introduction from female piety and the catholic reformation in france

– 1 –

INTRODUCTION: SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIP AND RIGORIST DEVOTIONAL CULTURE

Visitors to Paris in the early seventeenth century were apparently struck by the pervasiveness of the dévot. Dressed soberly and shrou ded in long black capes, these fi gures even walked with a distinctively modest gait and were thus instantly recognizable to observers.1 Later parodied as hypocrites by Molière in Tartuff e, throughout the early decades of the century, dévots were au courant. Th ese were lay men and women who dedicated their lives to God, leading lives of piety in the world amidst the belated arrival of the Catholic Reformation in France.2 Th e reception of the Council of Trent (1545–63) was marked formally in 1615, when the Assembly of Clergy offi cially recognized the Tridentine decrees on the condition of Gallican independence from the Roman See. Th e ensuing Catholic revival was spearheaded by the dévots, many of whom had been inspired by the zeal of the Catholic Leaguers during the turbulent fi nal stages of the Wars of Religion which ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

During the past two decades, historians have begun to investigate the lay, female contribution to the Catholic Reformation in this context.3 Barbara Die-fendorf, one of the key proponents of this new historiography, charted the shift from penitential spirituality to charity among the Parisian female pious elite and highlighted their part in the fi rst waves of spiritual rejuvenation in France.4 Diefendorf herself recognized that the new circumstances of the personal reign of Louis XIV necessitates the separate study of female piety in the decades aft er the Fronde, and this book seeks to take up the challenge. In response to this body of historiography, this volume presents female devotional culture as gener-ational and something which ought to be understood as a response to changing spiritual currents, as well as social and political circumstances. Moving beyond the study of institutional documentation, such as the records of religious houses and confraternities, it instead proposes that an interrogation of correspondence can help us to better understand the social realities of elite devotion and avoid off ering another version of the female spiritual ‘triumph’ over the repressive character of the Council of Trent.5 By rediscovering the piety of the Parisian female ‘spiritual elite’ who succeeded the dévots, this book tells the story of a

Copyright

2 Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France

generation of pious women who have scarcely been studied by historians of early modern religious culture.6

Seventeenth-century female ‘rigorist penitents’, as they are referred to here, have received little archival study since the nineteenth century – when they were mythologized as beautiful luminaries or précieuses who monopolized the salons, or viewed simply as the Belles Amies of the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal. By recovering their devotional culture, this book off ers a new perspective on how female piety evolved in the decades aft er the dévot generation had pioneered the Catholic Reformation in France.

Th e Catholic Reformation and the Rigorist Turn in FranceFrench historians have been at the forefront of attempts to recapture the ‘religion of the people’ in early modern Europe. Th e groundbreaking work of scholars such as Lucien Febvre and other Annalistes recovered the early history of the post-Reforma-tion Catholic laity.7 Since the 1950s, the histoire des mentalités and socio-historical approaches to religious experiences, led by Gabriel Le Bras and Jean Delumeau, have been more infl uential.8 Writing in the aft ermath of the Second Vatican Coun-cil (1962–5), Delumeau, a professed and active Catholic, was provoked by concerns about the fate of twentieth-century Catholicism and de-Christianization in France.9 Delumeau’s work stimulated a debate which is still being continued within French scholarship and two generations of his disciples have contributed a number of stud-ies to the history of lay piety during and aft er the Catholic Reformation.10 Across the Channel, John Bossy and his academic supervisor Henry Outram Evennett did not share Delumeau’s view of pre-Reformation Catholicism as obstinately pagan and instead claimed that the Counter Reformation destroyed many of the social ties that a thriving traditional religion had fostered.11 Bossy’s work helped to renew Anglo-American interest in the Counter Reformation.12

Since then, there has been an outpouring of work on the experiences of the Catholic Reformation in diff erent European countries and the history of the non-European Catholic world is now very rich.13 Th e newest appraisals of approaches to its history have argued that a less Eurocentric perspective is going to be essential if we are to understand how early modern Catholicism expanded into a ‘World Religion’.14 Th is study cannot contribute to the history of the non-European Cath-olic revival, but it can help to reinforce the point that the Catholic Reformation must be seen as a longer-term process of appropriation. Joseph Bergin recently reminded us that the French Catholic Reformation had not fi zzled-out by 1660 but continued in its various forms well into the eighteenth century.15 In this book, the rigorism adopted by elite, lay women in mid-seventeenth-century Paris is located within their experience of this ‘long’ Catholic Reformation.

