INTRODUCTION: SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIP AND RIGORIST DEVOTIONAL CULTURE

Visitors to Paris in the early seventeenth century were apparently struck by the pervasiveness of the dvot. Dressed soberly and shrouded in long black capes, these figures even walked with a distinctively modest gait and were thus instantly recognizable to observers.1 Later parodied as hypocrites by Molire in Tartuffe, throughout the early decades of the century, dvots were au courant. These were lay men and women who dedicated their lives to God, leading lives of piety in the world amidst the belated arrival of the Catholic Reformation in France.2 The reception of the Council of Trent (154563) was marked formally in 1615, when the Assembly of Clergy officially recognized the Tridentine decrees on the condition of Gallican independence from the Roman See. The ensuing Catholic revival was spearheaded by the dvots, many of whom had been inspired by the zeal of the Catholic Leaguers during the turbulent final stages of the Wars of Religion which ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. During the past two decades, historians have begun to investigate the lay, female contribution to the Catholic Reformation in this context.3 Barbara Diefendorf, one of the key proponents of this new historiography, charted the shift from penitential spirituality to charity among the Parisian female pious elite and highlighted their part in the first waves of spiritual rejuvenation in France.4 Diefendorf herself recognized that the new circumstances of the personal reign of Louis XIV necessitates the separate study of female piety in the decades after the Fronde, and this book seeks to take up the challenge. In response to this body of historiography, this volume presents female devotional culture as generational and something which ought to be understood as a response to changing spiritual currents, as well as social and political circumstances. Moving beyond the study of institutional documentation, such as the records of religious houses and confraternities, it instead proposes that an interrogation of correspondence can help us to better understand the social realities of elite devotion and avoid offering another version of the female spiritual triumph over the repressive character of the Council of Trent.5 By rediscovering the piety of the Parisian female spiritual elite who succeeded the dvots, this book tells the story of a

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generation of pious women who have scarcely been studied by historians of early modern religious culture.6 Seventeenth-century female rigorist penitents, as they are referred to here, have received little archival study since the nineteenth century when they were mythologized as beautiful luminaries or prcieuses who monopolized the salons, or viewed simply as the Belles Amies of the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal. By recovering their devotional culture, this book offers a new perspective on how female piety evolved in the decades after the dvot generation had pioneered the Catholic Reformation in France.

The Catholic Reformation and the Rigorist Turn in France

French historians have been at the forefront of attempts to recapture the religion of the people in early modern Europe. The groundbreaking work of scholars such as Lucien Febvre and other Annalistes recovered the early history of the post-Reformation Catholic laity.7 Since the 1950s, the histoire des mentalits and socio-historical approaches to religious experiences, led by Gabriel Le Bras and Jean Delumeau, have been more influential.8 Writing in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (19625), Delumeau, a professed and active Catholic, was provoked by concerns about the fate of twentieth-century Catholicism and de-Christianization in France.9 Delumeaus work stimulated a debate which is still being continued within French scholarship and two generations of his disciples have contributed a number of studies to the history of lay piety during and after the Catholic Reformation.10 Across the Channel, John Bossy and his academic supervisor Henry Outram Evennett did not share Delumeaus view of pre-Reformation Catholicism as obstinately pagan and instead claimed that the Counter Reformation destroyed many of the social ties that a thriving traditional religion had fostered.11 Bossys work helped to renew Anglo-American interest in the Counter Reformation.12 Since then, there has been an outpouring of work on the experiences of the Catholic Reformation in different European countries and the history of the nonEuropean Catholic world is now very rich.13 The newest appraisals of approaches to its history have argued that a less Eurocentric perspective is going to be essential if we are to understand how early modern Catholicism expanded into a World Religion.14 This study cannot contribute to the history of the non-European Catholic revival, but it can help to reinforce the point that the Catholic Reformation must be seen as a longer-term process of appropriation. Joseph Bergin recently reminded us that the French Catholic Reformation had not fizzled-out by 1660 but continued in its various forms well into the eighteenth century.15 In this book, the rigorism adopted by elite, lay women in mid-seventeenth-century Paris is located within their experience of this long Catholic Reformation. Rigorism was essentially a neo-Augustinian spiritual current which is often regarded as the continental counterpart to English Puritanism due to its

