book

VHRN Book of the Week

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Alain de Solminihac (1593-1659). Prélat réformateur de l’Abbaye de Chancelade à l’évéché de Cahors. By Patrick Petot. 2 vols. [Bibliotheca Victorina, Vol. XXI.] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Pp. 507; 509-1091. €140,00. ISBN 978-2-503-53277-6.)

From the publisher:

Abbé de Chancelade en Périgord et évêque de Cahors, Alain de Solminihac (1593-1659) est une figure marquante du mouvement de réforme pastorale de l’époque baroque.

Formé à Paris, il entreprend en 1623 le relèvement spirituel et matériel de son abbaye de Chancelade qui devient, en moins d’une décennie, un centre à partir duquel la réforme canoniale s’étend à la Saintonge, au Limousin et à l’Angoumois. Cette extension se heurte à la volonté du cardinal de La Rochefoucauld et de Charles Faure qui transforment la congrégation de Sainte-Geneviève en une congrégation de France destinée à regrouper dans une organisation centralisée toutes les branches de l’ordre canonial. Au terme d’un long conflit, dont les étapes sont ici reconstituées, la réforme de Chancelade n’échappe à l’absorption qu’au prix de l’abandon de son expansion.

La carrière de l’abbé de Chancelade connaît un tournant majeur avec sa nomination à l’évêché de Cahors en 1636. Religieux devenu évêque, il transpose son idéal de perfection chrétienne dans l’état épiscopal et entreprend la réforme de son diocèse selon le modèle tridentin et l’exemple de Charles Borromée : reconstitution du patrimoine épiscopal, statuts synodaux, mise en place de vicaires forains, visites pastorales, missions prêchées par les chanoines réguliers qu’il a amenés avec lui de Chancelade, fondation d’un séminaire confié aux prêtres de la Mission. Cette ferme action réformatrice s’est durablement heurtée à une opposition cléricale organisée.

Son rôle déborde largement son abbaye et son diocèse. Comte de Cahors et baron de Quercy, Solminihac appuie de son autorité temporelle le pouvoir royal durant la Fronde. Influent dans l’Église de France, étroitement lié à Vincent de Paul, membre de la Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, il joue un rôle important dans les affaires du temps, qu’il s’agisse de défendre les prérogatives du Saint-Siège, de condamner l’Augustinus ou d’obtenir la nomination d’évêques conformes à son idéal tridentin.

Ancien élève de l’École normale supérieure, agrégé de l’Université et docteur en histoire, Patrick Petot est professeur de classes préparatoires à Périgueux. Il s’est spécialisé dans la recherche en histoire religieuse et dans l’étude comparée des religions.

Reviewed by Alison Forrestal: The Catholic Historical Review, April, 2011,  Vol. XCVII, No. 2,

Leads – Ozanam and the roots of See-Judge-Act

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Here are highlights of what I have come up with so far…

 

▼ Philosophical Father of the See-Judge-Act  Another Ozanam

• http://www.olle-laprune.net/philosopher-of-the-see-judge-act

• Léon Ollé-Laprune can be considered, along with Alphonse Gratry from whom he drew inspiration, as one of the key philosophers of Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement and later of the YCW movement founded by Joseph Cardijn.

Cardijn read the philosophy of Léon Ollé-Laprune as a young seminarian,  Indeed, this influence is evident as soon as you start reading the works of Léon Ollé-Laprune.

Born in Paris in 1839, Léon Ollé-Laprune was a brilliant student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure where he would later become maître de conférences in 1875, a position he held until his premature death as a result of appendicitis on 13 February 1898.

He was much influenced by Frédéric Ozanam, who is most well known as founder of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, but was also a pioneer supporter of the workers democracy founded after the February Revolution of 1848. Ozanam had also been a lecturer in the French university system and it was his Christian commitment lived out in his lay life which most influenced Léon Ollé-Laprune.

As mentioned, Léon Ollé-Laprune’s philosophy drew heavily on the work of Alphonse Gratry, another democrat of 1848.

