For French theatre history, the seventeenth century paradoxically stands out as both the Grand Siècle, or golden age, in which Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Jean Racine produced their masterpieces, and as a period of intense antitheatrical sentiment in which Jansenist theologians like Pierre Nicole and Catholic bishops like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet composed treatises against the stage and its players. French historiographers have given the name la querelle de la moralité du théâtre, or the quarrel over the theatre's morality, to the diverse episodes that called into question the theatre's place in public life in prerevolutionary France.Footnote 1 This quarrel merits a performance analysis. Whereas theatre scholarship has devoted careful attention to the material features of early modern theatre practice, antitheatrical sentiment's story has largely been told as a progression of ideas.Footnote 2 In works that remain essential reading, scholars such as Moses Barras, Marc Fumaroli, Jonas Barish, Simone de Reyff, Jean Dubu, Sylviane Léoni, and Laurent Thirouin have examined the rise and development of French arguments against the stage, reconstructing French antitheatrical sentiment's intellectual history from antiquity through the French Revolution.Footnote 3 As demonstrated by titles such as Dubu's Les Églises chrétiennes et le théâtre [Christian churches and the theatre] and de Reyff's L’Église et le théâtre [the church and the theatre], enough of the period's antitheatrical fervor had religious roots that French theatre polemics are often also conceptualized as a conflict between the church and the theatre.
Surprisingly, though, little scholarly attention has focused on the human interactions and embodied activities that facilitated the spread of antitheatrical ideas among priests. Histories of French polemics about the stage can therefore give the impression that actors had bodies whereas priests did not, creating a mind–body split in scholarship on antitheatrical sentiment by associating the theatre with materiality and the church with ideas. Alongside its use of writing, however, the Catholic Church used what theatre scholars could consider a performance repertoire to help transmit theological ideas, doctrinal propositions, religious values, and moral arguments to the laity. This repertoire consisted of the gestures, ceremonies, and sacraments that made up the liturgy, along with the modes of bodily comportment that helped churchmen forge their priestly identity at the altar and in daily interactions with parishioners.Footnote 4
Knowledge about priestly repertoires matters for theatre history because priests at the parish level gave antitheatrical sentiment its teeth, transforming ideas about the theatre's moral harm into material consequences for actors. They did this by excluding actors from the sacraments. In a Catholic kingdom where sacramental participation and civic life were practically synonymous, exclusion had grave consequences for a person's well-being and reputation.Footnote 5 The nature of the sacramental exclusion imposed on actors varied from diocese to diocese but resulted in the marginalization of actors regardless of the exclusion's specific form. In some places, actors could not receive Communion or marry. In others, they were refused the last rites and Christian burial. In many places, they could not serve as godparents. Only by renouncing their profession could actors obtain absolution and restore themselves to sacramental participation. Priestly repertoires, in other words, played a crucial role in antitheatrical sentiment's history.
To reconstruct the early modern Catholic Church's bodily repertoire, especially as priests used it in relation to the theatre and its players, requires a performance analysis of liturgical manuals and other ecclesiastical texts such as episcopal edicts, seminary rules, and priestly correspondence. Chief among such documents is the diocesan Ritual, a type of liturgical book issued by the local bishop that gave instructions for conducting all the sacraments except the Eucharist.Footnote 6 In the same way that a Missal details what priests are supposed to say and do while celebrating Mass, a Ritual contains instructions for the other six Catholic sacraments.Footnote 7 When a bishop wanted the priests in his diocese to exclude actors from the sacraments, he made this clear by listing actors in the diocesan Ritual as “public sinners,” thereby disqualifying them from the sacraments until they publicly renounced their actions.Footnote 8 As Dubu has shown in his study of 127 diocesan Rituals published in France between 1600 and 1713, 30 percent of the Rituals published after 1649 excluded actors from the sacraments, whereas only 10 percent had classified actors as public sinners during the first half of the century.Footnote 9 An analysis of the diocesan Ritual's use in seminary training and parish practice between approximately 1640 and 1740 therefore offers one way to gain a more nuanced understanding of how attitudes against actors spread among French churchmen at the parish level.
Although diocesan Rituals provide a documentary link between antitheatrical sentiment and concrete actions taken against stage players, or between ideas and materiality, many questions remain about how to interpret the evidence they provide. Given the bishop's responsibility for issuing a Ritual, a top-down hypothesis about the relationship between antitheatrical sentiment and the sacramental exclusion of actors implicitly informs scholarship on the theatre conflict. Dubu's approach, focused on the bishops who issued Rituals rather than the clerical teams who often composed them or the priests who used them, exemplifies this tendency. Stated explicitly, a top-down hypothesis would propose that antitheatrical ideas from treatises associated with the querelle de la moralité du théâtre inspired French bishops to list actors as public sinners, which in turn prompted parish priests to withhold sacraments from actors. This top-down version of events may certainly describe the transmission of antitheatrical ideas in some cases, especially after the 1660s. At least two important difficulties nonetheless challenge a top-down transmission hypothesis, namely, chronology and consistency.
From a chronological perspective, the first Ritual to list comédiens (professional actors) as public sinners poses a puzzle.Footnote 10 Published in 1649, it predates by at least a decade the century's major French antitheatrical treatises by Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti (1666), Nicole (1667), the abbé Joseph de Voisin (1671), and Bossuet (1694). Its location also raises questions. Whereas one would expect to find the first antiactor Ritual in Paris, the hotbed of theatre debates, the first Ritual to specify that comédiens should not receive the sacraments was instead issued by Félix Vialart de Herse, the bishop of Châlons, where the sparse archival traces of theatre professionals make it unlikely that parish priests had many encounters with actors. What prompted the bishop of Châlons to add comédiens to the list of public sinners at midcentury?
Certainly, a growing tide of sentiment against the theatre during the first half of the seventeenth century provides important context. By 1649, English antitheatrical sentiment had already given rise to William Prynne's Histrio-Mastix (1633) and to the suppression of public theatres in England in 1642.Footnote 11 Debates about the theatre were intensifying in France, too. A protestant pastor named André Rivet published a pamphlet against plays in 1639, in response to which Georges de Scudéry published a defense of the theatre the same year. Between 1643 and 1646, Corneille's martyr plays, Polyeucte and Théodore, incited discussion about the theatre's capacity to represent sacred subjects. Most important, in 1641, at the behest of his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII issued a royal edict in favor of actors. It declared that as long as their acting did not contain representations that could harm the public, such as “dishonest actions” or “lascivious words or words with double meanings,” actors were not to be held guilty for their profession.Footnote 12 As Henry Phillips and Déborah Blocker suggest, French bishops who listed actors as public sinners in the wake of Louis XIII's 1641 edict may have done so to counteract the king's effort to protect stage players from the condition of infamy inherited from Roman law.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, neither the edict of 1641 nor the still-developing circulation of treatises for and against the theatre explains why one bishop rather than another would list actors as public sinners at midcentury. The history of ideas does not fully elucidate the material facts.
The second challenge to a top-down hypothesis about the transmission of antitheatrical ideas among parish-level clergy has to do with the lack of consistency with which priests excluded actors from the sacraments. In Gaston Maugras's words, “everything is inconsistent” in the history of the French church's refusal to administer sacraments to actors.Footnote 14 To begin with, as studies of the early modern French theatre unanimously attest, not all bishops listed actors as public sinners. Although the number of diocesan Rituals to exclude actors from the sacraments increased sharply during the second half of the seventeenth century, most bishops chose not to exclude actors from the sacraments. The 30 percent of antiactor Rituals identified by Dubu represent an important share of French diocesan Rituals, but far from the majority, which either suggests that antitheatrical tracts had limited influence in episcopal circles or that other factors, beyond the theological arguments advanced by figures such as Nicole and Bossuet, helped determine whether a diocese adopted measures against actors.