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Introduction

rejection of Baroque excesses.16 The careful work of Jean-Louis Quantin has revealed its origins in the writings of the Early Church Fathers.17 Historians of seventeenth-century France now usually recognize that there was, in the middle decades of the century, a rigorist spiritual turn. This was signalled by the increasingly severe outlook of the Gallican church on the sacraments of confession and communion, and by the rigorous casuistry of French clergymen who wanted to combat the moral laxity which they believed had been sanctioned by the Jesuits. The strict reform of the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal, led by Mre Anglique Arnauld (15911661) in the early seventeenth century is perhaps the most notorious expression of French rigorism, as the community became renowned for their strict outlook on predestined salvation and austere penitential practices.18 Above all, Port-Royal is remembered as the hub of a heretical movement known as Jansenism, named after the theology of the Flemish Bishop Cornelius Jansen (15851638), whose unorthodox doctrines the female religious and male clerics there were said to uphold. Daniella Kostrouns research has revealed the extraordinary political activism of the female religious at Port-Royal in the face of persecution by the monarchy.19 In the mid-seventeenth century, Parisians from the robe nobility and high magistracy also flocked to the defence of the nuns and its patrons eventually included most of the aristocratic women with whom this book is concerned. It is crucial, however, that the Port-Royal controversies are located within the wider history of the rigorist turn. Consequently, in this book I avoid using the term Jansenism which rather narrowly refers to the anti-Jesuit faction of Port-Royalists whose allegiance to Jansen was condemned by a papal bull of 1653, Cum Occasione. Rigorism better captures the broader shift taking place within French spirituality, since not all rigorists were supporters of PortRoyal and many who identified with this spiritual trend would certainly not have identified themselves as Jansenist. Here, I use the terms rigorist and rigorism to denote the neo-Augustinian spirituality and moral rigorism adopted by elite lay women, whilst recognizing that if they did not share a coherent doctrinal system, they certainly shared a certain style of devotion.20 The premise of Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation is that rigorism as manifested in the religious and social lives of lay, aristocratic Parisian women who converted to it should be understood in relation to the mid-century waning of the dvot movement.21 Certainly, rigorism was fundamentally different to the Salesian spirituality of the early seventeenth-century dvots which was, in simple terms, based on the premise that God wanted all men to be saved. In contrast, the most important rigorist principle was anti-Molinist; it said that God had only selected some individuals upon whom to bestow efficacious grace, which would allow them to suppress their corrupt human will and turn to God. Historians have preferred not to see the collapse of dvot organizations such

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Female Devotional Culture

as the Company of the Holy Sacrament as marking the disappearance of the movement in France and talk about it resurfacing with madame de Maintenons circle in the 1680s.22 The word dvot also continued to be used to denote persons of a spiritual persuasion well into the eighteenth century. Yet by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the dvot movement had lost the impetus which the early years of the Catholic Reformation had given it, and to be dvot was no longer to be in vogue. This book tries to show that, in this context, the moral austerity of the early dvots was revived by a new generation of spiritual elite, who inherited their predecessors desire for a more socially and spiritually exclusive culture of worship. Approaching lay, female rigorist piety in this way allows this study to contribute a history of rigorism which does not revolve around Port-Royal. Undoubtedly, it has to be understood in relation to the convents history, but it must be remembered that many of these women were attracted to the PortRoyal cause clbre because they were rigorists. The devotional culture of rigorist women has been masked by an excessively narrow, sectarian historiographical interest in their role in the Port-Royal intrigues. Whilst recognizing their role as instrumental protectors of the convent, this book argues for their place as practitioners of a distinctive culture of worship which evolved in response to the spiritual currents of the mid-seventeenth century.

