Surprisingly shrewd, and a fierce polemicist himself, Erasmus wrote several times in his voluminous correspondence about ‘books (or pamphlets) with sharp teeth’ (‘dentatissimi libelli’), in taking aim at either those who opposed Catholicism or those who were criticizing him. The Erasmian metaphor was quoted almost a hundred years later by Gabriel Naudé, the founder of the Mazarin library, in his "Le Marfore, ou Discours contre les libelles" (1620), where he claimed that polemical books may as well bite or threaten like dogs, bees, or snakes. The Erasmian expression suggests that polemical books might possess an almost physical power with which to threaten an object of attack. Naudé’s reuse of it makes it even more explicit as he implies that pamphlets lack any reasoned argument and strike with slander and aggressive rhetoric instead. The evocative visions of Erasmus and Naudé, in which a polemical book emerges as a material and symbolic object, have guided my own reflections on pamphlet literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Naudé’s erudite treatise may be seen as a repository of early modern commonplaces against pamphlets originating in the fields of ethics, law and the humanist ethos. As a defender of the political status quo, Naudé offers his readers a résumé of the early modern ‘negative theory’ of pamphlets that I will present in the following pages in order to understand the way in which the relation between print and sedition could be perceived in early modern France.