To make an inconsistent situation still more unpredictable, not all priests refused sacraments to actors, even in those dioceses with an antiactor Ritual. French clergy did not, for example, refuse sacraments to Italian actors, even though diocesan Rituals did not specify that an actor's nationality had any bearing on their status as public sinners.Footnote 15 Nor did churchmen consider singers, dancers, and opera performers comédiens, which consequently spared them from sacramental exclusion.Footnote 16 Even within a single parish, variability occurred. Parish registers suggest that priests sometimes allowed actors to list an alternative profession so they could participate in the sacraments, especially for baptisms. Molière, for example, used his titles as “Valet de chambre tapissier du Roi” and “Écuyer” in parish registers that list him as the godfather at baptisms for his nephew in 1659 and for the children of fellow actors Du Parc in 1663 and La Grange in 1672, as well as baptisms in 1661 and 1663.Footnote 17 At least two of these baptisms were conducted in the Parish of Saint-Eustache, whose clergymen would later refuse to give Molière a Christian burial. The parish's priests thus knew Molière's profession as an actor when he served as godfather and chose to overlook it. Actors who lacked titles as illustrious as those possessed by Molière listed themselves as “bourgeois de Paris,” again suggesting that priests occasionally allowed for loopholes when it came to sacramental exclusion.
A further element of inconsistency arises in relation to the clergymen who penned antitheatrical treatises. They were not the same priests who withheld sacraments from actors, creating yet another breach between the history of antitheatrical ideas and their implementation at the parish level. Bossuet provides the best example. Although in 1694 he authored a refutation of the stage, Bossuet never issued a diocesan Ritual in his capacity as bishop.Footnote 18 Conversely, the priests whose names have entered the historical record for withholding sacraments from actors did not compose treatises against the theatre. Nor did they, in general, belong to the highest ranks of the church. The three priests who refused to come to Molière's bedside—Fathers Lenfant, Lechat, and Paysant—were prêtres habitués, a type of priest that Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun calls “the true plebs of the clergy.”Footnote 19 Such priests lived together in a parish without any kind of benefice and supported the curate and vicar by conducting smaller religious services, such as masses for the dead and vespers, the revenues from which they shared in common.Footnote 20 As the century progressed, the likelihood that such priests had some kind of formal ecclesiastical training increased but, particularly during the first half of the seventeenth century, the average level of education for French diocesan clergymen was low, a trend that only gradually began to change after the 1640s with the foundation of France's first seminaries.Footnote 21 Even in the Parisian parish of Saint-Sulpice, where most known cases in which a priest refused sacraments to an actor occurred, and where the priests had a greater level of education thanks to their close connection to the parish's seminary, the clergymen who withheld sacraments from actors did not contribute any of their own pamphlets to the century's theatre debates.Footnote 22 To understand why some priests refused sacraments to some actors under some conditions therefore requires attention to the diversity of the early modern priesthood, the process of ecclesiastical professionalization over the course of the seventeenth century, and the particularities of a sacramental encounter that might make it more or less difficult for a priest to exert his authority in relation to an actor.
In other words, the story of antitheatrical sentiment needs its own performance history. The diocesan Ritual offers a starting point for a performance account of antitheatrical sentiment because it was not merely a prescriptive text that facilitated top-down reforms; it also functioned as a ceremonial object. When we focus on the ceremonial function of the diocesan Ritual and its relation to priestly performance rather than on its status as a prescriptive text, a different story of French antitheatrical activity emerges. A performance analysis reveals that the Ritual's physical presence during liturgical rites authorized a limited but nonetheless significant degree of ceremonial innovation on the part of clergymen who found themselves in situations for which the diocesan Ritual's content did not offer explicit instructions. This margin for innovation had important consequences for stage players—especially during the 1640s, when Catholic reform gained momentum in France and diocesan Rituals did not yet include instructions for how to deal with new cultural figures, such as the professional actor, who were gaining visibility and political legitimacy. Rather than trickling down from regulatory texts imposed by the church's elite, the diocesan Ritual's ceremonial status suggests that the idea of excluding actors from the sacraments emerged first among France's parish clergy in places where clergymen who did not belong to religious orders—known as secular priests—were struggling to professionalize by improving their ceremonial skills. Seminaries proved just such places. In them, ecclesiastical action against actors began as ceremonial experiments, captured the attention of France's higher clergy, and thereafter passed into normative documents like the diocesan Ritual, reinforcing antitheatrical discourses by enabling the theatre's opponents to cite the church's liturgical handbooks in their arguments against the stage.
The Ritual as Prescriptive Text and Ceremonial Object
The diocesan Ritual's dual nature as both a prescriptive text and a ceremonial object created a bridge between the realm of ideas and the priest's liturgical and pastoral activity, making it a particularly flexible tool for the church in its confrontations with the theatre. In its prescriptive aspect the Ritual helped standardize priestly practice, while in its ceremonial aspect it enhanced the priest's authority. These two dimensions of the Ritual's use operated in tandem and fostered a slow process by means of which some features of local practice—such as the refusal of sacraments to actors—could enter the church's normative repertoire.Footnote 23 To scholars focused on the Ritual's content, its prescriptive aspect may seem to dominate. Talal Asad emphasizes the Ritual's function as a set of instructions in Genealogies of Religion, where he explains that long before the word “ritual” came to signify symbolic behavior, it designated a “book directing the way rites should be performed.”Footnote 24 Here, prescription overshadows ceremony.
From the earliest days of the diocesan Ritual's history in the Middle Ages, however, the development of its content and structure derived from local needs; the flow moved predominantly from practice toward codification rather than the reverse. Produced for the purpose of facilitating liturgical practice, the precursors of the early modern diocesan Ritual, which date from the tenth century in France, were often designed for use by a local monastery and bore names such as Agenda, Sacerdotale, Pastorale, Sacramentale, Promptuarium, Liber officialis, or Enchiridion.Footnote 25 As this variety of titles suggests, the size, length, and content of these texts varied greatly.Footnote 26 So did their function and authority. The term Sacramentale, for example, referred to the book's content, which concerned the sacraments, and Agenda evoked the idea of functions “appropriate” for those in a pastoral position.Footnote 27 Neither of these names emphasized the text's prescriptive nature. Nor were France's early Rituals necessarily issued by a prelate. In the first part of the sixteenth century, many were prepared by printers and booksellers who recognized in the Ritual a marketable product or by theologians responding to local need.Footnote 28 Only gradually did the Ritual come to serve a standardizing function across the church, and even today each diocesan Ritual preserves its local flavor.
Diocesan Rituals that designated actors as public sinners figured into a larger trend in which French bishops in the seventeenth century enhanced the prescriptive function of Rituals by offering progressively more exhaustive instructions to clergymen. Other groups found themselves decried as public sinners in these longer Rituals, too, including heretics, schismatics, heavy drinkers, and duelists.Footnote 29 This trend toward longer Rituals began circa 1540, when French bishops started to embrace the Ritual as a tool for internal reform and an expression of their episcopal authority, as demonstrated by title pages that bore the bishop's name or arms. The Rituals of the period manifest the text's increasingly prescriptive aims by featuring a pastoral letter at the beginning of the volume and by choosing the term Rituale to designate these texts.Footnote 30 As Hyppolite de Bethune, bishop of Verdun, explained, the term Rituale meant “the rules that pastors must observe in carrying out their functions are therein prescribed.”Footnote 31 In 1614, Pope Paul V issued a Roman Ritual, further developing the genre's prescriptive function. Without eliminating Rituals published for dioceses and religious orders, Paul V proclaimed “Amidst the numerous and existing rituals it [the Roman Ritual] would rank as the official and authorized one, by whose standard the officiants could fulfill their priestly office unhesitatingly, and with uniformity and precision.”Footnote 32 In France, bishops emulated the regulatory aims set out by Paul V, in some cases by adopting the Roman Ritual at the diocesan level (Fig. 1) and in most cases by either adding local instructions to it or incorporating portions of the Roman Ritual into a revised diocesan Ritual.Footnote 33 Either way, although the overall production of Rituals decreased in the seventeenth century as compared to the sixteenth, their length grew in keeping with their enhanced prescriptive aims.Footnote 34 The Ritual of Bourges published in 1666, for example, fills two volumes, each of more than five hundred pages. In this multiplication of instructions given by bishops to their clergy—increasingly in French rather than Latin—one can see the church's effort to train and control parish-level interactions between priests and parishioners.Footnote 35
Figure 1. An early seventeenth-century woodcut of a parish priest holding a diocesan Ritual while blessing water to make holy water. Source: Rituale Romanum Pauli Quinti, pontificis maximi iussu editum (Lugduni [Lyon]: Michaelis Chevalier, 1616), 247.
