his views on St. Julien soon produced opposition. Although the judge had been granted access to manuscripts held in the cathedral archives in order to write his history and dedicated the work to the bishop of Le Mans, the cathedral canons learned of his intended arguments and sought to block publication. In June 1647, they determined to seek advice from the bishop on this subject and then sent deputies to Paris to intercede with Chancellor Pierre Séguier to prevent a royal privilege to publish from being issued. Le Corvaisier de Courteilles alerted his publisher, Cramoisy, to these machinations, and Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s original privilege to publish, dated December 11, 1645 and ceded to Cramoisy on March 15, 1646, was allowed to stand.106
Once Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s Histoire des evesques du Mans appeared in print, groups of adherents coalesced to help defend or attack his position. Within months of publication, the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste de la Barre used the very public occasion of a funeral oration pronounced in the cathedral to chastise Le Corvaisier de Courteilles for attempting to cut short the history of the bishops of Le Mans by two centuries and for contradicting fifteen centuries of church tradition.107 In 1650, the judicial official was able to publish a Deffence anticipée de “L’histoire des evesqves dv Mans” because several people to whom Bondonnet related the arguments of his planned rebuttal then reported them to Le Corvaisier de Courteilles.108 Further, as the monk was drafting his response, his progress was slowed by his inability to find a copyist in Le Mans to whom he could entrust his manuscript, forcing him to make the fair copy himself.109 Meanwhile, Gault, canon of the cathedral, set about drafting his own refutation of Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s arguments.110
Indeed, the intellectual climate in Le Mans in the 1640s seems to have been particularly fraught. Le Corvaisier de Courteilles clearly associated with a group of elites interested in historical topics, which included lawyers, royal officials, and clerics from the cathedral and the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre de la Couture, but significantly not from the Maurist abbey of Saint-Vincent. At least, when Pierre Trouillart published his Mémoires des comtes du Maine in 1643, he received dedicatory epigrams and other preliminary verses from a broad range of legal men and historians, including Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Julien Bodreau, and Claude Blondeau, as well as a cathedral canon and Michel Laigneau, prévôt of the abbey of La Couture, who in this guise could open the abbey’s archives to interested scholars.111 It was also against the works of Trouillart, Bodreau, and Le Corvaisier de Courteilles that the satirical verse mentioned above was aimed. On the other hand, the abbey of Saint-Vincent had recently drawn intense criticism for joining the Congregation of Saint-Maur, and Bondonnet had been one of the principal monks involved. In an attempt to prevent the abbey from transferring its allegiances from the Congregation of Chezal-Benoît to that of Saint-Maur in 1633, the lieutenant général of the sénéchaussée had imprisoned three monks, including Bondonnet, who had been instrumental in the negotiations with the monks of Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered to oppose the change, and Mathieu Bondonnet, sieur de Parence, a close relative, had his windows broken. By 1636, when the two Benedictine congregations finally signed a concordat of union and the Maurist monks arrived to take possession of Saint-Vincent, things had quieted down, but not so much to prevent Dom Jérôme-Anselme Le Michel, a Maurist monk working on the history of his congregation, from complaining in 1642 that there were no manuscripts worth mentioning in Maine and that he was receiving no assistance from anyone for his research.112 This hostility to Bondonnet clearly persisted into the period when he was defending the traditions of the church of Le Mans in print. On May 2, 1652, placards appeared all over Le Mans advertising a new work, entitled “L’arrogance morifiée,” by Jean de Launoy, further attacking Bondonnet for his ideas. When the monk attempted to obtain the work, first in Le Mans and then in Paris, however, it turned out that the whole thing had been a hoax and no such work existed!113 Significantly, irritations over the historical debate regarding St. Julien had gone so far as to lead someone to take great pains to expose the monk to public ridicule.
