Untitled - Monoskop

GRANT OF PRIVILEGE AND PERMISSION TO PRINT
Presumably the chancery assumed that applicants knew the law and that they
would make it their business to obtain the required certificate of orthodoxy
from the Faculty before putting the book on sale. Only one of these grants
mentions having seen an advis of the Faculty (CH 1523, 5). The applicant in
this instance was a foreigner.
Could securing a privilege from the chancery enable the beneficiary then to
disregard a negative reply from the Faculty? There is nothing to suggest that
he would have been immune from prosecution had he published the offending
book in these circumstances. A 'conflict of powers' has indeed been postulated
in the case of the Heures de nostre dame translates en Francoys et mises en rihtme, by
Pierre Gringore alias Mere Sotte, for which the author obtained a privilege 10
October 1525 from the chancery, then at Lyon (CH 1525, 2). 1 How could this
privilege have been granted, when the Faculty of Theology had decided some
time before against allowing the book to be printed? Was not this an attempt
to have the Faculty's decision overridden or circumvented, by securing royal
Letters Patent in the author's favour? Certainly no one knew the privilege
system better than Gringore. His had been the first privilege ever granted to a
French author, twenty years before (PR 1505, i ), and, as a trusted publicist of
the Crown, he had been granted several in the intervening years. But a
manoeuvre on his part to play offone authority against another is unlikely. He
was by this time the Vaudement Herald to Antoine, duke of Lorraine, and his
translation was dedicated to the duchess, Renee de Bourbon. And it was the
duke, a pillar of orthodoxy, like all his family, who had submitted the
translation to the Faculty of Theology in Paris, possibly as a precaution
against a work of this kind, which might be open to criticism as it stood being
official in his service and with a dedication to his
published by an important
wife. At the duke's request, the Faculty appointed two of its members,
Francois de Combles and Nicolas Ensche, to examine the work on 24 July
in the context ofa
I523. 2
Following their report, the Faculty made its decision,
heated debate on the question of allowing French translations of the Bible.
There had never been any question of preventing Books of Hours from
circulating in the vernacular, though a verse translation might give rise to
some licence. Gringore's personal orthodoxy was never queried. The theo-
1
F. M. Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne: a bibliographical study of books in French censured by the
Faculty of Theology of the university of Paris 1520-1551, Travaux d'humanisme et Renaissance, 172
(Geneva, 1979), p. 79. I think the suspicions here expressed about the form of the privilege are
groundless. The chancery was perfectly competent to issue such a grant in the king's name
while his mother was acting as Regent (see above, p. 33), and the clauses beginning 'Et en cas
de debat . . .' do not imply that trouble was expected but are legal formulae found in many
chancery privileges, e.g. that for L'hystoire du sainct greaal (CH 1515, i; see below, pp. 33 and
142).
2 Farge, Biographical Register of Paris doctors of Theology 1500-1536, pp. 106 and 156. Cf. the same
author's Orthodoxy and Reform in early reformation France: the Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500-1543
(Leiden, 1985), pp. 178-9.
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