Seventeenth-Century France Research Articles

Absolutist Attachments: Emotion, Media, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France. By Chloé Hogg. Rethinking the Early Modern. Edited by Marcus Keller, Ellen McClure, and Feisal Mohamed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+276. $99.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper and e-book).

<i>Absolutist Attachments: Emotion, Media, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France</i>. By Chloé Hogg. Rethinking the Early Modern. Edited by Marcus Keller, Ellen McClure, and Feisal Mohamed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+276. $99.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper and e-book).

Book Review: Bernard McGinn: The Crisis of Mysticism: Quietism in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Italy, and France

Book Review: Bernard McGinn: <i>The Crisis of Mysticism: Quietism in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Italy, and France</i>

Barbara B. Diefendorf, Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf, Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars

Reviewed by: Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars Gabrielle Verdier Gigault de Bellefonds, Marie, Marquise de Villars. Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court. Ed. and trans. Nathalie Hester. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 80. Iter Press, 2021. Pp [i]-xi; 100. ISBN 978-1-64959-010-7. $41.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-64959-011-4 (eBook). Bellefonds-Villars, as Nathalie Hester calls Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars to distinguish her from her husband, the Marquis Pierre de Villars, Ambassador to Savoy and Spain, was a member of the illustrious coterie of female letter writers in seventeenth-century France that included Madame de Sévigné. Unlike them and Madame de Coulanges (wife of Sévigné's first cousin) to whom she addresses thirty-seven letters from her time in Madrid (November 1679-May 1681), Bellefonds-Villars occupied a perilous position at a sensitive time in Franco-Spanish relations, one that had worldwide implications. She joined her husband at the royal court in Madrid several months after the ambassador had arrived to prepare the marriage of Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Louis XIV's niece, to the king of Spain, the disabled Carlos II. Would the French princess produce a successor to the Habsburg dynasty in Spain? Who would inherit the vast Spanish Empire, from Peru to the Philippines? As a woman, Bellefonds-Villars had special access to the young Queen's private spaces, which was denied the ambassador in the strictly gendered Spanish court. Bellefonds-Villars's writing is as delicate as her position at court, as Hester so deftly analyzes in her twenty-page introduction. Though ambassadrice (the title given to the wife of the ambassador), she should in no way be perceived as influencing the French princess in her new role as queen of Spain at a court and with a king who hated the French. Yet Louis XIV expected her to watch, guide, [End Page 194] and report on eighteen-year-old Marie-Louise who turned to her mature compatriot for company and comfort. Bellefonds-Villars's familiar letters to her friends in France thus become subtly diplomatic letters that inform while concealing by omission, indirection, and irony. The writer invites her readers to read between the lines, even to understand the opposite of what she writes. The unusual relation between Carlos and Marie-Louise—his probable impotence, her flourishing health, their paltry amusements, prescribed travels to three royal palaces, suffocating court etiquette and intrigues, worsening economic misery in Spain, and deadly boredom—all must be understood on several levels, including what is left unsaid. Hester's rich notes uncover these layers of meaning. Since letters to individual correspondents were read out loud in the salons and beyond, Bellefonds-Villars's information was bound to reach the Sun King. At stake were her own reputation and the Villars's future, as she suggests in apprehensive comments. Indeed, what she feared would come to pass. Complaints about the ambassadrice, attributed to Carlos II, reached Louis XIV; to maintain diplomatic relations at all costs, the Sun King recalled his ambassador, and Bellefonds-Villars was scapegoated. She left Madrid in May 1681; her husband followed in August of the same year. While anchoring Bellefonds-Villars's letters within seventeenth-century French women's social epistolary writing, Hester rightly highlights their unique nature, their diplomatic role. Bellefonds-Villars was the only épistolière who was also an ambassadrice. Not only does she observe—and influence—historical figures, the Villars endure the hardships of ambassadorial life with a miserable income in Spain and frequent hostile attacks on their person and household. Thanks to such revelations and their exquisite style, Bellefonds-Villars's surviving letters to Mme de Coulanges were published posthumously in 1759 by Denis-Marius Perrin, the editor of Mme de Sévigné's letters, and reprinted several times. In the nineteenth century, they were included in three collections, along with letters by Mmes de La Fayette, de Tencin, de Coulanges, and Ninon de l'Enclos. Alfred de Courtois's comprehensive scholarly...

