R. Knecht - The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France

The Annotations was France’s first great work of philology and its impact, notably on Alciati’s teaching of law at the University of Bourges, was considerable. Budé followed Valla in his use of a philological-historical method and in his opposition to the Bartolists, but he went further by reviving the Aristotelian concept of equity. This was to have a lasting effect on legal practice in France and elsewhere. Budé’s scholarship, though profound, was long-winded and undisciplined. His De Asse (1515), a treatise on ancient coinage, is full of absurdly patriotic digressions in which he seeks to elevate Paris above Athens as a centre of ancient learning.

Like Lefèvre d’Etaples, Budé repudiated the vocabulary and methodology of the schoolmen and wanted Christianity to rest solely on the correct study of Scripture. But he did not share Lefèvre’s mysticism. He despised devotions that were purely formal or smacked of superstition. He equated Christianity with obedience to Christ’s commands and the imitation of His life on earth. As a scholar Budé was well aware of errors in the Latin Vulgate and favoured a return to the original Greek text of the New Testament. His objective was to revivify religion by uniting the Christian faith and humanism. His admiration for the classics did not persuade him that compromise was possible between Hellenism and Christianity. Given the choice, he preferred the latter and in his last work, De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum , he even denied the value of ancient philosophy.

In 1514 the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris was drawn into a conflict which had been raging for three years between the German humanist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) and the German Dominicans. Reuchlin had promoted the Talmud, the Cabala and other Jewish studies as essential to a true understanding of biblical revelation; he also believed that the Bible and all its traditional glosses and interpretations should be re-examined in the light of recent exegetical advances and of the new expertise in Greek and Hebrew. His programme, however, if implemented, was likely to disrupt the traditional curriculum of theological faculties. He was accordingly censured by a special inquisition at Mainz in October 1513, and by another in Cologne four months later. The bishop of Speyer, however, acting for the pope, cleared Reuchlin of all charges and ordered an end to the inquisition, whereupon the Cologne theologians decided to consult their colleagues in Louvain and Paris.

The Parisian doctors received the message from Cologne at the end of April 1514 and promptly set up a committee comprising representatives of the scholastic tradition and friends of humanism to examine extracts from Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel. Numerous meetings followed in the course of which the Cologne theologians sent another book by Reuchlin for examination. There was also an intervention by Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who asked the faculty to drop its proceedings. On 2 August, however, the faculty decided against Reuchlin. His writings were described as ‘strongly suspect of heresy, most of them smacking of heresy and some actually heretical’. The faculty asked for the suppression of the Augenspiegel and the author’s unconditional retraction. What happened next is not clear. The faculty received a letter from the papal Curia in April 1515, which probably expressed surprise at the decision passed in August, and it ceased to discuss Reuchlin after 2 May. Traditionally, historians have seen the Reuchlin affair as marking a decisive break in the University of Paris between the ‘Old Learning’ and the ‘New’. It was the first serious conflict between schoolmen and humanists. Henceforth Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Etaples were seen by their friends as pursuing the same quest for a deeper faith, and by their enemies as sharing the same heresy.

Francis I was anxious to be seen as a great patron of learning as well as a great soldier. Though primarily a man of action, he liked books and enjoyed being read to at mealtimes. His baggage train included two chests of books whose titles point to his main interests: Roman history and the heroic deeds of antiquity. Like many other princes of his day, he was also interested in astrology, alchemy and the Cabala, occult sciences which were believed to hold the key to the universe. Francis asked Jean Thenaud to write two works for him on the Cabala, but the author warned him of its dangers: ‘It is far better’, he wrote, ‘to be ignorant than to ask or to look for what cannot be known without sinning.’

In the early sixteenth century the crying need for humanists in France was an institution in which classical languages that were excluded from the universities’ curriculum could be taught. In February 1517, Francis announced his intention to found such a college. He invited Erasmus to take charge of it, but the great Dutchman was far too keen on his own intellectual freedom to tie himself to the service of any prince. So Francis had to fall back on Janus Lascaris, who was now head of the classical college recently founded in Rome by Pope Leo X. As a first step towards establishing a college in France, the king asked Lascaris to set one up in Milan and provided him with some funds, but these soon ran out and Lascaris had to abandon the venture. In January 1522, Francis decided to establish a college for the study of Greek at the Hôtel de Nesle in Paris, but before this could get under way, his attention was absorbed by his war with the emperor which had begun in 1521.

Heresy was not unknown in France at the close of the Middle Ages, but except in parts of the south which had been infiltrated by Waldensianism (see below p. 221), it was not an organized movement. Thus Erasmus was broadly correct when he described France in 1517 as the only part of Christendom that was free of heresy. But this happy state was short-lived. In 1519, only two years after Martin Luther had posted up his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg, Lutheranism first appeared in Paris. John Froben, the Basle printer, reported on 14 February that he had sent 600 copies of Luther’s works to France and Spain. They were being avidly read, even by members of the Paris Faculty of Theology. In July 1519, Luther and Eck held their famous debate in Leipzig, and soon afterwards they agreed to submit their propositions to the judgement of the universities of Erfurt and Paris. While the Paris theologians were pondering the matter, Luther gave them further food for thought by publishing three radical tracts. On 15 April 1521 the faculty published its Determinatio condemning 104 Lutheran propositions. On 13 June the faculty and the parlement assumed joint control of the book trade in and around Paris. It became an offence to print or sell any religious book without the faculty’s prior approval. On 3 August a proclamation was read out in the streets to the sound of trumpets, calling on all owners of Lutheran books to hand them over to the parlement within a week on pain of imprisonment and a fine.

Whatever his private beliefs may have been, Francis I repeatedly expressed his opposition to heresy, sharing the view, almost universally held in his day, that religious toleration undermined national unity. The oath he had taken at his coronation bound him not only to defend the faith, but to extirpate heresy from the kingdom. However, at this early stage of the Protestant Reformation heresy was not easily recognized; the boundary between Christian humanism, as expressed in the works of Erasmus or Lefèvre, and Lutheranism was far from clear. Nor was the king obliged to endorse any definition of heresy, not even that of the Faculty of Theology. Having already committed himself to the cause of humanism, Francis must have found it difficult to accept Béda’s view that ‘Luther’s errors have entered this [kingdom] more through the works of Erasmus and Lefèvre than any others.’ The king was also much influenced by his sister Marguerite, a deeply devout person, who corresponded with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, from June 1521 until October 1524, and through his teaching imbibed the ideas of Lefèvre.