“Catholic” means “universal,” and early modern Catholic reformers often sought top-down standardization. Nevertheless, from time to time, a historian of the Reformation era reminds us that, like all politics, all Catholic reform is local. An insightful new demonstration of this truth is Barbara B. Diefendorf's Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France, which explores the experiences of French religious orders amid the disruptions and opportunities presented by the Wars of Religion and the ensuing period of Catholic renewal. This new contribution frequently reminded the reviewer of Craig Harline and Eddy Put's A Bishop's Tale (Yale University Press, 2000). Although differing in genre, style, scope, and perspective, both books brilliantly analyze “little-known but well-documented” (5) early modern Catholic people and institutions. Both books show how, in regions marked by long experience of religious war, Catholic reform—that is, internal renewal—was inextricably linked with Counter-Reformation—that is, with responses to the strength of Protestantism. Both books also treat sympathetically the internecine conflicts among Catholic institutions, showing how, for example, ecclesiastical lawsuits or disputes over accessories of a habit might be rooted in authentic reforming impulses. Rather than centering her narrative on one man and one diocese, however, Diefendorf offers a series of richly narrated case studies taken from a variety of male and female religious communities, both in the region of Paris and in southern France. And despite avoiding claims of “typicality” (5), Diefendorf sets us on the path to a new narrative on the reforming currents in Catholic France and in the Catholic Church more broadly.
Among the book's greatest contributions is its attention to a question often asked but not yet fully answered: “What happened to medieval orders during the early modern period?” Diefendorf draws from and builds on Joseph Bergin's synthesis on this question, discussed extensively in chapters 4–6 of his Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (Yale University Press, 2009). Most older religious houses in France had suffered as a result of the entrenched system of commendatory abbacy, by which nonresidents gained large portions of monastery income without the responsibility of governing directly. Commendatories multiplied after the crown consolidated its nomination rights in 1516, and monastic buildings fell into disrepair, discipline declined, and professions plummeted throughout most of the sixteenth century. Many houses already plagued by debt and dysfunction were further ravaged during the religious wars by (official and unofficial) violence from Huguenots, as well as depredations from armies of both sides. Regulars commonly became refugees, and later hopes of rebuilding hinged on both recovering threads of lost income and gaining new patronage from elite laity and clergy.
But patronage often went more readily to the recently founded orders emblematic of Catholic renewal rather than to struggling older houses such as the three major convents (Benedictine, Dominican, and Augustinian, respectively) of Montpellier. All three had been destroyed early in the religious wars and again devastated with the renewal of religious rebellion in 1621. Recovering from these afflictions was particularly hard for female monastics, since their houses were more dependent on local support than houses of the well-networked, less-enclosed congregations of their male counterparts. After many decades of leadership fights, property disputes, and appeals to authorities in both church and state, Montpellier's old convents limped at best, while local elite Catholic families showered the recently established Visitandines and Ursulines not only with their wealth but also with their daughters, some as recruits and some as students in convent schools.
Many older houses, however, also pursued internal reform, both for its own sake and as a strategy for gaining support, and such efforts themselves instigated controversy. Returning to primitive observance of an original rule—a classic standard of reform—could prove unworkable, as seen in attempts by reformed Trinitarians to dedicate one-third of their insufficient income to the redemption of captives. A primitive rule, moreover, could not itself justify another kind of reform, the borrowing of practices, such as state-of-the-art meditation methods, from newer orders. Moreover, any attempted reform of an order, congregation (confederation of houses within an order), or individual house tended to bring up divisions over rightful governance and over the respective roles of Rome and Paris in resolving disputes. Fault lines did not always follow obvious patterns. During the wars, Paris's Feuillants bore arms in defense of the rebellious Holy League against the will of their abbot, who was loyal to the crown. The monks’ rebellion also included demands for greater self-governance and the mitigation of recently adopted ascetical reforms. It is difficult to assess whether the Leaguer monks, who helped rally Paris against the cause of the Protestant Henry IV, were better examples of Catholic renewal than their royalist abbot, who wanted to preserve austere monastic discipline and abbatial authority.
If the book can be said to have a weakness, it is in the sometimes-tenuous connections among its case studies, which do not all speak to the same questions. But few readers would wish to jettison, for example, Diefendorf's in-depth analysis of the public rituals by which the Capuchins of Languedoc shored up Catholicism in the heart of Huguenot territory or her revision of the early history of France's Discalced Carmelites that places Pontoise just as much at the center as Paris.
The atypical nature of the studies is a feature, however, rather than a bug. It is one of the best illustrations of Diefendorf's contentions that the very meaning of reform was disputed and that local conditions determined much about the progress and outcome of renewal efforts. These varied narratives are, in any event, written with an art that makes them a delight to read, easily within the reach of nonspecialists. Moreover, this deeply researched book's rigorous analysis is destined to shape new thinking among historians of early modern Christianity.