▼ Léon Ollé-Laprune and the Sillon

• Léon Ollé-Laprune and his family were also close to the parents of the young Marc Sangnier and it is evident that the philosopher had a great influence on the founder of the Sillon movement. Indeed, Albert Lamy, also from the Sillon, wrote of Léon Ollé-Laprune, that “sa philosophie de la vie est la nôtre”, his philosophy of life is our philosophy.

In fact, in a small virtually forgotten book, Les Sources de la Paix Intellectuelle (The Sources of Intellectual Peace) published in 1892, Ollé-Laprune discussed the need to build a “movement” based around the idea that everyone has “quelque chose à faire dans la vie”, that each person has “something to do in life” as a co-operator of God.

Marc Sangnier and a number of students at the Stanislas University College in Paris were the first to take up this challenge of building such a movement dedicated to enabling people to discover their lay mission in the world in this way. Originally known as the Crypt, their group later adopted the name, Le Sillon (The Furrow) for their soon to be famous movement.

▼ Léon Ollé-Laprune and the See, Judge, Act method

• Although it was Cardijn who formulated the famous expression “see, judge, act” it was Léon Ollé-Laprune who was mainly responsible for developing the philosophical theory that lay behind the method.

In fact, the foundation of the see-judge-act method had already been developed by Léon Ollé-Laprune’s neighbour, Frédéric Le Play, the pioneering social scientist. Le Play’s méthode d’observation sociale formed the basis of the enquiry method later adopted by the Sillon, the YCW and other lay apostolate movements. Le Play, however, held to an elitist, paternalist conception of social organisation as indicated by the subtitle of his famous work La Méthode Sociale, “ouvrage destiné aux classes dirigeantes” (a study addressed to the ruling classes).

Léon Ollé-Laprune rejected Le Play’s elitist conception of society in favour of a democratic ideal. Ollé-Laprune’s writings thus developed a notion of the “moral person” acting in the world based on Aristotle’s conception of prudence (Phronesis – a much broader concept than the modern understanding of prudence) as the virtue necessary for political leader.

Ancient Greek democracy, however, had been restricted to the elite. Ollé-Laprune saw that a modern democratic society reqiured that every citizen needed to develop the level of prudence necessary for participating in governance. For Ollé-Laprune, prudence therefore became the democratic virtue and education for democracy was necessary to foster the growth of the ‘moral person’ as a responsible citizen.

Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement took up the challenge of building the necessary movement of democratic education, a notion later adapted by Cardijn as the basis of the worker education methodology of the YCW.

Léon Ollé-Laprune’s philosophy therefore lies at the heart of the YCW method and he can therefore justly be considered as the philosophical father of the See, Judge, Act.

▼ Alphonse Gratry, Mystic and reformer

• Alphonse Gratry, the 19th century French priest, mystic and philosopher, was a major source of inspiration for the young Joseph Cardijn.

Born in 1805, Gratry became a leading figure of the first generation of Christian social action in the period before and after the Workers Revolution of 1848. He was close to Frédéric Ozanam, who he brought in as a lecturer at the Stanislas College in Paris of which Gratry was director in the 1840s. After the death in 1854 of the excommunicated priest, Félicité de Lamennais, it was Gratry who celebrated a mass in his memory. He also knew Frédéric Le Play, the pioneering social researcher, whose methods were later adapted first by the Sillon and later by the YCW in its see-judge-act method. As John Henry Newman had done in England, so too in France did Gratry restore the Oratory, an association of priests founded by St Philip Neri. In short, Alphonse Gratry was a towering personality but whose influence always remained somewhat in the background.

He wrote a number of books, including a manual of social action published during the 1848 revolutionary period. Later his works took a more philosophicala and theological bent. His book, Les Sources, became an important reference for spiritual direction. His last book, La Paix, which was published in 1869, just before the outbreak of the Franco-German war of 1870, caused a storm in the militaristic ruling circles who dominated French political life.

Gratry opposed the definition of papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council. He was perhaps a major influence in the prevention of a broader definition from being adopted at the Council. After a period of reflection, he finally adhered to the teaching of Vatican I shortly before his death, preferring not to isolate himself or cut himself off from the Church as Lamennais had done.

