Planting the Cross

Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Examines the beginnings of the Catholic Reformation in France and shows how diverse and experimental religious reform was.
Based heavily on unpublished archival sources from multiple regions of France.
Written by an award-winning senior scholar of French religious history.

Planting the Cross

Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Description

The first thing that Catholic religious orders did when they arrived in a town to establish a new community was to plant the cross--to erect a large wooden cross where the church was to stand. The cross was a contested symbol in the civil wars that reduced France to near anarchy in the sixteenth century. Protestants tore down crosses to mark their disdain for "popish" superstition; Catholics swore to erect a thousand new crosses for every one destroyed. Fighting words at the time, the vow to erect a thousand new crosses was expressed in the rapid multiplication of reformed religious congregations once peace arrived.

In this book, Barbara B. Diefendorf examines the beginnings of the Catholic Reformation in France and shows how profoundly the movement was shaped by the experience of religious war. She analyzes convents and monasteries in three regions--Paris, Provence, and Languedoc--as they struggled to survive the wars and then to raise standards and instill a new piety in their members in their aftermath. What emerges are stories of nuns left homeless by the wars, of monks rebelling against both abbot and king, of ascetic friars reviving Catholic devotion in a Protestant-dominated South, and of a Dominican order battling demonic possession.

Illuminating persistent debates about the purpose of monastic life, Planting the Cross underscores the diverse paths religious reform took within different local settings and offers new perspectives on the evolution of early modern French Catholicism.

Planting the Cross

Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ch. 1. Old Orders in New Times: The Convents of Montpellier
Ch. 2. A Monastery in Revolt: Paris's Feuillants in the Holy League
Ch. 3. Catholic Militants in France's Protestant Heartland: The Capuchins of Languedoc
Ch. 4. Battling Demons to Propagate Reform: Sébastien Michaëlis and the Dominicans of Languedoc
Ch. 5. Catholic Reform from the Bottom Up: The Trinitarians of Provence
Ch. 6. Alternative Visions of the Teresian Heritage: How the Spanish Carmelites Became French
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Planting the Cross

Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Author Information

Barbara B. Diefendorf is Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. She is the author of From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (OUP, 2004), winner of the J. Russell Major Prize of the American Historical Association, and Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (OUP, 1991), winner of book awards from the New England Historical Association and National Huguenot Society, among other titles.

Planting the Cross

Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Reviews and Awards

"This is the fourth monograph produced by Barbara Diefendorf in a long and influential career. Like its predecessors, Planting the Cross shares the hallmarks of meticulous research, appealing prose and a provocative engagement with important lines of debate of interest to early modern historians. Another characteristic is the close attention she pays to the subtle interactions between the forces of continuity and change involved in shaping the distinctive religious and political culture emerging in early modern France by the end of the Wars of Religion ... As Planting the Cross makes quite clear, the Wars of Religion were themselves a powerful catalyst of religious change, one that intersected with monastic reform, reshaping in the process the French Catholic tradition from the ground up." -- Megan C. Armstrong, H-France Forum

"Using examples from both Paris and the provinces, this book 'decentralizes' Catholic reform and in so doing raises new questions about how historians should define it ... As the case studies in this book so brilliantly illustrate, Catholic reform had numerous 'centers' throughout France. The Catholic revival of the early seventeenth century was a grassroots affair that grew out of local initiatives." -- Linda Lierheimer, H-France Forum

"Diefendorf has written another thought-provoking study of early modern French Catholicism ... Diefendorf's profound archival knowledge also demonstrates that reform was very much a local and haphazard affair, rooted in the painful experience of civil war, rather than a uniformly imposed model of 'Catholic Reformation' drawn up in Trent. As such, the importance of Planting the Cross for our understanding of religious culture and coexistence in postwar France can hardly be overstated." -- David van der Linden, H-France Forum

"Diefendorf presents the reader with a thoughtful and incisive chronicle of the challenges which Catholic religious faced when rebuilding or expanding in the wake of the Wars of Religion...The book offers an engaging and well-executed series of microhistories, which challenge scholars to take seriously the rich vitality of archival sources from Catholic religious orders." -- Archie R. MacGregor, Marquette University

"impressive and engaging ... many will undoubtedly find inspiration in Diefendorf's local study approach, which offers intriguing possibilities for integrating the Jesuits into the nuanced and compelling story that she has sketched of the emergence of a "diverse, experimental, and experiential" Catholic renewal in France from the final decades of the sixteenth century." -- Eric Nelson, Journal of Jesuit Studies