That Launoy, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne, was a plausible author of a work aimed against Bondonnet demonstrates how much the local controversy over the early church at Le Mans was connected to the wider world of erudite scholars focusing on French ecclesiastical history. First, this wider erudition played a significant role in the local debate. After Le Corvaisier de Courteilles had finished his manuscript and in the same year as his Histoire des evesques du Mans appeared, Father Bolland published his Vita S. Liborii (1648), an edition of texts concerning the life of St. Liboire, fourth bishop of Le Mans, and the translation of his body along with the relics of other Manceaux saints from the church of Saint-Victor on the outskirts of Le Mans to Paderborn in Germany in 836.114 While some of the versions of the life of St. Liboire were already familiar in Le Mans, particularly that originating from the manuscript of Moreau, others seem to have been completely unknown there, including all of the versions originating from Paderborn.115 As previously mentioned, these documents provided Bondonnet with what he saw as irrefutable evidence that there had existed other bishops of Le Mans predating Liboire and whose episcopal reigns therefore pushed St. Julien’s back to the first century. As he explained, since the accounts recently provided by Bolland indicated that the bodies of Gundanisolus and Valerinus were found with that of Liboire in a church where the early bishops of Le Mans were regularly buried, these individuals must have been two hitherto unknown bishops of Le Mans. Their existence, moreover, completely contradicted Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s chronology, which was dependent on no gaps having existed between the reigns of the four earliest bishops.116 Hearing of Bondonnet’s proposed arguments, Le Corvaisier de Courteilles denied in his Deffence that Gundanisolus and Valerinus were bishops of Le Mans, but rather suffragent vicars or coadjutors. He further asserted (rightly) that Bolland had been dubious of their episcopal status and pointed out that none of the lives of St. Liboire provided by Bolland questioned that Liboire had immediately succeeded his predecessor, St. Pavace.117 Further, when he was updating the published text of his Histoire des evesques du Mans, Le Corvaisier de Courteilles added a reference to the relics of other saints being transported to Germany along with the body of St. Liboire, but identified St. Gundanisole (Gundanisolus) and St. Valerin (Valerinus) as confessors rather than bishops.118
Second, both local scholars and those in Paris recognized the connection between urban historical debates and wider arguments over the history and character of the French church. In laying out their arguments about St. Julien, both Le Corvaisier de Courteilles and Bondonnet referred to erudite scholars whose opinions helped to support their position. For Bondonnet, as we have already seen, the work of Bolland was essential, and he also mentioned arguments that Dom Germain Millet had made against Father Sirmond.119 By contrast, Le Corvaisier de Courteilles pointed out that Pierre Pithou, Nicolas Le Fèvre, Bosquet, Sirmond, and Launoy had all supported the view that the first missions to Gaul did not occur before the end of the second century. He further claimed that the Dupuy brothers, the Sainte-Marthe brothers, and Monsieur de la Mothe Le Vayer all concurred, even if they had not done so in print, thus implying that he had a personal channel to the opinions of these prestigious members of the Republic of Letters. Indeed, Le Corvaisier de Courteilles was in epistolary contact with Sirmond around the time that he published his Deffence, suggesting that both men recognized the concurrence of their interests.120
Even more significantly, the published historical debate in Le Mans led Launoy to publish an entire dissertation refuting the history of the early bishops of Le Mans as presented by both Le Corvaisier de Courteilles and Bondonnet, but with special emphasis on the arguments provided by the latter. According to Launoy, an ecclesiastical historian of whom it was said “that he remove[d] a saint from paradise every year,” the first bishop of Le Mans only dated to the second half of the fourth century.121 In responding to this latest opponent, Bondonnet charged that he even denied the existence of the first four bishops of Le Mans, from St. Julien to St. Liboire, simply based on the fact that Gregory of Tours failed to mention them. To support this claim, the monk reported a previous conversation he had held with Launoy in the library of Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris, where his interlocutor had confessed his doubts on the existence of St. Julien. When Bondonnet pressed him on the matter, Launoy admitted to doubting the existence of any of the early bishops not known to Gregory of Tours. Bondonnet then triumphantly produced the signature of Principius, bishop of Le Mans, present at the first council of Orléans in 511 but absent from Gregory’s history, thus temporarily confounding the skeptic.122 These parries aside, the fundamental issue separating Launoy and Bondonnet was that the former held that most of the sacred traditions of the early French church had been fashioned during or after the time of Charlemagne, so that in order to accept any of these traditions as historical, independent evidence was necessary. For Bondonnet, by contrast, a tradition was a doctrine handed down through the generations, either in writing or by word of mouth, so that to require written evidence was almost by definition to deny the value of tradition. Questioning the apostolate of St. Julien, therefore, was to deliver a shock to the faith, bonnes moeurs, and piety.123
With these arguments, the controversy at Le Mans over the early history of the church subsided. It is true that Le Corvaisier de Courteilles spent time annotating a copy of his Histoire des evesques du Mans, rehearsing new arguments to launch against Bondonnet’s claims, most likely with an eye to a revised edition, but no second edition appeared. Further, even though Canon Gault had drafted an entire manuscript arguing against Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, it never appeared in print and must rather be added to the long list of lost historical manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In terms of contentious historical publications, Le Mans saw a period of quiet, at least until Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s friend, Blondeau, launched a new round of controversy with his L’invasion de la ville dv Mans par les Religionnaires (1667), to be discussed in chapter 9.124
Disagreements such as the one over the mission of St. Julien that gripped Le Mans in the 1640s and 1650s demonstrate how important urban history could be for local communities. Although none of Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s or Bondonnet’s colleagues were willing to align themselves in print with either author—only members of Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s own family provided preliminary material to his history, and Bondonnet’s supporters only used their initials—the audience for the controversy went beyond learned elites. At least, this was what Bondonnet claimed when he explained why he was answering Launoy’s Latin treatise with a French response. Since his Vies des evesqves dv Mans had been read by many who did not understand Latin, he wanted them to have the satisfaction of following the arguments in his Refvtation as well.125 As this chapter has shown, historical writing was far more prevalent and historical culture more accessible in French towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than has often been represented. What particular authors could say was certainly dependent on the kinds of sources they could acquire and the connections on which they could draw, and there was undoubtedly an evolution in the extent to which local historians could rely on and relate to a developed network of erudite scholars both at home and throughout France. Throughout the period, though, the historical tradition was a major lens through which inhabitants of French towns understood their character as a single community, even as history writing could constitute a significant means to define and project the interests of particular groups claiming to speak for the whole.