His writings would later become an important source for the second generation of modern lay apostolate leaders and thinkers. The philosopher, Léon Ollé-Laprune, himself a disciple of Ozanam, nevertheless placed Gratry on a pedestal even higher than that of the founder of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Gratry’s writings, together with those of Ozanam and Ollé-Laprune, would also be greatly influential with Marc Sangnier and his collaborators in the foundation of the Sillon in the Crypt of Stanislas College in the 1890s.

Gratry exercised a wide influence at the end of the 19th century. The philosopher, William James, who wrote extensively on the philosophy of religious experience, and whose writings were also read by the young Cardijn, was one of many who were influenced by Gratry.

Like his predecessors, Cardijn also drew heavily on the writings of Alphonse Gratry, who thus became a vital source for the development of the third generation of the modern lay apostolate.

Alphonse Gratry’s thought would also become an important source for the recently canonised philosopher, St Edith Stein. Other social movements also drew on his thinking, e.g. the Moral Rearmament movement begun at Oxford in the 1930s.

Another to be influenced by Gratry was the English mathematician and philosopher, George Boole in whose honour we today speak of boolean logic.

In recent times, Gratry’s work has been been largely forgotten. 

However, the late Spanish philosopher, Julian Marias, published a book, La Filosofía del padre Gratry.,

And in 2006, the French Oratorians and the Cercle du Sillon hosted a colloquium at the French Senate, where Gratry had been chaplain, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth;

Other recent references to Gratry can be found by searching by a (Boolean!) search on altavista or another search engine.

▼ Wikipedia

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Oll%C3%A9-Laprune

• As Frédéric Ozanam had been a Catholic professor of history and foreign literature in the university, Ollé-Laprune’s aim was to be a Catholic professor of philosophy there. Theodore de Regnon, the Jesuit theologian, wrote to him:

“I am glad to think that God wills in our time to revive the lay apostolate, as in the times of Justin and Athenagoras; it is you especially who give me these thoughts.”

The Government of the Third Republic was now and then urged by a certain section of the press to punish the “clericalism” of Ollé-Laprune, but the repute of his philosophical teaching protected him. For one year only (1881-82), after organizing a manifestation in favour of the expelled congregations, he was suspended from his chair by Jules Ferry, and the first to sign the protest addressed by his students to the minister on behalf of their professor was the future socialist deputy Jean Jaurès, then a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences elected him a member of the philosophical section in 1897, to succeed Vacherot. Some months after his death William P. Coyne called him “the gre

History of the Daughters of Charity

bcicirel Vincentian History , ,

Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée : Histoire des Filles de la Charité. La rue pour cloître (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Fayard, 2011, 690 pages, with a preface of Pr. Dominique Julia, 30 €.

 

 

The Company of the Daughters of Charity is the most important female and catholic congregation in the world. There were 40.000 sisters at its height in the 1960’, 20.000 today set up in almost 100 countries. Therefore, the history of this congregation has never been written.

This book is based on the French DC’ private archives in Paris which had never been opened before, and the public ones seized during the French Revolution (Archives nationales).

It includes eleven chapters. The first four chapters present the founders and the founding events: 1. Vincent de Paul and Châtillon (1617). 2. Louise de Marillac and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs (1623). 3. Marguerite Nezot between Suresnes and Paris (1633). 4. A new community (1634-1642). The following four chapters present one of the most important secular congregations of the Ancien Régime: 5. Official agreements. 6. Authorities. 7.Vocations. 8. Spirituality. Three chapters lead the reader to the charitable world of the Daughters of Charity, varying on large or small-scale as micro-history likes to do : 9. Royaume de France’s scale. 10. The Head Office in Paris. 11. Poor Relief : hospitals, schools and parishes.

The book includes an important iconography, several maps and many graphs.

