The Testator’s Villainy

The poetry and persona of François Villon have been subject to transcultural reinvention since the fifteenth century (and especially since the nineteenth century, among Anglo-American poets). The legend of Villon goes back to an impecunious poet–criminal who disappeared in 1463, and who both encourages and resists a historicizing interpretation of villainy through his works. This chapter reassesses the singularity of the testator persona in Le Testament Villon (c.1461–2) in his complex vilifying manoeuvres. Some of these have distinct parallels in the early sixteenth-century works of the English poet John Skelton. Yet Villon idiosyncratically instantiates poetic discourse as a para-legal means of attesting to the rigours of torture, where the villain-poet is a direct (if unreliable) witness of his own subjection to judicial punishment.

Criminalizing Villainy

In juridical theory, a villainy implied a malicious offence in word or deed that took on a legal dimension if it was particularly grievous, and thus warranted judicial redress. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the juridical concepts and categories of crime that were associated with ‘villainous’ or ‘foul’ allegations known as vilains cas. From the late fifteenth century, the notion of vilain cas expanded to include the very worst crimes (those dubbed vilains et énormes). Chapter 1 ends with two case studies of vilains cas, showing how in practice, punishing a villainy and even identifying a villain in law was far from straightforward.

Defence, Attack, Arbitration

The poet Clément Marot (1496–1544) testifies, like Villon, to an insecure existence. This chapter explores how the vilification of Marot gained an especial impetus from the late 1520s. Marot used his poems to defend himself against allegations of heresy; he also used poetry to hit back at adversaries. We see it most strikingly in a furious quarrel with an enemy poet, François Sagon. As both poets marshalled a team of supporters, vilification became a self-sustaining enterprise with legal overtones. Neither Marot nor Sagon sought litigation; they sought arbitration by poetic means. Their quarrel overflowed its initial manifestation in the 1530s, with reputational damage to Marot (especially among conservative Catholics and to a lesser extent, among English Francophiles) extending into the seventeenth century.

The Villain

This chapter begins to expose villainy’s ambivalent flow between juridical theory and pre-modern literature. In literary-cultural discourse, the villain was the vilain: in other words, it was a commonplace to assert that the low-born, originally called vilains, would exhibit vile and potentially criminal standards of behaviour. This stereotypical alignment of low morality and low status divided French jurist opinion, not least because it entailed profoundly conflicting ideologies of nobility. The chapter ends with a reading of Giovan Battista Nenna’s Il Nennio (1542), a fiction with quasi-legal elements that deftly exposes nobility and villainy as a problematic binary in transcultural debates on vera nobilitas (true nobility).

A French History of ‘Most Shamefull Villanie’

By the 1580s, fragments of individual suffering in France’s Wars of Religion were being pieced together to form a larger picture within English cultural memory. A significant contribution came from Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589), ostensibly based on the testimonies of Huguenot exiles. The French Historie reverses the villain–hero pairing of Chantelouve’s tragedy (Chapter 11): Charles IX becomes a consummate dissembler, while Coligny (in keeping with Protestant polemical discourse) becomes a blessed martyr. However, Dowriche’s underlying concern is to promote a selective kind of epistemic vigilance (in Relevance Theory, an ‘alertness to error’) in her readers: they must not be blind to the presence of ‘a strange Italian weede’—the villainy of Machiavelli and Catherine de’ Medici—proliferating like a rhizome across European culture.

Profanity and Polemic

This is the first of three chapters exploring François Rabelais’s villainous style. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one read Rabelais against a constant stream of dire warnings not to. This chapter surveys hostile responses to Rabelais—the ‘prophane villaine’—on account of his allegedly irreligious and scurrilous works. During his lifetime (c.1494–1553), Rabelais was vilified by Calvinists and conservative Catholics. After his death, Rabelais’s name and works were ‘remembered’ unfavourably, although his villainous style was popular among a number of imitators (‘rabelizers’) in various polemical contexts. In their zeal to associate Rabelais with heresy and atheism, most rabelizers overlooked what was arguably his main focus on villainy: devilish trickery and cunning, oriented towards problems of justice and misogyny.

Afterword

The Afterword revisits two key lines of enquiry pursued throughout this book: first, the problems of containing and punishing villainous offences; secondly, pre-modern France’s appetite for extraordinary villains whose villainies achieved a transcultural significance. Both lines of enquiry converge upon a final example: the assassination of Henri IV by François Ravaillac, followed by the latter’s trial, torture, and horrific execution. The second half of the Afterword offers a parting perspective on villainy’s transcultural overspills, arguing that these are not reducible to materialist and anthropological processes: non-human, diabolical, and theological factors must be taken into consideration. The book concludes by glimpsing villainy in the present, vis-à-vis twenty-first-century responses to terrorism and to virulent recriminations in a world of ever-expanding media.

Panurge

At the centre of this book is an analysis of what Rabelais called ‘la plus grande villanie du monde’—‘the world’s greatest villainy’ (Pantagruel chs. 21–2). In this episode, Panurge enacts a vengeful trick on a Haughty Lady who spurned his advances. Chapter 8 evaluates divergent allegorical readings of the trick in relation to the episode’s farcical, scatological, and legal overtones. Since there is no judicial redress, Rabelais leaves us with an unfixed vilain et énorme cas of sorts: a situation that is morally, criminally, and aesthetically vilain; and énorme in an ever-expanding, spatial sense. Across the chapter, Panurge’s expansive villainy (panourgia) is explored in relation to his ageist–sexist tendencies, and in relation to his taste for facetious litigation (causes grasses) in the first half of Pantagruel. To these may be added his remonstrating against the scandalous ‘heretic’ Raminograbis and his cowardly, diabolical ravings (Tiers Livre chs. 21–3).

Forensic Tragedy

Charles IX was succeeded by his brother Henri III, pejoratively dubbed ‘Vilain Herodes’ (‘Henri de Valois’) by his opponents. The most virulent opposition came from the ultra-conservative Catholic League. Leaguers vilified Henri for breaking his oath to uphold the League’s mission to eradicate ‘heretics’; moreover, they blamed him for the ‘massacre’ of their champion, Henri de Guise, in 1588. Guise’s murder inspired a precocious young Leaguer, Pierre Matthieu, to compose a tragedy in his honour: La Guisiade (1589). This neo-classical tragedy has an overtly forensic aspect. Each act is accompanied by ‘arguments’ that present the circumstances of Guise’s death as a causa admirabilis—a case that will abnormally shock the audience’s sense of justice. The main action conjectures that the king’s perfidy and Guise’s assassination must have been the work of demonic villains acting ‘behind the scenes’.

Taking on the Law

In Rabelais’s later books villainy undergoes significant changes. By the time we get to the Quart Livre, Panurge no longer targets women with his violent tricks. The first half of this chapter gives a legal-literary reading of the Chiquanous episode (Quart Livre chs. 12–16), replete with litigation and ‘tragic farce’: here, Panurge’s violent, imaginative villainy is given full rein. The second half of the chapter concentrates on the courtroom drama of Panurge versus the Chats-fourrez (Cinquiesme Livre chs. 11–15). This has echoes of the courtroom scenes of La Farce de Pathelin, but it is no rehash of the latter. The case ends with Panurge resorting not to villainous tricks but to the protocol of venality (espices, legal emoluments offered to magistrates) in order to be acquitted of the charge of illicit vagabondage.