Pierre de Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, et antiqvité des Estats de Bovrgongne, devx livres: Plvs, des antiquitez d’Autun, liure 1[,] de Chalon, 2[,] de Mascon, 3[,] de l’abbaye & ville de Tournus, 1[.] … (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1581), aii v-aiii r, 18.
Ibid., 18–19. Since, according to Pierre Palliot, Bernard de Cirey gained his office as conseiller laïc in the Parlement of Burgundy in 1546, this date is the terminus a quo for this gathering, assuming that Saint-Julien’s representation of it was reliable. See Pierre Palliot, Le Parlement de Bovrgongne, son origine, son etablissement et son progrés: Avec les noms, svr-noms, qvalités, armes & blasons des presidents, chevaliers, conseillers, aduocats & procureurs generaux, & greffiers, qui y ont esté iusques à present … (Dijon: Pierre Palliot, 1649), 195.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, 19–20. For information on Claude Patarin, who died on November 20, 1551, and Humbert de Villeneufve, who was held prisoner in Geneva in 1513 and died in 1515, see Palliot, Le Parlement de Bovrgongne, 51, 53.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, 21–23. Chasseneux’s identification of the “Bourg des Dieux” with Dijon was almost certainly what was intended in the chronicle, given that Dijon was frequently identified as the “city of the gods.” See Michael P. Breen, “Addressing La Ville des Dieux: Entry Ceremonies and Urban Audiences in Seventeenth-Century Dijon,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 341–64, at 354–55.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, 23.
Saint-Julien was born in 1519 or 1520 and died on March 20, 1593. Although his De l’origine des Bovrgongnons was not published until 1581, it may have been written much earlier, given that the royal privilege to publish was granted on May 30, 1567. See Léonce Raffin, Saint-Julien de Balleure, historien bourguignon, 1519?–1593 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1975), 32, 92; Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, [ai v].
For the bonnes villes and the fundamental shift away from local autonomy beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, see Bernard Chevalier, Les bonnes villes de France du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982). For works that complicate the relationship between local elites and the undeniably growing reach of the royal administration and hold that loyalties to the monarchy and the locality were not incompatible, see Bernstein, Between Crown and Community; Michael P. Breen, Law, City, and King: Legal Culture, Municipal Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007); Lignereux, Lyon et le roi; Haddad, “Les histoires provinciales”; Vincent Gallais, “Entre apprentissage et ambition: La culture politique d’un procureur du roi au présidial de Nantes, Jean Blanchard de Lessongère (1602–1612),” in Cassan, Les officiers “moyens,” 367–86.
Religious processions and related practices not only defined sacred space within the city but also helped to reinforce memory and negotiate power relations. See Moshe Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Philip Benedict, “Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions, and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime,” French History 22, no. 4 (2008): 381–405; Antoine Coutelle, “Espace urbain et commémoration à Poitiers au XVIIe siècle: ‘La procession générale en mémoire du siège levé par ladmiral devant ceste ville,’” in Terres marines: Études en hommage à Dominique Guillemet, ed. Frédéric Chavaud and Jean Péret (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 207–12.
Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 221–29, 246–56, 352–68, 378–82.
On this topic, see my “Réseaux savants et choix documentaires de l’histoire locale française: Écrire l’histoire de Bourges dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle,” Histoire urbaine 28 (August 2010): 65–84.
Vivanti, “Paulus Aemilius Gallis condidit historias?”
Dolan, “L’identité urbaine et les histoires locales,” 280–81. Gauthier Aubert provides an extensive analysis of the numbers of provincial histories organized by location based on eighteenth-century bibliographies in “La question de l’érudition historique dans les villes bretonnes sous l’Ancien Régime,” Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Bretagne 84 (2006): 443–74.
In the preface to his Bibliothèque françoise (generally identified in this way based on the 1772 edition), La Croix du Maine mentioned his 1579 “Avertissement” and claimed to own a copy of most of the published works mentioned in his Bibliothèque. See [François Grudé] de La Croix du Maine, Premier volvme de la Bibliotheqve dv Sievr de La Croix dv Maine … (Paris: Abel l’Angelier, 1584), [aii r, aiii v]. In 1579, he claimed to own two thousand printed books and three hundred manuscripts, “Discovrs … ,” in Bibliothèque françoise, 540.
Ibid., [aiii v].
This opinion originated in print with Gilles Ménage’s sayings, which identified it as coming from Claude Blondeau of Le Mans. Although many subsequent historians adopted this view, Jean-Pierre Niceron was dubious and pointed out that La Croix du Maine spoke in equally measured fashion about both Reformed and militant Catholic writers. See Menagiana, ou les bons mots et remarques critiques, historiques, morales & d’érudition, de Monsieur Menage, recueillies par ses amis, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Paris: Florentin Delaune, 1715), 173; Niceron, Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes illustres, 24:289–90; B. [Barthélemy] Hauréau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (Paris: Dumoulin, 1870–77), 6:42.
La Croix du Maine, “Discovrs,” 525.
La Croix du Maine, “Desseins ou proiects du Sieur de la Croix-du-Maine, présentez au très-chrestien roy de France & de Pologne, Henry III du nom, l’an 1583, au mois de may,” in Bibliothèque françoise, 514. Against the view that La Croix du Maine was fabricating impossible numbers of manuscript volumes, Hauréau theorizes that these volumes were not fully digested narratives but collections of documents and transcribed texts with commentary. See Hauréau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 6:27–28.
Huppert, Idea of Perfect History, 192–93.
To arrive at these figures, I selected every individual in La Croix du Maine’s Bibliothèque françoise (1584) who lived in Le Mans or who clearly had a close association with the town. I did not count those individuals who were born in Le Mans but spent their entire professional lives in Paris or elsewhere. Counting the numbers of their works must be an impressionistic process, since La Croix du Maine sometimes only mentioned these works vaguely. When more than one was indicated, I counted them as two; when more than one kind was indicated, I assigned each kind as a work. For La Croix du Maine himself, I did not count the eight hundred memoranda and compendia he claimed to have assembled (94–95). Doing so would of course drastically inflate the number of works, including the number of historical works, in the sample.
La Croix du Maine, Bibliothèque françoise, 45, 369–70, 383, 485, quotation at 369.
Ibid., 485.
Ibid., 254, 323.
Ibid., 119–20, 266, 300–1, quotation at 300.
Ibid., 336–38.
Ibid., 369–70.
Hauréau mentions these doubts in his Histoire littéraire du Maine, 6:24.
Pierre Viel et al., Histoire de la vie, mort, passion, et miracles des saincts, desqvels principalement l’Eglise catholique faict feste & memoire par toute la Chrestienté … (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau & Jean Poupy, 1577), 334r (Paschal Robin du Faux, “La vie de Sainct Frambavlt …”); François de Belleforest, La cosmographie vniverselle de tovt le monde … (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau and Michel Sonnius, 1575), second pagination, 43–46.
Belleforest, Cosmographie universelle, second pagination, 57 ter-58; Viel et al., Histoire de la vie, mort, passion, et miracles des saincts, 503v (Paschal Robin du Faux, “La vie de Sainct Erblon”).
La Croix du Maine, Bibliothèque françoise, 254, 115, 211, 493, 406, 300–1, 123; [Claude Blondeau], Les portraits des hommes illvstres de la province dv Maine (Le Mans: Jacques Ysambart, 1666), 24 (Gervais Barbier, sieur de Francour).
[Élie Vinet], L’antiqvite de Saintes et Barbezievs (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1584), A3r; Claude Gigon, ed., “Recherche de l’antiqvité d’Engovlesme” par Élie Vinet, 1567 (Angoulême: F. Goumard, 1876), 16–17.
Labadie, “Étude bibliographique,” 28.
Jean Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, contenant l’origine, antiquité, gestes, prouësses, priuileges, & libertés des Berrvyers: Auec particuliere description dudit païs … (Lyon: Antoine Gryphius, 1566), 236.
Labadie, “Étude bibliographique,” 196.
Gabriel de Lurbe, “Discovrs svr les antiqvites trovvees pres le prievre Sainct Martin les Bourdeaus en iuillet 1594,” in Chroniqve bourdeloise composee cy devant en Latin … (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1619), 60v–61v, quotation at 61r–v.
A. [Antoine] Vachez, ed. and trans., Lyon au XVIIe siècle extrait de “L’itinéraire en France et en Belgique” d’Abraham Golnitz (Lyon: Aug. Brun and Cathabard, 1877), 13, 29.
Ambroise Tardieu, ed. and trans., De Limoges à Clermont et à Thiers en 1631: Extrait et traduction de “L’itinéraire” d’Abraham Golnitz (Lyon: Pitrat Aîné, 1882), 10. See chapter 5 for the historical and political contexts of this inscription.
Andrew Spicer, “(Re)building the Sacred Landscape: Orléans, 1560–1610,” French History 21, no. 3 (2007): 247–68 at 265–67.
Histoire et discovrs av vray dv siege qvi fvt mis devant la ville d’Orleans, par les Anglois, le mardy 12. iour d’octobre 1428, regnant alors Charles VII. de ce nom roy de France … (Paris: Saturny Hotot, 1576), aii r–v, endpapers (BnF Réserve, 8-lb26-12).