Theatrical Competition, Age, and the Career Race: ‘Old Corneille’ Rivals Racine

In 1670, Corneille and Racine duelled on the Parisian stage by presenting, within a week of each other, their particular version of the emperor Titus’s farewell to his beloved Bérénice. While this episode of the playwrights’ careers is well known, scholars have tended to minimize the importance of the head-to-head showdown in the overall arc of Corneille and Racine’s relationship. This essay argues for understanding their theatrical confrontation as an inflection point for their rivalry and explores how the rhetoric of age factored into the framing of their competition leading up to the Bérénice battle. The playwrights repeatedly called attention to their age in differentiating themselves from one another and used age to justify their authority over their rival. In focusing on the role age played in shaping Corneille and Racine’s theatrical showdown, the analysis calls attention to the dynamic between growing old, competing, and staying relevant in the theatrical circles of seventeenth-century France.

Making and Unmaking Man: Further Reflections on Sterne’s Allusions to Charron’s Of Wisdome

This article reconsiders the role that the allusions to Pierre Charron’s treatise De la sagesse, in its English translation by Samson Lennard , Of Wisdome, have in Tristram Shandy. Charron was a disciple of Montaigne and an advocate of philosophical scepticism in early seventeenth-century France. He was influential, especially in the Jansenist circles, but his reception was, and still is, not uniform, as some regarded him as an anti-dogmatic apologist of Christian values, while for others he was simply an impious free thinker. After an overview of Sterne’s references to Charron, noticed by Francois Pellan and Melvyn New, the article concentrates on a further possible allusion to Of Wisdome in the last chapter of volume 9 of Tristram Shandy that mentions Plato and Diogenes together. The article maintains that the odd coupling of those two ancient philosophers might have derived from a chapter in Of Wisdome that Sterne already used in the famous incipit of his Tristram Shandy. In this view, beginning and end of Tristram Shandy appear to join in calling attention to two of the main themes that run through it, thus providing a sort of ideal denouement to a story that set the duty of caring and nurturing against men’s instinct for ‘undoing and killing one another [and] ruining and destroying our own kind’, as Montaigne had said and Charron, and then Sterne, restated in their own ways.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

Thomas M. Lennon. Sacrifice and Self-Interest in Seventeenth-Century France: Quietism, Jansenism, and Cartesianism. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 304. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. 300. $139.00 (cloth).

Thomas M. Lennon. Sacrifice and Self-Interest in Seventeenth-Century France: Quietism, Jansenism, and Cartesianism. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 304. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. 300. $139.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 3

7. Stylistic Considerations on Scene No. 8 from the Musical Performance PreȚioasele Ridicole [The Affected Young Ladies] by Vasile Spătărelu

Abstract Molière is one of the playwrights who not only marked and defined the seventeenth century in France, but, creator of the modern comedy and discoverer of the authentic comic, contributed fully to educating the public in his present and for the future. His comedies have stood the test of time, as they resonated with the audience, which found itself in them. In the twentieth century, his plays entered the artistic territories adjacent to the theater trough other creators, who turned them into film scripts and librettos for musical theater. The subject of our research is a fragment pertaining to the farcePrețioasele ridicole [The Affected Young Ladies] turned into a musical show under the signature of Vasile Spătărelu. An important name in Romanian music, creator with great melodic imagination, harmonic refinement and perfect literary taste, the composer from Iași made a possible compositional model for the genre, which is part of the Romanian musical show’s route opened by Paul Constantinescu and Pascal Bentoiu. His work is distinguished by the stylistic area to which it adheres, by rhythm and vivacity, by the original combination between the spoken and the sung text, by the ingenious architecture of the scenes, by the adequacy of the writing technique to the desired effect and expression. Fully requesting all the resources of the interpreters, we consider that the analysis of the important moments is very useful to them. If pages of theatrical exegesis were dedicated to the characters Magdelon and Cathos, for Mascaril we did not identify something similar, much less a stylistic-interpretive analysis from a musical perspective. In order to achieve a complete characterization of the character, useful to potential student performers, we will comment on the first segments of the Scene no.8 in which Mascaril’s “identity” is established, as he presents himself in front of the two “precious ones”. (the entrance and the monologue).

Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France. By Barbara B. Diefendorf

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«Orgogliose come demoni»: le monache ribelli di Port-Royal

The text starts from the question posed by the nuns of Port-Royal: can the monastic condition ignore the voice of conscience? The dramatic results triggered by the questions had their roots in a book published in 1640: Augustinus by Cornelis Jansen who proposed uncompromising religiosity by appealing to the thought of the holy bishop. That book created around itself a spiritual movement that marked the seventeenth century with a brand of diversity and opposition to the ruling power, political and religious. But perhaps Jansenism would never have been such an attractive ethical reference without Port-Royal, which the king wanted to destroy precisely to disperse the movement.The Cistercian abbey, however, was first of all a community of women consecrated to prayer and yet, the extent of the theological controversies of which it became the center and the vast literary production that surrounded it, ended up eclipsing that primacy of the conversation with God that was the highest ambition of the religious group. On the other hand, it was difficult for a group of austere nuns who refused blind obedience not to cause scandal, in seventeenth-century France and beyond. However, the destruction of the abbey did not manage to silence the voices of its inhabitants and their behavior still challenges us.

