ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition here: https://bibliopen.org/9781644531792. The open access edition is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.

This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Bruce Hayes is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Kansas.

REVIEWS

"In a thought-provoking conclusion, Hayes argues persuasively for the importance of this little-studied field of French Renaissance letters. This is a work for those interested in the history and/or literature of Renaissance France, and for those who study satire and humor. Readers unfamiliar with the works under discussion will appreciate the numerous citations, provided in French and English translation, and the generous provision of contextualizing information—material that makes this study accessible to nonspecialists."

— D. L. Boudreau, Mercyhurst University, Choice

"Bruce Hayes not only places satires in the context of a chain of historical events but also argues for their historical life, agency, and function, with the necessary close readings that allow readers better to understand these fairly obscure texts. The result is a clear and lively discussion of a tense social milieu through some biting literary texts and performances. This is an original contribution to the fields of French early modern literature and culture and the history of the Reformation."

— Antonia Szabari, University of Southern California, author of Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France

"Hayes’s volume makes a critical intervention in the fields of humor, rhetoric, and warfare, as well as showing very successfully the reciprocal relationship between these areas. Hostile Humor in Renaissance France tells an intriguing story of how hostile humor--as well as the laughter it incited--changed the course both of rhetoric and of conflict in the sixteenth century [. . . and] offers some important innovations and does a service to the study of the history of emotions, while also providing an accessible route through which to enter the comic (and tragic) world of sixteenth-century France."— Lucy Rayfield, University of Oxford, H-France Review

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