Bonaventure Des Periers (†1544) did not write the ‘Nouvelles Récréations et joyeux devis’ (1558)
This one is pretty obvious when you think about it
An article of mine was published a little while ago in the Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance.1 You can go find it there, or else you can read this summary of it in English.
The Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis is a collection of ninety tales, some of them funny and most in fairly bad taste. For example, there’s one where a pregnant bride’s husband goes off on a trip three weeks after their wedding night, and their neighbour André convinces her that a little more work is necessary to finish off the baby’s ears. In another one a councillor gives his old mule to his groom and asks him to find him a new and younger one; a little while later the groom sells it back to him in disguise for thirty écus, explaining he found one similar enough to the old one that it won’t take any getting used to. In one a young man dresses up as a girl and joins a convent, but runs into trouble when the abbess, wondering why some of the nuns are getting pregnant, lines them all up naked for inspection. (Hilarity ensues.)
The collection was first published in 1558 by Robert Granjon in Lyon. Here is the title page:2
As you can see the name of the author was given as “feu Bonavanture des Periers valet de chambre de la Reine de Navarre”. Des Periers was a real person who actually served as valet de chambre to Queen Marguerite of Navarre until his death in 1544. He is famous for writing the Cymbalum mundi (1537), a set of four unfunny dialogues that were falsely reputed to carry a secret subversive message. After his death, a collection of his writings was also published by his friend and fellow valet Antoine Du Moulin.3 But the Nouvelles récréations are the work on which his modern reputation primarily rests. They have been reedited in dozens of editions and translated into as many languages.4 Hundreds of articles and dozens of books have been written about their literary qualities and their relationship to the other works of Des Periers.
Therefore it is somewhat problematic for his reputation (and for that of modern literary scholarship) that Des Periers certainly did not write the Nouvelles récréations. This was already asserted in the sixteenth century by Estienne Tabourot and other authors, who nevertheless did not provide evidence for their denial.5 Then, in the early eighteenth century, it was independently noticed by two scholars, Prosper Marchand and Bernard de La Monnoye, that a great many historical details in the tales are obviously datable to after the death of Des Periers in 1544. For example, in nouvelles 5 and 66 there are references to the Tiers livre of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, which was first published in 1546. In nouvelle 17 the famous jurist Pierre Lizet is referred to as “recently deceased”; he died in 1554. In nouvelle 27 the bishop René du Bellay is likewise referred to as “recently deceased”; he died in 1556. In nouvelle 47 there is a mention of the “late king François”, who died in 1547. In nouvelle 66 there is a citation from a book called De archa Noé by Jean Borrel; this book was published in 1554.
And so on. The natural conclusion is that the Nouvelles recreations were not written during the lifetime of Des Periers, but sometime between his death and the publication of the book in 1558; probably pretty close to 1558 as a matter of fact. Perhaps, as La Monnoye seems in places to suggest, it is possible that although the tales containing anachronisms are not by Des Periers, the rest are still attributable to him: but that assumption seems gratuitous to me, and motivated less by evidence than a reluctance to depart from Granjon’s statement of the book’s author. I want to underline at this point that false attributions are nothing unusual; there is nothing remarkable about a sixteenth-century publisher putting the wrong name on the title page of his book, by ignorance or deceit.
Charles Nodier, famous romantic author of the 19th century, is responsible for overcoming the inconvenient evidence of the anachronisms and ratifying the attribution of the book to Des Periers for modern generations. In 1839 he wrote an article for the Revue des Deux Mondes in which he supplied an easy explanation for how the Nouvelles recreations could still be considered genuine:6
I freely allow that Desperiers, who died before 1544, could not have spoken of the death of president Lizet, deceased in 1554; or that of René du Bellay, bishop of Le Mans, who did not cease living until 1556. The same goes for two or three parallel cases which La Monnoye has collected before me, and probably for some others which escaped us both. But what does this prove? These phrases: recently deceased, deceased bishop of Le Mans, etc., are only insertions which a careful publisher lets fall into his text to certify its authenticity [sic!] or to bring it up to date.