Rigorism was essentially a neo-Augustinian spiritual current which is oft en regarded as the continental counterpart to English Puritanism due to its

Copyright

Introduction 3

rejection of ‘Baroque excesses’.16 Th e careful work of Jean-Louis Quantin has revealed its origins in the writings of the Early Church Fathers.17 Historians of seventeenth-century France now usually recognize that there was, in the mid-dle decades of the century, a rigorist spiritual turn. Th is was signalled by the increasingly severe outlook of the Gallican church on the sacraments of confes-sion and communion, and by the rigorous casuistry of French clergymen who wanted to combat the moral laxity which they believed had been sanctioned by the Jesuits. Th e strict reform of the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal, led by Mère Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661) in the early seventeenth century is perhaps the most notorious expression of French rigorism, as the community became renowned for their strict outlook on predestined salvation and austere penitential practices.18

Above all, Port-Royal is remembered as the hub of a heretical movement known as Jansenism, named aft er the theology of the Flemish Bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), whose unorthodox doctrines the female religious and male clerics there were said to uphold. Daniella Kostroun’s research has revealed the extraordinary political activism of the female religious at Port-Royal in the face of persecution by the monarchy.19 In the mid-seventeenth century, Parisians from the robe nobility and high magistracy also fl ocked to the defence of the nuns and its patrons eventually included most of the aristocratic women with whom this book is concerned. It is crucial, however, that the Port-Royal controversies are located within the wider history of the rigorist turn. Consequently, in this book I avoid using the term ‘Jansenism’ which rather narrowly refers to the anti-Jesuit faction of Port-Royalists whose allegiance to Jansen was condemned by a papal bull of 1653, Cum Occasione. Rigorism better captures the broader shift taking place within French spirituality, since not all rigorists were supporters of Port-Royal and many who identifi ed with this spiritual trend would certainly not have identifi ed themselves as Jansenist. Here, I use the terms ‘rigorist’ and ‘rigor-ism’ to denote the neo-Augustinian spirituality and moral rigorism adopted by elite lay women, whilst recognizing that if they did not share a ‘coherent doctri-nal system’, they certainly shared a certain ‘style’ of devotion.20

Th e premise of Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation is that rigorism – as manifested in the religious and social lives of lay, aristocratic Parisian women who converted to it – should be understood in relation to the mid-century wan-ing of the dévot movement.21 Certainly, rigorism was fundamentally diff erent to the Salesian spirituality of the early seventeenth-century dévots which was, in simple terms, based on the premise that God wanted all men to be saved. In con-trast, the most important rigorist principle was anti-Molinist; it said that God had only selected some individuals upon whom to bestow ‘effi cacious grace’, which would allow them to suppress their corrupt human will and turn to God. Historians have preferred not to see the collapse of dévot organizations such

Copyright


as the Company of the Holy Sacrament as marking the disappearance of the movement in France and talk about it ‘resurfacing’ with madame de Maintenon’s circle in the 1680s.22 Th e word ‘dévot’ also continued to be used to denote per-sons of a spiritual persuasion well into the eighteenth century. Yet by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the dévot movement had lost the impetus which the early years of the Catholic Reformation had given it, and to be ‘dévot’ was no longer to be in vogue. Th is book tries to show that, in this context, the moral austerity of the early dévots was revived by a new generation of spiritual elite, who inherited their predecessors’ desire for a more socially and spiritually exclusive culture of worship.

Approaching lay, female rigorist piety in this way allows this study to contribute a history of rigorism which does not revolve around Port-Royal. Undoubtedly, it has to be understood in relation to the convent’s history, but it must be remembered that many of these women were attracted to the Port-Royal cause célèbre because they were rigorists. Th e devotional culture of rigorist women has been masked by an excessively narrow, sectarian historiographical interest in their role in the Port-Royal intrigues. Whilst recognizing their role as instrumental protectors of the convent, this book argues for their place as practitioners of a distinctive culture of worship which evolved in response to the spiritual currents of the mid-seventeenth century.

Female Devotional CultureTh is investigation of rigorist devotional culture seeks to unveil the rituals, prac-tices and beliefs underpinning the religious lives of aristocratic women and which also informed their personal identities, social attitudes and behaviour. Th e concept of a devotional culture best captures the essence of their piety which, as I have already noted, did not always exhibit a clear and coherent theol-ogy, but rather a style of worship organized by particular beliefs and grounded in penitence. In this book, I want to draw attention to its subtler textures in three ways. Firstly, I propose that rigorist penitents were practising a socially exclusive kind of pious sociability, which was founded upon intimate spiritual friendships between them, which were believed to be salvifi cally profi table. Secondly, I show how their devotional routines were characterized by a more demanding culture of penitence which rejected the licentious culture of an increasingly libertine royal court and its ostentatious Baroque ceremonies. Th irdly, I consider how their culture of worship may have informed, and been informed by, a post-con-version belief in their election or self-perception as God’s spiritual elite with an affi nity with the early Christian community.23

Th is history of their spiritual lives must be situated within the wider study of pious female circles in France. In addition to the research on dévot networks,

