George Hoffmann
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198808763
- eISBN:
- 9780191852138
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198808763.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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 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.Less
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.
