ABSTRACT
This chapter explores scandal's sixteenth-century French career and charts its course through both theological and vernacular case studies. 'Scandal' both unlocks a confessional controversy and reveals porosity between secular and theological uses that is expressed as a kind of contamination of the several registers. Its word history shows that scandal was reinvented as a Protestant polemical tool during the Reformation, before shedding its theological and provocative charge to become a term of vernacular morality by the end of the seventeenth century. When Jean Calvin published Des Scandales in 1550 he insisted on the original theological meaning of the word, and this Protestant reclaiming of the term had considerable impact. Fifty years after Calvin, Francois de Sales would attempt to reclaim scandal for Counter-Reformation purposes. Alongside the prurience and outrage of the royal court, Sales's second kind of passive imaginary scandal is also present in the stories.