Copyright

Introduction 5

Jonathan Spangler and Patricia Ranum have done much to illuminate the pious lives of the Guise women, whilst Mark Bryant has analysed Madame de Main-tenon’s role in the conversion of the court in the later seventeenth century.24 Th ere are also some interesting parallels to explore between rigorism and the godliness of Puritan women, recently studied by scholars such as Andrew Cam-bers and Femke Molekamp.25

Th e historian of female religion in seventeenth-century France can also learn from the abundant scholarship on the devotional lives and spiritual iden-tities of lay women and the female religious across medieval and early modern Europe. Studies by historians Jodi Bilinkoff , Silvia Evangelisti and Laurence Lux-Sterritt – among others – have uncovered the diff erent colours and com-plexities of Catholic female spiritualities and destabilized many of the categories historians use to discuss them.26 Caroline Walker-Bynum’s canonical work on the feminization of religious symbols and language in the Middle Ages has a continuing resonance to scholars of female piety.27 Historians are also indebted to the scholarship of Gabriella Zarri – whose ‘Living Saints’ revealed the subtle ways in which religious expression off ered agency to women, oft en outside the institutional bounds of the Church.28

Robert Orsi’s analysis of the emergence of a new feminine, devotional culture in early twentieth-century Chicago is a useful tool for thinking more broadly about these themes.29 His seminal book Th ank You, St Jude explores the evolution of devotions to the cult of Saint Jude among women living in a Mexican-American parish in South Chicago in 1929. Th e study shows how the subordination of immigrant women in the community was reinforced by the cult. Yet integral to the story is an account of the creative response of the daugh-ters and grand-daughters of immigrants experiencing the social and political changes wreaked by the War and Great Depression:

through the power of their desire and need, awakened by and in response to the new challenges and possibilities of their American lives, and with the fl exible media of devotional culture – the images they could take away with them into their rooms and beds, the water and oil they could touch to their pains in gestures and rituals of their own improvising – the immigrants daughters could do much with what they inherited.30

For Orsi, the cult of St Jude both exploited the ‘culturally mandated’ responsi-bilities of immigrant women and celebrated their devotional capacities.31 Not only does Orsi’s reading off er historians of lay religion an approach to genera-tional female spiritualities, but also a model of interpretation for a devotional culture which was at once both liberating and constraining. Th is tension was also present in seventeenth-century lay, rigorist culture.

Copyright


By exploring another occasion when female piety operated outside of formal parameters, this book aims to off er a diff erent perspective on female agency and religious culture. Rigorism off ers historians of early modern female spirituality a unique encounter with an alternative culture of worship which was, at times, dis-sident and subversive. Whilst it would be unwise in a study of high-ranking, elite women to overplay the signifi cance of their gender or to see them as victims of a patriarchal system or a repressive Church, it does seem fruitful to highlight occa-sions when these women resisted or defi ed the devotional channels prescribed to them. As we shall see, this might have taken the form of lay women off ering informal spiritual advice to each other in the absence of a male spiritual direc-tor, reading devotional works considered inappropriate for women, or receiving communion when they were supposed to abstain.

Th is investigation charts the emergence of a new form of female sociability in a period when the salon is usually privileged as the ‘defi ning social institution’ of feminine sociabilité.32 Salons were gatherings usually held in the homes of noble and bourgeois women in Paris and in the provinces where women and men con-versed, composed and performed literary oeuvres, and debated matters of moral or philosophical interest. Many of the lay women who became rigorist penitents were regulars at the Parisian literary salons of the early seventeenth century before their conversions, as we shall see in Chapter 1, and their pious sociability retained many of the elements that characterized salon interaction, such as its foundation in letter writing. Rigorist penitents began to see salon sociability as representative of the mondanité (worldliness) that they felt compelled to sacri-fi ce, however, and their devotional culture was based upon a rejection of many of the social customs that made the salon part of Ancien Régime elite culture.33 Scholars such as Dena Goodman and Steven D. Kale have observed a shift in salon culture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as women were gradually excluded from the more serious and intellectual environments of the philosophical salon due to the mockery of female ‘ridiculous preciosity’.34 Th e mid-seventeenth-century rigorist critique of salon habits among the high female aristocracy is potentially signifi cant to this history of the ‘feminocentric’ salon and its later decline. More importantly, the history of rigorist female sociability exemplifi es how unconventional feminine sociabilities may have matured out-side of the salon in this period.

Th e rigorist aloofness from the salon was paralleled by their detachment from the royal court during an era when noble presence was crucial for secur-ing royal favour.35 Louis XIV reached his majority in the middle decades of our period, beginning his personal rule in 1661. During peacetime, courtiers were usually invited three days per week to be entertained by the King with billiards and cards, and its endless programme of feasts and spectacles made his court a theatre of power.36 Th e story of how one pious network of aristocratic women

Copyright

Introduction 7

rejected the royal court of the Sun King is a powerful counter-narrative to the history of the seventeenth century – which is still imagined predominantly as the ‘age of Louis XIV’. Th is study will show how rigorist devotional culture transgressed and subverted conventional forums for aristocratic sociability pri-marily through their critique of the court.

