Less Rightly Said

Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that "corrected vices" but "spared the person"--yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas.