George Hoffmann
University of Michigan, Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty Member
Global Montaigne. Hommage à Philippe Desan (University of Chicago) 25 juin 2021 : 17h-19h : Visioconférence Conférence invitée de Philippe Desan : « Montaigne : objet d’étude global » Avec la participation de Amy Graves (University of... more
Global Montaigne. Hommage à Philippe Desan (University of Chicago)
25 juin 2021 : 17h-19h : Visioconférence
Conférence invitée de Philippe Desan : « Montaigne : objet d’étude global »
Avec la participation de Amy Graves (University of Buffalo), Véronique Ferrer (Université Paris-Nanterre), George Hoffmann (University of Michigan).
La rencontre aura lieu le 25 juin de 17 h à 19 h sur la plateforme WebEx.
Lien : https://univlyon3.webex.com/univlyon3/j.php?MTID=m40fcef9f0eac6553c28d1e2ab21c6146
25 juin 2021 : 17h-19h : Visioconférence
Conférence invitée de Philippe Desan : « Montaigne : objet d’étude global »
Avec la participation de Amy Graves (University of Buffalo), Véronique Ferrer (Université Paris-Nanterre), George Hoffmann (University of Michigan).
La rencontre aura lieu le 25 juin de 17 h à 19 h sur la plateforme WebEx.
Lien : https://univlyon3.webex.com/univlyon3/j.php?MTID=m40fcef9f0eac6553c28d1e2ab21c6146
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The case of one “serial convert,” Hugues Sureau du Rosier, provides the focus for this study of shifting confessional identities. Du Rosier, a Catholic-turned-Protestant who became a Protestant-turned-Catholic before returning once again... more
The case of one “serial convert,” Hugues Sureau du Rosier, provides the focus for this study of shifting confessional identities. Du Rosier, a Catholic-turned-Protestant who became a Protestant-turned-Catholic before returning once again to the reformed faith, illustrates the phenomenon of “serial conversion” that exposes stress lines in the early modern period’s efforts to consolidate stable confessional identities. Du Rosier himself, however, managed to reconcile his apostasy through identifying with the figure of Peter, both a lapsed apostle who denied Christ and the stable “rock” upon whom the Church erected itself. Peter’s succession in fact constituted the primary justification for du Rosier’s lingering attraction to Catholicism. Inventive reading practices of the Bible like this one reveal how sola scriptura could diversify the kinds of stories early moderns told about themselves. The providential micro-history du Rosier constructed for himself participates in a broader Reformation tension between conflicting claims of succession and substitution, that is, on the one hand, a claim of continuity with apostolic doctrine, and, on the other, a claim of rupture with the medieval traditions embodied in the Roman Church. The continuity that the Reformation asserted depended upon identificational reading practices such as those du Rosier practiced.
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Abstract Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective... more
Abstract
Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective serialization that suggested a fictional continuity. If part publicity stunt, however, these satires also cannily exploited and extended the reformed theological concept of “communication” by which the traditional corporeal understanding of the social body, figured in Communion, was replaced with spiritual connection to Jesus and, ultimately, to fellow worshipers. Satires’ emphasis on foreignness and distance from one’s neighbors in particular facilitated a kind of “stranger sociability” with fellow reformed readers they did not know. This theological origin suggests that the modern public sphere began with the communication of the Mass before it transformed into mass communication.
Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective serialization that suggested a fictional continuity. If part publicity stunt, however, these satires also cannily exploited and extended the reformed theological concept of “communication” by which the traditional corporeal understanding of the social body, figured in Communion, was replaced with spiritual connection to Jesus and, ultimately, to fellow worshipers. Satires’ emphasis on foreignness and distance from one’s neighbors in particular facilitated a kind of “stranger sociability” with fellow reformed readers they did not know. This theological origin suggests that the modern public sphere began with the communication of the Mass before it transformed into mass communication.
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“Atheism” retains an uncomfortable, parochial quality that suggests less a condition of conscience than a sort of special-interest group. “Secularist” and then “agnostic” arose as more acceptable options in the nineteenth century, and,... more
“Atheism” retains an uncomfortable, parochial quality that suggests less a condition of conscience than a sort of special-interest group. “Secularist” and then “agnostic” arose as more acceptable options in the nineteenth century, and, today, thirty percent of those who deny God's existence still refuse to identify themselves as atheists. According to a recent Pew survey, barely three percent of the American population confess to being either atheists or more acceptable agnostics. The term's failure to establish itself reflects its historical status as a parochial category within religious discourse: sixteenth-century “atheism” was distinctly not a forerunner of liberal freethinking, neither practically nor even theoretically. Instead, it served the cause of confessional partisanship as a means by which to characterize and reshape not unbelief, but belief.
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In spite of Montaigne’s dismissal of his schooling as a “failure,” significant features of his thought can be traced to his humanist education. Not only did he acquire literacy in French at school, he picked up a comic outlook from the... more
In spite of Montaigne’s dismissal of his schooling as a “failure,” significant features of his thought can be traced to his humanist education. Not only did he acquire literacy in French at school, he picked up a comic outlook from the plays of Terence in which he acted. Further, George Buchanan exposed the young Montaigne to reformation ideas. Later, Marc-Antoine Muret’s Julius Caesar would school Montaigne in displaying confidence in face of fortune’s vicissitudes, an attitude that he would incorporate into the “heroic” skepticism of the Essays. More generally, he adopted images, language, and postures from the stage as a way of understanding the life as a comédie humaine. Montaigne, however, preferred to award a determining influence for his adult character to the infancy he spent in a rural village.
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Since Alan Bray first taught us to look at early modern friendship with new eyes, Montaigne’s “Of friendship” has acquired a sort of canonical status. The essay now figures as an exemplary witness of pre-modern European masculine culture.... more
Since Alan Bray first taught us to look at early modern friendship with new eyes, Montaigne’s “Of friendship” has acquired a sort of canonical status. The essay now figures as an exemplary witness of pre-modern European masculine culture. I question how well Montaigne practiced the friendship of which he could speak so movingly. This essay sheds new light on the practical ends such idealistic friendships in fact fulfilled in the early modern France of Montaigne's time, uses which may go some way toward explaining their popularity. This essay also ponders how Montaigne transformed perfect friendship’s practical, if hidden, function into a claim for absolute exclusivity that breaks with the openness one generally finds in the rest of the Essays and must ultimately lead one to qualify the popular impression of its author’s affability.
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Secular and religious thinking, both, have tended to privilege acting on principle over responding to circumstances. This has allowed proponents for the separation of Church and State to argue that one can surrender matters of outward... more
Secular and religious thinking, both, have tended to privilege acting on principle over responding to circumstances. This has allowed proponents for the separation of Church and State to argue that one can surrender matters of outward conduct in public to the State without compromising one’s “inner” beliefs. Yet, this secular conception of belief, isolated from broader social commitments, can also lead to radical expressions of faith. It is worth questioning, then, whether secularism’s configuration of belief as a free-floating mental state does not, in the long run, prove more dangerous than did culture-bound religious differences. Anti-humanism need to look beyond the secular-religious configuration of belief to embrace conceptions of the good based on practice.
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The first of three projected parts on Montaigne's religious politics, this essay presents the text of the profession of faith Montaigne made in 1562. I analyze this profession with respect to theological issues in the 1540s, religious... more
The first of three projected parts on Montaigne's religious politics, this essay presents the text of the profession of faith Montaigne made in 1562. I analyze this profession with respect to theological issues in the 1540s, religious conflict in the 1560s, and Montaigne's place in the political landscape of Bordeaux's Parlement.
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Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective... more
Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective serialization that suggested a fictional continuity. If part publicity stunt, however, these satires also cannily exploited and extended the reformed theological concept of “communication” by which the traditional corporeal understanding of the social body, figured in Communion, was replaced with spiritual connection to Jesus and, ultimately, to fellow worshipers. Satires’ emphasis on foreignness and distance from one’s neighbors in particular facilitated a kind of “stranger sociability” with fellow reformed readers they did not know. This theological origin suggests that the modern public sphere began with the communication of the Mass before it transformed into mass communication.
Research Interests: Persuasion and Publicity
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Reformation satire grew out of the humanist reinvigoration of classical models but abandoned their convivial tone when reformers targeted Roman Eucharistic worship. Insofar as the Eucharist symbolized the social body, attacks against it... more
Reformation satire grew out of the humanist reinvigoration of classical models but abandoned their convivial tone when reformers targeted Roman Eucharistic worship. Insofar as the Eucharist symbolized the social body, attacks against it could only be understood by readers as attacks against themselves. Iconoclasm drove reformers to this measure because the doctrine of “real presence” authorized reformers’ (disputed) charges of Roman idolatry. Efforts to mock the consequences of this doctrine pushed satires to vulgar and scatological extremes. The result proved an inimical posture which invalidated these works’ purported claims to persuade readers, making them instead serve as rites of passage by which reformers assumed an antagonistic role with respect to moderate French Gallicans.