The terms selected to designate actors in these longer diocesan Rituals suggest varying degrees of antitheatrical zeal. Comédien, the most frequently occurring term, connoted a certain degree of respect because France's most reputable troupes used it to describe themselves. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the term histrion, inherited from Roman law, connoted infamy and contempt.Footnote 36 The term farceurs designated those who specialized in farce, a genre that had mostly disappeared from Parisian stages by 1648, while the term bateleurs referred to acrobats and street performers. Both farceur and bateleur had derogatory connotations, especially when applied to actors who considered themselves professionals, like those at the Comédie-Française after 1680.Footnote 37 France's most extreme example of an antiactor diocesan Ritual used all three terms for performers. Issued in 1667 by Nicolas Pavillon (1597–1677), the Jansenist-leaning bishop of Alet, it demonstrates how the placement of actors on the list of public sinners promoted their exclusion from the sacramental community. “Who are those who must not be admitted to Holy Communion?” it asks in the chapter on the Eucharist. The response:
Those who are considered publicly unworthy, as are the excommunicated, forbidden, infamous; for example, those who are recognized as cohabiting, usurers, magicians, sorcerers, blasphemers, drunks, actors, farce players and acrobats; women of ill repute, duelers, those living in enmity, and other public sinners.Footnote 38
If a person from any of the above categories were to request Communion, the Ritual commanded the priest to turn them away until their behavior had changed: “You must refuse Communion to all these people until they have corrected themselves, made the appropriate penance, and repaired the scandal they have caused.”Footnote 39 The Ritual thus taught priests in Alet to treat actors, professional or otherwise, as public sinners and chase them from the altar.
Given that Rituals circulated among dioceses, the prescriptive influence of antiactor Rituals could readily extend beyond the parishes for which it was officially intended.Footnote 40 During an episcopal visit in 1659, for example, the bishop of Lodève discovered that the priests in his diocese were using Rituals from Bordeaux, Lyon, and Toulouse.Footnote 41 A Ritual's prescriptive content alone, therefore, tells only one part of the story of the way the proscription of actors as public sinners spread from one diocese to another. Its movement, too, mattered. Nor were Rituals static texts: in dioceses such as Chartres, Rouen, Paris, Lyon, Le Mans, and Toulouse, the bishop issued updated versions as often as seven to twelve times in the sixteenth century.Footnote 42 The Ritual's prescriptive ambitions must be considered, then, in light of the way priests used it.
Despite the diocesan Ritual's growing prescriptive force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it remained a ceremonial object, too. Seminary textbooks on how to conduct the sacraments offer a glimpse of the way priests thought of and used books such as the diocesan Ritual. A clergyman named Matthieu Beuvelet from Paris's Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet authored one of the seventeenth century's most widely circulated liturgical handbooks, the Instruction sur le manuel [Instruction on the Ritual], which had already reached its fourth edition by 1659. Based on thirty-eight Rituals from France, Germany, and Spain, Beuvelet's Instruction sur le manuel compiled what he considered the best instructions from each of his source texts, creating a synthesis of European diocesan Rituals intended to showcase what was, in his view, the church's ceremonial uniformity.Footnote 43 Overlooked by previous studies on France's theatre conflict, Beuvelet's handbook is particularly interesting for the history of antitheatrical sentiment's spread among parish clergy. Inspired, no doubt, by the Ritual of Châlons, which is listed among its sources, the handbook classified actors as public sinners. “To whom can one give the last rites?” it inquires. “To all the faithful who request it, with the exception of two types of people”:
1. Public sinners, like usurers, concubines, actors [comédiens], those who are excommunicated or denounced by name, unless they have beforehand made satisfaction.
2. Those who for some accident of illness, like frenzy, weakness of mind, a violent and continual cough, vomiting, and the like, cannot receive the blessed Sacrament without some irreverence.Footnote 44
Seminarians who learned to conduct the sacraments with the help of this handbook, whether they came from or later worked in a diocese with an antiactor Ritual, would come to see actors as public sinners who must make satisfaction by renouncing the stage before receiving the church's ceremonies. Beuvelet's handbook makes it safe to assert that, in comparison to clergymen who never spent time in a seminary, a seminary-trained priest was more likely to perceive actors as morally dangerous, more likely to refuse sacraments to actors and, if he later climbed the ranks to bishop, more likely to issue an antiactor diocesan Ritual.
Beuvelet's handbook also sheds light on the diocesan Ritual's ceremonial functions. It does so by highlighting the very tactile relationship a priest needed to have with a diocesan Ritual, which Beuvelet signaled by choosing the Greek term Enchiridion to designate his text, rendered as Manuel in French, meaning a small handbook. The term Manuel denotes a Ritual, he explained, “because one must have it almost always at hand, or at least render the use of it so familiar that when you are looking for something, you can find it right away upon opening the book.”Footnote 45 Kept at hand, the diocesan Ritual constituted a key ceremonial element. To keep the Ritual at hand despite its length, priests either had an assistant carry it or kept an abridged version that could more easily fit in a pouch or pocket.Footnote 46 Rather than a dry reference text stored on a clergyman's shelf, the Ritual accompanied a priest as he conducted sacraments in the parish. By calling diocesan Rituals “manuals,” Beuvelet and the seminaries that used his compilation taught priests to consider the Ritual essential to ceremonial enactment.
When held in the hands of a priest during a rite or sacrament, the Ritual not only enabled him to find quickly the liturgical information he needed. It also constituted a ceremonial object: even if its pages remained closed, the diocesan Ritual's physical presence underscored the priest's authority, enhanced the respect due to the actions carried out during the rite, and functioned as a locus for the negotiations implied by any sacramental undertaking. Seventeenth-century France's literate population recognized such functions as characteristic of ceremonial objects. According to Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel, objects and actions that augmented the splendor, seriousness, or good reputation of a person or institution were at the heart of ceremony, which he defined as “The assemblage of several actions, services, and ways of acting that serve to render something more magnificent or solemn,” or, in an ecclesiastical context, “those things that can render divine worship more august and venerable.”Footnote 47 A diocesan Ritual's presence in a priest's hand likewise made a sacrament more splendid.
Splendor involves power. Thanks to the diocesan Ritual's ceremonial function, a priest could reinforce his ecclesiastical power by displaying the diocesan Ritual. Not surprisingly, issues concerning power and its expression imbue each of Furetière's definitions, epitomized by the royal entry “carried out with great ceremony.”Footnote 48 Twenty- and twenty-first-century ritual theorists interested in ceremony likewise highlight the types of power dynamics implicit in Furetière's royal entry example. “Ceremony is manifestly competitive, sometimes conflict-laden, and often divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’” notes Ronald L. Grimes.Footnote 49 Indeed, sacramental practice at the parish level frequently entailed conflict and competition. A diocesan Ritual in hand, a priest had a valuable resource for asserting his position in such situations. The diocesan Ritual, in its ceremonial aspect, symbolized the priest's power and helped him realize the authority attributed to him by post-Tridentine doctrines on the priesthood.Footnote 50
The special treatment accorded to the Ritual during the administration of the sacraments further testifies to its ceremonial status. Not a sacred object, liturgical instructions offer fewer details for its handling than for objects like the consecrated Eucharistic wafer. Most of the time, the diocesan Ritual's content assumes that its ecclesiastical readers already know how to deploy a liturgical book in a ceremonial context. Nonetheless, the rare occasions where the Ritual mentions itself afford a glimpse of how its presence helped a clergyman produce priestly authority and elicit respect for his actions. Beuvelet's chapter on the sacrament of Extreme Unction, for example, specifies that upon being summoned to a sick person's home to administer the last rites, the priest should first go to the church to find a cleric to accompany him, whose job it was to carry a small cross in his right hand and the Ritual under his arm.Footnote 51 From a practical perspective, it would have been easier to carry the Ritual in a bag, which was in fact suggested for some sacraments.Footnote 52 Instead, the priest and cleric formed a small procession in which the Ritual enjoyed a privileged position, near the holy oil carried by the priest. The Ritual of Bourges, on which Beuvelet draws extensively in his own handbook, also emphasizes the placement of the Ritual under the cleric's arm or—if a cleric could not be found—under the priest's arm. Whether carried by priest or cleric, the instructions placed the diocesan Ritual on display as a ceremonial object.