 

 

Writing the history of the Daughters of Charity

 

This study was necessary because the few summary books existent are out-of-date because of their apologetic tone[1]. So, the Lazarist Alfred Milon who wrote the first essay in 1927, thought that “during the period going from the death of the founder, Saint Vincent de Paul, to the French Revolution, nothing important happened: it is just a period of ordinary growth.”[2] From this point of view, the history of the “sœurs grises” (grey sisters) really begins with the fabulous rise of the « cornettes » in the 19th Century.

The first period, from the beginning of the Company in 1633 to the death of its founders in 1660, seems to be the best known. Pierre Coste and his successors’ positivist and erudite work, the wish of Vatican II Council to come back to the  “original spirit” of the founders (Perfectae caritatis, 1965 ; Ecclesiae Sanctae, 1966), enabled to find many documents. Internal studies (Élisabeth Charpy, DC[3]) or scholar ones (Susan E. Dinan[4]) are based on this archival material. However, Louise de Marillac is far less known than Vincent de Paul. The gap between their two memories took place since the 18th Century because of the beatification and the canonization of M. Vincent.

More generally, the Ancien Régime period, from the 1660’ to the French Revolution, is still poorly known. It is fundamental not only for itself but also to understand the rise of the 19th Century. The Daughters of Charity are already popular on the point of the French Revolution because their action matched with the care service model produced by the Lumières. It explains why they were the first to be re-established by Napoléon. It enabled them to highly contribute to change the religious way of life: the cloistered nuns, prevailing under the Ancien Régime, give way to the sisters living in open communities (Claude Langlois ; Marie-Claude Dinet-Lecomte[5]).

 

A propitious historiographic context

 

For a long time, French historiography opposed Women history and Religious history for ideological reasons. Today, they meet more and more with one another thanks to the impulse given by the English and American historians. Many works focused on nuns history (Bernard Hours ; Bernard Dompnier et Dominique Julia ; Gwénaël Murphy ; Elizabeth Rapley[6]) and, in this case, on the institutes of apostolic life in a gender perspective (Laurence Lux-Sterritt ; Querciolo Mazzonis ; Silvia Evangelisti ; Carmen M. Mangion ; Sioban Nelson[7]).

French scientific journals echoed these researches, particularly about the question of the monastic enclosure[8]. The Daughters of Charity have contributed to impose a new religious way of life for women: neither wife, neither nun, but secular, which is a sort of ambiguous “third status” (Gabriella Zarri)[9]. Gender studies seem to be an interesting way to examine religious congregations and laywomen such as the “dames de charité”[10]. But it is not the only one. Other exist such as social history (recruitment, sisters’ geographical and social origins, vocations), spiritual history (the « École française » so important for the founders, jansenist influences during the 18th Century, devotion to Virgin Mary…), professional practices (hospital sisters and teaching sisters[11]), economical history (what is charity’s cost ?), political history…

This book is an essay of “histoire totale” as Fernand Braudel wished. A second volume will take over during the next years concerning 19th and 20th Century. An international approach will be fundamental. I am interested in all archives you can keep.

 

Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée, PhD

Member of the « Centre de recherches en histoire du XIXe siècle » (Paris Sorbonne)

 

bdelavergnee@hotmail.com


[1] Les Filles de la Charité de Saint Vincent de Paul, Paris, Letouzey et Ané, coll. « Les ordres religieux », 1923 ; Léonce Celier, Les Filles de la Charité, Paris, Grasset, coll. « Les grands ordres monastiques », 1929 ; Pierre Coste, Charles Baussan, Georges Goyau, Trois siècles d’histoire religieuse, Les Filles de la Charité, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1933.

[2] Annales de la congrégation de la Mission, 92, 1927, p. 738.

[3] Small books on Louise de Marillac (Élisabeth Charpy, Un chemin de sainteté. Louise de Marillac, Paris, Compagnie des Filles de la Charité, 1988, 243 p. ; id., Petite vie de Louise de Marillac, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1991, 125 p.) and manly the edition of the Marillac’s Écrits spirituels (éd. É. Charpy, Paris, Compagnie des Filles de la Charité, Tours, impr. Mame, 1983, 920 p.) and Documents sur la Compagnie des Filles de la Charité aux origines(éd. É. Charpy, Paris, Compagnie des Filles de la Charité, 1989, 1111 p.).

