Clément Marot (1496-1544) is perhaps the most notable poet of the early 16th century, the period after the death of Villon, and before the advent of Du Bellay and Ronsard. From a Norman family, he was born in Cahors, the son of a poet. Marot is normally regarded as a conservative force in French verse, reaching back into the French Middle Ages rather than forward into the Italian- accented Renaissance. He is often represented in anthologies by his rondeaux, his ballades and his chansons, all of them forms that reach backwards; but a key element in his work was his paraphrasing of the Psalms--not an inherently conservative task at the time, as Wursten makes clear.
Alongside those of theologian Théodore de Bèze (1519-1605), Marot's metrical Psalms formed the basis of the Genevan Psalter, part of the Huguenot world and to this day in use among Francophone Protestants. Paralleled by developments in other languages-- English, Dutch, German, Scots and others--this was a definitive step in the growth of the Reformed churches. The new (or in their terms renewed) emphasis on scripture meant a departure from what were judged to be corrupt practices that had grown up during the Middle Ages, a pattern of reform closely paralleling those in Renaissance painting and in the Humanist scholarship that could be seen as preceding and underpinning both. This demanded an abandonment of hymns and paraliturgical songs as non-scriptural. At the same time, the greater emphasis on the individual meant that a congregation could not simply witness a liturgical event (as might be said to have been the pre-Second Vatican Council Catholic position, and to remain the Orthodox one): their conscious participation was essential. Consequently, congregations had to sing and the Psalter was the obvious scriptural source to which to turn. As with the Bible, translation was essential.
It was not however enough just to translate. In the medieval musical world, unmensural liturgical (popularly dubbed Gregorian) chant had been sung by cathedral and monastery choirs, who went through the entire Psalter in a weekly cycle. But congregations needed something metrical and strophic, like the secular and paraliturgical songs with which they might be assumed to have been formerly familiar. If good money was to drive out bad, singable paraphrases were required; hence the work of Marot in French, as Sternhold and Hopkins in English, was to write metrical Psalms. This was also the age in which Erasmus sought to produce a dependable Greek New Testament (though his choice of manuscripts has been much criticised), Luther translated the Bible into German and William Morgan translated it into Welsh. Translating Psalms was a process that ran in parallel to this work of translating Bibles, with sometimes confusing consequences. In England, the Book of Common Prayer used the Coverdale translation, and Coverdale's remained in place in the Book of Common Prayer long after the 1611 version was available.
From 1519 to 1526, Marot was a valet-de-chambre to Marguerite de Valois, a leading force in the movement for church reform in France. He went on to be in the service of her brother, François I. That earlier poets adapted their voices to the views of their employers surprises no medievalist: does the fact that he was the author of Psalms paraphrases suggest that he did this at the command of Marguerite? But this is 16th century literature, the early modern period: can the wording of the Psalms be studied to deduce Marot's own religious views? After all, modern readers begin to expect modern (or at least early modern or proto-modern) language and writing, and by extension seek to deploy modern critical methods.
Any study which interlinks author and work faces accusations of falling for the "autobiographical fallacy" and certainly Wursten's opening declaration that "the best way to get acquainted with a poet is by reading his poetry," while undeniable in one sense, is asking for trouble in another (7). Flaubert and Dickens wrote in an age of autobiographical fiction and against a background of a contemporary historiography that was building on the earlier revolution in method achieved by such as Hume and Gibbon. The critical skills developed to read them have led various scholars astray when it came to earlier writers. George Kane pointed this out in his noted UCL Chambers Memorial Lecture, published as The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland, 1965. Indeed, the examination of Marot's earlier poems and those immediately following his imprisonment during François I's enforced absence following the disastrous Battle of Pavia, are reminiscent of readings of Piers Plowman in search of its author's Lollardish ur-Protestant religious programme (or was it in fact a medieval Catholic one?). C. A. Mayer's warning that terms such as "Lutheran," "Protestant" and "Evangelical" have to be used with caution when considering the age of the Reformation remain sound and are cited by Wursten.
We should remember (as Owen Chadwick reminds us in the opening pages of his monograph The Reformation, 1964) that all interested parties at the end of the Middle Ages agreed there had to be reform of the Church. Consequently, the fact that Marot can be shown to have much in common with one or more of the religious parties of the day should not surprise us. Many within the literate classes shared a common education, to some degree a common world view and as a result at least some common cultural-political aims. They grew up in the cultural late Middle Ages, they were often in contact with the developments that we call the Renaissance, they were likely to correspond with other members of the Christian Humanist movement, and they sought to triangulate their views with what we call the Reformation. When Marot was in his well-known 153536 exile in Ferrara, he moved (as D. J. Shaw French Studies 52, 1998 has already pointed out) in Humanist circles. No wonder then that Wursten argues that Marot took very seriously the business of translating this book of Hebrew scripture. In a clear link to issues associated with the study of medieval literature, the problems with regard to hapax legomena and obscure turns of phrase to be found in inter alia Chaucer, Langland and Béroul are also present in Marot. M. A. Screech (one of the key scholars, alongside C.A. Mayer, and G. Defaux, whose views Wursten investigates), has already demanded what exactly "il a mangé le lard" means (and Wursten usefully explores this expression).
Wursten studies the successive versions of Marot's Psalm paraphrases using historical, philological, and theological techniques, and offers as his conclusion that the poet was interested in reaching a consistent, literary, and historically reliable versification of the Psalms, something that automatically challenged the convention of a Christological exegesis. Clément Marot and Religion dubs this process "de- theologising:" "The hermeneutics behind Marot's Psalm translations (borrowed from Martin Bucer, shared by Calvin) not only resulted in a thorough historicising and humanising of the Psalter, it was also a crucial step in demythologising the Psalms as part of holy Scripture (369)." This observation can hardly be too strongly emphasised, as one might add that this development to which Wursten draws attention, drove a wedge into the relationship between New and Old Testaments that had been a key presupposition of Christian theology. As such it was a step towards what one might loosely call "Enlightenment" attitudes.
Wursten also shows ways in which Marot tried to make his implicit exegesis tie in more closely with Calvin's explicit one. Cross referencing to the exegetical work of Kimhi, Ibn Ezra and Martin Bucer (vide Becker Clement Marots Psalmenbersetzung, 1921) suggests sources for Marot's hermeneutical framework. This is linked to the "Hebrew truth" convictions of Lefèbre d'Etaples, whose rather tense relationship with Erasmus is well known. The study, not surprisingly, thus locates Marot within the context of Christian Humanists, that bigger picture within which (as mentioned above) both Renaissance and Reformation can best be understood. However, it goes further than that.
After analysing the form and idiom of the paraphrases, Wursten declares that Marot was influenced by Calvin but would not break with Rome. Calvin had no respect for the 'Nicodemites' whose ecclesiology led them to sitting on the fence. Nevertheless, while Marot collaborated with Calvin in Geneva in 1543, he could not or would not choose between Rome and Geneva. Wursten uses Calvin's term, but distinguishes it or perhaps defends it from the use made of it in Carlo Ginzburg's 1970 study Il Nicodemismo, in which Lefèbre d'Etaples is speculatively fingered, a work curiously absent from Wursten's bibliography.
This is not a light read, nor a fast one. It is a careful, detailed assessment both of Marot's writing and of the secondary literature. The book includes a good-sized, up-to-date bibliography but it is disappointing that the only index is of Marot's poems. For a book of this size, density and price, greater support from indexing would have been welcome.