Through its display in the context of the sacrament of Extreme Unction—the sacrament during which a priest would demand that an actor renounce the stage upon threat of not receiving the last rites—the diocesan Ritual ceremonially underscored the priest's authority. First, by delegating the responsibility of carrying the Ritual to a cleric, the liturgical instructions for Extreme Unction gave the priest an entourage. According to early modern ceremonial protocols, the greater a person's entourage, the greater his or her magnificence.Footnote 53 A priest accompanied by a cleric who carried his Ritual thereby enacted the importance attributed to the priesthood by the Council of Trent. Second, even without a cleric, a priest who carried the Ritual under his arm while holding a cross in his right hand associated the sacramental actions he would perform—described in the Ritual's pages—with the power and agency attributed to the Crucifixion in the Catholic tradition. Finally, by holding the Ritual the priest could increase the laity's respect by making his own respect for the ceremonies visible. As the Ritual of Reims argued, the priest had a responsibility to “make outwardly visible” his respect for holy things.Footnote 54 To show this respect, the Ritual admonished priests to follow its instructions precisely and to read out loud to their parish the lessons contained in the Ritual about the respect parishioners should direct toward the sacraments, the ceremonies, and the clergy. These gestures implied that the priest must physically hold the Ritual. Having a Ritual in hand thus constituted one of the “external ceremonies” by means of which a priest enacted and modeled liturgical respect, along with other ceremonial expressions like wearing the surplice and stole, assembling a clerical entourage, and lighting candles.Footnote 55
At the same time, the Ritual's physical presence also functioned ceremonially to limit the individual charismatic authority a priest might obtain from an outstanding liturgical performance. Although pocket-sized editions and abbreviated versions of diocesan Rituals existed so that priests could always carry one, the standard editions were imposing books whose size and weight served as a reminder that the ceremonies, rites, and explanations proffered by the priest were not his own; he acted in the name of the church. Both Beuvelet's Instructions sur le manuel and the Ritual of Reims demonstrate this concern for directing respect toward the church's institutional heritage rather than its individual representatives by asserting that their own version of the Ritual reproduces exactly the church's unchanging ceremonial instructions. For Beuvelet, the “content and form” of the church's ceremonies “remain inviolable for all the Sacraments” since their origin sixteen hundred years before his handbook, whereas the Ritual of Reims asserts that “The church conserves so religiously the ancient ceremonies that she changes nothing in the words that one . . . uses in administering the sacraments, not even upon renewing from time to time the Ritual.”Footnote 56 Such claims regarding the Ritual's content established its physical presence as a sign of institutional rather than personal authority.Footnote 57 Whatever respect or reputation would otherwise accrue to the priest thanks to a skillful performance was consequently redirected toward the church by means of the Ritual's constant display. Like the clerical robes that seminaries helped to enforce, the diocesan Ritual served as a signal that the priest acted not on his own authority but by means of the authority invested in his priestly office.
In reality, of course, liturgical ceremonies changed over time, no two priests performed them in exactly the same way, and on any given day a priest might face a situation in which he was not quite sure what to do. In the early 1640s, actors who requested sacraments presented priests with a dilemma that diocesan Rituals did not yet tell them how to resolve. On the one hand, France had inherited from Roman law the tradition of considering actors as infamous, while on the other hand Louis XIV's edict had at least provisionally lifted some players from infamy, namely those whose plays belonged to the neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy rather than farce.Footnote 58 When confronted with ambiguous figures, priests had to decide whether to administer the sacrament in question. The choice to refuse the sacraments was not always an easy one. Despite the elevated language used by Catholic reformers to describe the priest's authority, early modern texts that taught priests how to do their jobs make it clear that many clergymen shied away from withholding the sacraments, especially in relation to a parishioner who enjoyed some form of secular power or authority. The prospect of saying no to a nobleman might fill a priest with trepidation. Professional actors, too, benefited from a modicum of authority based on the favor granted them by the king and by their audiences. To help priests in difficult sacramental situations, theologians composed whole tomes on situations in which it was not clear whether sacraments should be withheld or not.Footnote 59 Meanwhile, to boost the priest's courage, seminary tracts offered injunctions like the following from Charles Borromeo: “Do not fail to publicly reprimand and correct [public sins], whatever bad-mouthing, bullying, slander, or insults might come your way, as long as it is useful to the glory of God and the salvation of souls.”Footnote 60 The admonishment that the priest should be willing to face loss of reputation and harassment suggests that clergymen needed strong resolve to follow through with a sacramental refusal.
Even in situations not explicitly covered by the diocesan Ritual's instructions, in its capacity as a ceremonial object the diocesan Ritual's physical presence helped bolster a priest's authority by lending the air of prescribed action to his decisions. Liturgical traditions, of course, placed a limit on the actions a priest could undertake during a sacramental refusal. Where the diocesan Ritual's content did not provide specific directives, the priest nonetheless possessed a margin of creativity in his response to a situation. For example, as I discuss below, during the second half of the seventeenth century priests adopted the practice of making actors refuse the stage in pen and ink, if possible before a notary. This was not altogether surprising given the church's long history of using scribes to record its affairs; in fact, before the fifteenth century all notaries in France were clerics.Footnote 61 Nothing in the diocesan Ritual, however, required public sinners to produce a written renunciation.Footnote 62 Rather, the Ritual's physical presence lent the air of prescribed action to the priest's decision to demand a renunciation in writing.
As the case of priestly demands for written renunciations demonstrates, analyses that overemphasize the Ritual's prescriptive function risk giving too much credence to the church's own discourses about itself. Although seventeenth-century diocesan Rituals declare their perfect conformity to ancient customs and denounce as “reckless” any priestly action that did not exactly follow the Ritual's content, to at least some degree these statements served a performative function by instantiating the very authority the Ritual sought for itself.Footnote 63 Even the most detailed diocesan Rituals did not provide instructions for every scenario a priest might encounter while administering the sacraments, making it impossible for a priest to follow the Ritual mechanically. Furthermore, when a priest held a diocesan Ritual in his hands, its ceremonial aspect continued to shape what he could and could not do in liturgical encounters, especially in situations fraught with ambiguity. Consequently, the diocesan Ritual must be treated as a multifaceted entity—as both text and object—whose pages demanded prescriptive force and whose presence generated authority. The slippage between these two aspects of the diocesan Ritual—between its prescriptive and ceremonial functions—opened a narrow but nonnegligible space for the priest's own best judgment about how to handle a sacramental situation and, by extension, for cautious liturgical experimentation.
Prudence and Liturgical Experimentation
Instructions in the diocesan Ritual acknowledged that a clergyman must think for himself, within the bounds established by the Ritual's instructions. In some cases, a Ritual might explicitly call for the priest's personalized contribution, as the Ritual of Reims does when it tells priests that they can add “that which they judge appropriate” to the ready-made lessons provided in the Ritual “according to their erudition and ability, as long as they do so in conformity with the Ritual's contents.”Footnote 64 This creative margin had a name: the church called it “prudence.” Diocesan Rituals specified that a clergyman must exercise prudence to determine which questions to ask during confession, whether to defer or refuse absolution, which forms of penance to impose, and how best to deal with the different types of people who requested a sacrament.Footnote 65 Prudence afforded priests a certain degree of liturgical flexibility. Classified by the church as one of four desirable but nonessential spiritual qualities recommended in priests who heard confessions—that is to say, qualities the lack of which would not nullify a sacrament—prudence created margin within the rites leading up to a sacrament so that clergymen could elaborate solutions they considered appropriate to a particular case or circumstance.Footnote 66 The ideal priest, in other words, followed all the instructions in the Ritual, but not by rote. Over time, this creative margin that the church afforded to priestly prudence facilitated a process through which one priest's ceremonial experiments, such as recourse to a notary during a confession, could enter the clergy's repertoire of accepted best practices and eventually find its way into the diocesan Ritual's explicit prescriptions.
