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Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Bossy
John Bossy*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

My motives in choosing this subject are: to respond to the invitation of our chairman; to expound the conviction that the persistence of French Catholicism through the crises of the Reformation was largely the result of the voluntary association of French Catholics; and to try to discover whether there was anything in Catholic theological or pastoral teaching of the period which might have given these associations a theoretical perspective, or grounded them in some kind of associative conception of the Church. I add that, despite the very considerable importance of the subject, one might even claim its decisive importance for the outcome of the wars of religion in Europe as a whole, it has (with some shining exceptions) not received very much attention from historians, and that in England essential texts and studies are hard to come by.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 23: Voluntary Religion , 1986 , pp. 171 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1986

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References

1 Luther’s Works eds J. Pelikan and H.T. Lehmann 54 vols (Philadelphia 1955-75) 46 pp. 23 seq; 49 pp. 224 seq.

2 I say ‘probably’ because I do not see much evidence that massacres of Protestants, as in 1572, were actually carried out by Catholic leagues. Bordeaux (see following note) seems to be an exception.

3 Salmon, J.H.M., Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London 1975) pp. 148 seq, 172; Boutruche, R. ed Bordeaux de 1453 à 1715 (Histoire de Bordeaux, iv: Paris 1966) p. 244; Lettres de Catherine de Médicis eds H. de la Ferrière and G. Baguenault de Puchesse 10 vols (Paris 1880-1909) 1 p. 552 Google Scholar and n. 1.

4 Mémoires de Claude Haton ed F. Bourquelot 2 vols (Paris 1857) pp. 1152-53.

5 Salmon, Society in Crisis pp. 201-3, 207 seq; Mémoires de Claude Haton pp. 88r-888, 1153-56; pp. 936 seq, 954-961, 1144-45.

6 Salmon, Society in Crisis pp. 208-211; E. le Roy Ladurie, Carnival: a People’s Uprising at Romans, 1579-80 (ET, London, 1980) esp. caps iv and v; Y-M. Bercé, Fête et Révolte: des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris 1976) whose interpretation of the Carnival of Romans (pp. 75-78) I find more attractive than Le Roy Ladurie’s. Lettres de Catherine de Médicis 7 pp. 48, 51, 56.

7 Ibid. pp. 97 seq, 104, 107, 144; Boutruche, Bordeaux de 1453 à 1715 pp. 249 seq.

8 I have not yet been able to see the essential work of Marc Venard, ‘Les confréries de Pénitents du XVIe siècle dans le province ecclésiastique d’Avignon’, Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse, 6e série i (1967), or his thesis, L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVIe siècle. Meanwhile I have drawn upon Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge 1981) pp. 190 seq, 246-47; A.L. Martin, Henri III and the Jesuit Politicians (Geneva 1973) pp. 60 seq, 86 seq (for Auger); and Philip T. Hofmann, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 (New Haven/London 1984) pp. 38-40. Maurice Agulhon, Pénitents et Franc-maçons de l’ancienne Provence (Paris 1968), cap, iv, is a mine of relevant knowledge, though it is mainly about the eighteenth century.

9 I have used as a model the readily accessible Statuts de la Congrégation des Pénitents de l’Annonciation de Nostre Dame (Paris 1583) repr. in L. Cimber and F. Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 1ère série 10 (Paris 1836) pp. 435-59, evidently composed by Auger. This was a peculiar example in many ways, but its statutes seem fairly standard; cf., e.g., Hofmann, Lyon p. 38. It is worth noting that it had two rules, one laxer and one stricter; the former may be regarded as ‘traditional’, the latter as ‘Counter-Reformation’.

10 Benedict, Rouen pp. 194, 201.

11 ‘Narrative of Elizabeth Sanders’, from Archives of the English College, Valladolid: series 2, L.5, no 13; Benedict, Rouen pp. 196, 201.

12 Mémoires de Claude Haton p. 1153; Lettres de Catherine de Médias i p. 552 n. 1; Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival pp. 100, 179f; Hofmann, Lyon pp. 58-63. Pierre Duparc, ‘Confréries du Saint-Esprit et communautés d’habitants au Moyen Age’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4ème série, 36 (1958) pp. 349-367, 555-585, is the fundamental account.

13 Journal de Pierre de l’Estoile: règne de Henri 111 ed L.-R. Lefèvre (Paris 1943) pp. 336-7 (September, 1583). I am grateful to J.-L. Flandrin for pointing this passage out to me. Cf. Mémoires de Claude Haton pp. 926-28 (numerous pilgrimages, including to Compostela, c. 1578); Davis, The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’ PP 90 (1981) p. 51.

14 ‘Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the late Mediaeval English Town’, PP 98 (1983) pp. 1-29.

15 Concilia novissima Galliae ed L. Odespun de la Meschinière (Paris 1646) pp. 169 seq (Rouen, Cardinal Bourbon, 1581: fraternities at pp. 193, 195-6); 225 seq (Reims, Cardinal Guise, 1583: at pp. 229-30); 391 seq (Bourges, 1584: at p. 435); pp. 445 seq (Aix, 1585: at p. 492); pp. 509 seq (Toulouse, Cardinal Joyeuse, 1590: at pp. 536-7). There was also a council at Bordeaux in 1582-3 (Ibid. pp. 279 seq): as the Histoire de Bordeaux remarks (Bordeaux de 1453) à 1715 p. 253), it was resolutely Borromean; it did not mention fraternities.

16 Scarisbrick, J.J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford 1984) p. 44; Hofmann, cf., Lyon pp. 56, 61.Google Scholar

17 Concilia novissima Galliae pp. 232, 536; Thesaurus novus anecdotorum eds E. Martène and U. Durand (5 vols, Paris 1717) 4 cols 1191-1206, at col 1203.

18 Natalie Z. Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France’, Daedalus 106 no. 2 (1977) pp. 87-114 (at pp. 101-04); ‘The Sacred and the Body Social’ pp. 40-70 (at pp. 62-4, 66-7); J.-L. Flandrin, Les amours paysannes (16e-2oe siècles) (Paris 1975) pp. 27 seq, 40 seq (Benedicti). In the edition of Benedicti which I have consulted, La somme des pechez et le remede d’iceux (Paris 2 éd. augmentée, 1595), I can only find (p. 93) a weaker version of the text quoted by Flandrin: had the original been expurgated?

19 du Val, A., Sommaire des heresies … qui sont en la Cène des Calvinistes … extrait des œuvres de M. Emond Auger (Paris 1568)Google Scholar nos 6, 8, 20, 21.

20 Bodin, Jean, Six Books of the Commonwealth abridged, trans and ed Tooley, M.J. (Oxford n.d.) pp. 96–107 Google Scholar (Book iii, chap 7), supplemented by De Republica libri sex (Lyon/Paris 1586) p. 749. This passage, from Book vi, chap 6, not given by Tooley, is quoted in full in P. Mesnard, L’essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siècle (3 ed Paris 1977) pp. 545-6.

21 Six Books of the Commonwealth pp. 8, 105-6.

22 Mesnard, L’essor de la philosophie politique pp. 567-616, esp p. 578.