Editions of this work were published in 1606, 1611, and 1621, variously in octavo and duodecimo formats.
François Le Maire, Histoire et antiqvitez de la ville et dvché d’Orléans … (Orléans: Maria Paris, 1645), 307.
Gilles Chabaud, ed., Les guides imprimés du XVIe au XXe siècles: Villes, paysages, voyages (Paris: Belin, 2000), parts 1 and 8; Marc Boyer, Histoire de l’invention du tourisme XVIe–XIXe siècles: Origine et développement du tourisme dans le Sud-Est de la France (Gémenos: L’Aube La Tour d’Aigues, 2000), chapters 1–2; Gilles Chabaud, “Images de la ville et pratiques du livre: Le genre des guides de Paris (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 45, no. 2 (April–June 1998): 323–45; Gerrit Verhoeven, “L’influence des guides imprimés aux Pays-Bas sur la construction et l’évolution de l’espace touristique européen (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles),” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 83, no. 2 (2005): 399–423. Abert Babeau’s Les voyageurs en France depuis la Renaissance jusqu’à la Révolution (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970) still provides a useful overview for France.
Stagel, History of Curiosity, 58–60.
Nicolas de Nicolay, Description générale du Bourbonnais en 1569, ou histoire de cette province (villes, bourgs, châteaux, fiefs, monastères, familles anciennes, etc.), ed. Maurice d’Irisson d’Hérisson (Moulins: C. Desrosiers, 1875), 36–42.
Jacques-Auguste de Thou, “Mémoires de Jacques-Auguste de Thou depuis 1553 jusqu’en 1601,” in Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, vol. 37, ed. Claude-Bernard Petitot (Paris: Foucault, 1823), 187–530, at 315, 325.
Lemerle, La Renaissance et les antiquités de la Gaule, 71–72.
Pierre Bergeron, “Suite du voiage dItalie et dEspagne,” BnF ms fr. 5560, 377r–500v, at 486v, 487v. Portions of this narrative have been published in François-Georges Pariset, “La Guyenne vue par Pierre Bergeron en 1612,” Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, 2nd series, 4 (1955): 225–41.
Bergeron, “Suite du voiage dItalie et dEspagne,” 487r–v, quotation at 487v. Father Louis Richeome made reference to the same phenomenon, but he reported it as evidence that God did indeed perform miracles in modern times. See Louis Richeome, Trois discovrs povr la religion catholique, les miracles, les saincts, les images …, 2nd ed. (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1598), 124–26.
[Justus Zinzerling], Voyage dans la vieille France avec une excursion en Angleterre, en Belgique, en Hollande, en Suisse et en Savoie: Par Jodocus Sincerus, écrivain allemand du XVIIe siècle, trans. Thalès Bernard (Paris: Dentu, 1859), 63, 67–68.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 248.
Abaham Gölnitz’s Vlysses belgico-gallicus … (Leiden: Elzevier, 1631) proved so appealing, for example, that Louis Coulon copied it very closely in his L’Vlysse françois ov le voyage de France, de Flandre, et de Savoye … (Paris: Gervais Clousier, 1643). For more on the relationship between cosmographies and urban histories, see chapter 3 as well as Hilary J. Bernstein, “Cosmography, Local History, and National Sentiment: François de Belleforest and the History of Paris,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 31–60.
[François Fustailler] and Philibert Bugnyon, Chroniqve de la ville de Mascon … (Lyon: Nic. Edoard, 1560); Pierre de Saint-Julien, Devx livres des antiqvitez de Mascon … (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1580), published with his De l’origine des Bovrgongnons; Saint-Julien, Discovrs des antiqvitez de la ville, et cite de Chalon svr Saone; Claude Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, ancienne et moderne de la ville et cité de Chalon svr Saone: Enrichie des choses qvi appartiennent à son dioceze, & regardent l’étenduë du ressort de son bailliage, & quelques particularitez de la prouince … (Chalon-sur-Saône: Philippe Tan, 1659). On the dating of Fustailler’s text, Saint-Julien relates that he owned a manuscript copy with a dedication to Claude de Longvy, bishop of Mâcon, dated August 12, 1532, but Philibert Papillon reported having seen another manuscript copy in which the author indicated that he had composed the work in 1520. Since Saint-Julien himself dates the end of Longvy’s episcopacy at Mâcon to 1529, it seems safe to assume that the work was originally composed sometime in the 1520s. See Saint-Julien, Devx livres des antiqvitez de Mascon, 266, 295; Philibert Papillon, Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne …, 2 vols. (Dijon: Philippe Marteret, 1742), 1:232.
Saint-Julien, Devx livres des antiqvitez de Mascon, 231.
Fustailler and Bugnyon, Chroniqve de la ville de Mascon, 23–24.
Ibid., 41–42, quotation at 42.
Ibid., 6–7.
Saint-Julien, Devx livres des antiqvitez de Mascon, 265–66.
Ibid., 233, 270–71.
Ibid., 254–57, quotation at 255. The question of the identity of the early counts of Mâcon was also of importance to Duchesne. See chapter 7 for more on this topic.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 360, quotation at 379. For most of his biography of Saint-Julien, Perry relied on what Louis Jacob had written earlier, but this comment on the historian was Perry’s own addition. See Louis Jacob, De claris scriptoribvs cabilonensibvs libri III: In I. agitur de iis, qui vel ortu vel aliquâ dignitate floruerunt; In II qui in diocesi & praefectur cabilonensi nati sunt; In III. qui in eadum diocesi mortui sunt (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy, 1642), 49–51.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 34–35.
Van Damme, Le temple de la sagesse, 323–55.
Letter of Antoine Vyon d’Hérouval to Philibert de La Mare, dated October 5, 1676 from Paris, BnF ms fr. 24423, 67; letter of Vyon d’Hérouval to La Mare, dated April 6, 1677 from Paris, BnF ms fr. 24423, 68–69. For more on Vyon d’Hérouval and his scholarly milieu, see Neveu, Érudition et religion, 175–233.
Philibert de La Mare, Historicorum Burgundiae conspectus: Ex bibliotheca Philiberti de La Mare regii ordinis militis, senatoris divionensis (Dijon: Jean Ressayre, 1689).
Letter of Vyon d’Hérouval to La Mare, dated October 18, 1678 from Paris, BnF ms fr. 24423, 72.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, unpaginated [4–5]; Louis Jacob, Traicté des plvs belles bibliotheqves pvbliqves et particvlieres, qvi ont esté, & qui sont à present dans le monde … (Paris: Rolet le Duc, 1644), 633.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, unpaginated [1–2, 8].
Jean Roy-Chevrier, “L’illustre Orbandale et l’histoire de Chalon,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Chalon-sur-Saône, 2nd series, 12 (1924): 1–52, at 8.
Jean Tricard, “Les livres de raison français au miroir des livres de famille italiens: Pour relancer une enquête,” Revue historique 304, no. 4 (2002): 993–1011; Nicole Lemaître, “Les livres de raison en France (fin XIIIe–XIXe siècles),” Testo e senso 7 (2006): 1–18;
BnF ms fr. 32994, 105r, 261v. Jehan Glaumeau’s journal has been published as Alfred Hiver de Beauvoir, ed., Journal de Jehan Glaumeau, Bourges, 1541–1562 (Bourges: Just-Bernard, 1867).
E. [Édouard] Henry and Ch. [Charles] Loriquet, eds., Journalier ou mémoires de Jean Pussot, maître charpentier en la Couture de Reims (Reims: P. Regnier, 1858), xlvi, 289–91.
Ibid., 220–21, quotation at 220. See also James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 202–3.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 322, 347. Perry explicitly indicates that he followed this text very closely, only updating the expression. He also contradicts himself regarding whether his contact was André Clerc’s grandson or great-grandson.
When Léonard Bertault came to narrate the events of the first civil war in Chalon, he drew very heavily on the narrative provided by Perry but then ceased to provide any particular account of the rest of the wars, claiming that he was loath to open old wounds. See [Léonard Bertault and Pierre Cusset], L’illvstre Orbandale, ov l’histoire ancienne & moderne de la ville & cité de Chalons sur Saône … (Lyon: Pierre Cusset, 1662), 793–806.
Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 341.
Ibid., 358–59, quotation at 358.
Ibid., 364.
Henri Drouot, Mayenne et la Bourgogne: Étude sur la Ligue (1587–1596), 2 vols. (Dijon: Bernigaud & Privat, 1937), 1:191–92, 287. Antoine de Guillermy, seigneur de Lartusie, Mayenniste commander of the citadel of Chalon, later opined that the deputies “ne sont guères bonnes gens,” and Joachim de Chastenay, baron of Saint-Vincent, included them in a list of five or six of the most prominent politiques of Chalon who should be arrested. See Joseph Garnier, ed., Correspondance de la mairie de Dijon extraite des archives de cette ville, 3 vols. (Dijon: J.-E. Rabutot, 1868–70), 2:137, 141.
For example, Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 365.
On Pontus de Tyard, see ibid., 367–68, 371–72, 380–81; “Preuves,” 101.
Ibid., 358, 360, 383, 386; Jean-Pierre Abel Jeandet, Pages inédites d’histoire de Bourgogne au XVIe siècle: Fragments des annales de la ville de Verdun-sur-Saone-et-Doubs (Dijon: Darantiere, 1893), 285, 353.
Jacob, De claris scriptoribvs cabilonensibvs, 115.
It is therefore fortunate to note that Perry followed the texts of the authors he used very closely, when it is possible to make the comparison. At least, in comparing what he says on the sieur de Sancy’s strategies to preserve one hundred thousand écus from Mayenne’s forces with Sancy’s own account, it is clear that he paraphrased the original closely and left nothing out. See Perry, Histoire civile et ecclesiastiqve, 389; Nicolas de Harlay, sieur de Sancy, Discours sur l’occurrence de ses affaires, ed. Gilbert Schrenk (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 95–97.
