Public Acts of Private Devotion: From Silent Prayer to Ceremonies in France’s Early Seminaries

Abstract

Clergymen at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice during the seventeenth century conducted their devotional exercises in a group setting. Their devotional acts were consequently interior but not quite private. At four-thirty each summer morning and five o’clock in the winter in 1682, when the French sun had not quite risen over Paris, a young cleric went door to door at the seminary’s dormitory, lighting lamps and knocking to awaken those of his fellow seminarians who had not jumped out of bed at the sound of the morning bells.1 Private devotions practiced together began the day. At five-thirty, the seminarians filed into the Salle des exercices, or classroom, for an hour of ‘silent prayer in common, partly kneeling and partly standing’.2 After Mass, breakfast, classes, and lessons in plain chant, the seminarians gathered again for a second devotional exercise before lunch, this one called the examen particulier, or personal examination. The examen particulier had two parts. First, ‘each person [read] silently, on bended knees and bareheaded, a chapter of the New Testament.’3 Second, they listened to a short guided reflection on a vice or virtue, called the examen or ‘examination,’ upon which the group meditated quietly until lunch. Lunch gave way to an hour of recreation followed by an afternoon occupied by classes and the recitation of canonical hours, ending with dinner at seven o’clock and one final devotional exercise at eight-thirty in the evening when, as the house rules stated, ‘we do in common the evening prayer and examination of conscience.’4 Practiced in common, one could even describe the non-private nature of seminary devotions as public.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyOral PresentationVirtual CommunityInstructional SessionDutch RepublicThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.