ABSTRACT
The final chapter of this study is dedicated to an examination of the homoerotic within religious discourse and practices, notably confession and penance, whose manifestation and evolution in the Renaissance will be studied as they intersect with wider social and cultural developments associated with the emergence of modernity. First, in relation to a letter written by François de Sales, I will examine the textual trouble created by a homoerotically charged passage. Subsequently, a number of texts and practices relating to Henri III’s devotional activities will be read in conjunction with the satirical responses they elicited. While the primary works that form the subject of this chapter were not written in direct imitation of pre-existing models, they very consciously inscribe themselves in a literary and ideological tradition, drawing on and prolonging what might be termed the ‘master text’ of Christianity, embodied in the corpus of sacred literature: the Bible, the Fathers, the canons, and so on. They also concern the issue of the establishment of a definitive text: in the case of François de Sales, that of the standard modern edition of the saint’s works; in the case of Henri III, the desire of the king and some of his entourage – ultimately frustrated – to create a particular ‘royal text’: that is, to establish as authoritative a particular script, to impose a particular version of events that would be that of history.1 As in previous chapters, then, the following pages work to illuminate the literary and social contexts of the texts studied. By contrast, however, the approach adopted here will depend less on expounding Renaissance readings and reworkings of literary models and focus rather on a number of passages in texts that present themselves as normative, but that suggest more than they say, or say more or otherwise than
1 I am inspired here by the work of Pierre Zoberman, who, drawing on that of Michel Riffaterre, refers to the body of official and semi-official panegyric discourse generated around Louis XIV as ‘the royal text’ (‘Eloquence and Ideology: Between Image and Propaganda’, Rhetorica, 18:3 (2000), 295-320 (p. 307)). While I use the term here in a slightly different sense, it should be noted that in his desire for a literature and other cultural productions that sanctified the monarchy, Henri III sought to initiate a process that Louis XIV would bring to fulfilment. It is Fredric Jameson who describes religion as a ‘master-code’ in pre-capitalist societies (‘Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost’, in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976-84, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, et al. (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 35-56 (p. 37)).
