Gérard Roussel was a prominent French ecclesiastical leader in the sixteenth century and yet is little known. The Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment historical narratives have all ignored him. A member of the renewal-minded Circle of Meaux from 1521 to 1525, he collaborated with the famous humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, to produce an evangelical preaching manual. This study examines its emphases. When this Circle was crushed, Roussel fled to Strasbourg and admired the Reformation taking place there. Marguerite de Navarre recalled him to France and became his patron in various ways. He translated into French a children’s catechism originally published by the German reformer Johann Brenz. The translation puzzles readers today, because it is too complicated for children. This study suggests it was targeted at the royal children to influence their future rule. Roussel became the Lenten preacher in Paris in 1533, experiencing great success. John Calvin was one of his admirers. While traditionalists reacted with tumult, the crowds flocking to hear Roussel suggest that the French evangelicals were more significant in the first third of the century than is commonly understood. They offered a “third option” in France, in addition to the traditionalists and the rising Protestants. Consistently, these evangelicals sought reform of the French church and society through gospel preaching and irenic living. They strongly rejected church schism. Roussel accepted the Bishopric of Oloron in 1536, where he diligently taught, preached and modeled his irenic evangelical emphases. Calvin viciously turned on him as one practising dissimulation. Roussel prepared both a guide for episcopal visitation of a diocese and an extensive catechism for theological students that had the same goal as the preaching manual produced in Meaux. Traditionalist opposition ensured they would not be published, but we have a manuscript available. This study examines them, finding that Roussel was intent on building bridges between all reformers, both Protestant and Catholic. He avoids, as a key example, embracing any of the hotly contested positions on the Lord’s Supper that surrounded him. He instead constructed a simplified biblical Mass, consistent with much traditional piety, but clearly emphasizing gospel preaching as well. Killed in an attack by a Catholic traditionalist in 1555, his life points to the French evangelical embrace of both gospel preaching and irenic living. Recent scholarship has discovered that such irenic impulses had a greater impact on Christian society in this era than has often been recognized. This study deepens that awareness. / Graduate / 0330 / 0335 / 0320 / aschoeber@shaw.ca

Traditionally, Arthur Johnston has been judged proxime accessit to George Buchanan in the world of Scottish neo-Latin poetry, and particularly in the versification of the Book of Psalms. The thesis offers a counterpoint to that theme. More of his poetry came under scrutiny at the close of the nineteenth century, when an edition of his Parerga and Epigrammata of 1632, turned scholarly attention to his secular poems. This study examines the poems written between 1599 and 1622 during Johnston’s peregrenatio academica in Europe – poems which depict him at the moment of his emergence onto the public stage, and which offer insights into his life, and the worlds he occupied, during those years. Part one of the thesis will examine his early years and his move into the academic world in Aberdeen and at Heidelberg University. Part two will consider the years he passed as a teacher of philosophy at the Huguenot Academy in Sedan, the independent principality on the northern border of France. It will look, too, at the evidence of his year spent in Padua, where he studied to become a physician. Part three will focus on the years 1619-22 when his longest secular poems were composed. He wrote and published with an eye to achieving a post in the medical circle around James VI and I. The thesis concludes by considering the retreat he made from Europe and London to his home in Aberdeen, and looks briefly at one of the small poems he wrote in 1623-24. Throughout, themes emerge of Johnston’s irenic preferences, and his response to the disturbance to intellectual life brought about by Calvinist division, and by the crisis heralded by the Bohemian Revolt.