Martyrdom, Anatomy, and the Ethics of Metaphor in d’Aubigné’s L’Hécatombe à Diane and Les Tragiques

This chapter explores the relationship between violence and truth as well as the ethics of bloody metaphors of love when applied to real, witnessed brutality. It considers the repeated images of torture, wounding, and civil war in Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné's sonnets and the religious persecution of Protestants during France's religious wars by juxtaposing his Petrarchan sequence, L'Hécatombe à Diane, and his Protestant tragic-epic, Les Tragiques. It examines the connections between the poet's desire and torment in L'Hécatombe and the tradition of self-displaying anatomy in early modern medical treatises. It argues that Tragiques repeatedly mischaracterizes Hécatombe while simultaneously appropriating the sonnet sequence's imagery, themes, and structures. The tragic-epic then repurposes these for its own ideological ends, establishing ethically simplified configurations that channel violence into partisan politics and allow the transcendence of death and pain through martyrdom. In turn, L'Hécatombe's pagan sonnets become the landscape in which to express struggle, complicity, and countersovereignty.