"Dear Doctor Bouchart, I am no Lutheran": a reassessment of Clément Marot's Epistle to Monsieur Bouchart.

Abstract

Marot's epistle to Monsieur Bouchart, a doctor of Theology, is usually interpreted as referring to his imprisonment in 1526. In it, an accusation of Lutheranism is connected with a denunciation by an offended woman and/or a breaking of the Lenten fast. In this essay the author first shows that this interpretation leaves a number of fundamental questions unanswered, in particular concerning a course of events that has to be surmised, even when corrections and fine-tuning of recent scholarship are taken into account. He suggests that one sees this persistent aporia as a challenge to reconsider the usual view. He examines and abandons the allocation of this epistle to Marot's 1526 imprisonment and instead interprets the epistle with the eyes of the first readers, the Parisian population of 1534. An interpretation beginning from the publication date resolves many of the unanswered question quite naturally and the content then appears to be surprisingly topical.