Journal articles on the topic 'French Wars of Religion (1562-1598)'

L'argent du roi: les finances sous François Ier. By Philippe Hamon. Paris: Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière, Ministère de l'Economie, 1994. Pp. xliii+609. ISBN 2-11-087648-4. 249F.The king's army: warfare, soldiers, and society during the wars of religion in France, 1562–1576. By James B. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+349. ISBN 0-521-55003-3. £45.00.One king, one faith: the parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+543. ISBN 0-520-08626-0. £50.00.A city in conflict: Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+228. ISBN 0-7190-4694-7. £40.00.The birth of absolutism: a history of France, 1598–1661. By Yves-Marie Bercé, translated by Richard Rex. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Pp. viii+262. ISBN 0-333-62757-1. £15.50.The French sixteenth century has always posed serious difficulties for historians. It was a time of rapid change and, in its later decades, of massive disorder, so that there are many large and complex issues to unravel. The need for close analysis as an antidote to over-hasty generalizations is obvious, yet on many issues the archives are frustratingly scanty or even non-existent. A group of recent books tackles these problems with considerable ingenuity and a fair degree of success, even if some of the gaps in the evidence inevitably defy the authors' best efforts.

The French Civil Wars, or ‘Wars of Religion,’ were set primarily in the sixteenth century and enveloped France in a religious conflict. The Civil Wars were a series of violent periods between the French Protestant Huguenots and the Roman Catholics, Catholicism being the official religion of the French Kingdom. The ongoing struggle resulted in an escalation of civil violence and polarity between the religious affiliations, creating a divided French populous that carried out many atrocities, such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The violence subsided in 1598 when King Henry IV enacted the Edict of Nantes, granting substantial conditions and support to the Huguenot population in France. However, this paper argues for the importance of categorizing the wars as ‘civil’ and not ‘religious.’ The dynamic situation involves more than religious differences, including a central reliance on community-based disputes, group association based on mass paranoia, and even political gain for those of the French nobility. It is important to understand the complexity of the Civil Wars. Denoting them as a religious conflict ignores the other civil implications which provoked aggression between French communities and forces.

The chief martyrology of the French Protestants or Huguenots, the Histoire des martyrs, was the work of a Walloon refugee in Geneva, Jean Crespin. The Histoire focuses on the martyrs of the French Reformation, but also describes the ordeals of those in Scodand, England, and Flanders, as well as of medieval precursors of Protestant ideas, such as Hus and Wyclif. Later versions of the text include the martyrs of the Early Church, whose faith the Huguenots claimed to be reviving and in whose sufferings they believed themselves to be sharing. The Histoire quickly became popular in the fledgeling Reformed churches of France, avidly read from the pulpit and in the home. The accounts of the courage of the martyrs no doubt reinforced the resolution of a group destined to remain a minority, and who became increasingly resigned to their fate. During the civil strife known as the French Wars of Religion, religious tensions were exacerbated by political and military conflict. However, the incident which provoked the outbreak of the wars in 1562 was the massacre of a Huguenot congregation at Vassy, in Champagne, and, indeed, the wars were to be particularly noted for their brutal sectarian violence.

The second half of the sixteenth century saw France descend into civil war, after several decades of increasing religious tensions brought about by the Reformation. It was an outcome which traditional political thought dreaded, because internal union was one of the most prized features of a healthy political body. Civil war, the line went, was much worse than any other calamity which might befall a polity and threatened it with complete dissolution. Therefore, once France found itself in such a situation from 1562 onwards, one of the main issues in French political discourse became the restoration of internal peace: all the parties involved in the conflict paid at least lip service to it, although each envisioned their own path in order to achieve this goal. For the radical Catholics, internal peace could not be divorced from religious unity, therefore, the Protestants had to be exterminated, chased out or brought back into the Catholic fold. A more moderate group of Catholics came to argue that this was not possible without doing irreparable damage to the country and that coexistence with Protestants had to be accepted at least temporarily, looking to the king to impose such a solution. Finally, the Protestants, who envisioned at the beginning of the wars the possibility of converting the whole France to the Reformation, came to embrace the second point of view, as well, under the pressure of political realities. This paper aims to analyze the discourse of peace in the propaganda issued during the French Wars of Religion, examining its main themes and how it unfolded over this period of more than thirty years.