In addressing how the practice of a certain devotional style was underpinned by spiritual friendships between aristocratic women, this book is alert to the ways in which collective piety helped to reinforce social ties. In this regard, the infl uential approaches of historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and John Bossy, who used modern social anthropology to interpret religious rituals and highlighted how they had the power to bind social groups, is of continuing importance.37 Religion was a collective and social experience for these scholars, just as it was for Émile Durkheim.38 Th e way rigorist women’s commitment to demanding penitential regimes generated bonds between them might also force us to re-evaluate some of the consequences of the Catholic Reformation for the laity, in particular the argument that it resulted in a ‘highly individualistic’ and antisocial religion.39 In doing so, however, it is also essential to be mindful of the recent methodological debate concerning the overuse of social and cultural anthropology by historians of early modern religion and the associated criticism of their alleged implicit secular biases which have caused them to distort the beliefs of historical actors.40 In response to this, and in line with the scope of the Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World series, at the heart of this book is an exploration of how belief – in this case spiritual election and predestined salvation – interacted with devotional practices and sociability.

A New Generation of Spiritual Elite Th e lives of the lay female rigorists were fi rst illuminated by the librarian Cécile Gazier (1878–1936) who coined the term Belles Amies to describe the female patrons of the convent of Port-Royal in her book, published in 1930.41 Gazi-er’s Belles Amies numbered eight women who became important protectresses of the convent throughout the seventeenth century: Anne de Rohan, princesse de Guéméné (1606–85); Marie-Louise de Gonzague, later Queen of Poland (1611–67); Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé (1599–1678); Anne Hurault de Cheverny, marquise d’Aumont (1618–58); Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse de Longueville (1619–79); Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, madame de La Fayette (1634–93); Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–96); and Mademoiselle Marguerite de Joncoux (1668–1715).

Gazier’s sketches of each of these women revealed how the diff erent circum-stances surrounding their personal conversions brought them into the orbit of

Copyright


the Port-Royalists. Crucially, these profi les were intended merely as a sample of the lay women whose lives impacted upon the history of the convent: Gazier did not claim that these were the only active female patrons of the convent, or that their patronage was the only notable aspect of their biographies.42 Gazier wanted to generate interest in the wider story of the lay female contribution to the convent’s history. Th e unintended legacy of her representation of the Belles Amies has been the relegation of these women to a sideshow; they have been cast simply as the wealthy patrons of Port-Royal who lent their status to defend the convent during its persecution by the Crown and Papacy. Here, the spiritual-ity of the female rigorists is shown to be more consequential and deserving of a fuller investigation.

My own confi guration of the lay female rigorists does not reject Gazier’s representative sample, but aims to be more attentive to the closest relationships among rigorist women as indicated by their surviving correspondence. Conse-quently, the focus of this book is necessarily a small network of eight women, born between 1585 and 1637. As well as Guéméné, Gonzague, Sablé and Longueville (all studied by Gazier), it focuses on four other women: Anne-Marie Marti-nozzi, princesse de Conti; Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt; Anne Doni d’Attichy, comtesse de Maure ; and Louise de Béon du Massés, comtesse de Brienne. It seems instructive here to briefl y outline their personal biographies, starting with the fi ve whom the sources reveal to be most instrumental in this new devotional culture.

Th e duchesse de Longueville (1619–79) (Figure I.1) was the daughter of Henri II de Bourbon, prince de Condé (1588–1646) and Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency (1594–1650), princesse de Condé, and was born on 27 August 1619 during the imprisonment of her father at the château de Vincennes. On 2 June 1642 she married Henri II d’Orléans, (1595–1663), duc de Longueville, d’Estouteville, prince souverain de Neufchâtel and Wallengin-en-Suisse, comte de Dunois, de Tancarville and Saint-Paul, pair de France, and governor of Picardy and Normandy. His fi rst wife was Louise de Bourbon, with whom he had two sons who died as children, and one surviving daughter, Marie d’Orléans, later duchesse de Nemours (1625–1707). His marriage with Anne-Geneviève produced four children, two of whom reached adulthood: Jean-Louis Charles d’Orléans, duc de Longueville (1646–94), Charles-Paris (1649–72), Charlotte-Louise d’Orléans (d. 1645) and Marie-Gabrielle (d. 1650). Anne-Geneviève was widowed on 11 May 1663 when the duc de Longueville died at Rouen and, importantly, the duchess never remarried and lived as a widow until 5 April 1679.43

Copyright

Figure I.1 : Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse de Longueville (1619–79). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Réserve, QB,

201, 56.

