The Influence of Humanism on Post-Reformation Catholic Preachers in France
P RIOR TO THE REFORMATION, most sermons given in France were structured according to the "modern method" of division and subdivision, which proceeded in rather artificial fashion from theme to protheme, then to the elaboration of theological points and exempla. Those who deviated from this form, such as Jean Vitrier, were lavishly praised by humanists such as Erasmus, but were often sufficiently heterodox in other respects to attract the attention of the Paris Faculty of Theology.' In the first decade after the outbreak of the Reformation in France, the modern method persisted, but by the 1530s it had been replaced almost completely by a much freer and more expressive rendering of theological and Biblical material. This was accompanied by an equally major change in the language of printing: by the mid-sixteenth century, almost all popular sermons were printed in French, whereas their earlier counterparts had been printed exclusively in Latin. Many of these changes can be attributed to the effects of the Protestant Reformation, when Catholics changed their style and structure out of a positive realization of the need for simplification, and more negatively to combat the Protestants on their own turf. But to see the changes in sermons as simply a result of the Reformation is to ignore the rich intellectual heritage of the last decades before the Reformation in France. The seeds of change were first sown in a group of men born roughly between 1490 and 15 10, whom I will refer to as the "generation of 1490." They were the intellectual elite, most of whom studied in Paris, and whose lives and outlooks