Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf

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.

Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal

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.


Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf

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.


2003 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 147-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohini Jayatilaka

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Rajbir Singh Judge

Abstract This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.


Author(s):  
Ulrike Matthies Green ◽  
Kirk E. Costion

This chapter introduces the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model (CCIM), which was designed to more clearly expose the processes that occur in the multicultural contexts of colonization, frontiers, and ancient borderlands. The model can visually represent simultaneous interactions by numerous participants and explores the various ways in which people interact and what motivates their participation in cultural exchanges. This chapter reviews the theoretical origins of the CCIM, describes how it works, and how it has changed since its inception. Second, the chapter briefly introduces each of the case studies in this volume which serve to showcase the versatility of the CCIM.


2019 ◽  
pp. 110-129
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf

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.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Broadhead

ABSTRACTThis article examines the forces that shaped the responses of the urban commons to the Reformation in Augsburg. Developing work by Blickle and others, it considers the extent to which traditional communal ideals were reflected in measures to construct a system of ‘sacral corporatism’. An examination of the attitudes of guildsmen towards communal values and institutions shows variation in their views, even on such basic points as the identification and imposition of the ‘common good’. Case studies show how predominantly poor weavers were attracted to the call to enforce communal principles as a means of defending their status and incomes. To this end they welcomed evangelical teaching, for it provided scriptural and ethical endorsements of corporate action. In contrast, members of the butchers' guild, who were involved in a capital intensive occupation, resisted communal restraints on their freedom to trade and make profits. The butchers' opposition to the Reformation rested more on their rejection of ‘sacral corporatism’, as advocated by reformers in Augsburg, than on support for Catholicism. Augsburg shows the significance of communal values in the urban Reformation, but it demonstrates that these were neither static nor uniformly accepted. On the contrary they were themselves the subject of dispute.


Author(s):  
Michele L. Morrisette ◽  
Daniel A. Dinnsen ◽  
Judith A. Gierut

AbstractEmpirical and theoretical claims about the markedness of place features and associated context effects are evaluated against the facts of acquisition. The primary focus is on the segmental inventories and substitution patterns of young children with phonological delays (ages 3;0-8;6). Results are reported from a large scale cross-sectional archival study of 211 children. Additionally, two especially challenging case studies are singled out for consideration. A typological account of the cross-sectional variation is formulated in optimality theoretic terms and requires permutable rankings of place-referring constraints. Consideration is also given to the different statistical trends along with a comparison of developing and fully developed languages.


1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin

The tradition of religious revolution directed against partially Muslim rulers is traced to the religious reform movement among the zwāya of Mauritania in the 1660s, and to the jihad that brought them briefly into control of Futa Toro, Cayor, Walo, and Jolof in the 1670s. In spite of the reconquest of these states by their secular rulers and the re-establishment of Hassānī control in southwestern Mauritania, the tradition of religious revolt and the aim of establishing an imamate under religious leadership lived on, to reappear in other Fulbe states. It came a generation later, with the jihad of Malik Sy in Bundu during the 1690s, and direct connexions can be traced between the leadership in Bundu and the leadership in the later jihad in Futa Jallon. The jihad in Futa the 1770s and 1780s followed in the same tradition. This evidence suggests that the external influence of the mid-eighteenth-century revival of Islam in Arabia and the Middle East has been overemphasized in West African religious history. Forces working for the reform of Islam based in Africa itself were already at work.


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