Copyright


Anne-Marie Martinozzi, princesse de Conti (1637–72) (Figure I.2) was born in Rome to Geronimo Martinozzi and Cardinal Mazarin’s sister, Laure-Marguerite Mazzarini (1608–85). Anne-Marie came to Marseille with her mother in Sep-tember 1648 and married ex-Frondeur Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti, pair de France, comte de Pézenas, baron de La Fère-en-Tardenois, seigneur de l’Isle-Adam, chevalier des ordres du roi, and governor of Guyenne and Langue-doc (1629–66), on 21 February 1654. Conti’s marriage to Armand brought her into the Bourbon-Condé family – which included the ‘Grand Condé’, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–86). More signifi cant for this work is the relationship she developed with her sister-in-law, the duchesse de Longueville, as will become clear. Anne-Marie and Armand’s marriage produced three children, two of whom lived through to adulthood: Louis de Bourbon was born on 6 September 1658 and died on the same day, Louis-Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti (1661–85) died of smallpox on 9 November 1685 and François-Louis, prince de Conti (b. 30 April 1664) lived until the age of forty-fi ve. Anne-Marie died in Paris on 4 February 1672.44

Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt (1600–74) (Figure I.3) was the daughter of Henri de Schomberg and his fi rst wife Françoise de l’Espinay. Her fi rst marriage to François de Cossé, comte de Brissac was annulled and on 24 February 1620, she married Roger du Plessis, duc de Liancourt (1598–1674), duc de La Roche-Guyon, pair de France, marquis de Guercheville, comte de Beaumont and conseiller du roi, premier écuyer de sa petite écurie, and mestre de camp du regiment de Picardie. Th e marriage produced one son, Henri-Roger du Plessis who married Anne-Elisabeth de Lannoy and had the Liancourt ‘s grand-daughter Jeanne-Charlotte du Plessis Liancourt (1644–69). Aft er the death of their son Henri-Roger in 1646, the duke and duchess became the guardians of Jeanne-Charlotte and, as we will see, arranged for her education in Port-Royal. Jeanne-Charlotte died prematurely however, in 1669, aft er marrying her cousin François VII de La Rochefoucauld, prince de Marcillac (1634–1714). Th e duch-esse de Liancourt died on 14 June 1674.45

Th e marquise de Sablé (1599–1678) was the daughter of Gilles de Souvré, marquis de Courtenvaux, chevalier des ordres du roi and maréchal de France, and Françoise de Bailleul, dame de Renouard, born in 1599. In 1610 she made her fi rst appearance at court and, along with the comtesse de Maure, became lady-in-waiting to Marie de Medici. On 9 January 1614, she married Philippe-Émmanuel de Laval, marquis de Sablé, but it was essentially a marriage of political conveni-ence and aft er having fi ve children, the couple separated. She was widowed in 1640 and sometime aft er the death of her son Guy de Laval in 1646, she left her home in the faubourg Saint-Honoré by the Louvre and retreated to Port-Royal: a pivotal moment in the history of rigorist devotional culture. Sablé died on 16 January 1678.46

Copyright

Figure I.2: Anne-Marie Martinozzi, princesse de Conti (1637–72). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Réserve, QB, 201, 51.

Copyright

Figure I.3 : Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt (1600–74). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Réserve NA, 24 (A).

Copyright

Introduction 13

Anne Doni d’Attichy, comtesse de Maure (1601–63), descended from a Flor-entine family as the daughter of Octavien Dony, seigneur d’Attichy (d. 1614) and Valence de Marillac (d. 1617). She inherited the seigneury of Attichy in 1637 aft er the death of her brother Antoine who was killed at Flanders. One of her other brothers was Louis Doni d’Attichy, bishop of Riez and later of Autun. In 1635 she married Louis de Rochechouart, comte de Maure (1601–69), grand-sénéchal de Guyenne, but the marriage produced no children. Maure’s testament was dated February 1656, according to Nicolas Lefèvre de Lezeau, but there is no extant copy. Th e comte de Maure outlived her and died on 9 November 1669.47

Th e remaining three fi gures are connected in important ways to these women and can be identifi ed as rigorist but, as this book explains, their own life trajectories presented certain obstacles to a fuller commitment to it. Marie-Louise de Gonzague (1611–67) (Figure I.4) was the daughter of Catherine de Lorraine (d. 1618) and Charles de Gonzague (1580–1637). She was the older sibling of Anne de Gonzague, princesse Palatine (1616–84). Her mother died when she was seven years old, and she was raised predominantly by her paternal aunt. Shortly aft er her conversion, the Polish ambassadors Krzysztof Opalinski Palatine of Poznan and Wacla Leszczynski, Bishop of Warmia, arrived in Paris in October 1645 with a retinue to collect Marie-Louise before her marriage to the Polish King Wladyslaw IV. When Jan Kazimierz succeeded his elder brother at the age of thirty-nine he accepted her in marriage. Marie-Louise died in May 1667 and was buried at Wawel Cathedral.48

