Luthériens et autres hérétiques à Lyon, dans la « danse des morts » des frères Frellon (1542)

The 1542 edition of Simulachres et historiées faces de la mort, printed in Lyon by Jean and François Frellon, is famous for its beautiful images of death from Hans Holbein the Younger. A study of the accompanying texts reveals a multiplicity of sources that have long remained shrouded in anonymity; they include dyed-in-the-wool Lutherans (Rhegius, Huberinus, Johannes Freder), Reformed thinkers (Heinrich Bullinger, Antoine Du Pinet, and perhaps Sebastien Castellio), and a heterodox antitrinitarian (Michael Servetus, manipulating Erasmus and Chlichtove). All were “heretics” in the Catholic kingdom. The Frellon brothers and their printer Michel Du Bois, themselves clandestine adherents of the Reformed religion, introduced to the Lyon market an “evangelical” “art of dying well” for “Nicodemites,” which was reprinted until the beginning of the Wars of Religion and the Edicts of Pacification.