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Hoffmann George. Olivier Guerrier, Quand «les poètes feignent » : «fantasie » et fiction dans les Essais de Montaigne, Paris, Champion, 2002, coll. «Études montaignistes » n° 40. In: Littératures 51,2004. Mérimée. pp. 192-193
Research Interests: Art and Littérature
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As the conflict deepened in France, reformers found themselves forced to adopt a more clandestine posture. Satires consequently grew more obscure as they increasingly served as an in-joke for a beset coterie. So, although outlandish... more
As the conflict deepened in France, reformers found themselves forced to adopt a more clandestine posture. Satires consequently grew more obscure as they increasingly served as an in-joke for a beset coterie. So, although outlandish satire did continue, it retreated from public dispute and acquired a tragic undertone of martyrdom. The fondness for allusions to the Odyssey betrays French reformers’ conflicted feelings over their exilic aspirations figured in references to Exodus. Satire remained one of the ways in which they could indulge nostalgia for their unreformed past, even as they demarcated themselves from it. The uneasy conjunction of Odyssey and Exodus combines into the unlikely figure of the reformer as “pilgrim,” a spiritual traveler who might one day return home.
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Geographic foreignness (more often imagined than not) could also transform into temporal alienation to the degree that reformers’ ideal of resuscitating the primitive Church of apostolic times implied they belonged to another time.... more
Geographic foreignness (more often imagined than not) could also transform into temporal alienation to the degree that reformers’ ideal of resuscitating the primitive Church of apostolic times implied they belonged to another time. Temporal estrangement frequently figured itself as “incredulousness” at the mores of contemporary France. Though at times seeming skeptical in spirit, this incredulity proved one of “holy horror.” Thus, the Reformation’s sense of historical detachment did not lead to modern disenchantment. Although the religious conflicts could drive away some French sympathizers (Rabelais proves particularly instructive in this regard), Reformation attacks on credulity aimed at the traditional understanding of religion as an exchange of debts and did not harbor hidden secular impulses.
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Research Interests: Art and Montaigne Studies
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Research Interests: Art and Montaigne Studies
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French reformers shared language, culture, and tradition with their unreformed neighbors. To distinguish themselves, they began by caricaturing Roman rites as foreign: imported from Italy, they proved arcane, superstitious, and pagan. In... more
French reformers shared language, culture, and tradition with their unreformed neighbors. To distinguish themselves, they began by caricaturing Roman rites as foreign: imported from Italy, they proved arcane, superstitious, and pagan. In an era of overlapping jurisdictions when “foreign” did not possess the clear cut it does today, reformers fashioned a stark sense of “outsider” culture through reworking the terms of barbarian, savage, stranger, and exotic. The fantastic voyage device coordinated all these elements, but it also worked to make the reformer ultimately a stranger in a strange land. Reformers’ own sense of themselves as foreigners in France deepened their investment in the Pauline imperative to be “in the world but not of it,” thus creating a lushly imaginative experience of spiritual alienation.
Research Interests: Alienation and Barbarian
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AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: What Is Theory? / Zahi Zalloua 1. From Amateur Gentleman to Gentleman Amateur / George Hoffmann 2. Theory and Practice in "Du pedantisme" / Eric MacPhail3. Fashion / John O'Brien 4. Duty,... more
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: What Is Theory? / Zahi Zalloua 1. From Amateur Gentleman to Gentleman Amateur / George Hoffmann 2. Theory and Practice in "Du pedantisme" / Eric MacPhail3. Fashion / John O'Brien 4. Duty, Conciliation, and Ontology in the Essais / Jacob Vance 5. Montaigne Parrhesiastes: Foucault's Fearless Speech and Truthtelling in the Essays / Reinier Leushuis 6. "Qu'est-ce que la critique?" La Boetie, Montaigne, Foucault / Marc Schachter 7. Confession or Parrhesia? Foucault after Montaigne / Virginia Krause 8. Nasty, Brutish, and Long: The Life of Montaigne's Essais in Hobbes's Theory of Contract / David l. Sedley 9. Cannibalizing Experience in the Essais / Andrea Frisch 10. Rereading Montaigne's Memorable Stories: Sexuality and Gender in Vitry-le-Francois / Edith J. Benkov 11. Theorizing Sex and Gender in Montaigne / Todd W. Reeser 12. For a Theory of Forms in Montaigne / Philippe Desan 13. Fadaises & Dictons / Tom Conley 14. "Mettre la theorique avant la practique": Montaigne and the Practice of Theory / Richard L. Regosin Bibliography Contributors Index
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Though often read as proto-ethnographic documents, French reformed accounts of the New World reveal their indebtedness to the exoticizing tropes of satiric literature. A growing sensitivity to custom as a function of place and to... more
Though often read as proto-ethnographic documents, French reformed accounts of the New World reveal their indebtedness to the exoticizing tropes of satiric literature. A growing sensitivity to custom as a function of place and to reformers’ own mobility, both geographical and mental, led to a precocious notion of universality—church could be anywhere one joined one’s hands in prayer. Far from merely disdaining “local” customs, reformers practiced keen forms of observation whose debt to traditional disciplined observance makes them count as a mode of worship, not an anticipation of scientific empiricism. Finally, satiric defamiliarization predisposed French reformers to accept their diasporic destiny.