The French wars of religion, 1562–1629. By Mack P. Holt. (New Approaches to European History, 8.) Pp. xiv+239 incl. 9 maps and 7 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. £30 (cloth), £10.95 (paper). 0 521 35359 9; 0 521 35873 6Reformation in La Rochelle. Tradition and change in early modern Europe, 1500–1568. By Judith Pugh Meyer. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 298). Pp. 182 incl. frontispiece, 9 figs and 21 tables. Geneva: Droz, 1996. 2 600 00115 8A city in conflict. Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. (Studies in Early Modern European History.) Pp. xi+228. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. £40. 0 7190 4694 7One king, one faith. The Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. (A Centennial Book.) Pp. xiii+543. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1996. £50 ($65). 0 520 08626 0When the French king Henri III appeared before the Parlement of Paris to enregister the Edict of Nemours on 18 July 1585, he was greeted with a eulogistic harangue from the first president of the parlement, Achille de Harlay. This was, he told the king, a true lit de justice, in which the king was united and reconciled with his people within a godly union around the one, true and Catholic religion. He went on to remind the king that it was twenty-five years ago to the month that the first edict of Catholicity had been promulgated. In the intervening period, the parlement had never accepted the principle behind the adventure of religious pluralism attempted in the various edicts of pacification with the Protestant minority. They had only enregistered them under the duress of ‘the explicit command of the king’ and the ‘urgent necessity of the times’, judging all such measures ‘contrary to the tranquility of your state’, and against the law of God. One observer recorded that the king wept during this speech. But these were not tears of joy, for this edict (which obliged the Protestant minority to abjure or depart the realm within months) had been forced upon him by the duke of Guise and the Catholic League. At a stroke it unwound the painfully slow efforts of the French monarchy to rebuild its authority on the basis of a royally imposed religious pluralism. The king appeared before his parlement to reap what rewards he could from a measure that also advertised his faiblesse. Like the more recent tear for the decommissioning of a royal yacht, these were the ways a monarch used to express the politically impossible. For us they are an important reminder of the passions that gripped French politics during its painful and bloody reformation and how sophisticated we must be in their interpretation. The four works under consideration here are very disparate – a socio-institutional study, an up-to-date, interpretative textbook, and two case-studies in the urban reformation. Their only common thread is that they represent the variety of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the French denomination) scholarship on the wars of religion.

Lyric poetry as a tool to unify language and politics points of view. We propose to examine how lyric poetry was used as a politic tool by French kings of the Renaissance period (1515–1589). In France, the building of a specific identity starts with François I Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts (1539): all official documents previously in Latin, had now to be in French. The second act was Defence et Illustration de la langue française published by Joachim du Bellay in 1549 ruling on the use of vernacular language in lyrical poetry. Both events gave impetus to the unification of the language, not only in official documents but also in everyday life. As each province had its own idioms, the proposal was ambitious. We focus on Ronsard, the most representative poet of the catholic party during the civil wars of religion, which begin in 1562. In 1566 Ronsard begins his politic career with Les Hymnes, a long poem that celebrates on the catholic dynasty of the Valois family. Agrippa d’Aubigné, as a protestant poet, appreciate the poem enough to recommend it to everybody – lyric poetry rising above religious opinion. After the death of Henri II, Ronsard became a sort of diarist of Catherine de Medici’s politics, as expressed in his Discours des misères de ce temps 1562 and Continuation du discours des misères de ce temps. These texts, which justify the catholic positions of the queen, were published in 10-page booklets to be accessible to the population. The protestants poet including Chandieu, gave a violent answer to these one sided catholic texts. For all the Calvinist, mass is a disgusting ‘théophagie’. During her regency, Catherine de Medici organised a two-year (1562– 1564) visit around the kingdom with her son, Charles IX, in order for people to meet their king. This would be today a sort of ‘enterprise of communication’. It was never done before. Ronsard was required, as a spokesman, to follow the huge royal caravan, contributing to the development of words and new forms of lyric poetry. He wrote various entertainments according to the occasion or place of performance, later collected in Elegies, Mascarades et Bergeries, published by Buon in 1566. After the court returned to Fontainebleau and Paris, Ronsard continued La Franciade, a text he began in 1549. He was also required to manage the reception of Polish ambassadors who came to Tuileries and Fontainebleau to fetch the duke of Alençon (the future king Henri III of France) as new elected polish king. The official artist Antoine Caron has left paintings and drawings of these entertainments. Ronsard’s politic works in connection with the poets of the period change not only the language but also the way of thinking as it was the first step to centralism, which was the aims of the French kings. The same phenomenon took place in the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution in 1789, when poets were needed to bring the people together during a period of inspiration that drew them away from violence. They built a new image of the Renaissance, mixing history and imagination. In 1851, Les Châtiments, in which the poem titled “Le manteau Imperial” (1853) is one of the most ferocious, Victor Hugo protested against “le coup d’état” of Napoléon III. This text denied that Napoleon III was the fair successor of Napoleon I. To place France in context in the history of humanity, Hugo published La Légende des siècles (1859), a long text in alexandrine form which recalled the theme of Franciade: both texts aim to enshrine the history of the French kingdom. In Estonia, when Estonians needed to assert the history of their origins, the same phenomenon took place in 1857 with Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg. Lyric poetry is used in tension periods to claim a strong, original and uniform voice in the face of difficulties. In France, in the sixteenth century, lyric poetry was at the origin of a new way of life.

International audience This paper offers to think about the problems faced by a society confronted with the presence - real or fantasized - of the « enemy within ». In this society, the identification of the other and the self-presentation do not only serve to protect the social honor but are matters of life and death. What are the skills mobilized for identifying the "suspects"? The wars of Religion (1562-1598) can help to think of a society confronted with sudden violence and, just like the terrorism, from the inside of the community. La presente contribución propone una reflexion sobre los problemas encontrados por una sociedad confrontada con la presencia - efectivo o fantaseada - de un "enemigo interior". En esta sociedad, el reconocimiento de los otros y la presentación de sí mismo no tienen por objeto unico de proteger el honor social, pero son situaciones de vida o muerto ¿ Cuáles son las competencias movilizadas para identidiar a los "sospechosos"? Las guerras de Religión (1562-1598) pueden ayudar a pensar una sociedad confrontada con la irrupción de una violencia súbita y, como el terrorismo, venida del interior de la comunidad. La présente contribution se propose de réfléchir aux problèmes rencontrés par une société confrontée à la présence – réelle ou fantasmée – d’un « ennemi intérieur » prêt à frapper n’importe où, n’importe qui, tapi dans l’indolence, la banalité, la routine et le confort du quotidien. Dans cette société, la reconnaissance d’autrui et la présentation de soi n’ont plus pour but de protéger l’honneur social mais engagent des questions de vie ou de mort. Quelles sont les compétences mobilisées pour débusquer les « suspects » ? Les guerres de Religion (1562-1598) peuvent aider à penser une société confrontée à l’irruption d’une violence soudaine et, à l’image du terrorisme, venue de l’intérieur de la communauté

Abstract This article analyses political homelessness in French literature during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), using Montaigne’s ‘De la vanité’ (‘Of Vanity’) as a case study. In that chapter, in which Montaigne discusses travel extensively, he aligns writers and vagabonds, later describing his writing style and way of thinking as vagabondage. There is no direct equivalent of the term ‘homelessness’ in early modern French, but ‘vagabond’ is frequently used to describe those of no fixed abode. Montaigne’s brief appropriations of the vagabond figure enable a reassessment of his relation to home and to politics, understood in the broader context of mass displacement and renewed philosophical reflection on home in this period. Firstly, the alignment between writers and vagabonds is read as a reference to Montaigne’s experience of papal censorship in Rome and an anticipation of his claim to be a citizen of the world. Montaigne’s creative vagabondage has affinities with Rosi Braidotti’s theory of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ (another kind of world-citizenship), which is both an aesthetic principle and a way of interrogating – and affirming – political agency. The article then goes on to analyse the extent to which Montaigne is ‘politically homeless’, in the sense that he is alienated by politics and refuses factionalism. Lastly, we consider Montaigne’s relation to homelessness in the context of contemporary print culture: the existence of clandestine ‘homeless texts’ reveals the limits of Montaigne’s strategic vagabondage. The conclusion then returns to the stakes of Montaigne’s claim that his style of writing is a ‘vagabond’ movement.

