Francis I’s Royal Readers

Abstract

The arrival of Francis I’s Royal Readers on the cultural scene of Paris in 1530 was perhaps less a triumphal entry than, as Marc Fumaroli has described it, a Trojan horse on the slopes of Sainte-Geneviève.¹ The upshot was in marked contrast to the earlier foundation of Greek studies at Oxford and Cambridge in 1516–19, when the appointments of Richard Foxe and Richard Croke as university readers in Greek seem to have carried none of the threat the Sorbonne perceived from the Royal Readers.² But then, the political climates in which these events unfolded differed sharply. By 1531 in England, the break with Rome meant that doctrinal and legal disputes would now rest with Henry VIII as the ‘Supreme Governor’; in France, the pressures towards a similar rupture had been largely checked by the Concordat of Bologna (1516), while the Faculty of Theology of Paris continued to exert its monolithic sway over questions of Church doctrine. The Sorbonne, whose blessing Henry VIII would seek without success in his matrimonial wars, was the same body, led by Noël Béda, that would challenge the royally sanctioned authority of the lecteurs royaux.