Conclusion

The systemic role of families in the production of much literature and learning in the early modern period needs greater recognition. Countless works were shaped by families’ practice of hunting in packs to maximize their place in society. This production of works was just one of many planks within the broader transgenerational strategies of families, commoner as well as noble. Works were woven into the wider webs of families’ inheritance and legacy practices. They helped families imagine their own futures and steer a course into it, even if that course subsequently swerved, forked, or faded. These families did not, however, represent society as a whole. They belonged overwhelmingly to social elites, whether noble or commoner. However, family literature was often rooted in anxiety, disappointment, and conflict as well as in hope and a sense of vocation, mission, or entitlement to power.

From Professor’s Son to ‘François Beroalde, escuyer, sieur de Verville, docteur en medicine’

François Béroalde de Verville used self-representation, including in print, more extensively than his father, Matthieu Beroald, in order to carve out his own social status. Literature and learning were for François the passport to social ascent, one of the media in which it was achieved, and a sign that it had been achieved. But his is a less clear-cut story of social ascent than his father’s. It is in this insecurity, and in the fragility of the social effects of François’s own intellectual inheritance from his father, that the very dynamism of François’s representations of social status lies. The chapter first considers what Matthieu bequeathed to his son François, formally and informally. It then considers how François constructed his own social status. What role, if any, did family, learning, and literature play in that constructing? And how did the latter affect his communicating to readers through texts?

Moulding Social Hierarchy by Communicating Experience of It

What is the extent, and what are the limits, of the role played by the figure of Jean Marot in the experience of social hierarchy that his son Clément’s poetry communicates? ‘Experience’ is understood here in a broad sense, including for example personal relationships, events, possessions, emotions, imaginings, memories, and the very attempt to make sense of all that. Much of Clément’s poetry is autobiographical in the sense that its force relies on the reader accepting that it is rooted in the poet’s experience. However, in the forms in which it was printed in the period it was not autobiographical in the sense of inviting the reader to construct a precise record of a life. Its aim seems rather to have been to maximize the relevance, to different readers, of a singular experience of social hierarchy, to communicate one celebrity’s adventures on the social ladder, but also something more.

Introducing the Marots

Chapters 16–19 are a case study of the family that produced the best-selling vernacular literary author of sixteenth-century France: Clément Marot. The example of this family also provides one way of examining the relationship to family and social hierarchy of a genre of writing that was fundamental to literate culture: poetry. The aspiration to social ascent was only one of the reasons why poetry was so widely composed in sixteenth-century France, but it was a key one. Like other cultural practices—ranging from dress and heraldry to forms of address—poetry was therefore itself part of the very mechanics that constructed social hierarchy.

Conclusions

While La Croix du Maine and Sainte-Marthe were responding in part to representations of family—as underpinning literature and learning—that they found in some of the works they surveyed, on the other hand the pair were also extending the family function further still. The vast fields of high-cultural endeavour scoped by La Croix du Maine and Sainte-Marthe did not simply pre-exist their surveys but were further shaped by them. Both surveys were highly selective in social, gender, regional, and other terms. Sainte-Marthe’s Elogia perhaps communicate more profoundly than any other work in the period the triangular imbrication of (i) family, (ii) social hierarchy, and (iii) literature and learning.

Not Going to Plan

Even those families for whom works of literature and learning afforded ways of projecting themselves into the past and the future did not always follow through smoothly on that projecting. Many works of literature and learning therefore communicated a version of family that did not square with smooth patrilinear norms. One kind of disruption was illegitimate birth. Others included bitter personal, confessional, and inheritance-based divisions within families. Two case studies are highlighted: that of the poet and magistrate Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye and his children, in particular his courtier and libertin-poet son Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux; and that of Nicolas Vignier (the once-Protestant historian) and the confessionally divided literary producers who were his descendants.

Works Shaped by Family

Family literature ranged from works of humanist scholarship to history, to poetry, to engineering. There was considerable imitation by relatives of the practices, disciplines, and genres that preceding relatives had adopted. More generally in family literature, certain preoccupations recurred, for example with history, time, nobility, genealogy, and transmission. Certain structural elements of printed-book objects were fostered by family dynamics: large size; paratexts; bricolage. This chapter surveys some ways in which the preoccupation with propelling families into the future shaped printed books. The survey is of a spectrum of overlapping possibilities: it runs from volumes that were largely presented as being by a single literary producer to ones that were largely presented as being by a family collective.

Other Collectivities

Beyond the family, other collectivities also played a role in the production of written works that endured across generations. For literary and learned works, these other collectivities included: households (with their servants, secretaries, disciples, and collaborators in addition to family members); networks of clients, patrons, and friends; salons; courtly circles; institutions such as universities, humanist colleges, and printers’ workshops; religious communities ranging from monastic orders to Jesuits to Protestant churches. They had complex and varying relationships to families. Some overlapped with families or were supplementary extensions of them—especially households, governed by the family head. But some of these other collectivities were in competition with families for loyalty or offered an alternative to them. Moreover, literary and learned legacies could reach beyond the family to benefit broader communities.

Transmission beyond Legal Inheritance

The familial transmission of assets went beyond the inheritance by law (whether at death or by lifetime transfer) of lands, buildings, furniture, annuities, royal offices, and the like. Much else was transmitted outside the law. Such objects of paralegal transmission and informal patrimonialization can be understood as sociocultural legacies. They included formal education, informal know-how, the family’s reputation, its social honours, and its patronage and clientele networks. Such transmission also included literature and learning, not just in the sense of skills transmitted through education but in that of an expectation that works would be produced. Unlike most kinds of juridical inheritance, some kinds of paralegal, sociocultural legacy were peculiarly well suited to benefiting the family as a whole rather than just the odd member.

Why This Time and Place?

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.