Satire has recently re-emerged as a potent political tool, but it has played many different roles in the past. French reformers waged massive satire campaigns in the sixteenth century to little or no political effect and, even, to their... more
Satire has recently re-emerged as a potent political tool, but it has played many different roles in the past. French reformers waged massive satire campaigns in the sixteenth century to little or no political effect and, even, to their own disadvantage. Satiric forms nevertheless flourished because they fulfilled a devotional purpose. By portraying themselves as lonely travelers passing through the strange and exotic lands of Catholic custom, French reformers found a way to flesh out imaginatively the Pauline injunction to live in the world but not as part of it. The spiritual alienation cultivated in satiric literature allowed reformers to fashion themselves, after Calvin’s recommendation, as pilgrims in this world and confessional foreigners in their home country. At the same time, these satires’ self-presentation and their modes of address implied a reformed audience constituted by those who “got the joke.” The new communion entailed in laughing at Catholic excesses, modeled upo...
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... 43-7). Walter Raleigh, accused in his day as an atheist, also could question the soul's immortality ... reveal himself and thus toying with his father, is indeed cruel; as Auden famously remarked ... fashion, he claims... more
... 43-7). Walter Raleigh, accused in his day as an atheist, also could question the soul's immortality ... reveal himself and thus toying with his father, is indeed cruel; as Auden famously remarked ... fashion, he claims elsewhere that he does ask for them when they are not needed, Tout ...
<p>Although the schismatic and iconoclastic sensibilities visible in French reformed satires doomed the movement in France, a number of attitudes explored through the fantastic-voyage device spread into French culture generally.... more
<p>Although the schismatic and iconoclastic sensibilities visible in French reformed satires doomed the movement in France, a number of attitudes explored through the fantastic-voyage device spread into French culture generally. Montaigne illustrates how the French, exposed to such ideas earlier in their lives, assimilated their conclusions even as they rejected the Reformation. Montaigne's celebrated essay "Of Cannibals" turns both the surface imagery and the deeper structure of Reformation satire toward a new form of "inner distance" where one entertains considering oneself a stranger. Responding to reformers' emphasis on the contingency of custom and their new procedures of observation, the essay defamiliarizes the Mass through implicit comparison with the ceremony of cannibalism. Finally, Montaigne avails himself of "stranger sociability" in elaborating a new form of anonymous intimacy with his reader. France may have remained confessionally Catholic, but it became culturally reformed.</p>
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Secular and religious thinking, both, have tended to privilege acting on principle over responding to circumstances. This has allowed proponents for the separation of Church and State to argue that one can surrender matters of outward... more
Secular and religious thinking, both, have tended to privilege acting on principle over responding to circumstances. This has allowed proponents for the separation of Church and State to argue that one can surrender matters of outward conduct in public to the State without compromising one’s “inner” beliefs. Yet, this secular conception of belief, isolated from broader social commitments, can also lead to radical expressions of faith. It is worth questioning, then, whether secularism’s configuration of belief as a free-floating mental state does not, in the long run, prove more dangerous than did culture-bound religious differences. We need to look beyond the secular–religious configuration of belief to embrace conceptions of the good based on practice.
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Twenty original perspectives on such authors as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labe, and Helisenne de Crenne, as well as on less familiar works of religious polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, bibliophilism, and... more
Twenty original perspectives on such authors as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labe, and Helisenne de Crenne, as well as on less familiar works of religious polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, bibliophilism, and ichthyology.