A cardinal virtue, ecclesiastical texts treat prudence as a term even the least-skilled priestly readers already know and therefore do not define it.Footnote 67 Descriptions of ecclesiastical prudence, however, call for a type of action that theatre scholars would today understand as improvisational. An analogy between a sacramental exchange and early modern improvisational theatre clearly has limits. To begin with, diocesan Rituals do not acknowledge key features of theatrical improvisation, such as laughter and surprise, that seminary training explicitly sought to prevent.Footnote 68 Additionally, some sacraments left more room for priestly prudence than others. A highly scripted sacrament like the Eucharist left few words and gestures to the priest's prudence, whereas confession required priests to make many impromptu decisions. Although a priest did not have the same leeway that France's early farce players or commedia dell'arte performers enjoyed, a priest who administered the sacraments had to assess a social situation quickly, classify the participants according to a standardized list of character types, and then act in accordance with the resulting scenario. According to Diana Taylor, in a scenario “all the elements are there: encounter, conflict, resolution, and dénouement. . . . But they are, ultimately, flexible and open to change.”Footnote 69 Each confession presented clergymen with a scenario in Taylor's sense. On the part of the priest, this scenario involved deciding which questions to ask, whether to accord absolution, and which penance to assign based on a list of characteristics attributed to the penitent, including place of residence, social station, attitude, intelligence, and the length of time since his or her previous confession.Footnote 70 In Beuvelet's words, prudence expressed itself “in four principal ways, of which the first concerns the interrogations one must do before and after the confession; the second, when one must accord, defer, or refuse absolution; the third, the manner in which to require penance or satisfaction; and the fourth, the different ways to deal with penitents depending on their dispositions.”Footnote 71 Consequently, the thinking and behavior that a sacramental encounter demanded of a priest shared many similarities with theatrical forms that combined “well-defined fixed characters and lively fixed situations.”Footnote 72 In the “lively fixed situations” encountered by a priest while administering the sacraments, prudence referred to the interpretive acts by means of which he applied doctrine and edicts to specific circumstances.
Two seventeenth-century anecdotes about the refusal of sacraments to actors demonstrate how confession, to borrow a description of commedia dell'arte, was “simultaneously well-rehearsed and open to the inspiration of the moment, a meeting of structured control and spontaneous creativity.”Footnote 73 These anecdotes further suggest how the diocesan Ritual in its dual status as prescriptive text and ceremonial object both shaped the scenarios priests enacted and legitimized their experimental departures from the script printed in the Ritual. Finally, the interplay between prudent experimentation and legitimization that was facilitated by both the content and physical presence of a diocesan Ritual during a sacrament shows how a practice, like refusing absolution or Communion to actors, could begin as a situationally specific innovation and then spread, becoming a prescriptive action.
The first anecdote shows how the refusal of sacraments to actors entered the confessional scenario. It recounts what I believe to be the confessional exchange between a priest and actor that inspired French bishops to begin listing actors as public sinners at the end of the 1640s. Recorded in a manuscript memoire written by Jean du Ferrier (1609–85), one of the first clergymen trained by Jean-Jacques Olier at the seminary he founded in 1642 in the parish of Saint-Sulpice in the Faubourg Saint-Germain just outside Paris, the anecdote describes a period just before the first antiactor Ritual's publication.Footnote 74 After entering holy orders, Ferrier served until 1649 as the superior of a community of priests, akin to the prêtres habitués discussed earlier, who helped the curate administer sacraments in the parish.Footnote 75 Ferrier reports that during this period, an actor who had been performing farces at the Foire Saint-Germain, or seasonal fair near the church of Saint-Sulpice, found himself ill to the point of death and asked for a confessor and the sacraments.Footnote 76 Upon learning of the actor's condition, Ferrier instructed the priest who had responded to the actor's summons to “absolve him if he saw him repentant, but to forbid him the Communion of the holy Viaticum.”Footnote 77 According to Ferrier's account, this sacramental refusal prompted two actors to leave their profession. The first was a young man who had “entered the company [troupe] only a month before in the belief that there was no wrong in it,” and the second was the dying actor who “recognized himself as unworthy to participate in it [Communion]” and “avowed that he would renounce the theatre, and indeed when he had recovered his health, he abandoned it entirely.”Footnote 78 These conversions, according to Ferrier, convinced other curates in Paris that withholding sacraments from actors was a fruitful strategy.Footnote 79 “Messieurs the curates of Paris, in the next monthly assembly, approved this refusal as very fitting,” he writes.Footnote 80 Ferrier and other priests who worked at the parish level in Paris concluded that sacramental refusal was an effective way to counteract the theatre.
Ferrier's story demonstrates a priest's application of prudence to interpret and respond to a sacramental situation in a contextually specific way. Paris's own diocesan Ritual would not list actors as public sinners until 1654, and the bishop of Châlons had not yet excluded actors from the sacraments in his Ritual, either. Adherence to a prescription in the diocesan Ritual did not, therefore, dictate Ferrier's decision to refuse Communion to the actor. Rather, he relied on prudence to decide what to do. His first interpretive act consisted in assigning an identity to the dying individual, in keeping with the diocesan Ritual's instruction that priests use their prudence to determine the penitent's place in the social order.Footnote 81 At the beginning of the anecdote, Ferrier classifies the sick person as an opérateur who “went onstage where he represented farces to attract the people.”Footnote 82 By choosing the term opérateur, Ferrier characterizes the dying man as suspicious. Furetière defines opérateur as a “Charlatan who sells his drugs and remedies in public and onstage.”Footnote 83 Of the terms used to refer to performers in seventeenth-century France, opérateur was one of the most degrading—even more so than terms such as farceur and bateleur that churchmen would later use in diocesan Rituals. In fact, Ferrier reports that the head of the troupe later contested Ferrier's use of terms such as opérateur and insisted that he and his fellow actors were comédiens. Ferrier in turn rejects the word comédien as the stage player's effort to “elevate his profession above that of charlatans and puppeteers.”Footnote 84 This negotiation about how to classify the performers foregrounds the interpretive work in which Ferrier engaged. As soon as Ferrier designated the performer an opérateur instead of, say, a bourgeois de Paris, Ferrier invoked a social category that necessitated additional prudence for its heightened ambiguity.
Indeed, ambiguity characterizes Ferrier's telling of the anecdote, highlighting the trial-and-error quality of prudence at work in a given scenario. An important sign that priests did not quite know what to do when confronted with a dying actor can be seen in their need to consult each other. When the priest who initially visited the ill performer does not know how to respond, he goes to Ferrier for advice. Once the situation becomes Ferrier's responsibility, he tries several tactics, including preaching. Ferrier describes how he gave a lecture about the evils of stage plays and the excommunication of actors, in which he cited the Councils of Arles and of Constantinople, to a group of the ill performer's friends who “came during the night with several torches to demand that we take him the Blessed Sacrament.”Footnote 85 Most of the troupe did not take kindly to Ferrier's diatribe. “I went out to speak with them,” writes Ferrier, “but as they were actors and charlatans without piety or understanding, all that I told them against their profession, rather than persuading them, embittered them.”Footnote 86 Although one young actor in the group was receptive to Ferrier's chastisements and requested an individual meeting, Ferrier views preaching as less effective than withholding the sacraments. Overall, the account narrates a situation for which Ferrier and his fellow priests understood the scenario but did not have a step-by-step plan. They lacked instructions to follow when it came to dealing with actors, which prompted them to try a range of responses in an effort to convince the performers to change their minds about the theatre's moral status and, by extension, their profession as theatre makers.
For the history of French antitheatrical sentiment, Ferrier's anecdote provides a possible solution to the unsolved question of what prompted the bishop of Châlons to list actors as public sinners in his diocesan Ritual more than a decade before the key antitheatrical texts of the 1660s and 1670s appeared. The anecdote shows an initial phase of clerical attitudes toward actors, prior to the first antiactor Ritual of 1649, in which priests at the parish level knew basic arguments against the theatre, such as the councils cited by Ferrier, and faced a growing number of actors in Paris as the theatre professionalized.Footnote 87 Bereft of specific instructions for how to treat actors, these priests used their prudence when confronted with a dying stage player to develop a course of action that would be in keeping with the church's methods for responding to other penitents engaged in potential sources of sin. Ferrier's decision to withhold the sacraments to try to push the actors to renounce their profession found favor with other parish priests and subsequently found its way into the prescriptive content of French diocesan Rituals. Prudence, ceremonial experimentation, and the sharing of information among priests through oral networks form the backbone of this story and show how they innovated within the accepted limits of the confessional scenario.