Political Resonances in the Motets for Saint Louis Under Louis XIV

This article examines several motets composed to celebrate Saint Louis (Louis IX) in late seventeenth-century France. As praise of Saint Louis overlapped with that of Louis XIV, these pieces offer insights into the interplay between the French baroque sacred repertoire and royal encomium. In their texts and music, the motets reflect shifts linked not just to the ceremonial contexts for which they were written but also to wider political developments. In particular, the move from ahistorical presentations of a triumphant Louis IX in the 1660s and 1670s to a portrayal of the crusader king’s fortitude in captivity and defeat later in the reign reflected the changing context of Louis XIV’s wars. By presenting a new view on the political resonances of these works, the article shows the value of sacred music as a source for historians of royal representation under the Sun King.

Barbara B. Diefendorf. Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France.

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:Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

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Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France. Barbara B. Diefendorf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xii + 216 pp. $74.

Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France. Barbara B. Diefendorf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xii + 216 pp. $74.

Authors and languages in a sociohistorical context: Basque religious literature in seventeenth-century France

AbstractIn this paper, we apply the methods of historical sociolinguistics to seventeenth-century religious literature in Basque. We explore issues related to macrosociolinguistics, and, in particular, the problem of contextualisation of authors and their works. As an example of this approach, we analyseDoctrina Christianaby Esteve Materra (published in 1617 and 1623), the first Basque Catholic catechism in the province of Labourd, in the northern part of the Basque Country. It marked the beginning of an intense period of publishing in Basque which lasted until the late seventeenth century. We place the book in the context of major religious movements in France at that time. Materra’s catechism was a response of the Catholic Church to the Reformation in the Basque Country, and was produced with the support of the Church authorities, which needed Basque to reach monolingual speakers. Notwithstanding, Materra’s catechism also attests to the development of a model of written language to be used in the Labourdin literature.

Bérénice on Trial: Judging Corneille Against Racine

On 21 November 1670, Parisian spectators could watch Racine's Bérénice at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and, a week later, attend the premiere of Corneille's Tite et Bérénice at the Palais Royal, as the playwrights and their troupes vied for box office success. Despite Racine's victory, scholarship on the playwrights has minimized the importance of this duel as just one among many guerres comiques. This essay argues that the comedy, Tite et Titus ou Critique sur les Bérénices, published anonymously in 1673, enables a better understanding of how the duelling plays were a defining experience for both playwrights. The comedy stages Racine's Titus and Corneille's Tite, who come before the god Apollon in judgment, accusing one another of impersonation. Understanding the allegory of the Parnasse trial renders visible the stakes of the Bérénice duel and illustrates the changing reception of the tragic genre in the last quarter of seventeenth-century France.

Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France. By Barbara B. Diefendorf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 215 pp. $74.00 cloth.

Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France. By Barbara B. Diefendorf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 215 pp. $74.00 cloth. - Volume 89 Issue 2

Gallantry and Matrimonial Heterosexuality: Love and Friendship in Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (1654)

ABSTRACT This article reads Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre from the viewpoint of the history of sexuality. Scholars have argued that Scudéry’s map, by implementing a reconfiguration of emotions, paves the way for modern affective subjectivity. I suggest that by virtue of a deferral of sex typical of gallantry, the Carte de Tendre pictures a tension between two economies of feelings in relation to sex: two erotics. While drawing on a homoerotic conception of friendship — redefined as “tender friendship” once women are given access to it — the map points to a modern de-eroticized, or heterosocial, definition of friendship in contrast with (hetero)sexual love. It suggests that the access of women to friendship in seventeenth-century France has played an important role in the development of sexuality as a heteronormative apparatus in the modern era.

Mellem Klosteret og Verden

The article presents Armand-Jean de Rancé’s reform of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe. It positions Rancé’s ascetic programme within the wider devotional culture of seventeenth-century France, and explores in three registers the inherent dynamic between withdrawal from the world and engagement with the world. The first register concerns the abbot’s biography, the argument being that the familial, societal and ecclesiastical ircles inhabited by Rancé before and after his conversion are more closely connected than has been traditionally seen. The second is dedicated to the position of La Trappe in contemporary society and a discussion of the continuous traffic across the monastic wall of texts, guests, rumours and myths. The third involves an examination of the role of withdrawal and engagement in Rancé’s reform and its ascetic programme, showing how the abbot expounds the central notion of solitude as a place, a condition and a strategy. The article presents key insights from the author’s doctoral thesis, which was defended at the University of Copenhagen in June 2017.