Planting the Cross

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Direct Path ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Monastic Life

This book examines how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented changes to monastic life in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France. Scholars of France’s Catholic Reformation have tended to focus on the movement’s later stages and, taking a top-down approach, view it from the perspective of activist clerics seeking to impose a fixed idea of religious life. This study focuses instead on the movement’s beginnings and explores the aims and tactics of proponents of reform from different but overlapping perspectives. The six case studies draw from three regions—Paris, Provence, and Languedoc. The first chapters tell the story of religious caught in the direct path of the Wars of Religion, which reduced France to near anarchy in the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 tells of the difficulty traditional women’s orders had surviving—much less reforming themselves—in Protestant-dominated Montpellier. Chapter 2 examines the rebellion of Paris’s Feuillants against both their ascetic abbot and the king during the Holy League revolt. Chapter 3 recounts the implantation of the militant Franciscans called Capuchins in the Protestant heartland, Languedoc. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the struggle to reform two old orders—the Dominicans and Trinitarians—that had fallen into decay. Chapter 6 explores conflicting interpretations of Teresa of Avila’s legacy at France’s first Carmelite convents. The book illuminates persistent debates about what constituted religious reform and how a reform’s success should be judged. It shows reform to have been lived as an ongoing process that was more diverse, experimental, and experiential than is often recognized.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Congregation Of The Mission ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church ◽  
And Training

This book offers a major reassessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul’s prominence in the dévot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, it explores how he turned a personal vocation to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three interrelated strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal charity. It demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The book’s central questions concern de Paul’s efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and it argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the dévot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. It is the first study to assess de Paul’s activities against the backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Cross

The introduction first explains why “planting the cross” is an apt metaphor for the renewal of monastic life that took place in the wake of France’s Wars of Religion. It introduces the six case studies that make up the book and explains how each explores a particular question, or set of questions, about how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented the changes commonly known as the “Catholic Reformation.” The cases show that “reform” was not simply imposed from above, nor was it fixed or completed with the adoption of a new constitution or rule. Arguments for a return to a religious order’s original purity or a life of greater austerity encouraged debate about how the order should best live out its rule. The introduction concludes with a summary of the circumstances that made religious reform so urgently needed and a brief overview of how the reform movement spread.

Catholic Reform from the Bottom Up

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-129
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
Original Rule

The chapter examines efforts the Trinitarians of Provence made to reverse a long decline and to adapt their medieval order to reflect the new spiritual climate of the Catholic Reformation. The reform was made by ordinary members despite opposition from their superior general in Paris, who envisioned reform only as a return to the order’s original rule. Founded to ransom Christian slaves in the Mediterranean, the order had fallen away from its rule and experienced declining vocations and impoverishment in the Wars of Religion. The chapter argues that the Provençal monks took their model of religious life from the reformed congregations of Capuchins and Recollects and not from a desire to return to some imagined primitive purity. They wanted to govern their houses in a more collaborative way, to better educate their priests, and to create a more spiritualized community with the interiorized personal piety that characterized the Catholic Reformation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Significant Research ◽  
Catholic Reform

For information on the life and work of Vincent de Paul, historians still depend mainly on the standard biography produced by the Vincentian Pierre Coste, the triple volume Le Grand Saint du grand siècle, even though it is close to a century since this was published. It is now widely recognized that while the disruption of the Wars of Religion (1562–98) meant that the drive for Catholic reform began later in France than elsewhere, once it was set in motion it reached levels of intensity and creativity over the first six decades of the seventeenth century which were unmatched in any other region. The Introduction locates de Paul within the historiography of the Catholic Reformation and French religious renewal, by offering a survey of the findings of the most significant research in these areas, and identifying the questions that these evoke for the assessment of de Paul’s activities.

Conflict and Community in the Seventeenth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Legal Obligation ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
The People

This chapter reflects on the conflicts between seroras and their communities. Seroras, like their male colleagues, were parts of their communities through and through, and often little separated emotionally, physically, or economically from the people they served. Proximity easily gave birth to tension and conflict, and as members of their communities, seroras and priests often responded passionately and intensely. These visible contraventions to a reformed, peaceful, and professional clergy drew the attention of the bishop; consequently, criminal cases handled by the Diocese of Pamplona are skewed toward breaches of both legal obligation and social expectations, including episodes of violence. How parishioners reported, reacted to, and participated in conflict with their seroras underscores the ease with which the ideals of reform were consumed and deployed by local communities and for local purposes. Seroras occupied a central place within local religious life; yet the vocation was not static, nor was it immune to challenge. In the postreform years, conflict involving seroras and their communities provided a crucial opportunity for localities to engage with the practical aspects of implementing religious reform, mold it according to their own preferences, or reject it altogether.

The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-55
Author(s):  
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Prophylactic Measures ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
Moral Discourses

The first chapter explores sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how they inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The exposition includes selected medical works from the fifteenth to the end of sixteenth century that deal with anatomic descriptions of bodily functions, the role of each sex in procreation, and the explanation of diseases, prophylactic measures and cures. In addition, chapter 1 examines discourses of the plague and syphilis in order to show how stigmatizing diseases particularly affected women. Besides medical treatises, the chapter examines influential moral works, such as Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524) and fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (1583), as well as discourses on poverty such as Vives’s De subventione pauperum (1525), and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Amparo de pobres (1598), to illuminate how the established conception of female mental and physical inferiority had detrimental consequences for her diminished social role.

John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion

1932 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Batten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Storm And Stress ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Theological Differences ◽  
The Church

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.

Political Factors in Movements toward Christian Unity in Seventeenth Century Europe

1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
J. Minton Batten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Definite Period

Religious, political, and economic forces have given direction to the stream of modern history. Though all these forces operate in every age, each has exercised the major influence for a definite period of the modern era. Religious forces were dominant in the sixteenth century. Then religious values were regarded as of primary concern. The great thinkers on political and economic subjects usually based their ideas on religious principles. The major wars were Wars of Religion.

Image, Instruction, and Emotion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Heal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 4 turns from the confessional to the devotional image, investigating seventeenth-century transformations in the ways in which theologians and pastors understood images’ spiritual value. It considers the rise of new types of piety during the late sixteenth century: renewed interest in mysticism and a flourishing of devotional literature aimed at the laity. It considers the impact of the Thirty Years’ War on Lutheran religious life. Drawing in particular on the writings of Johann Arndt (1555–1621), it argues that during the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century images were afforded a new role in Lutheran piety: their affective power—their ability to move Christians’ hearts and souls—was given new emphasis. It explores the increasing significance ascribed to images through looking at Bilderbibeln, cycles of biblical illustrations, and other works of religious instruction.

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