Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 1999"

The religion of the people and the politics of religion

Abstract: This second volume begins with a Section on the religion of the people. The clergy offered the liturgical services, sermons, evangelistic missions, and the offices sanctifying birth, marriage, and death; distinctions are made between what they intended and how their ministrations were popularly interpreted and incorporated into the social order. Statistical soundings concerning the extent of religious practice and the degree of conviction involved are evaluated. Further chapters deal with processions, pilgrimages, and popular practices and superstitions, with hermits and confraternities, with the impact of reading the Bible and other edifying literature in an age of increasing literacy. Finally comes a view of the twilight world of magic and sorcery. Throughout this Section the comments of theologians and thinkers of the Enlightenment are recorded, whether in coincidence or contradiction. The next section deals with the efficacy of the confessional and the role of the casuistry of the Church in attempting to mould sexual mores, business practices, and in the world of the theatre. In the next two Sections, the role of religious issues in political affairs is detailed. An overview of the Jansenist quarrel and of the activities of the Jesuits brings in the story of the struggle between Crown and Parlement, while an extended portrayal of the life of the Protestant and Jewish communities leads to the history of the debate on toleration, involving the Gallican Church in political interventions and controversy. Throughout the two volumes the rising forces of anticlericalism and the tensions within the ecclesiastical establishment have been recorded, and these themes come to their climax in a final section on the role played by churchmen in the coming of the Revolution.

Les mots sans guère de choses : la praelectio

Abstract: Michele Rossellini : Words without things : the praelectio The history of praelectio from Erasmus to the 18th century reveals an increasing orientation towards to form more than substance. The Jesuits, indeed, stay away from the moral of the Ancients pagans, but they think that their « beautiful style » can and should be used to tell God's glory. The Jansenists, opposed to the flashing eloquence, turned the exercice towards language and translation. These process of thoughts have made a concept of « explication de texte » wich separates them from their fonction of speech.

Religion et Société: Les Réguliers et la vie régionale dans les diocèses d'Auxerre, Langres et Dijon (fin XVI e -fin XVIII e siècles) by Dominique Dinet (review)

Abstract: Religion et Societe: Les Reguliers et la vie regionale dans les dioceses d'Amverre, Langres et Dijon (fin XVI(c)-fin XVIII(c) siecles). By Dominique Dinet. 2 vols. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. 1999. Pp. 435; 437-950. 280E) A massive dissertation (doctorat d'etat), this work has much to offer specialists of early modern religious history. The author examines in great detail the evolution of religious orders and congregations of three dioceses in Burgundy and Champagne, from the Edict of Nantes of 1598, to 1789 and the French Revolution. Responding to a historiographical tradition that has often slavishly repeated the harsh, Enlightenment polemics of a Voltaire or a Montesquieu, Dinet argues for a more nuanced view of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious houses. This carefully documented study, based largely on archival sources, provides much evidence for the author's principal thesis: At least in the specific regions studied, there was not, as has often been posited, a simple scenario of rapid growth of religious communities in the 1600's, followed quickly by a wellearned and steep decline in the 1700's@ Against this monochromatic rise-and-fall model, Dinet establishes a much more complex picture. While some groups, such as the Franciscan friars, did lose their popularity and numbers in the eighteenth century; others grew, especially the newer congregations of uncloistered women religious, such as the Daughters of Charity Aver-Age Catholics, the people in the parishes, rarely perceived members of religious orders and congregations as lazy, useless, wealthy gluttons, even if the philosophes did portray them that way. Indeed, the educational and charitable work of many religious was higly valued, and missed greatly when it was suppressed by force at the century's end. More sympathetic to Jesuits than to Jansenists, Dinet suggests that where a decline in religious vocations did occur it was in places of jansenist dominance, such as the diocese of Auxerre for much of the first half of the eighteenth century. There, under the episcopate of Mgr de Caylus, religious unsympathetic to a jansenist agenda of moral rigorism and infrequent reception of the Eucharist were expelled or otherwise punished.The Jesuits were barred from preaching or hearing confessions in his diocese. Dinet argues that devotions associated with the Jesuits, such as that to the Sacred ff eart, gained many devotees among the rural population, while Jansenism remained more of an elite movement supported principally by the secular clergy. The complexity of obstacles and difficulties faced by both older, established religious communities, and by newer ones, Dinet amply demonstrates. At least eight distinct instances of ecclesiastical and civil authority helped to determine a house's fate. …

Shakespearean Manuscripts, French Jansenists, and the Cultural Politics of Misprision

Abstract: "T he incorrect attribution of Folger Library manuscript V.a. 312, "A Discourse Against Plays and Romances" (ca. 1680), testifies not only to the obfuscation history inevitably produces but also to the very human desire to endow objects with value. Scholars and owners never identified V.a. 312 accurately because, quite simply, a certain epistemological myopia ensured that they would not see what was before them. Or, to put it another way, only through the lens of their historical moment could the manuscript come into focus. Once clarified, it could be described, assessed, and valued-albeit incorrectly. Thus, this treatise, a translation of a vitriolic attack on the theater originally written by the Jansenist apologist Pierre Nicole, metamorphosed into "an original and unpublished manuscript of the time of Charles II," in the words of one auction catalogue.' The manuscript acquired further value through its putative association with Dryden, Shakespeare, and the seventeenth-century stage. By 1929, V.a. 312 was sufficiently "original" and "rare" to command one of the highest prices paid that year for a literary manuscript. How an ordinary translation attained such stature speaks to a constellation of desires and dispositions, all of them complicit in this long history of misprision.