This investigation of rigorist devotional culture seeks to unveil the rituals, practices and beliefs underpinning the religious lives of aristocratic women and which also informed their personal identities, social attitudes and behaviour. The concept of a devotional culture best captures the essence of their piety which, as I have already noted, did not always exhibit a clear and coherent theology, but rather a style of worship organized by particular beliefs and grounded in penitence. In this book, I want to draw attention to its subtler textures in three ways. Firstly, I propose that rigorist penitents were practising a socially exclusive kind of pious sociability, which was founded upon intimate spiritual friendships between them, which were believed to be salvifically profitable. Secondly, I show how their devotional routines were characterized by a more demanding culture of penitence which rejected the licentious culture of an increasingly libertine royal court and its ostentatious Baroque ceremonies. Thirdly, I consider how their culture of worship may have informed, and been informed by, a post-conversion belief in their election or self-perception as Gods spiritual elite with an affinity with the early Christian community.23 This history of their spiritual lives must be situated within the wider study of pious female circles in France. In addition to the research on dvot networks,

Introduction

Jonathan Spangler and Patricia Ranum have done much to illuminate the pious lives of the Guise women, whilst Mark Bryant has analysed Madame de Maintenons role in the conversion of the court in the later seventeenth century.24 There are also some interesting parallels to explore between rigorism and the godliness of Puritan women, recently studied by scholars such as Andrew Cambers and Femke Molekamp.25 The historian of female religion in seventeenth-century France can also learn from the abundant scholarship on the devotional lives and spiritual identities of lay women and the female religious across medieval and early modern Europe. Studies by historians Jodi Bilinkoff, Silvia Evangelisti and Laurence Lux-Sterritt among others have uncovered the different colours and complexities of Catholic female spiritualities and destabilized many of the categories historians use to discuss them.26 Caroline Walker-Bynums canonical work on the feminization of religious symbols and language in the Middle Ages has a continuing resonance to scholars of female piety.27 Historians are also indebted to the scholarship of Gabriella Zarri whose Living Saints revealed the subtle ways in which religious expression offered agency to women, often outside the institutional bounds of the Church.28 Robert Orsis analysis of the emergence of a new feminine, devotional culture in early twentieth-century Chicago is a useful tool for thinking more broadly about these themes.29 His seminal book Thank You, St Jude explores the evolution of devotions to the cult of Saint Jude among women living in a Mexican-American parish in South Chicago in 1929. The study shows how the subordination of immigrant women in the community was reinforced by the cult. Yet integral to the story is an account of the creative response of the daughters and grand-daughters of immigrants experiencing the social and political changes wreaked by the War and Great Depression:
through the power of their desire and need, awakened by and in response to the new challenges and possibilities of their American lives, and with the flexible media of devotional culture the images they could take away with them into their rooms and beds, the water and oil they could touch to their pains in gestures and rituals of their own improvising the immigrants daughters could do much with what they inherited.30

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For Orsi, the cult of St Jude both exploited the culturally mandated responsibilities of immigrant women and celebrated their devotional capacities.31 Not only does Orsis reading offer historians of lay religion an approach to generational female spiritualities, but also a model of interpretation for a devotional culture which was at once both liberating and constraining. This tension was also present in seventeenth-century lay, rigorist culture.

