The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560-1600 (review)

Abstract

The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560-1600. By Megan C. Armstrong. (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press. 2004. Pp. vii, 278. $75.00.) When I began my work on the French Wars of Religion decades ago, social tensions and class struggles served as the primary explanations for the violence of the era. Given my then poorly articulated dissatisfaction with largely ignoring religion as a motivating factor, I am pleased to find still another book that presents religion as central to the religious wars. Megan Armstrong puts forward a powerful case for the importance of the Franciscans in galvanizing French Catholic opposition to the French Protestants and aiding and abetting the Catholic League's resistance to Henry III and Henry of Navarre. The author begins with a succinct overview of the era of the religious wars, which emphasizes the close interplay between politics and religion. In the minds of most French Catholics religious division necessarily led to political sedition because of the irreducible relationship between church and monarchy. The author stresses the importance of traditional pious practices to French Catholics as a means of purging the world of sin, especially heresy. This leads her into a discussion of the Franciscans and how they promoted such devotions through their preaching. She points out the political radicalism of so many of the friars and notes how unusual it was for members of a religious order, for whom obedience to authority was a key aspect of their lives, to be involved in seditious behavior. Armstrong then devotes a chapter to the internal reform of the Franciscan order. She examines the fissures between the Conventual and the Observant Franciscans in France and the tensions that arose when the Capuchins were introduced there by 1568. The work provides detailed information on the judicial disputes that often ended up in the Parlement of Paris. Armstrong notes that the many patrons of the Franciscans among the French elite often wound up on opposite sides in the final phases of the religious wars. (An appendix provides the names of patrons to the Parisian Franciscans, the nature of their patronage, and the sums involved.) Her explanation for Franciscan success lies in the nature of their piety and preaching, which she finds to have been highly emotional and sensual in the meaning of the word that it excited the senses. These features help to explain the popularity of the Franciscans across the French social classes. …