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