Th e princesse de Guéméné’s (1606–85) (Figure I.5) participation in rigorist devotional culture was cut short by her return to the world some years aft er her conversion. Guéméné was the only daughter of Pierre de Rohan and Madeleine de Rieux, born at Mortiercrolles on 20 April 1604 and baptized in Notre-Dame-des-Anges on 25 April. In 1617 she married her cousin Louis VII de Rohan (1598–1667) prince de Guéméné, duc de Montbazon, pair and grand veneur de France, seigneur de Coupvray and comte de Rochefort. Th e marriage produced two sons: Charles de Rohan (d. 1699) married Jeanne-Armande de Schomberg on 10 January 1653 and had four children; Louis de Rohan was executed on 27 November 1674. Th e prince was buried at Coupevray-en-Brie in 1667; the princess died on 14 March 1685 at Rochefort.49

Louise de Béon du Massés, comtesse de Brienne (1585–1665), is not usually a fi gure associated with the history of Port-Royal. She was, however, a dévot whose piety evolved in response to the rigorist movement and who became intimately connected to other women in this group. Brienne was the daughter of Bernard de Béon du Massés, marquis de Bouteville, governor of Saintonge-Angoumois (1554–1608) and Louise de Luxembourg-Brienne (1567–1647). In February 1623, she had married Henri-Auguste de Loménie, comte de Brienne (1594–1666), who was Secretary of State for Foreign Aff airs between 1646 and 1663.

Copyright

Figure I.4: Marie-Louise de Gonzague, later Queen of Poland (1611–67). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Réserve, NA, 24 (A).

Copyright

Figure I.5 : Anne de Rohan, princesse de Guéméné (1604–85). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Réserve, QB, 201, 62.

Copyright


She died at Châteauneuf-sur-Charente in the south-west of France on 2 Septem-ber 1665, probably at the château de Bouteville.50

Th ese eight women are the central fi gures in my analysis of lay rigorist devotional culture. Th e aim of this book is not to profi le the rigorist network in its entirety because this is something which other scholars such as Antony McKenna have already begun to do.51 An indiscriminate, blanket approach to the correspondence would also belie the exclusivity of lay, aristocratic women’s spiritual friendships. It would simply substantiate the traditional view of these women as part of a large, inclusive circle of ex-salonnières who gathered in mad-ame de Sablé’s conventual apartment at Port-Royal. Here, attention is limited to the density of relationships within this lay, female group, without denying the possibility for its broader connections and for relationships obscured by missing sources. Tracing the increasing exclusivity of some relationships permits some consideration of how ties within this group changed over time and allows us to see how even spiritual friendships were aff ected by social selection.

Letters and their Interpretation Correspondence has been overlooked as a source for reconstructing the piety of seventeenth-century rigorists because of the legacy of French nineteenth-cen-tury editions of their letters which, owing to the contemporaneous emergence of interest in the salon, tend to privilege the worldly activities of elite women.52 Th e editors of these were, by their own admission, oft en quite selective in their publications of the letters, which were not intended to be used as a repository of sources.53 Instead, they served to buttress a particular narrative or biographical story of the salonnières of the Grand Siècle, and have not been re-edited since their initial publication. Faith Evelyn Beasley has even gone as far as suggest-ing that, ‘in the wake of the upheaval of the Revolution’, scholars such as Victor Cousin (1792–1867) exploited the history of the salon to salvage the ‘greatness’ of France.54 She argues persuasively that Cousin’s ‘novelistic’ histories were part of nineteenth-century ‘myth-making’ about France’s past: the collateral damage of which was the ‘devalorization’ of seventeenth-century women.55 Biographical studies of Cousin also support these suppositions.56 It was the historiographical neglect of these letters – many within the Portefeuilles Vallant collection, named aft er the marquise de Sablé’s physician who archived her letters and oft en placed a docket or a brief explanation of the contents on the cover – which inspired the research for this book.57 By returning to the original manuscript letters, I have attempted to overcome the problems with the editorialized versions which oft en omitted sentences and contained discrepancies as to who the authors and recipients of certain letters were.58