This is a nice-sounding line of reasoning. But it must be very firmly rejected, just like La Monnoye’s suggestion of tales gathered from different authors. If there is independent reason to believe that a text is authentic, then it is perfectly acceptable to put brackets around certain passages within it that seem to be spurious. But, as is the case here, when there is no such independent proof, and the question of authenticity still remains to be decided, it is totally illegitimate—and a fine performance of question-begging—to dismiss the passages mustered against authenticity as mere interpolations.
Just imagine what you could do with Nodier’s method: there is pretty much no text that could ever be proved a forgery on textual grounds. You could prove that the Donation of Constantine was genuine, because all the anachronistic words flagged by Valla were inserted by unscrupulous in the middle ages. Or else that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had their basis in a real document written by the Jews, albeit they were modified and expanded by their Russian editors to make them more lurid. Yet for nearly two centuries after Nodier’s article, the consensus of scholarly opinion has embraced his defence of the Nouvelles récréations’ authenticity. In my article I cite a train of scholars repeating his argument down to our own day; sometimes even to the point of plagiarism. Publishers of the sixteenth century were loosey-goosey people, the famous experts tell us: it’s no surprise if they added some up-to-date references to their manuscript of the Nouvelles récréations.
Well, loosey-goosey as these publishers were, I’m not sure why that’s an argument for their being flexible about anachronisms, but not for their readiness to put a false author on the cover of their books. In any case, an argument like this over general habits of printers is pointless: it is necessary to look at the evidence in this specific case. The fact of the matter is that there is no evidence whatsoever for Des Periers’s authorship of the book. There is only the bare statement of the publisher that he wrote it, made fourteen years after his death. Nor did Granjon supply any reasons for this statement, or anything but the vaguest explanation of how he himself came by the manuscript:
He thanks “some virtuous person” for saving the Nouvelles récréations from oblivion. It doesn’t even seem like Granjon himself knew who this person was! So I think it’s fair to cease treating his statement as evidence for Des Periers’ authorship. It is nothing more than an assertion; and assertions do not ripen into proof by the passage of centuries.
I think I even know where Granjon got the name “Bonavanture des Periers” from in the first place: the Recueil des œuvres de feu Bonaventure Des Periers, which was published by his fellow Lyonnese printer Jean de Tournes in 1544, right after the death of the author.
I think he borrowed Des Periers’s name and title from the title page of this book, down to the prefix feu, which describes someone who has recently died—apt enough in 1544, but no longer in 1558.
So in conclusion: there was a book published in 1558 that was attributed to Bonaventure Des Periers. There is no evidence, apart from the publisher’s assertion, that he wrote it. And on the other side of the ledger there are a great many details in the book that prove that he cannot have written the book as we have it. This leaves us with two options. Either (like the vast majority of historians and “literary critics”) we can search diligently for reasons why after all Des Periers is the real author of (at least most of) the book. Or else, far more simply, and as I think we must, we can conclude once and for all that the common attribution of the Nouvelles récréations is baseless and false.
Jonathan Nathan, ‘Les Nouvelles récréations (1558) ne sont pas de Bonaventure Des Périers (†1544)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85, no. 3 (2023): pp. 601–33.
One of the most immediately noticeable things about this book is the typeface that Granjon set it in: it was his trademark lettre française, more commonly known today as Civilité (the title of another book printed by Granjon.) Designed to imitate the handwriting of the time, it is very beautiful but almost illegible before you get a little practice with it.
Antoine Du Moulin, ed., Recueil des œuvres de feu Bonaventure Des Periers, Vallet de Chambre de Treschrestienne Princesse Marguerite de France, Royne de Navarre (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1544).
See e. g. John A. Rea, trans., ‘Cock of the Walk—Ribald Classic’, Playboy 6, no. 1 (January 1959), p. 63.
Estienne Tabourot, Les bigarrures du Seigneur Des Accordz (Paris: Jehan Richer,
1583), fol. 20r.
Charles Nodier, ‘Bonaventure Desperiers’, Revue des Deux Mondes 20, Quatrième Série (1 November 1839): pp. 329–51 [350].