Reforming French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers

Reforming French Culture is a ground-breaking work on the literary genre of Reformation satire--colloquial, obscene, scatological--designed to mock the excesses as well as the essence of the Roman Catholic rite and hierarchy. Enticingly, Hoffmann proposes that while romance, with its episodic, heroic narrative, is the literary genre of Counter-Reformation, satire is the genre of Reformation. This minor category of Renaissance French literature is an unstudied continent that plays a key role...