The historical and cultural particularities of sixteenth-century France made interpretations of Homer of the period particularly rich in implications for a study of the interrelationship between textual and political authority in early modern Europe. While Homeric epic found political applications in other Renaissance states, notably those in Italy, nowhere else was Homer read in such a systematic and political fashion as in France. All of the writers considered in this book, from Guillaume Budé to Joachim Du Bellay and Etienne de la Boétie, from the Catholic Jean Begat to the Huguenot Jean de ... More

The historical and cultural particularities of sixteenth-century France made interpretations of Homer of the period particularly rich in implications for a study of the interrelationship between textual and political authority in early modern Europe. While Homeric epic found political applications in other Renaissance states, notably those in Italy, nowhere else was Homer read in such a systematic and political fashion as in France. All of the writers considered in this book, from Guillaume Budé to Joachim Du Bellay and Etienne de la Boétie, from the Catholic Jean Begat to the Huguenot Jean de Sponde and Montaigne, deliberately engaged the figure of Homer with the key religious and political events of their time. In so doing, the act of reading Homer, an authority on politics, became inseparable from engaging in a politics of authority, of debating the nature of that sovereignty and eventually questioning that sovereignty itself.