[4] Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France. The Early History of the Daughters of Charity, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006.

[5] Le Catholicisme au féminin. Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale, Paris, Cerf, 1984 ; Les Sœurs hospitalières en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. La charité en action, Paris, H. Champion, 2005.

[6] Carmes et carmélites en France du XVIIe siècle à nos jours, Paris, Cerf, 2001 ; Visitation et Visitandines aux XVIIeet XVIIIe siècles, Saint-Étienne, Université de Saint-Étienne, 2001 ; Le peuple des couvents. Poitou, XVIIe-XVIIIesiècle, La Crèche, Geste éditions, 2007 ; A Social History of the Cloister. Daily life in the teaching monasteries of the Old Regime, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

[7] Redefining Female Religious Life. French Ursulines and English Ladies in seventeenth-century Catholicism, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005; Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy. Angela Merici and the Company of St Ursula (1474-1540), Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 2007; Nuns. A History of Convent Life, 1450-1700, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, chap. 7 “Open communities for Women”; Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities. Catholic women religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008; Say Little, Do Much. Nurses, Nuns and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia, Univeristy of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

[8] For instance : Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, special issues : « Femmes et religions », 1995 ; « Chrétiennes », 2002 ; « Clôtures », 2007. See http://clio.revues.org

[9] Gabriella Zarri « The Third Status », in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, Silvana Seidel Menchi (ed.), Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, Kirksville, Truman State Univ. Press, 2001, p. 181-199. See also: Camilla Russel « Convent culture in Early-Modern Italy : Laywomen and Religious Subversiveness in a Neapolitan Convent », in Megan Cassidy-Welch, Peter Sherlock (ed.), Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Turnhout, Brepols, 2008, p. 57-76.

[10] Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004; Ulrike Strasser, Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004; Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New women of the old faith. Gender and American catholicism in the progressive area, The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

[11] See for instance Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones (The medical world of early modern France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997) who put back the Daughters of Charity inside a vast social history of medecine.

VHRN Book of the Week

bcicirel Vincentian History

Nivoelisoa Galibert, A l’angle de la Grande Maison: Les lazaristes de Fort-Dauphin de Madagascar: correspondence avec Vincent de Paul (1648-1661), (Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 552. Illustrations, bibliographie, glossaire, ISBN: 978-2-84050-503-7. €36.00

“Au meme titre que les écritures arabico-malgaches (Sorabe), la Grande Maison (Tranobe) est emblématique de la religion pratiquée dans l’Anosy au Sud-Est de Madagascar. Entre Islam revisité et pratiques ancestrales, le microcosme lazariste en mission depuis 1648 au Fort-Dauphin achoppe au caractère en apparence essentiellement anthropocentriste de cette region. Le cadre de cette évangelisation difficile est la première tentative d’établissement français à Madagascar sous l’égide de lal Compagnie des Indes Orientales (1642-1674), principalement durant le mandate du gouverneur Étienne de Flacourt, auteur de l’Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar (1658 et 1661). La correspondence addressee au future saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) demeure un texte encode dans l’esprit de l’éveil missionnaire antérieur à la revolution idéologique des Lumiéres. En tant que témoinage des acteurs, le present recueil introduit directement dans l’ailleurs spatio-temporel au XVIIe siècle de la Congrégation de La Mission [lazariste], ordre destine à l’origine à la seule assistance des pauvres de France. De fait, écrites à l’Àge classique, les letters posent déjà les jalons de la problématique modern du contact des cultures, d’où jaillit la mise en lumière comme la mise à l’ombre de l’indentité des évangélisateurs et de l’altérité des autochtones. La réflexion sur l’échec de la mission chrétienne dans ses premières tentative dans l’océan Indien s’organise ainsi autour de trois axes: générique, aui met au jour le texte encodé par les spécificités de la letter missionnaire au XVIIe siècle; poétique, qui met la rhétorique au service d’un discours d’enveloppement avant les Lumières; enfin anthropologique, aui actualize ce que les ethnologues actuels nomment le principe de coupure. Le corpus annoté de la correspondence est, d’une part, assorti d’une presentation générale, qui contextualize les copies multiplies par les archivistes de la Congrégation de la Mission, et d’autre part, d’annexes diverses-index, glossaire, chronologie, notices bibliographiques et autres documents lazaristes.”