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By exploring another occasion when female piety operated outside of formal parameters, this book aims to offer a different perspective on female agency and religious culture. Rigorism offers historians of early modern female spirituality a unique encounter with an alternative culture of worship which was, at times, dissident and subversive. Whilst it would be unwise in a study of high-ranking, elite women to overplay the significance of their gender or to see them as victims of a patriarchal system or a repressive Church, it does seem fruitful to highlight occasions when these women resisted or defied the devotional channels prescribed to them. As we shall see, this might have taken the form of lay women offering informal spiritual advice to each other in the absence of a male spiritual director, reading devotional works considered inappropriate for women, or receiving communion when they were supposed to abstain. This investigation charts the emergence of a new form of female sociability in a period when the salon is usually privileged as the defining social institution of feminine sociabilit.32 Salons were gatherings usually held in the homes of noble and bourgeois women in Paris and in the provinces where women and men conversed, composed and performed literary oeuvres, and debated matters of moral or philosophical interest. Many of the lay women who became rigorist penitents were regulars at the Parisian literary salons of the early seventeenth century before their conversions, as we shall see in Chapter 1, and their pious sociability retained many of the elements that characterized salon interaction, such as its foundation in letter writing. Rigorist penitents began to see salon sociability as representative of the mondanit (worldliness) that they felt compelled to sacrifice, however, and their devotional culture was based upon a rejection of many of the social customs that made the salon part of Ancien Rgime elite culture.33 Scholars such as Dena Goodman and Steven D. Kale have observed a shift in salon culture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as women were gradually excluded from the more serious and intellectual environments of the philosophical salon due to the mockery of female ridiculous preciosity.34 The mid-seventeenth-century rigorist critique of salon habits among the high female aristocracy is potentially significant to this history of the feminocentric salon and its later decline. More importantly, the history of rigorist female sociability exemplifies how unconventional feminine sociabilities may have matured outside of the salon in this period. The rigorist aloofness from the salon was paralleled by their detachment from the royal court during an era when noble presence was crucial for securing royal favour.35 Louis XIV reached his majority in the middle decades of our period, beginning his personal rule in 1661. During peacetime, courtiers were usually invited three days per week to be entertained by the King with billiards and cards, and its endless programme of feasts and spectacles made his court a theatre of power.36 The story of how one pious network of aristocratic women

Introduction

rejected the royal court of the Sun King is a powerful counter-narrative to the history of the seventeenth century which is still imagined predominantly as the age of Louis XIV. This study will show how rigorist devotional culture transgressed and subverted conventional forums for aristocratic sociability primarily through their critique of the court. In addressing how the practice of a certain devotional style was underpinned by spiritual friendships between aristocratic women, this book is alert to the ways in which collective piety helped to reinforce social ties. In this regard, the influential approaches of historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and John Bossy, who used modern social anthropology to interpret religious rituals and highlighted how they had the power to bind social groups, is of continuing importance.37 Religion was a collective and social experience for these scholars, just as it was for mile Durkheim.38 The way rigorist womens commitment to demanding penitential regimes generated bonds between them might also force us to re-evaluate some of the consequences of the Catholic Reformation for the laity, in particular the argument that it resulted in a highly individualistic and antisocial religion.39 In doing so, however, it is also essential to be mindful of the recent methodological debate concerning the overuse of social and cultural anthropology by historians of early modern religion and the associated criticism of their alleged implicit secular biases which have caused them to distort the beliefs of historical actors.40 In response to this, and in line with the scope of the Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World series, at the heart of this book is an exploration of how belief in this case spiritual election and predestined salvation interacted with devotional practices and sociability.

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A New Generation of Spiritual Elite

The lives of the lay female rigorists were first illuminated by the librarian Ccile Gazier (18781936) who coined the term Belles Amies to describe the female patrons of the convent of Port-Royal in her book, published in 1930.41 Gaziers Belles Amies numbered eight women who became important protectresses of the convent throughout the seventeenth century: Anne de Rohan, princesse de Gumn (160685); Marie-Louise de Gonzague, later Queen of Poland (161167); Madeleine de Souvr, marquise de Sabl (15991678); Anne Hurault de Cheverny, marquise dAumont (161858); Anne-Genevive de Bourbon-Cond, duchesse de Longueville (161979); Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, madame de La Fayette (163493); Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Svign (162696); and Mademoiselle Marguerite de Joncoux (16681715). Gaziers sketches of each of these women revealed how the different circumstances surrounding their personal conversions brought them into the orbit of