Ferrier's anecdote thus complements Dubu's assessment of France's early antiactor Rituals. Focused on the diocesan Ritual's prescriptive aspect, Dubu suggests that an ecclesiastical text published before 1649 inspired reform-minded bishops to list actors as public sinners. He identifies as the culprit a Latin edition of Charles Borromeo's works published in Paris in 1643 under the title Acta Ecclesiæ Mediolanensis [Acts of the Church of Milan].Footnote 88 Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584, exerted tremendous influence among French clergymen, as did Olier and the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, to whose initiative Dubu attributes the publication.Footnote 89 According to Dubu, this 1643 edition of the Acta exaggerated passages from the Italian saint's Episcopal instructions that mentioned entertainments and entertainers. The first antiactor Rituals, Dubu implies, listed comédiens as public sinners in emulation of what Dubu considers a “tendentious” translation of Borromeo's Acta.Footnote 90
Without attention to the ceremonial aspects of the diocesan Ritual and the confessional scenario, however, Dubu's argument breaks down. Although Dubu finds passages in the 1643 edition where the Latin translation figures actors as profane in a way the Italian original does not, the 1643 edition did not list entertainers as public sinners, not even in a short passage titled “Of actors, mimes, traveling entertainers, hostels, and gamblers.”Footnote 91 Furthermore, none of Borromeo's instructions about the sacraments exclude histrions or mimes.Footnote 92 Therefore, even if Vialart de Herse's Ritual drew on Borromeo's instructions, the bishop of Châlons and the individuals who helped him pen his diocesan Ritual would have needed to do some innovating of their own to draw the conclusion that the Borromean model for a good bishop entailed listing actors as public sinners. They would have needed to rely on their prudence or to have observed other priests who, through the application of prudence, refused sacraments to actors.
Ferrier's anecdote shows precisely such a process in which local priests applied their prudence and then encouraged other priests—including those who would later have responsibility for drafting diocesan Rituals—to follow their lead. Borromeo's legacy in relation to the classification of actors as public sinners in France is therefore better understood as setting the constraints within which a churchman needed to enact his prudence. Priests who received seminary training would have thought of Borromeo in this way. Beuvelet cites Borromeo in the chapter of his handbook on penitence and recommends that priests read portions of Borromeo's Vie every day.Footnote 93 Ferrier, too, positions Borromeo's Acta as an influence that informed clerical perceptions of the confessional scenario. He discusses Borromeo's text before the anecdote about the dying actor, so that the actor's conversion serves as an example of the local clergy's use of Borromeo. “The Acts of the Church of Milan that we had published in Paris,” writes Ferrier, “served as the guidelines to the priests, especially regarding the refusal and delay of absolution as we fruitfully practice it, making [false penitents] rather give up the proximate occasions of [sin] and engage in practices of penance against sins of habit.”Footnote 94 Here, Ferrier presents Borromeo's text as a framework—a règle or rule rather than a set of case-by-case instructions—that made the refusal and deferral of absolution integral to the confessional scenario when dealing with Catholics whose behavior could lead others to sin. For Ferrier, attending plays constitutes one of these “proximate occasions” of moral downfall, or situations likely to entice someone to sin.Footnote 95 Thus, although Borromeo's text did not explicitly target actors, it did make the withholding of absolution and, by extension, the refusal of the sacraments a standard part of the confessional scenario, regardless of whether the penitent in question was officially classified as a public sinner in the local diocesan Ritual.
A spirit of experimentation arose from the Borromean focus on eradicating proximate occasions of sin as French priests sought ways to follow Borromeo's example. In relation to actors, Ferrier's manuscript signals the link between the Borromean influence and confessional experiments quite clearly. In what seems to be 1647 but possibly as early as 1643 or 1644, the priests of Saint-Sulpice held a three-day conference to which they invited “a number of theologians [docteurs] from the Sorbonne and monks [Religieux] from each convent in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”Footnote 96 For three days, they “conferred and came to an agreement about” Borromeo's instructions before they began to hear Easter confessions.Footnote 97 Ferrier notes that the time spent discussing Borromeo “produced great good” because “among other things” it resulted in “chasing a band of actors that had come and established itself in the parish with the support of the Duke of Orleans, calling themselves his actors.”Footnote 98 This appears to have been Molière's Illustre Théâtre, established in 1643, which had rented a tennis court called the Jeu de paume des Mestayers until late 1644 in the suburb of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and thus in the parish of Saint-Sulpice.Footnote 99 In her biography of Molière, Virginia Scott indeed credits the Illustre Théâtre's move to the other side of the Seine at the end of 1644 in part to the churchmen of Saint-Sulpice, noting that “Olier attacked the young company relentlessly, finally forbidding his parishioners to attend their theatre on pain of excommunication and damnation.”Footnote 100 What the actors experienced as persecution, Ferrier perceives as an experiment in sacramental practice justified by its results and similar to efforts he and his priests were trying during the same period on parishioners who partook in dueling.Footnote 101
Experiments regarding the best way to put Borromeo's guidelines into practice spread beyond the parish of Saint-Sulpice through priestly networks, enabling local innovations to enter the confessional scenario in other places. As mentioned by Ferrier, priests in Paris shared information with each other about local problems and successes via a monthly assembly. This assembly, over which Ferrier usually presided in his capacity as superior of the Community of Priests of Saint-Sulpice, likely provided the mechanism by which Ferrier's method for handling actors spread. According to Ferrier's account, the assembly “approved” as “very fitting” his refusal of Communion to the dying actor.Footnote 102 The assembly gathered all the curates, vicars, and “confrères” of the diocese, who brought with them written responses to between ten and twelve questions agreed upon at the end of the previous assembly.Footnote 103 Their written responses formed the basis of a discussion, led by the assembly's president, who “interrogated” each participant and then “made them repeat the resolutions that Monsieur the Bishop had sent them on the other questions to which they had already responded, so that everyone agreed on the same moral.”Footnote 104 Ferrier continues: “The fruit of these conferences cannot be expressed. It produced knowledge [science] and discipline among the clergy, unity and vigilance too.”Footnote 105 Thus, when Ferrier states that the monthly assembly of curates had approved his practice, this means the question of whether or not to refuse absolution to actors had been among the ten or so questions addressed during an assembly meeting, to which Paris's curates and vicars had responded in writing, and then upon which the bishop had issued a final decision—presumably to the effect that actors should be treated, like duelists, as those who should renounce a practice or profession before receiving the sacraments. Although not inscribed in a diocesan Ritual until 1649, this assembly decision would have informed the “prudence” exercised by a priest confronted with an actor and would have increased the likelihood that he would demand a renunciation of the stage as if this requirement were written in the copy of the diocesan Ritual he held in his hands.
Vialart de Herse, the first French bishop to list actors as public sinners, had close ties to Paris's seminaries and thus the milieu described by Ferrier, creating the distinct possibility that the Ritual he issued in 1649 drew on the decision arrived at by the monthly assembly of parish priests when they approved Ferrier's withholding of sacraments to an actor. Vialart de Herse and Olier were cousins, had worked together in two missionary efforts in the provinces prior to Vialart's appointment as bishop, and maintained close ties with leading figures of Catholic reform in 1640s Paris—such as Vincent de Paul (1580–1660), Adrien Bourdoise (1584–1655), and Jean Eudes (1601–80)—making them both part of a larger cohort of priests and prelates who shared ideas and practices with each other.Footnote 106 In fact, Cardinal Richelieu appointed Vialart de Herse to the Coadjutory and subsequently to the Episcopal seat at Châlons only after Olier turned the office down in 1639 in favor of starting his seminary.Footnote 107 Vialart had sufficiently close ties with Olier, as well as convergent interests since they both ran seminaries, so as to want to keep apprised of ceremonial innovations at Saint-Sulpice. Finally, a steady flow of seminary directors from Paris collaborated with Vialart de Herse in Châlons during the first ten years of his episcopacy. Among them were three priests from the Seminary of Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet—home to Beuvelet and his Manuel—who helped Vialart de Herse found his seminary.Footnote 108 One of these priests, M. le Pelletier, became Vialart de Herse's vicar general.Footnote 109 Finally, when it came time to issue a diocesan Ritual as part of his reform efforts, Vialart de Herse did not compose it himself but rather “charged several capable people, well instructed in good Theology, Christian morals, and ecclesiastical rites, to compose a Ritual.”Footnote 110 The author of Vialart de Herse's Vie does not give the names of these delegates, but it would not be surprising if Pelletier were among them. All this evidence suggests that through priestly exchanges and interdiocesan collaboration, the types of experimental practice described in Ferrier's anecdote found prescriptive form in Vialart de Herse's diocesan Ritual.