Docteur d’État en literature française, Professeur des Universités en poste à Madagascar, member de l’Académie nationale malgache, Nivoelisoa Galibert est chercheur associé au Centre de Recherches Littéraires et Historiques de l’Océan Indien (Université de La Réunion) et member du Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Écritures Missionnaires (Institute Catholique de Paris) ainsi que du Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages (Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV). Elle est l’auteur d’une these intitulée Madagascar dans la literature française de 1558 à 1990. Contribution à l’étude de l’exotisme (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Septentrion, 1997), et d’une Chronobibliographie analytique de la literature des voyages, imprimée en français sur l’océan Indien des origines à 1896- Madagascar Réunion Maurice – (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2000).

Vincentian ebooks are now available

bcicirel Vincentian History ,

The Vincentian Heritage Collections is undergoing a slight make-over. The host, BE Press, has recently developed some new functionality, including an ebook format that makes texts much easier to access.

 

We will be converting some of the material in VHC to the new ebook format and will be announcing new features in the near future. All ebooks are available here: http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhc/

VHRN Book of the Week

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From Penitence to Charity, By Barbara B. Diefendorf, 368 pages; 7 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-509583-8ISBN10: 0-19-509583-9

Winner of the J. Russell Major Prize of the American Historical Association

Description
From Penitence to Charity radically revises our understanding of women’s place in the institutional and spiritual revival known as the Catholic Reformation. Focusing on Paris, where fifty new religious congregations for women were established in as many years, it examines women’s active role as founders and patrons of religious communities, as spiritual leaders within these communities, and as organizers of innovative forms of charitable assistance to the poor. Rejecting the too common view that the Catholic Reformation was a male-dominated movement whose principal impact on women was to control and confine them, the book shows how pious women played an instrumental role, working alongside–and sometimes in advance of–male reformers. At the same time, it establishes a new understanding of the chronology and character of France’s Catholic Reformation by locating the movement’s origins in a penitential spirituality rooted in the agonies of religious war. It argues that a powerful desire to appease the wrath of God through acts of heroic asceticism born of the wars did not subside with peace but, rather, found new outlets in the creation of austere, contemplative convents. Admiration for saintly ascetics prompted new vocations, and convents multiplied, as pious laywomen rushed to fund houses where, enjoying the special rights accorded founders, they might enter the cloister and participate in convent life. Penitential enthusiasm inevitably waned, while new social and economic tensions encouraged women to direct their piety toward different ends. By the 1630s, charitable service was supplanting penitential asceticism as the dominant spiritual mode. Capitalizing on the Council of Trent’s call to catechize an ignorant laity, pious women founded innovative new congregations to aid less favored members of their sex and established lay confraternities to serve society’s outcasts and the poor. Their efforts to provide war relief during the Fronde in particular deserve recognition.

Reviews
“From Penitence to Charity is an important work that goes far to explain the intense religious enthusiasm of the first half of the century of the saints and that shows the crucial role that elite women played in helping to define this spiritualityIt furthers our understanding of the roles that women played in early modern European society and reinforces our view of the Catholic Reformation as a movement profoundly shaped by lay involvement rather than engineered and imposed by clerics.”–Journal of Modern History

“Barbara Diefendorf’s new book on the leading role played by aristocratic and bourgeois women in the French Catholic revival marks the triumphant completion of a trilogy of books transformed our understanding of Paris in the era of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations. Diefendorf’s lucid and straightforward prose will ensure that the books becomes essential reading to students and scholars of the Counter-Reformation. This is women’s history at its best; rather than apply anachronistic interpretative models to slippery evidence, she builds strong narrative by letting female actors speak for themselves and in so doing she permits us to get as close as we can to their world, their experiences, and to the possibilities of female agency in the early modern public sphere.” —The Sixteenth Century Journal