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the Port-Royalists. Crucially, these profiles were intended merely as a sample of the lay women whose lives impacted upon the history of the convent: Gazier did not claim that these were the only active female patrons of the convent, or that their patronage was the only notable aspect of their biographies.42 Gazier wanted to generate interest in the wider story of the lay female contribution to the convents history. The unintended legacy of her representation of the Belles Amies has been the relegation of these women to a sideshow; they have been cast simply as the wealthy patrons of Port-Royal who lent their status to defend the convent during its persecution by the Crown and Papacy. Here, the spirituality of the female rigorists is shown to be more consequential and deserving of a fuller investigation. My own configuration of the lay female rigorists does not reject Gaziers representative sample, but aims to be more attentive to the closest relationships among rigorist women as indicated by their surviving correspondence. Consequently, the focus of this book is necessarily a small network of eight women, born between 1585 and 1637. As well as Gumn, Gonzague, Sabl and Longueville (all studied by Gazier), it focuses on four other women: Anne-Marie Martinozzi, princesse de Conti; Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt; Anne Doni dAttichy, comtesse de Maure; and Louise de Bon du Masss, comtesse de Brienne. It seems instructive here to briefly outline their personal biographies, starting with the five whom the sources reveal to be most instrumental in this new devotional culture. The duchesse de Longueville (161979) (Figure I.1) was the daughter of Henri II de Bourbon, prince de Cond (15881646) and Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency (15941650), princesse de Cond, and was born on 27 August 1619 during the imprisonment of her father at the chteau de Vincennes. On 2 June 1642 she married Henri II dOrlans, (15951663), duc de Longueville, dEstouteville, prince souverain de Neufchtel and Wallengin-en-Suisse, comte de Dunois, de Tancarville and Saint-Paul, pair de France, and governor of Picardy and Normandy. His first wife was Louise de Bourbon, with whom he had two sons who died as children, and one surviving daughter, Marie dOrlans, later duchesse de Nemours (16251707). His marriage with Anne-Genevive produced four children, two of whom reached adulthood: Jean-Louis Charles dOrlans, duc de Longueville (164694), Charles-Paris (164972), Charlotte-Louise dOrlans (d. 1645) and Marie-Gabrielle (d. 1650). Anne-Genevive was widowed on 11 May 1663 when the duc de Longueville died at Rouen and, importantly, the duchess never remarried and lived as a widow until 5 April 1679.43

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Figure I.1: Anne-Genevive de Bourbon-Cond, duchesse de Longueville (161979). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Rserve, QB, 201, 56.