A second anecdote, again from the parish of Saint-Sulpice but approximately forty years later, shows how the confessional scenario continued to evolve through ceremonial experimentation so as to include an actor's written renunciation of the stage, transcribed in the presence of a notary. This second anecdote reinforces the above analysis of confession as a scenario at once “well-rehearsed and open to the inspiration of the moment, a meeting of structured control and spontaneous creativity.”Footnote 111 Here, the well-rehearsed quality can be seen in the way actors in 1680s Paris now occupied the clearly defined role of public sinners in the confessional scenario thanks to their inscription in the diocesan Ritual's content after 1654. At the same time, the diocesan Ritual's physical presence continued to facilitate subtle innovations in ceremonial practice, which gradually entered the ecclesiastical repertoire and acquired the status of prescribed action by the early eighteenth century. In this case, the anecdote demonstrates how the practice of demanding a written renunciation from actors moved from a liturgical experiment in the 1680s to a response scripted by ecclesiastical texts that comment on the diocesan Ritual, if not yet in diocesan Ritual itself, by the 1730s.
On a summer Sunday in 1684, an actor-playwright from the Comédie-Française named Guillaume Marcoureau, known as Brécourt, débuted a play at the Théâtre Guénégaud that was to be his last; a comedy titled Timon. The actors of the Troupe du Roi performed Timon seventeen times between its début and the end of December, performing it not only in Paris but also before Louis XIV's Court at Fontainebleau and Versailles.Footnote 112 During one of the court performances, Brécourt exerted himself too much and, according to tradition, burst a blood vessel, which would lead within months to his demise.Footnote 113 By late February of 1685, he was feeling sufficiently unwell so as to fear for his life. Brécourt lived in the parish of Saint-Sulpice on the rue du Seine, not far from both the Théâtre Guénégaud and the parish church. Suspecting that his days might be numbered, on 15 March 1685 Brécourt summoned his parish priest and expressed his desire to confess and receive the last rites.Footnote 114
Sulpicians remember the priest who arrived at Brécourt's home, Claude Bottu de la Barmondière, as always ready to administer the last rites, which means always with a Ritual in hand.Footnote 115 One of Barmondière's contemporaries, Joseph Grandet (1646–1724)—the director of Saint-Sulpice's seminary in the diocese of Angers and the author of a manuscript compilation of short Vies about seventeenth-century priests with a reputation for holiness—described him in the following way:
He always carried in his pockets, when he went to visit his parish, a ritual, a stole, a surplice, some holy water, a crucifix, and a Bible so that if by chance he found himself in a neighborhood where there was a sick person in dire need, he could administer the sacraments without returning to his church.Footnote 116
The Ritual Barmondière carried to Brécourt's home would have most likely been the edition issued by the archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondy, in 1654, which was, as noted above, the first Ritual in Paris to list actors as public sinners.Footnote 117 Published the year before Barmondière entered seminary, Gondy's 1654 Ritual would have been the version with which Barmondière had become acquainted during the most critical years of his priestly formation.
In keeping with the passage in the 1654 edition of the Parisian Ritual that listed actors among the public sinners who must be excluded from Communion, Barmondière agreed to administer the sacraments to Brécourt upon one condition: that Brécourt publicly renounce his profession as an actor.Footnote 118 Thus far, the scenario presented by Brécourt's request for the last rites replicates in several dimensions the anecdote narrated by Ferrier, underscoring the “never for the first time” quality Taylor attributes to scenarios as a form of cultural transmission; what Taylor calls the “setup” that “lays out the range of possibilities” for a scenario's development includes the same cast of characters, the same location, and the same goals as those that characterized Ferrier's anecdote.Footnote 119 In fact, before he was installed as the parish priest of Saint-Sulpice in 1678, Barmondière held the same post as Ferrier, leading the parish's community of priests.Footnote 120 The setup thus bears the marks of a well-rehearsed and therefore predictable scenario.
Yet, a critical difference distinguishes the Brécourt scenario from the anecdote recounted by Ferrier, revealing the incremental liturgical innovations exercised through ecclesiastical prudence. Barmondière required Brécourt not only to state but also to pen his renunciation of the stage, thereby introducing writing into an interaction that would have otherwise consisted only of oral and ceremonial exchanges. To this end, the priest drew up an act that Brécourt signed in front of four witnesses.Footnote 121 In the context of Protestant conversions, written statements had a ceremonial precedent. Henri IV had handed to the archbishop of Bourges a summary of his submission to the Catholic Church as part of his public abjuration ceremony in 1593.Footnote 122 At the parish level, priests recorded abjurations in their registers and sometimes required the Protestant to sign a statement in the presence of a notary, a practice that became especially common after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the same year of Brécourt's renunciation.Footnote 123 Priestly repertoires thus included the possibility of a written statement as part of the scenario for sacramental encounters with heretics.
The request for a written renunciation from an actor nonetheless constitutes an innovative gesture because neither the Ritual of Paris, nor Beuvelet's Instructions sur le manuel, nor the most detailed diocesan Rituals to which Barmondière would have had access explicitly stated that a priest should require public sinners to submit a written statement.Footnote 124 The statement signed by Brécourt reads:
In the presence of Claude Bottu de la Barmondière, priest, doctor of theology from the Sorbonne, parish priest of the Church and Parish of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and the witnesses named hereafter, Guillaume Marcoureau de Brécourt has acknowledged that having up until now practiced the profession of actor, he renounces it entirely and promises with a true and sincere heart to no longer exercise [the profession of actor] nor take to the stage, even if he returns to a condition of full and entire health. Signed in Paris, in the house of the above-mentioned Marcoureau de Brécourt, in the presence of . . . , the 15th day of the month of March 1685.Footnote 125
Through small innovations such as the introduction of writing, churchmen sought to enhance their authority in relation to stage players in periods when the theatre's cultural standing had improved in a way that challenged the church's designation of actors as sinners.
Upon first analysis, the renunciation text seems to showcase Barmondière's strength and, by extension, the strength of the church against Brécourt specifically and the theatre more generally. Indeed, once the act was signed, Barmondière stored it in the parish registers, where he and his vicars recorded all the parish's births, baptisms, marriages, and burials.Footnote 126 Reduced to a line of text, Brécourt's profession as an actor could now be enfolded into a document over which the parish priest had control. Furthermore, the text itself positions Saint-Sulpice's parish priest as the arbiter of linear time by bracketing Brécourt's identity as an actor in the past and attempting to eradicate it from the future. The profession he practiced “up until now” Brécourt promises to “no longer exercise . . . even if he returns to a condition of full and entire health.” This statement, now in the priest's possession, could also circulate. An anonymous treatise on the sacraments from the early eighteenth century, for example, specifies that the Sunday after obtaining a renunciation from an actor the priest should “read this writing [aloud] during the time he gives the sermon.”Footnote 127 Whereas ceremonies, as performances, occupy primarily the present, the written record of the renunciation represents a bid to extend the ceremonial action beyond its temporal limits.
Although the renunciation text represents a show of strength on the part of the church, the names and titles given to Barmondière and Brécourt in the document belie Brécourt's relative power and suggest that Barmondière's introduction of writing in fact represents a nonscripted response to the actor's perceived status. Whereas Ferrier derided the actor in his anecdote as an opérateur, the renunciation text addresses Brécourt by name, acknowledges that he exercised a profession, and names that profession using the word actors used for themselves, comédien. If Barmondière had wanted to disparage Brécourt's craft, he could have called him a buffon, bateleur, histrion, or farceur.Footnote 128 In another sign of respect, nor does the written statement use the phrase “public sinner” to explain the need for a renunciation. These details, while small, attest to the degree to which Brécourt, as an actor in the 1680s rather than the 1640s, possessed his own claims to cultural legitimacy before the likes of Barmondière.
Brécourt's person and profession fell under the powerful, if somewhat arbitrary, protection of the king's house. As a member of the Comédie-Française, Brécourt, like his fellow actors, had an “almost official role” at the king's court.Footnote 129 The performances at Fontainebleau and Versailles just prior to Brécourt's illness figured among his responsibilities as an actor under the king's patronage.Footnote 130 As Blocker has noted, the “exclusivity accorded” to the Comédie-Française after its creation in 1680 “publicly made its members servants of the prince, to the point that some of them dared call themselves officers of the king.”Footnote 131 The renunciation text does not afford Brécourt quite such an illustrious identity.Footnote 132 Nonetheless, given the king's patronage, Barmondière's refusal of sacraments to an actor from the Comédie-Française implied taking a stand, if only a modest one, against the king. The triple identity afforded Barmondière by the renunciation text—priest, doctor from the Sorbonne, and curate—seems designed in part to strengthen his position against potential challenges to his treatment of Brécourt as a public sinner.