Abstract In histories of the Wars of Religion and narratives of rights and the rise of the state, ‘freedom of conscience’ is often treated as self-evident. However, this article demonstrates its contested meaning through French Protestant and Catholic reactions to liberty of conscience as granted by the monarchy in 1563, when its particular use as the legal framework for the toleration of Calvinists can be identified. As a malleable tool of toleration, this politicized liberty of conscience protected conscience in households, but separated it from the exercise of religion, a formula for pacification repeated in the 1598 Edict of Nantes. Not only did this usage conflict with theological interpretations of conscience, but it disrupted notions of French citizenship and reinforced royal power by framing heresy as sedition. Far from freeing individual consciences, this article concludes that royal liberty of conscience constrained the actions of Catholics and Protestants while enforcing their coexistence.

Abstract This article explores the memory of France’s Wars of Religion in urban histories published during the century and a half that followed the restoration of peace with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. It asks why, despite explicit prohibitions against reviving memories of injuries suffered during the wars, local historians persisted in demonizing former opponents in histories that remained overtly confessional in their representation of the troubles. The article focuses on Catholic authors, who wrote fifty-six of the fifty-eight works examined. Protestants had little incentive to memorialize the towns in which they had a limited and declining position. Catholics, by contrast, mobilized memory to reaffirm a local identity rooted in Catholic practice and belief. Retelling the suffering local populations endured and recounting the city’s ritual responses to the religious schism, they pushed Protestants to the margins of a civic culture represented as inherently Catholic even in a bi-confessional state.

AbstractThis article analyses excerpts from letters sent by French Reformed congregations and politically-engaged Calvinist laymen in 1562. In these dispatches, the churches, lay notables, and local magistrates of Montpellier, Grenoble, Gap, Nîmes, Issoire and Rouen requested pastors to Geneva or thanked the town’s authorities for ministers previously sent there. However, these six letters were not addressed to the Venerable Company of Pastors, but specifically to the syndics and Small Council of Geneva. While the role of the Company in the sending of Geneva-trained pastors to France on the eve of the Wars of Religion is known, the participation of the Republic of Geneva’s political authorities in these activities needs more scholarly attention. This article seeks to offer a discussion of this topic through analysis of correspondence and other sources held in the

En 1562 les divisions religieuses en France dégénèrent en conflit armé. Castellion (Conseil à la France désolée) et Loys Le Roy (Des Différens et troubles advenans entre les hommes par la diversité des opinions en la religion) proposent deux options différentes pour rétablir la paix : la tolérance pour le premier, la concorde pour le second. Ces deux voies suivent des logiques opposées : la concorde postule le retour à l’unité, la tolérance consiste à accepter la division. Concorde et tolérance sont les deux voies entre lesquelles hésite la France de 1562 à 1598, quand l’Édit de Nantes met fin aux guerres de religion.

Anders Toftgaard: “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”. On Giacomo Castelvetro’s manuscripts in The Royal Library, Copenhagen. In exile from his beloved Modena, Giacomo Castelvetro (1546–1616) travelled in a Europe marked by Reformation, counter-Reformation and wars of religion. He transmitted the best of Italian Renaissance culture to the court of James VI and Queen Anna of Denmark in Edinburgh, to the court of Christian IV in Copenhagen and to Shakespeare’s London, while he incessantly collected manuscripts on Italian literature and European contemporary history. Giacomo Castelvetro lived in Denmark from August 1594 to 11 October 1595. Various manuscripts and books which belonged to Giacomo Castelvetro in his lifetime, are now kept in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Some of them might have been in Denmark ever since Castelvetro left Denmark in 1595. Nevertheless, Giacomo Castelvetro has never been noticed by Danish scholars studying the cultural context in which he lived. The purpose of this article is to point to Castelvetro’s presence in Denmark in the period around Christian IV’s accession and to describe two of his unique manuscripts in the collection of the Royal Library. The Royal Library in Copenhagen holds a copy of the first printed Italian translation of the Quran, L’Alcorano di Macometto, nel qual si contiene la dottrina, la vita, i costumi et le leggi sue published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547. The title page bears the name of the owner: Giacº Castelvetri. The copy was already in the library’s collections at the time of the Danish King Frederic III, in the 1660’s. The three manuscripts from the Old Royal collection (GKS), GKS 2052 4º, GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º are written partly or entirely in the hand of Giacomo Castelvetro. Moreover, a number of letters written to Giacomo Castelvetro while he was still in Edinburgh are kept among letters addressed to Jonas Charisius, the learned secretary in the Foreign Chancellery and son in law of Petrus Severinus (shelf mark NKS (New Royal Collection) 1305 2º). These letters have been dealt with by Giuseppe Migliorato who also transcribed two of them. GKS 2052 4º The manuscript GKS 2052 4º (which is now accessible in a digital facsimile on the Royal Library’s website), contains a collection of Italian proverbs explained by Giacomo Castelvetro. It is dedicated to Niels Krag, who was ambassador of the Danish King to the Scottish court, and it is dated 6 August 1593. The title page shows the following beautifully written text: Il Significato D’Alquanti belli & vari proverbi dell’Italica Favella, gia fatto da G. C. M. & hoggi riscritto, & donato,in segno di perpetua amicitia, all ecc.te.D. di legge, Il S.r. Nicolò Crachio Ambas.re. del Ser.mo Re di Dania a questa Corona, & Sig.r mio sempre osser.mo Forsan & haec olim meminisse iuvabit Nella Citta d’Edimborgo A VI d’Agosto 1593 The manuscript consists of 96 leaves. On the last page of the manuscript the title is repeated with a little variation in the colophon: Qui finisce il Significato D’alquanti proverbi italiani, hoggi rescritto a requisitione del S.r. Nicolo Crachio eccelente Dottore delle civili leggi &c. Since the author was concealed under the initials G.C.M., the manuscript has never before been described and never attributed to Giacomo Castelvetro. However, in the margin of the title page, a 16th century hand has added: ”Giacomo Castelvetri modonese”, and the entire manuscript is written in Giacomo Castelvetro’s characteristic hand. The motto ”Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” is from Vergil’s Aeneid (I, 203); and in the Loeb edition it is rendered “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”. The motto appears on all of the manuscripts that Giacomo Castelvetro copied in Copenhagen. The manuscript was evidently offered to Professor Niels Krag (ca. 1550–1602), who was in Edinburgh in 1593, from May to August, as an ambassador of the Danish King. On the 1st of August, he was knighted by James VI for his brave behaviour when Bothwell entered the King’s chamber in the end of July. The Danish Public Record Office holds Niels Krag’s official diary from the journey, signed by Sten Bilde and Niels Krag. It clearly states that they left Edinburgh on August 6th, the day in which Niels Krag was given the manuscript. Evidently, Castelvetro was one of the many persons celebrating the ambassadors at their departure. The manuscript is bound in parchment with gilded edges, and a gilded frame and central arabesque on both front cover and end cover. There are 417 entries in the collection of proverbs, and in the explanations Giacomo Castelvetro often uses other proverbs and phrases. The explanations are most vivid, when Castelvetro explains the use of a proverb by a tale in the tradition of the Italian novella or by an experience from his own life. The historical persons mentioned are the main characters of the sixteenth century’s religious drama, such as Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth, James VI, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and his son, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, Gaspard de Coligny and the Guise family, Mary Stuart, Don Antonio, King of Portugal, the Earl of Bothwell and Cosimo de’ Medici. The Catholic Church is referred to as “Setta papesca”, and Luther is referred to as “il grande, e pio Lutero” (f. 49v). Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca are referred to various times, along with Antonio Cornazzano (ca. 1430–1483/84), the author of Proverbi in facetie, while Brunetto Latini, Giovanni Villani, Ovid and Vergil each are mentioned once. Many of the explanations are frivolous, and quite a few of them involve priests and monks. The origin of the phrase “Meglio è tardi, che non mai” (52v, “better late than never”) is explained by a story about a monk who experienced sex for the first time at the age of 44. In contrast to some of the texts to be found in the manuscript GKS 2057 4º the texts in GKS 2052 4º, are not misogynist, rather the opposite. Castelvetro’s collection of proverbs is a hitherto unknown work. It contains only a tenth of the number of proverbs listed in Gardine of recreation (1591) by John Florio (1553?–1625), but by contrast these explanations can be used, on the one hand, as a means to an anthropological investigation of the past and on the other hand they give us precious information about the life of Giacomo Castelvetro. For instance he cites a work of his, “Il ragionamento del Viandante” (f. 82r), which he hopes to see printed one day. It most probably never was printed. GKS 2057 4º The manuscript GKS 2057 4º gathers a number of quires in very different sizes. The 458 folios in modern foliation plus end sheets are bound in blue marbled paper (covering a previous binding in parchment) which would seem to be from the 17th century. The content spans from notes to readyforprint-manuscripts. The manuscript contains text by poets from Ludovico Castelvetro’s generation, poems by poets from Modena, texts tied to the reformation and a lot of satirical and polemical material. Just like some of Giacomo Castelvetro’s manuscripts which are now in the possession of Trinity College Library and the British Library it has “been bound up in the greatest disorder” (cf. Butler 1950, p. 23, n. 75). Far from everything is written in the hand of Giacomo Castelvetro, but everything is tied to him apart from one quire (ff. 184–192) written in French in (or after) 1639. The first part contains ”Annotationi sopra i sonetti del Bembo” by Ludovico Castelvetro, (which has already been studied by Alberto Roncaccia), a didactic poem in terza rima about rhetoric, “de’ precetti delle partitioni oratorie” by “Filippo Valentino Modonese” , “rescritto in Basilea a XI di Febraio 1580 per Giacº Castelvetri” and the Ars poetica by Horace translated in Italian. These texts are followed by satirical letters by Nicolò Franco (“alle puttane” and “alla lucerna” with their responses), by La Zaffetta, a sadistic, satirical poem about a Venetian courtisane who is punished by her lover by means of a gang rape by thirty one men, and by Il Manganello (f. 123–148r), an anonymous, misogynistic work. The manuscript also contains a dialogue which would seem to have been written by Giacomo Castelvetro, “Un’amichevole ragionamento di due veri amici, che sentono il contrario d’uno terzo loro amico”, some religious considerations written shortly after Ludovico’s death, ”essempio d’uno pio sermone et d’una Christiana lettera” and an Italian translation of parts of Erasmus’ Colloquia (the dedication to Frobenius and the two dialogues ”De votis temere susceptis” and ”De captandis sacerdotiis” under the title Dimestichi ragionamenti di Desiderio Erasmo Roterodamo, ff. 377r–380r), and an Italian translation of the psalms number 1, 19, 30, 51, 91. The dominating part is, however, Italian poetry. There is encomiastic poetry dedicated to Trifon Gabriele and Sperone Speroni and poetry written by poets such as Torquato Tasso, Bernardo Tasso, Giulio Coccapani, Ridolfo Arlotti, Francesco Ambrosio/ Ambrogio, Gabriele Falloppia, Alessandro Melani and Gasparo Bernuzzi Parmigiano. Some of the quires are part of a planned edition of poets from Castelvetro’s home town, Modena. On the covers of the quires we find the following handwritten notes: f. 276r: Volume secondo delle poesie de poeti modonesi f. 335v: VII vol. Delle opere de poeti modonesi f. 336v; 3º vol. Dell’opere de poeti modonesi f. 353: X volume dell’opre de poeti modonesi In the last part of the manuscript there is a long discourse by Sperone Speroni, “Oratione del Sr. Sperone, fatta in morte della S.ra Giulia