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Anne-Marie Martinozzi, princesse de Conti (163772) (Figure I.2) was born in Rome to Geronimo Martinozzi and Cardinal Mazarins sister, Laure-Marguerite Mazzarini (160885). Anne-Marie came to Marseille with her mother in September 1648 and married ex-Frondeur Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti, pair de France, comte de Pzenas, baron de La Fre-en-Tardenois, seigneur de lIsle-Adam, chevalier des ordres du roi, and governor of Guyenne and Languedoc (162966), on 21 February 1654. Contis marriage to Armand brought her into the Bourbon-Cond family which included the Grand Cond, Louis II de Bourbon (162186). More significant for this work is the relationship she developed with her sister-in-law, the duchesse de Longueville, as will become clear. Anne-Marie and Armands marriage produced three children, two of whom lived through to adulthood: Louis de Bourbon was born on 6 September 1658 and died on the same day, Louis-Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti (166185) died of smallpox on 9 November 1685 and Franois-Louis, prince de Conti (b. 30 April 1664) lived until the age of forty-five. Anne-Marie died in Paris on 4 February 1672.44 Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt (160074) (Figure I.3) was the daughter of Henri de Schomberg and his first wife Franoise de lEspinay. Her first marriage to Franois de Coss, comte de Brissac was annulled and on 24 February 1620, she married Roger du Plessis, duc de Liancourt (15981674), duc de La Roche-Guyon, pair de France, marquis de Guercheville, comte de Beaumont and conseiller du roi, premier cuyer de sa petite curie, and mestre de camp du regiment de Picardie. The marriage produced one son, Henri-Roger du Plessis who married Anne-Elisabeth de Lannoy and had the Liancourts granddaughter Jeanne-Charlotte du Plessis Liancourt (164469). After the death of their son Henri-Roger in 1646, the duke and duchess became the guardians of Jeanne-Charlotte and, as we will see, arranged for her education in Port-Royal. Jeanne-Charlotte died prematurely however, in 1669, after marrying her cousin Franois VII de La Rochefoucauld, prince de Marcillac (16341714). The duchesse de Liancourt died on 14 June 1674.45 The marquise de Sabl (15991678) was the daughter of Gilles de Souvr, marquis de Courtenvaux, chevalier des ordres du roi and marchal de France, and Franoise de Bailleul, dame de Renouard, born in 1599. In 1610 she made her first appearance at court and, along with the comtesse de Maure, became lady-inwaiting to Marie de Medici. On 9 January 1614, she married Philippe-mmanuel de Laval, marquis de Sabl, but it was essentially a marriage of political convenience and after having five children, the couple separated. She was widowed in 1640 and sometime after the death of her son Guy de Laval in 1646, she left her home in the faubourg Saint-Honor by the Louvre and retreated to Port-Royal: a pivotal moment in the history of rigorist devotional culture. Sabl died on 16 January 1678.46

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Figure I.2: Anne-Marie Martinozzi, princesse de Conti (163772). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Rserve, QB, 201, 51.

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Figure I.3: Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt (160074). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Rserve NA, 24 (A).

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Anne Doni dAttichy, comtesse de Maure (160163), descended from a Florentine family as the daughter of Octavien Dony, seigneur dAttichy (d. 1614) and Valence de Marillac (d. 1617). She inherited the seigneury of Attichy in 1637 after the death of her brother Antoine who was killed at Flanders. One of her other brothers was Louis Doni dAttichy, bishop of Riez and later of Autun. In 1635 she married Louis de Rochechouart, comte de Maure (160169), grandsnchal de Guyenne, but the marriage produced no children. Maures testament was dated February 1656, according to Nicolas Lefvre de Lezeau, but there is no extant copy. The comte de Maure outlived her and died on 9 November 1669.47 The remaining three figures are connected in important ways to these women and can be identified as rigorist but, as this book explains, their own life trajectories presented certain obstacles to a fuller commitment to it. MarieLouise de Gonzague (161167) (Figure I.4) was the daughter of Catherine de Lorraine (d. 1618) and Charles de Gonzague (15801637). She was the older sibling of Anne de Gonzague, princesse Palatine (161684). Her mother died when she was seven years old, and she was raised predominantly by her paternal aunt. Shortly after her conversion, the Polish ambassadors Krzysztof Opalinski Palatine of Poznan and Wacla Leszczynski, Bishop of Warmia, arrived in Paris in October 1645 with a retinue to collect Marie-Louise before her marriage to the Polish King Wladyslaw IV. When Jan Kazimierz succeeded his elder brother at the age of thirty-nine he accepted her in marriage. Marie-Louise died in May 1667 and was buried at Wawel Cathedral.48 The princesse de Gumns (160685) (Figure I.5) participation in rigorist devotional culture was cut short by her return to the world some years after her conversion. Gumn was the only daughter of Pierre de Rohan and Madeleine de Rieux, born at Mortiercrolles on 20 April 1604 and baptized in Notre-Damedes-Anges on 25 April. In 1617 she married her cousin Louis VII de Rohan (15981667) prince de Gumn, duc de Montbazon, pair and grand veneur de France, seigneur de Coupvray and comte de Rochefort. The marriage produced two sons: Charles de Rohan (d. 1699) married Jeanne-Armande de Schomberg on 10 January 1653 and had four children; Louis de Rohan was executed on 27 November 1674. The prince was buried at Coupevray-en-Brie in 1667; the princess died on 14 March 1685 at Rochefort.49 Louise de Bon du Masss, comtesse de Brienne (15851665), is not usually a figure associated with the history of Port-Royal. She was, however, a dvot whose piety evolved in response to the rigorist movement and who became intimately connected to other women in this group. Brienne was the daughter of Bernard de Bon du Masss, marquis de Bouteville, governor of Saintonge-Angoumois (15541608) and Louise de Luxembourg-Brienne (15671647). In February 1623, she had married Henri-Auguste de Lomnie, comte de Brienne (1594 1666), who was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs between 1646 and 1663.