Barmondière's insistence on a written renunciation likewise responds at least in part to Brécourt's association with sources of authority beyond the stage. As Maugras explains, early modern French actors “Almost always . . . gave in and accepted” the demand to renounce the stage. However, “If he returned to health, one of two things happened: either he forgot his promise and did not keep it, or an order from the First Gentleman [of the King's chamber] obliged him to reappear onstage without the slightest worry in the world about the commitment he had made in relation to the Church.”Footnote 133 A written renunciation statement would give the church a document to which they could point in protest against a royal order that returned an actor to the stage who had previously renounced his or her profession.
Two factors related to the diocesan Ritual's prescriptive content and ceremonial presence opened the sacramental exchange to inscription. First, the classification earlier in the century of acting as a “public” sin introduced the possibility of inscription because certain kinds of writing—especially writing conducted in the presence of a notary or distributed in print—occupied and structured the notion of publicness. One example given for the term “public” in Furetière's Dictionnaire universel, for example, noted that an author was said to “give his works to the public when he had them printed,” adding that “Otherwise it would suffice to make them circulate as manuscripts.”Footnote 134 Likewise, Furetière defined a notary as an “Officer-guardian of the public faith, who keeps the notes and minutes of contracts that parties have entered into in his presence and who produces authentic copies.”Footnote 135 Writing in these two types of situation both constituted and defined a “public.” By extension, to declare a type of sinner “public” implied that his or her actions already circulated like a printed text and had transgressed the “public faith” secured by the notary's archival storehouse. “Public” sin made “public” writing appropriate. Consequently, the designation of actors as “public” sinners served to broaden the ceremonial possibilities available to priests by making the demand for a written renunciation or the summoning of a notary a logical extension of the sacramental scenario.
Meanwhile, as a ceremonial object the diocesan Ritual enjoyed a direct relationship to the type of public writing already conducted by priests in sacramental situations, namely, the keeping of parish registers. As already mentioned, it was into these registers that parish priests inscribed Protestant abjurations and that Barmondière inserted Brécourt's renunciation. Furetière defines a register as “A public book that serves to keep records or acts or minutes for the justification of various facts that one might need in the future,” and lists parish registers as an example of this kind of public text.Footnote 136 Although not registers themselves, diocesan Rituals typically contained instructions on how to keep these registers. Beuvelet's Instructions sur le manuel devotes an entire chapter to the proper way to maintain the registers of baptism, marriage, and burial.Footnote 137 Likewise, the Ritual of Bourges provides instructions for a register of “The State of Souls” in which the priest recorded who had or had not confessed and received Communion at Easter.Footnote 138 One can certainly imagine a scenario in which a priest might open his diocesan Ritual and refer to these instructions while filling out the appropriate parish register. In terms of the diocesan Ritual's ceremonial significance, its association with the church's public records increased the authority conveyed by the diocesan Ritual's presence. A priest with a diocesan Ritual in hand who demanded that an actor renounce his or her profession in writing before a notary evoked, whether intentionally or not, the church's role as record keeper in early modern France.
When Barmondière demanded a written renunciation in 1685, he engaged in a liturgically acceptable but nonscripted action. By the early eighteenth century—although not yet specified in the Parisian Rituals of 1697 or 1701Footnote 139—the obligation to obtain a written renunciation of the stage from a dying actor had entered the priestly scenario in the form of ecclesiastical instructions intended to aid priests in improving their sacramental performance. A treatise titled Theorie et pratique des sacremens [Theory and practice of the sacraments], published in 1736, attests to the degree to which written renunciation had become standard practice. Structured as questions and answers, the treatise asks, “What measures must a parish priest take to make public the renunciation of the profession of actor that he would have received from an actor to whom he would have administered the sacraments at death?”Footnote 140 The treatise responds, “He would be obliged, before taking the Viaticum to this actor, to extract from him a written renunciation.”Footnote 141 Before administering the sacrament, the instructions continue, the priest should “publicly read the [statement]” when the “Holy Viaticum is in the sick person's room” and afterward “on the following Sunday he should read the written statement again when he gives the sermon.”Footnote 142 Through the interplay between liturgical experimentation and prescription that the physical presence of a diocesan Ritual facilitated, the church's treatment of actors in France thus evolved over a ninety-year period such that the previous generation of priests’ impromptu solutions to the perceived threat of stage players became the next generation's scripted ceremonial behavior.
Conclusion
Rather than an inert prescriptive text that directed French priests to enact their bishop's instructions mechanically, the diocesan Ritual enjoyed a hybrid status between rule book and ceremonial object. Animated by the priest's prudence, or interpretive margin, the diocesan Ritual's hybrid nature enabled its physical presence to legitimize liturgical actions that corresponded to the spirit of the Ritual's prescriptive content but went beyond the behaviors explicitly called for in its pages. As a liturgical object, the diocesan Ritual therefore fostered ceremonial innovation. These innovations often occurred on a very small scale, such as the inclusion of a new category—like actors—in the list of public sinners or the use of writing to secure a renunciation. They nonetheless effected incremental change in the liturgical repertoire through which priests exerted influence over the nonliturgical cultural forms of production around them, such as the theatre.
For the larger story of antitheatrical sentiment, the ceremonial context that spurred the spread of diocesan Rituals that classified actors as public sinners helps reveal networks of priests whose religious performances shaped discourses about the theatre's role in public life. A focus on the use of diocesan Rituals serves as a reminder that ceremonial practices transmit ideas even when not distilled into a philosophical or theological discourse. Ceremonies transmit ideas in part by reinforcing human relationships. The circulation of diocesan Rituals shows this process at work. Their circulation helped forge and maintain the ties that bound seminary directors, bishops, and humble clergymen together into the institution of the church. These ties, as seen in Ferrier's references to the monthly assembly of Parisian curates or in the priests from Bourdoise's Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet who traveled to the diocese of Châlons to help its bishop found his seminary, exerted tremendous influence over the way early modern French clergymen envisioned the ideal churchman and his prudence. It was through such networks that ideas about the theatre and strategies for responding to actors spread among priests in early modern France.
So great was the diocesan Ritual's network-building agency as a ceremonial object that in at least one instance a bishop sent his diocesan Ritual to another, anonymously, by sending it first to a seminary. In October of 1677, Louis Tronson, the seminary of Saint-Sulpice's Superior General, concluded a letter to the bishop of Arras, Guy de Sève de Rochechouart, by remarking, “I received a Ritual of Arras, which I imagine was sent on your behalf for the Monseigneur the bishop of Coutances.”Footnote 143 That same day, Tronson passed the Ritual to a seminarian names Jullien de Lallier who, after six years at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, was on his way back to his home diocese of Coutances to become the parish priest at Valognes.Footnote 144 After entrusting the Ritual to Lallier, Tronson wrote the following letter to Charles-François de Loménie, the bishop of Coutances: “I placed in his hands a Ritual of Arras that I received without any letter, but that I imagine must have been sent to me for you.”Footnote 145 The unexplained arrival of a Ritual activated an interdiocesan network. The only existing copy of the Ritual, if it was the one issued by the bishop of Arras in 1675, was destroyed along with the municipal library in 1915.Footnote 146 Did it list actors as public sinners? We might never know. Nonetheless, passed from hand to hand to hand, the Ritual strengthened seminary ties stretching from the northernmost corners of the kingdom to its Western arm where, upon arrival, it would eventually bind hand to priestly hand at some sick person's bedside. When ill and calling for a priest, the actor's designation as public sinner depended not just on the diocesan Ritual's prescriptive content, but on its capacity as a ceremonial object to sustain relationships and generate affinity among the priests responsible for carrying out its instructions. Without this ceremonial support, antitheatrical texts would remain dead letters.
Joy Palacios is an assistant professor of religious studies in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on the way large organizations use performance and ritual to generate authority, maintain institutions, and forge communities. Her book, Ceremonial Splendor: Performing Priesthood in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), examines the way seminary-trained clergymen used representational strategies such as rehearsals, ceremonies, and framing to construct themselves in the image of the parfait ecclésiastique, or perfect churchman. Her articles have appeared in Liminalities; Performance Matters; Performance, Religion, and Spirituality; and Past and Present, as well as in a number of edited collections.
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