Copyright

Introduction 17

In turning to the letter as a source for female piety, historians of seventeenth-century France are working with artefacts from ‘the age of feminine letter writing’.59 Letter-writing manuals reinforced the parallel made between femininity and the genre when they taught women how to compose letters, and were one of the most widely diff used print genres during this period. Letters were also central to polite culture at court: Louis XIV even read his courtiers’ mail at Versailles.60 In the last thirty years the study of this age of letter writing has profi ted from some fruitful col-laboration between literary theorists, feminist scholars and historians, culminating in the move towards a cultural history of correspondence within Anglo-American scholarship.61 Letters are now seen as texts which should be mined for their tropes and ‘writerly qualities’.62 Th ese disciplinary developments are important for our understanding of seventeenth-century female letters, which were oft en craft ed with the enjoyment of the reader in mind and sometimes read aloud to a collec-tive audience. Th e epistolary sociability of rigorist penitents should also help to combat the assumption that letters were conducive to privacy and introspection.63 As Mary Morrisey and Gillian Wright have argued, manuscript letters reveal how early modern women could dispense and receive spiritual advice.64 Correspond-ence enabled the transgression of boundaries and allowed women to converse with friends and associates in their absence.65 Letters not only tell us about individual women’s religious sensibilities; they also tell us about discursive communities who were bound by a commitment to devotion.

Letters have also interested scholars as material objects. In the 1990s, A. R. Braunmuller used space in the manuscript letter to decode social hierarchies embedded in correspondence.66 Seventeenth-century letter guides such as Antoine de Courtin’s Nouveau traité de civilité of 1671 advised that aft er the address writ-ten at the top of the page, a space was to be left which would be greater or lesser depending upon the status of the recipient.67 In his work on women’s letter writing in early modern England, James Daybell pointed out other ways that the pal-aeographic form of a letter might be analysed, such as the hand that they were composed in and the use of abbreviations and contractions.68 Th e attention paid by French historians to the material letter has been limited and Giora Sternberg is one of the fi rst to take up this mantle for early modern French letter writing.69 His important work on ‘status interaction’ has shown that letters conformed to certain social norms, where forms of address, subscriptions, the ceremonial of expression and non-verbal features such as spatial intervals and graphic parameters were all signifi ers of the relationship between sender and receiver.70 Dena Goodman has been the fi rst to explore the culture of consumption that the vogue for letter writ-ing generated, including the supply of commodities such as porcelain inkstands, veneered writing desks and decorated paper.71

Many of the letters analysed in this book took a similar form. Th ey were most oft en billet letters, generally no greater than fi ft een centimetres in length. Conse-

Copyright


quently, the pages were usually fi lled with text, rarely with salutations or spaces. Most of the letters were written in an informal italic hand which was generally used in letters to family, friends and social inferiors, whereas a formal italic hand signifi ed a relationship with a social superior or politically infl uential friend.72 Words were oft en abbreviated – something which women were instructed not to do in letters to a social superior by French letter-writing manuals – and spell-ings were usually phonetic.73 It is clear that, in some cases, the letters were not intended to be kept. Longueville was particularly private and she was nervous about her letters being intercepted or being read by third parties. She oft en reminded the recipients of her letters to burn them and so probably discussed most of her plans in person.74

Th e letters occasionally betray aspects of the mechanics and logistics of letter writing. Letters exchanged within Paris were usually delivered by valets-de-pied, despite the formalization of the French postal service in our period.75 Where the letters are originals and not copies, it is clear that most were sealed in the same way. Th e most common form of closing and sealing a letter in this period was what is known as the ‘tuck and seal’ format: the letter was folded twice both horizontally and vertically, tucked together and sealed with wax.76

Figure I.6: Letter from the comtesse de Maure to the marquise de Sablé, 1660. BnF, Ms. Fr, 17050, fo. 293, comtesse de Maure to the marquise de Sablé, 1660. BnF, Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9061716j [accessed 17 February 2014]; repro-

duced courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Copyright

Introduction 19

Th e clues that palaeographic analysis can give the historian add to the value of returning to these manuscript letters to explore rigorist devotional culture. Th ese sources do not provide one continuous narrative from 1650 to 1680 and, in parts, the disproportionate survival of some women’s letters results in a heavier concen-tration upon them. Where the letters are silent on some aspects of the organization of rigorist devotional lives, I have also looked to a selection of other sources – including probate inventories, household accounts, spiritual autobiographies and testaments – in order to off er a fuller account of the devotional routines and rituals underpinning this culture of worship, as well as its material style.

A Rigorist Culture of Worship Th is investigation of rigorist devotional culture is carried out over the course of fi ve chapters, which are thematic but also follow a loose chronological thread. Th e book begins with a short preamble to the history of our penitents’ conver-sions, locating their experiences within a longer narrative which preceded their involvement in the noble rebellion, the Fronde. Th is opening discussion over-hauls the backstory to the history of their conversions by instead identifying their spiritual heritage within the female arm of the dévot movement in Paris. Th is, it suggests, may have predisposed them towards a rigorist turn in the 1650s.

