Topic
Jansenism
About: Jansenism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 189 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1397 citations. The topic is also known as: jansenisme & jansenists.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the rise of the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the eighteenth century and the debates that this devotion stirred within Catholicism concerning its iconographical representations.
Abstract: This essay examines the rise of the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the eighteenth century and the debates that this devotion stirred within Catholicism concerning its iconographical representations. While images of the fleshy, anatomical heart of Jesus were perceived by the Jansenists as obscene and an ultimate Disrobing of Christ, the devotion, progressively sanitized in its representations, brought Christ to the center of Catholic devotional life again, and helped to move the much-criticized cult of the saints to the margins. While examining how the ultimate defining image of Christianity was so fiercely opposed and debated, I explore the thorny issue of the role of images in Catholicism.
8 citations
TL;DR: The emergence of le public and public opinion as ideological constructs, and their theoretical discussion, have been traced back to Rousseau's 1750 Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts and through the writings of Malesherbes, Condorcet, Turgot, Mercier, and a number of other writers and politicians as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: ONE OF THE PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES explored recently by historians to account for the momentous upheaval of 1789 has been the analysis of the creation and expansion of public opinion as a rival concept and a competing force to royal authority in pre-revolutionary decades. While the emergence of le public and public opinion as ideological constructs, and their theoretical discussion, have been traced back to Rousseau's 1750 Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts and through the writings of Malesherbes, Condorcet, Turgot, Mercier, and a number of other writers and politicians, other studies have followed the instanciation of public opinion in various oppositional writings, from the pamphlets supporting the Jansenist party and the parlementaires in the 1750s to the outpouring of violent libels surrounding all the great crises of the declining monarchy in the 1780s.1 That art criticism was an important channel of public opinion,
8 citations
TL;DR: The meaning of the word "citizen" was discussed by the philosophes of the Ancien Regime as mentioned in this paper, who pointed out that it served their polemical purposes during prolonged disputes about religious, fiscal, and administrative matters spanning the eighteenth century.
Abstract: "Everyone parades the name of citizen these days," grumbled the abbe Bouniol de Montegut in 1756.1 Six years later Rousseau complained that the French applied this name to themselves without understanding its real meaning.2 As the self-styled "genuine Catholic patriot" and the self-styled "citizen of Geneva" suggested, their contemporaries used the word "citizen" both loosely and frequently. Loosely, as if synonymous with "subject," inasmuch as the principles of divine-right absolutism excluded them from sovereignty and the structures of the corporate kingdom deprived them of any common juridical identity. Frequently, not because the Encyclopedists interpolated the word into their vocabulary but because it served their polemical purposes during the prolonged disputes about religious, fiscal, and administrative matters spanning the eighteenth century.3 While philosophes repudiated much of the Ancien Regime outright, clergy, Jansenists, Protestants, parlementaires, pamphleteers, and their rulers unwittingly undermined the traditional order they claimed to defend by arguing for decades about the interpretation of the unwritten constitution of the realm.4 Their prolonged and well publicized contestations altered the meaning of words like "citi-
8 citations
01 Aug 2006
TL;DR: This paper explored the political ramifications of the divisions between "orthodox" and "heterodox" within eighteenth-century Europe's believing communities and asked to what extent the religious and theological differences separating Jesuits from Jansenists, orthodox Lutherans or Calvinists from Pietists, and High Church Anglicans from English Dissenters took the form of differing political visions.
Abstract: An older historiography of the Enlightenment took the defence or rejection of Christian belief as its starting point and, dividing the world into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’, regarded political thought as derivative of these groupings. Unbelief unleashed a ‘liberal’ assault on monarchy and social hierarchy, while belief came to the defence of these institutions, resulting in ‘conservative’ political thought (see, for example, Martin 1962). This model does justice to something that was incontestably new in the eighteenth century: namely, the emergence of emancipated, secular thought. Yet it is not without its limitations, chief among them being its underestimation of the ‘enlightenment’ of, and dissent within, ‘believing’ communities. Accordingly, this chapter explores the political ramifications of the divisions between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ within eighteenth-century Europe’s believing communities. It asks to what extent the religious and theological differences separating Jesuits from Jansenists, orthodox Lutherans or Calvinists from Pietists, and High Church Anglicans from English Dissenters took the form of differing political visions, not only about the church but also about state and society. In so doing, it broaches the relationship between divergent religious sensibilities and differing kinds of political thought. The heart of the most ‘irreligious’ of Europe’s Enlightenments, France, should provide the acid test of any religiously oriented construal of eighteenth-century political thought. France, therefore, must be this European grand tour’s first and longest stop.
8 citations