ABSTRACT
In 1564, looking back at several years of slaughter, desecration, devastation, pillage, and open warfare, Pierre de Ronsard wrote in his Bergerie:
Le citoyen estoit bany de sa cité. Les autels despouillez de leurs Saincts tutelaires, Les temples resembloient aux deserts solitaires, Sans feu, sans oraison, et les Prestres sacrés Servoient de proye aux loups, par les champs massacrés.1 [The townsman was banished from his town. The altars were despoiled of their titular saints, the temples resembled lonely deserts, without the sacred flame, without prayer, and the holy Priests were prey to the wolves, massacred in the fields.]
The Bergerie, written for the Queen’s Day at Fontainebleau, is one of Ronsard’s many oeuvres de circonstance which, as Michel Dassonville notes, must be understood “dans le contexte historique qui les a vu naître”2 [in the historical context that gave them birth]. In this case, context includes both the specific occasion for which this “occasional” poem was written and the wider setting of the first French War of Religion.