Le Maire, Histoire et antiqvitez (1645), biii r.
Claude de Rubys, Histoire veritable de la ville de Lyon … (Lyon: Bonauenture Nugo, 1604), **2v.
BnF ms fr. 32994, 264r.
Ibid., 271r–272r.
Nicolas Catherinot, Dissertation, que le parquet de Bourges est du corps de l’université (Bourges: Jean Toubeau, 1672), 4 (dedicatory epistle).
For an overview of the genre of erudite episcopal histories in Old Regime France, see Jean-Marie Le Gall, “Catalogues et séries de vies d’évêque dans la France moderne: Lutte contre l’hérésie ou illustration de la patrie?,” and Olivier Poncet, “L’histoire des évêques saisie par l’érudition (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Liber, gesta, histoire: Écrire l’histoire des évêques et des papes, de l’antiquité au XXIe siècle, ed. François Bougard and Michel Sot (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 367–436.
Tallon, Conscience nationale, 4–5, 27–36, quotation at 4.
Ibid., 66–79; Jean-Marie Le Gall, Le mythe de Saint Denis entre Renaissance et Révolution (Seysell: Champ Vallon, 2007), 230–87.
Modern accounts of the early ecclesiastical history of Le Mans shed considerable doubt on many of the views held in the early modern period. Louis Duchesne has shown that the first bishop for whom there is any confirmed outside evidence is St. Victor (reputedly the fifth bishop of Le Mans), and Walter Goffart dates the first mentions of St. Julien’s mission to Maine and of the traditional order of the bishops of Le Mans to the mid-ninth century. See Louis Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux de l’ancienne Gaule: Tome deuxième; L’Aquitaine et les Lyonnaises (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Thorin et Fils and A. Fontemoing, 1899), 309; Walter Goffart, The Le Mans Forgeries: A Chapter from the History of Church Property in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). This chapter uses the traditional numbering of the bishops of Le Mans in order to engage with the opinions of the seventeenth century.
[Antoine Le Corvaisier de Courteilles], Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, et de ce qvi s’est passé de plus memorable dans le diocese pendant leur pontificat (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy and Gabriel Cramoisy, 1648), 38–40.
Ibid., 31–36, 46.
Ibid., 36–37, 41–42.
Ibid., 43–44, quotation at 43.
Jean Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, avec plvsievrs belles remarqves svr la chronologie … (Paris: Edme Martin, 1651), 68–69, 80–81. On the “Actus,” see Goffart, Le Mans Forgeries, 39–50; on the early catalogs of bishops attached to the “Actus” and the “Gesta Aldrici,” see Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, 313–16. On Jean Moreau, see Hauréau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 8:206–8.
Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, 11–31.
Ibid., 31–50, 58–60.
Ibid., 98–105.
Hauréau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 2:131. The verse complained: “Nos Innocents Loisirs font tort à leur auteur / Nos Contes sont sortis d’une mauvaise plume / Dun semblable succès nos évêques ont peur: / Si Bodreau fait bien, ce n’est pas sa coutume” (Our Innocent Pleasures do harm to their author / Our Counts have descended from a bad pen / Our bishops fear a similar success / If Bodreau does well, it is not his custom).
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, ei r-eii v, quotation at eii v.
[Antoine Le Corvaisier de Courteilles], Deffence anticipée de “L’histoire des evesqves dv Mans”: Contentant le desadueu de quelques additions & fautes inserées dans le texte à l’insceu de l’auteur (Le Mans: Hierôme Olivier, 1650), 3–8. Bondonnet later argued that Le Corvaisier de Courteilles had made up these perversions of his text as it was being composed and printed in Paris, but in his own published copy of his Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, Le Corvaisier de Courteilles crossed out the passages concerned and wrote in the margin that “this text has been added and is not of my composition.” It is hard to imagine that Le Corvaisier de Courteilles would maintain a false pretense in his own copy of his history. See [Jean Bondonnet], “Response sommaire à La defense anticipee dv sievr de Covrteilles,” in his Les vies des evesqves dv Mans, 709–13; Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, 457, crossed out passage and marginal addition. Similar crossed out passages and marginal notes appear on 339 and 468. This copy of Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s work with his original manuscript additions and alterations to his published text is held by the bm Le Mans and is available at http://80.82.239.59/simclient/integration/manuscrits_VMAN/dossiersDoc/voirDossManuscrit.asp?INSTANCE=EXPLOITATION&DOSS=BKDD_10273764. Future references to Le Corvaisier de Courteilles’s marginal additions refer to this copy.
Louis-Jean Denis, “Dom Jehan Bondonnet, moine bénédictin de Saint-Vincent du Mans, prieur de Sarcé,” Revue historique et archéologique du Maine 39 (1896): 197–217, at 206; Bondonnet, “Response sommaire,” 710–11.
