Scandalizing the Monarchy

This book is a cultural and theatrical history of the community of Parisian law clerks, the Bazoche, between 1460 and 1560. The clerks were servants of, and apprentices to, increasingly powerful lawyers who represented the crown in the Parlement, the hub of the state. While the Bazoche inherited solemnity and a sense of civic responsibility from its official employment, and possessed its own privileged jurisdiction, it was simultaneously a festive kingdom which mixed mirth with biting political satire. A socially diverse organisation, it was a conduit between high and low, a tribune of the people. The book examines the judicial, educational, and festive activities of the Bazoche, before devoting itself to a detailed exploration of its production of carnivalesque fools' plays (sotties) as topical performance events over four consecutive reigns. As a richly opportunistic political genre, the sottie's enactment of counterfeit kingship and satirical mimicry of kingly discourse and ritual provides fertile material for an analysis of royal cultural production. The sots subject both policy and ideology to forensic appraisal. The royal state is on trial at a festive tribunal. Such outspokenness was variously subject to censorship, policing, acculturation and repression. The book traces the authorities' reaction to the sottie's challenges and the genre's decline as absolutism established itself.