This article seeks to examine the representations of audiences in conflict in the abundant pamphleteer literature that flourished during the Wars of Religion. Drawing on Marc Angenot’s work on polemical rhetoric, as well as on the analyses of historians and literary critics, we are interested specifically in the genre of dialogue, as mobilized in the League pamphlet entitled Dialogue d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant, attributed to F. Cromé (1593). This text is distinctive for having been republished, with little reworking, by the League’s opponents, the Politiques, who therefore recognized the validity of the dialogue’s argumentation. This article sets out to discern specific modes of address and of making present the text’s target audiences, to reflect on the polemical weapons used to discredit the enemy, but also to examine the rhetorical purpose of this dialogue, which is indicative of a new relation, less argumentative and more performative, between reading publics and political conflict.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Holtz, G., (2025), "Le conflit des publics dans le Dialogue du Manant et du Maheustre (1593) : un dialogue de sourds de la fin des guerres de religion", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Holtz, Grégoire. "Le conflit des publics dans le Dialogue du Manant et du Maheustre (1593) : un dialogue de sourds de la fin des guerres de religion." Renaissance and Reformation 42 (1): 2019. 113-128. DOI: 10.7202/1064521ar. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.