Varana Duchessa d’Urbino”, followed by a discourse on the soul by Paulus Manutius. Finally, among the satirical texts we find quotes (in Latin) from the Psalms used as lines by different members of the French court in a humoristic dialogue, and a selection of graffiti from the walls of Padua during the conflict between the city council and the students in 1580. On fol. 383v there is a ”Memoriale d’alcuni epitafi ridiculosi”, and in the very last part of the manuscript there is a certain number of pasquinate. When Castelvetro was arrested in Venice in 1611, the ambassador Dudley Carleton described Castelvetro’s utter luck in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, stating that if he, Carleton, had not been able to remove the most compromising texts from his dwelling, Giacomo Castelvetro would inevitably have lost his life: “It was my good fortune to recover his books and papers a little before the Officers of the Inquisition went to his lodging to seize them, for I caused them to be brought unto me upon the first news of his apprehension, under cover of some writings of mine which he had in his hands. And this indeed was the poore man’s safetie, for if they had made themselves masters of that Magazine, wherein was store and provision of all sorts of pasquins, libels, relations, layde up for many years together against their master the Pope, nothing could have saved him” Parts of GKS 2057 4º fit well into this description of Castelvetro’s papers. A proper and detailed description of the manuscript can now be found in Fund og Forskning Online. Provenance GKS 2052 4ºon the one side, and on the other side, GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º have entered The Royal Library by two different routes. None of the three manuscripts are found in the oldest list of manuscripts in the Royal Library, called Schumacher’s list, dating from 1665. All three of them are included in Jon Erichsen’s “View over the old Manuscript Collection” published in 1786, so they must have entered the collections between 1660 and 1786. Both GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º have entered The Royal Library from Christian Reitzer’s library in 1721. In the handwritten catalogue of Reitzer’s library (The Royal Library’s archive, E 15, vol. 1, a catalogue with very detailed entries), they bear the numbers 5744 and 5748. If one were to proceed, one would have to identify the library from which these two manuscripts have entered Reitzer’s library. On the spine of GKS 2053 4º there is a label saying “Castelvetro / sopra Dante vol 326” and on f. 2r the same number is repeated: “v. 326”. On the spine of GKS 2057 4º, there is a label saying “Poesie italiane, vol. 241”, and on the end sheet the same number is repeated: “v. 241”. These two manuscripts would thus seem to have belonged to the same former library. Many of the Royal Library’s manuscripts with relazioni derive from Christian Reitzer’s library, and a wide range of Italian manuscripts which have entered the Royal Library through Reitzer’s library have a similar numbering on spine and title page. Comparing these numbers with library catalogues from the 17th century, one might be able to identify the library from which these manuscripts entered Reitzer’s library, and I hope to be able to proceed in this direction. Conclusion Giacomo Castelvetro was not a major Italian Renaissance writer, but a nephew of one of the lesser-known writers in Italian literature, Ludovico Castelvetro. He delivered yet another Italian contribution to the history of Christian IV, and his presence could be seen as a sign of a budding Italianism in Denmark in the era of Christian IV. The collection of Italian proverbs that he offered to Niels Krag, makes him a predecessor of the Frenchman Daniel Matras (1598–1689), who as a teacher of French and Italian at the Academy in Sorø in 1633 published a parallel edition of French, Danish, Italian and German proverbs. The two manuscripts that are being dealt with in this article are two very different manuscripts. GKS 2052 4º is a perfectly completed work that was hitherto unknown and now joins the short list of known completed works by Giacomo Castelvetro. GKS 2057 4º is a collection of variegated texts that have attracted Giacomo Castelvetro for many different reasons. Together the two manuscripts testify to the varied use of manuscripts in Renaissance Italy and Europe. A typical formulation of Giacomo Castelvetro’s is “Riscritto”. He copies texts in order to give them a new life in a new context. Giacomo Castelvetro is in the word’s finest sense a disseminator of Italian humanism and European Renaissance culture. He disseminated it in a geographical sense, by his teaching in Northern Europe, and in a temporal sense through his preservation of texts for posterity under the motto: “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”.