The Monastic Orders

Abstract

This chapter describes the presence of the religious orders within France referred to as “the white mantle of the churches.” The place where many of the greatest religious orders were founded and developed, France's landscape was heavily dotted with old and new, male and female religious orders. With the Catholic Reformation, the latest and perhaps the most intensive round of foundations began, adding new “religions”—as religious orders were commonly described since the Middle Ages—to the existing ones, which by way of response often found themselves regrouping, reforming, and sometimes expanding in new formations. If the sheer scale of the presence of the regulars in France, in both town and country, is difficult to convey as a whole, it is largely because of the considerable plasticity of the successive forms that this presence possessed, which can lead historians of the ancien regime church to underestimate them.