“Relying on an impressive abundance of primary sources, printed and manuscript, Diefendorf identifies several developments during and just after the French wars of the later decades of the 1500s. This book will be very significant for historians of early modern France and for scholars interested in the interactions of religion, gender, and culture.”–Theological Studies

“From Penitence to Charity is one of the most important studies of the Catholic Reform to date. This book will change our understanding of the reform movement and gender.”–Renaissance Quarterly

“This book will be very significant for historians of early modern France and for scholars interested in the interactions of religion, gender, and culture.”–Theological Studies

“To say that Barbara Diefendorf’s third monograph is her most significant contribution is saying something indeed. From Penitence to Charity bears all the hallmarks of Diefendorf’s fine scholarly hand: meticulous research, nuanced analysis, and narrative richness. It is, however, a more ambitious project, one that deftly weaves together gender, religion, economics, and politics to explain the spiritual renewal of the seventeenth century. In the process, Diefendorf rewrites the history of the Catholic Reformation in France, and, along with it, the spiritual life of women.”–H-France Review

“The first achievement of this refreshing book is to return to the forefront of scholarly minds the forgotten and overshadowed Parisian women who drove Catholic revival in their city and beyond during and after the Wars of Religion.”–The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

“Diefendorf argues for the enormously positive role of women during the formative years of the Catholic Reformation. She makes her case eloquently and well. Without their collaboration, that Reformation would have been a much different thing.”–The Catholic Historical Review

“[A] significant contribution to the larger story of the “feminization” of religion in France….It could be argued that the Catholic Reformation, instead of being a moment when men controlled and confined women, was a moment when some women imposed their vision of piety upon the church. Diefendorf has composed a very compelling and readable book that offers her audience an understanding of the changing meanings of piety in late sixteenth and early seventeeth-century France.”–American Historical Review

Product Details
368 pages; 7 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-509583-8ISBN10: 0-19-509583-9

About the Author(s)
Barbara B. Diefendorf is Professor of History at Boston University

VHRN Book of the Week: China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom During the Qing (1644-1911)

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Anthony E. Clark, China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom During the Qing (1644-1911), Lehigh University Press, 2011, 288 pgs, ISBN 9781611460179, ISBN 1611460174.

From the publisher: While previous works on the history of Christianity in China have largely centered on the scientific and philosophical areas of Catholic missions in the Middle Kingdom. China’s Saints recounts the history of Christian martyrdom, precipitated as it was by cultural antagonism and misunderstanding. Anthony Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those of the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successful at producing a “Chinese Constantine.”  One of the principal results of Catholic martyrdom in China was the increased indigenization of Christianity. During the reconstruction of mission churches, hospitals, and orphanages after the hostilities of the Boxer Uprising (1898-1900), the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating martyrs was attached to the reinvigoration of Christian communities.  Not only did Catholic architecture accomodate to Chinese sensibilities, but causes for sainthood were also begun at the Vatican to add Chinese names to the Church’s lists of saints.  The implications of Clark’s work extend beyond the subject of Christianity in China to the broader fields of cultural, socio-economic, political, and religious history.  This pioneering study follows the trails of Western missionaires and Chinese converts as they negotiate the religious and cultural chasms that existed betweeh the West and China, and it demonstrates that these differences resulted in two very different outcomes.  Whereas converts appear to have bridged the cultural divide,often to the point of self-sacrifice, political and cultural tensions on the macro level sometimes ended with forceful conflicts.  This book contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural and religious interaction, and provides an account of an heretofore ustudied chapter in the history of Christianity on the global landscape.”

 

Dr. Clark’s research was supported in part by a grant from the Vincentian Studies Institute of DePaul University.

VHRN Book of the Week

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La Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul aux XIXe siècle (1833-1871): Un fleuron du catholicisme social. By Mathieu Brejon de Lavergnée. [Historie religieuse de la France, Vol. 34] (Paris: Éditions du Cerf. 1008. Pp. 713. €29,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-08609-7.)

