‘Bigarrures folatres et mesdisantes’: A Curio from Pierre de l’Estoile’s Cabinet?

Recent research into the political culture of the Wars of Religion has demonstrated the importance of libellous publications in the civil wars. As rival parties took up positions in the conflict, writers and their patrons used literary publications to support their claims to honour, status and political advantage. Through these texts, writers cultivated a poetics of obscenity, gossip and slander that both denounced and illustrated the moral decline of their times. They deployed common genres, tropes and arguments throughout their disputes, and pursued a range of publishing strategies between manuscript and print. Research into this political culture has transformed our understanding of the Wars of Religion as a period of great literary energy and creativity, giving much-needed attention to anonymous, clandestine and subversive texts, while re-evaluating the involvement of significant writers in the conflicts of their times