Contenu du sommaire : Réforme et poésie en Europe aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles

The Lutheran Reformation had a considerable impact on the development of German literature and especially poetry. But it also turned that poetry towards an almost exclusive religious way, as the importance of choral and of meditation poetry shows. In the middle of the 17th century however, poetic production has blossomed out also in secular ranges. At the beginning of the 18th century, the liturgical function of poetry (including sometimes its polemic character) has largely been replaced by a very personal expression of individual faith.

It was not until after the sixteenth century that the Reformation from central Europe initiated in English poetry new trends characterized not so much by historical commitment as by a strong allegorical lyricism resulting in a metaphorical religion of the Book. Not only did the Bible become the natural cornerstone of any poetry - the poet as a new psalmist starting an amazingly casual dialogue with God - but this poetry consequently developed into an articulate celebration of the Word, while poetic writing kept combining Spirit and wit into ever more elaborate conceits of the Book.

The calvinian Reformation had a great influence on French literature during the 16th century, mostly on poetry which it contributed to revive. Through his theological commentaries, Calvin reflected very precisely on biblical style and on the possibility to reform poetry by imitating David's Psalms. In a discontinuous way, his reflection formed a kind of poetical manifesto, which became a reference for French protestant poets. This article aims at drawing the main points of this Protestant poetics, and at examining it in the light of religious lyric poetry at the end of the century.

The biblical character of Jonas is an eloquent example of the scope of reformed poetics in the 16th century. While Jonas is still typologized as a harbinger of Christ and the redemption, his prayer gives rise to lyrical retellings which are at once a personal and a collective appropriation of the figure of the man chosen for salvation, within a new form of biblical hermeneutics combined with poetics inherited from Marot and Beza. Jonas is equally celebrated as the bearer of the Word of God, and as the foremost prophet of penitence. Aubigné succeeded in transforming the Calvinist scheme of divine vocation, with a prophetic function that the chosen one first challenges then faces up to, into a complex human portrait which is both original and typically reformed, in which God's chosen prophet is also a poet with a preaching mission.

The article re-examines the polemics between Theodore Beza and Gilbert Génébrard over the question of the Huguenot poet's versified Latin paraphrases of the Psalms (1579) and the Song of Solomon (1584). The two controversialists have similar interpretations of the second book, our sole focus here, in terms of both the allegorical method they adopt and the ecclesiastical meaning they attribute to the bucolic parable foreshadowing Christ and the Church. In other words, the controversy is not so much about dogma as poetics and ethics; the Hebrew scholar and philologist maintains that there is only one type of sacred prosody suited to versifying the Bible in Latin, while the poet allows himself to use various lyrical meters. This only goes to show how, throughout his life, Beza was first and foremost a poet.

Under the Edict of Nantes (1598-1685), the signs of confessional affiliation in religious poetry by French Protestants became less obvious and not as easy to identify and make sense of. This phenomenon can be partly explained by an internalizing of norms in a controversial context, which tends to marginalize, eventually to suppress, any form of transgression; but it is mainly the sign of the self-limitating of the Christian muse's domain. This article aims at explaining this self-concealment, by replacing it in the socio-historical context which was that of French Protestants, and relating it to a process of integration into a literary space which tends to impose a “proper” Christian discourse.