From the Book Jacket:


“On connaît Frédéric Ozanam depuis sa béatification par Jean-Paul II in 1997 et les nombreux ouvrages qui lui ont été consacrés. Mais que sait-on vraiment de l’œuvre qu’il a contribué à fonder? La petite conférence de charité réunit en 1833 une poignée d’étudiants du Quarter latin, catholiques et romantiques, pour se soutenir dans la prière et visiter les pauvres à domicile. A la veille de la Commune (1871), la Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul était devenue l’une des principales œuvres du monde catholique. Elle compte aujourd’hui 700,000 membres dans près de 150 pays. Cet ouvrage éclair les raisons de ce succèss et entraîne le lecteur sur les voies d’une histoire sociale du religieux. Il met en lumière, par une rigoureuse prosopographie, les parcours types de plusieurs centaines de catholiques sociaux. Entre le dévot du Grand Siècle et le bénévole associatif contemporain, il y eut un temps pour l’homme d’œuvres modèle d’engagement que la figure postèrieure du militant a injustement conduit a déconsidérer. L’auteur trace ainsi les contours de la “voie vincentienne”, mystique active qui trouve le Christ dans la rencontre avec les pauvres et façonne l’exercice d’un audacieux apostolate des laïcs. Il expose le tableau des œuvres charitable, en particulier à Paris où tadis et indigents abondent, et leur évolution sous l’effect de hausmannisation de la capital sous le Second Empire. Une interprétation anthropologique du “don charitable” peut enfin être tentée. Il est une question, lancinante, qui traverse le livre: la charité n’est-elle pas un moyen de refonder le lien social? Figure de l’antimodernité, elle est peut-être plus politique qu’il n’y paraît. Le débat n’est pas clos.”

 

See the review of this work below:

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/385262

 

VHRN Book of the Week

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Forrestal, Alison and Nelson, Eric, eds., Politics and Religion in Early Modern France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 270 pps. ISBN: 978-0-230-52139-1

From the Book Jacket:

“Containing ten essays representing the latest research by specialist scholars of the period, Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France explores the political and religious world that developed in France over the course of the thirty years between 1594 and 1624.  While historians of both the religious wars and seventeenth-century France readily recognize the importance of the opening decades of Bourbon rule for long-term developments in the country’s political and religious culture, they have rarely chosen to make it a focus of investigation.  By addressing and reformulating key issues for the conclusion of the Wars of Religion and the development of seventeenth-century French political and religious culture, these essays confirm the pivotal role that the early decades of the seventeenth century played in inventing and consolidating the classic features of the Bourbon polity and Catholic Reform.  In doing so, they usher these years towards a position of historiographical parity with the hitherto dominant eras of the Wars of Religion and Bourbon Absolutism.”

Alison Forrestal is lecturer in Early Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland.  She is the author of Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Early Modern France (2004) and Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600-1900 (1998).

Eric Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University, U.S.A.  He is the author of The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590-1615).

Read the review:

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Vincentian Heritage Collections – digital resources for the Vincentian scholar

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The Office of Mission and Values, the Vincentian Studies Institute, and the John T. Richardson Library at DePaul University continue to develop the Vincentian Heritage Collections – a digital repository of documents, texts, and ebooks pertaining to Vincentian Heritage.

 

In a little over one year, the project has added over 577 articles and 145,000 pages of material to the site. Usage statistics indicate there have been over 7,500 visits to the site from 99 countries. As the collection continues to acquire, process, and add new content, it will also adopt new features and functionality to improve the end user experience. Because the digital platform from Berkeley Electronic Press is only a few years old, developers are continually working to make improvements and adjustments.

 

Already a useful tool for scholars around the world, the Vincentian Heritage Collections will continue to be an important element in DePaul’s plans to make scholarly resources more readily available online.

 

As the Collections add new content or features, we will continue to send updates. If you have questions about the site or suggestions to improve it, please contact the project team at mission.depaul@gmail.com