ABSTRACT
This chapter explores depictions of the English landscape – both urban and rural — in the writings of three Protestant refugees from the French Wars of Religion. Jacques Grevin, Jacques Bellot, and Pierre Erondelle offer us visions of the English city and English countryside shot through with the peculiar problems that the refugee faces. In the late 1890s, a manuscript in Bibliotheque Nationale was identified as containing various sonnets written by Grevin during this exile, as well as a poem from 1561, addressed to Elizabeth I. Both the England sonnets and Elizabeth poem are heavily indebted to Du Bellay's cycle Les Regrets, a searching account of exile and personal crisis in Rome in the 1550s. Bellot's most artful and successful strategy is the representation of the interior of an English household: a contented, pious ideal home that functions as a model, a goal and a reassurance for French immigrants.