Conversion was a dramatic turning point in the individual lives of the peni-tents featured here. Th eir spiritual autobiographies, testaments and letters show that many revisited the experience years later to refl ect upon the transition they had made from sinner to penitent. Chapter 2 explores these transformative expe-riences which took place in the middle decades of the century at the moment when the dévot movement went into decline and the broader rigorist turn within the French Church began to be felt among the laity. Th e chapter uses surviving spiritual autobiographies written by Longueville, Liancourt and Conti and fi nds evidence that these converted penitents began to embrace a new form of piety which was informed, in some cases, by their self-perception as God’s elect and, in others, by a more general sense of spiritual confi dence.

Chapter 3 reconstructs the friendships these eight rigorist penitents began to form in the aft ermath of their conversions. Th e intimate relationships revealed by their correspondence tell us that draconian regimes designed to punish sin and evoke the fear of God actually generated grounds for amity with fellow spiritual friends. Th ese penitents acted as ‘guardians of the soul’ who shared their spiritual anxieties and supported each other in the search for a good spiritual director. Th is chapter argues against the hegemonic view of post-Tridentine Catholicism as highly anti-social by exploring the commitment that women such as Conti, Longueville and Sablé had towards their female friends. Th ese female spiritual friendships are found to be exclusive relationships which were even elevated

Copyright


above spiritual bonds with male spiritual directors. Th e chapter also questions what impact their sense of spiritual elevation had upon rigorist women’s socia-bility during the early 1660s. It scrutinizes the dismissive treatment of the court in their correspondence and fi nds evidence that their disillusionment with the world was heightened by the persecution of Port-Royal.

Chapter 4 is devoted to a closer and more extensive study of the penitential rituals rigorist women adopted and aims to recover the distinct style of piety they practised in the decades aft er their fl ight from the world. In order to off er a fuller picture of the hours they spent in the cabinet, as well as their participation in more formal services in the chapel, this chapter investigates the material realm of their devotional culture using the surviving post-mortem inventories taken at the residences of Liancourt, Longueville, Guéméné and Brienne.77 Th ese docu-ments are used in conjunction with other sources as indicators of the material environment in the spaces which their culture of worship was conducted, as well as evidence of the devotional media which rigorist women possessed, before a fi nal section using funeral orations and testaments explores the ceremonies rigo-rist women planned for aft er their deaths. It also presents some evidence for the devotional reading that structured rigorist womens’ days, using a case study of the books owned by the duchesse de Liancourt.

Using these sources, this chapter contends that our penitents’ spiritual identities and devotional practices found a unique material expression in their homes. It argues that the infrequency, and in some cases total absence, of devo-tional aids and ornamentation in rigorist hôtels, might be understood as a shift away from dévot piety and, more importantly, a reaction to the ostentation and extravagance of Baroque Catholicism sanctioned by the establishment. Finally, it proposes that the understated, simple style of worship practised by rigorist women was in imitation of the early Christians with whom, I argue, they had a spiritual affi nity.

Aristocratic estates in the Paris hinterland provided rigorist women the opportunity to create spiritual and moral sanctuaries which off ered respite from the city and court. Chapter 5 recovers the importance of the estate as a space for the pursuit of an exclusive devotional culture among spiritual friends in the 1660s and 1670s. Th e château is found to be a place which could be devoted to worship, but also as a means of circumventing the court and city. Th e chapter uses correspondence as a starting point for mapping rigorist penitents’ journeys away from Paris, and builds up an impression of how they passed the time using household accounts and the records of charitable donations. Correspondence was a medium for keeping them in contact with discursive networks in Paris when they were at the estates and thus uncovers how their devotional culture and pious sociability extended beyond the city. As will become clear, recreation was a moral issue for rigorist women and one further way which the devotional

Copyright

Introduction 21

culture of the spiritual elite could be distinguished. Th is chapter shows that the rigorist retreat to the country estate was more than just part of the annual aris-tocratic season, but a way to spurn Parisian pleasure-seeking high-society and spend time in the pursuit of salvation with spiritual friends.

Across these fi ve chapters, we will chart the progression that a band of society women made over thirty years to becoming a coterie of converted penitents and, in doing so, unveil a portrait of the lay, aristocratic ‘brand’ of rigorist piety. Th e longer-term legacy of this devotional culture for the history of female piety in sev-enteenth-century France will be discussed in the concluding chapter. Th e narrower focus of this book on one informal network of eight spiritual friends is also off set by what their culture of worship and pious sociability can tell us about the broader histories of female piety and the unfolding of the Catholic Reformation in France. Th e Belles Amies may be well-known to historians of Port-Royal and, indeed, to scholars of seventeenth-century France. Th is book is the fi rst attempt to investigate if, and how, the austerity of the rigorist spiritual vision played out in the social and religious lives of the lay, aristocratic women who adopted it.

Copyright

introduction from female piety and the catholic reformation in france

Documents