Jean-Baptiste de la Barre, S.J., Oraison fvnebre de Monseignevr L’Illvstrissime et Reverendissime Emery de Marc de la Ferte evesqve dv Mans, conseiller du roy en ses conseils: Decedé le dernier d’auril 1648; Prononcee en l’eglise cathedrale dv Mans au iour de ses obsequies 16 may 1648 … (Le Mans: Hierosme Olivier, 1648), 11–12.
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Deffence, 17.
Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, eiii v.
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Deffence, 23; Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, 4; Paul Piolin, Histoire de l’église du Mans, vol. 6 (Paris: H. Vrayet de Surcy, 1863), 219.
Pierre Trouillart, Memoires des comtes du Maine … (Le Mans: Hierôme Olivier, 1643), unpaginated [8–18]. On the duties of the prévôt, see Bénédictins de Solesmes, ed., Cartulaire des abbayes de Saint-Pierre de la Couture et de Saint-Pierre de Solesmes (Le Mans: Edmond Monnoyer, 1881), 427.
Dom [Edmond] Martène, Histoire de la Congrégation de Saint-Maur: Tome II; De l’élection de Dom Grégoire Tarrisse comme supérieur général de la congrégation à la séparation de Cluny et de Saint-Maur; 1630–1645, ed. Dom G. [Gaston] Charvin (Ligugé: Abbaye Saint-Martin, 1929), 101–19; Louis-Jean Denis, ed., Lettres de Bénédictins d’abbayes du Maine (1642–1727) (Mamers: G. Fleury et A. Dangin, 1898), 4–5. On the controversy over the Maurist monks at Le Mans, see also Piolin, Histoire de l’église du Mans, 84–88; Denis, “Dom Jehan Bondonnet,” 201–5. For the Maurist “voyages littéraires,” of which Le Michel’s was an early example, see Hurel, “Le voyage littéraire,” 158.
Jean Bondonnet, Refvtation des trois dissertations de Mg Iean de Lavnoy doctevr en la Sacree Faculté de Theologie de Paris: Contre les missions apostoliqves dans les Gaules au premier siecle … (Paris: Jean Piot, 1653), eii r–v. It is not clear what Bondonnet thought he would achieve by relating this episode.
Jean Bolland, Vita S. Liborii, episcopi, calculo laborantium patroni, e veteribus mss. eruta et commentario historico illustrata a Joanne Bollando (Antwerp: J. and J. van Meurs, 1648).
Bolland did not acquire an excerpt of Moreau’s manuscript from Le Mans, but rather obtained it from the French translation that Pierre Viel, doctor of theology and canon of the cathedral of Le Mans, had provided for the Histoire de la vie, mort, passion, et miracles des saincts (1577), translating it back into Latin. See Bolland, Vita S. Liborii, 1–2; “La vie de Sainct Liboire quatriesme euesque du Mans … Traduite du Latin que M. Iean Maureau docteur en theologie a extraict des anciens legendaires & martyrologes de l’eglise du Mans, par M. Pierre Viel aussi docteur,” in Viel et al., Histoire de la vie, mort, passion, et miracles des saincts, 234v–235r. The question of the relationship of all of the accounts of the life of St. Liboire and translation of his remains has been much debated, but Goffart offers a clear summary, as well as his own solution, in “The Literary Adventures of St. Liborius: A Postscript to the Le Mans Forgeries,” Analecta Bollandiana: Revue critique d’hagiographie 87, nos. 1–2 (1969): 5–62.
Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, 100–5.
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Deffence, 12–16.
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, marginal addition, 289.
Bondonnet, Les vies des evesqves dv Mans restitvées et corrigées, 75.
Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, 25; L. [Léon] de la Sicotière, Notes sur Antoine Le Corvaisier de Courteilles et sur son “Histoire des évesqves dv Mans” (Mamers: G. Fleury and A. Dangin, 1888), 11. Le Gall points out that Sirmond and Launoy were both frequent visitors to the library of the Dupuy brothers and notes that Le Corvaisier de Courteilles and Bondonnet both made reference to Parisian erudite scholars (Le mythe de Saint Denis, 245, 247).
Letter of Guy Patin dated November 16, 1649, quoted in Piolin, Histoire de l’église du Mans, 212–13, quotation at 213; Bondonnet, Refvtation des trois dissertations, aiv v, 334.
Bondonnet, Refvtation des trois dissertations, aiv v, 351–53.
Ibid., 355–69.
François Bondonnet claimed that Le Corvaisier de Courteilles and Blondeau were close friends in Lettre du Solitaire Philalite à vn de ses amis touchant le livre de “L’invasion de la ville dv Mans par Religionnaires en l’année mille cinq cens soixante et deux” (Laval: Auguste Goupil, 1896 [1667]), 38, 46.
Bondonnet, Refvtation des trois dissertations, ei v.