The Catholicisms of Coutances: Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789, by J. Michael Hayden

Abstract

The Catholicisms of Coutances: Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350-1789, by J. Michael Hayden. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xvi, 368 pp. $100.00 Cdn (cloth). Scholars of Early Modern Europe certainly will appreciate this ambitious and convincing contribution to the study of the history of religion. The book complements the author's extensive work on the Catholic reform in France that he co-authored with Malcolm Greenshields, 600 Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190-1789 (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). From there, Hayden has changed the lens to focus on one diocese, Coutances, from 1350 to 1789. This book takes the reader to the varieties of (or Catholicisms) that evolved in the diocese over several centuries, peering deeply into the multiple layers of belief, behaviour, and practice. Hayden stresses the importance of to Early Modern people, as purely a central defining element in a person's identity. Religious belief and practice were shaped by historical events across this period: the Hundred Years' War, the Protestant the Wars of Religion, the two Catholic Reformations, and to a lesser extent the Enlightenment. Of these, what shaped Catholicisms the most is what is called the Second Catholic Reformation, a movement that was launched by the Council of Trent and then gained momentum and a distinct national character in France in the seventeenth century. Rather than positing a dichotomy between elite religion and popular religion, Hayden delineates a symbiotic relationship between official Catholicism and the variety of Catholicisms that contained aspects of that official religious expression but were coloured by various traditions and myths. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, the ecclesiastical efforts to reform lay Catholic beliefs and practices had succeeded in forming a not-uncritical but stalwart loyalty to the Catholic one that allowed for variants. Hayden investigates a large area of ecclesiastical territory and he is sensitive to the regional variations in the diocese. Religious belief and practice were less intense in some areas, a factor he attributes to the penetration of the Protestant faith (although he notes the difficulty in determining which was cause and which was effect: weak Catholic devotion or Protestant infiltration). The book can be divided into several parts. The first part contains two foundational chapters, one outlining the diocese's basic features: its physical and linguistic geography, its history as well as the precarious condition of the common people. The other chapter sketches the official Catholic belief structure and the devotional expectations that upheld it, all of which lay atop a pre-existing layer of unofficial belief that revolved around nature and the various approaches to propitiate it. The next part comprises four chapters on the Catholicisms of the clergy: i) the bishops: all adherents of the main tenets of official but in practice evolving generally from a group of worldly, non-resident men in the later Middle Ages, to a series of Tridentine-inspired reforming bishops, and then a group of competent but complacent bishops in the eighteenth century; ii) the cathedral chapter and the archdeacons, the former concentrating on maintaining their privileges and the latter rooting their in a devotion to reform; iii) the religious orders: their credibility and survival into the later eighteenth century depended on the extent to which they could attach their to reform and to engagement with the laity, either through preaching or teaching; iv) the secular priests: they became increasingly separated from the laity but still aligned more neatly with reform by the eighteenth century, in spite of their lower socio-economic condition and lifestyle relative to their superiors. …