The Politics of Print During the French Wars of Religion

Book excerpt: In The Politics of Print During the French Wars of Religion, Gregory Haake examines how, in late sixteenth-century France, authors and publishers used the new medium of the printed text to control the terms of public discourse and determine history, or at least their narrative of it. The creativity of the Renaissance ushered in new instability of discourse and a decline of traditional centres of authority. Gregory Haake shows that poets, authors, printers, and polemicists — including historians, such as Simon Goulart; the great poets of the time, such as Pierre de Ronsard or Agrippa d’Aubigné; or anonymous authors of polemical texts — rushed in to take advantage of discursive uncertainty to discredit their enemies and shape the meaning of history as it unfolded.