Reconstructing early modern religious lives: the exemplary and the mundane

Abstract

When the first readers of L’Histoire de la vie et moeurs de Marie Tessonniere (1650) turned past the title page, what did they hope to find? The text is described at the beginning of the dedicatory epistle as “Cet ouvrage de Devotion” (de la Riviere a2), signalling that the work was intended to provide spiritual guidance for the reader as well as offering a record of the life of Tessonniere herself. In its dual purpose, this was a very typical religious biography. In common with funeral sermo...