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“Speaks my Cueur who wins in you” Charles de Sainte-Marthe (1512-1555?): the evangelical work ‘Parle mon Cueur who wins in you’ Charles de Sainte-Marthe (1512-1555?): the Evangelical work

Abstract

Charles de Sainte-Marthe's life journey, punctuated by as many condemnations and as banishments, is emblematic of the difficult conditions known by those traditionally referred to as the “Evangelicals”. Whereas since the famous Affair of the Placards harmony, still possible in Briçonnet’s time, does not prevail any longer, Sainte-Marthe, an admirer of Calvin's work, is committed to actively defending and stubbornly promoting a return to the “real faith”. Among his fellow students, the figure of Sainte-Marthe enjoys a special aura: he is a theologian, royal professor at the University of Poitiers, and this quality gives him a leading role in the evangelical movement. Indeed, his writings, and especially the works he composed in prison, testify to an original reflection on the three pillars of the Christianity: faith, hope and charity. Heir of the Lefèvre d’Étaples thought, Sainte-Marthe does not consider these three entities as habitus and, defending their inseparability, he renders inoperative the mercenary logic of Salvation through works. However, without adopting the opposite and extreme point of view of the sola fides of the Reformed, the Evangelical places the work of faith at the center of his thought: it is the proof of the living spirit of God acting in Man. Consequently, the intrinsic value of a Christian's literary, oratorical or political work is modified: it is the manifestation of the live faith ("foy vive") which is imposed and defined essentially as a cooperation of the spirit of God and Man. The performative nature of the evangelical work therefore becomes a fundamental case study.Drawing on the study of the poetic and oratory works of Sainte-Marthe, this work seeks to define the different spiritual, literary, linguistic and political stakes of the evangelical work. La Poesie françoise (1540), at the crossroads of the various aesthetic influences of the time, either inspired by Petrarch or Plato, is also the collection of an outcast who does not hesitate to express his anti-educational thinking and religious opinions. If the numerous epigrams, in turns pleasant or serious, sometimes become the sharp arrows of the outcast, other poems, especially the elegies, show how much the collection can be read as a true spiritual pilgrimage leading the poet and his reader to Virtue. This ideal is also expressed in a more concrete fashion by the friendly sphere drawn at the end of the collection, Le Livre de ses amys, where several poems written by the poet's friends are gathered. Friendship stands out here as a fundamental theme of Evangelism, since it is a question of recreating a community united around moral and spiritual values as well as around the same language: the French language, of which Sainte-Marthe became a true defender as early as 1540.Ten years later, we find the same stakes in the famous Oraison funèbre de Marguerite de Navarre that Sainte-Marthe, then a jurist, wrote the day after the death of his protector. The work, translated by its author into French, appears as the fulfillment of his evangelical thought: Marguerite, praised as tradition demands it, is sublimated as a model of virtue. Furthermore, the style of the eulogy, while it becomes a "mirror of the princesses", reveals the didactic but also strong political interest of this work, whose stake is to unite the evangelical community standing against the current of wordly thought.Finally, the stylistic study of Sainte-Marthe's works highlights the care taken by the evangelical to use simple, accessible, and French-language writing. In fact, his writings stand out as an essential milestone in the reflection that has accompanied, since 1539, the consecration of the French language as an administrative, judicial and national language.

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