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Figure I.4: Marie-Louise de Gonzague, later Queen of Poland (161167). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Rserve, NA, 24 (A).

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Figure I.5: Anne de Rohan, princesse de Gumn (160485). Reproduced by kind permission of the BnF, Estampes et Photographie, Rserve, QB, 201, 62.

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She died at Chteauneuf-sur-Charente in the south-west of France on 2 September 1665, probably at the chteau de Bouteville.50 These eight women are the central figures in my analysis of lay rigorist devotional culture. The aim of this book is not to profile the rigorist network in its entirety because this is something which other scholars such as Antony McKenna have already begun to do.51 An indiscriminate, blanket approach to the correspondence would also belie the exclusivity of lay, aristocratic womens spiritual friendships. It would simply substantiate the traditional view of these women as part of a large, inclusive circle of ex-salonnires who gathered in madame de Sabls conventual apartment at Port-Royal. Here, attention is limited to the density of relationships within this lay, female group, without denying the possibility for its broader connections and for relationships obscured by missing sources. Tracing the increasing exclusivity of some relationships permits some consideration of how ties within this group changed over time and allows us to see how even spiritual friendships were affected by social selection.

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Letters and their Interpretation

Correspondence has been overlooked as a source for reconstructing the piety of seventeenth-century rigorists because of the legacy of French nineteenth-century editions of their letters which, owing to the contemporaneous emergence of interest in the salon, tend to privilege the worldly activities of elite women.52 The editors of these were, by their own admission, often quite selective in their publications of the letters, which were not intended to be used as a repository of sources.53 Instead, they served to buttress a particular narrative or biographical story of the salonnires of the Grand Sicle, and have not been re-edited since their initial publication. Faith Evelyn Beasley has even gone as far as suggesting that, in the wake of the upheaval of the Revolution, scholars such as Victor Cousin (17921867) exploited the history of the salon to salvage the greatness of France.54 She argues persuasively that Cousins novelistic histories were part of nineteenth-century myth-making about Frances past: the collateral damage of which was the devalorization of seventeenth-century women.55 Biographical studies of Cousin also support these suppositions.56 It was the historiographical neglect of these letters many within the Portefeuilles Vallant collection, named after the marquise de Sabls physician who archived her letters and often placed a docket or a brief explanation of the contents on the cover which inspired the research for this book.57 By returning to the original manuscript letters, I have attempted to overcome the problems with the editorialized versions which often omitted sentences and contained discrepancies as to who the authors and recipients of certain letters were.58

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In turning to the letter as a source for female piety, historians of seventeenthcentury France are working with artefacts from the age of feminine letter writing.59 Letter-writing manuals reinforced the parallel made between femininity and the genre when they taught women how to compose letters, and were one of the most widely diffused print genres during this period. Letters were also central to polite culture at court: Louis XIV even read his courtiers mail at Versailles.60 In the last thirty years the study of this age of letter writing has profited from some fruitful collaboration between literary theorists, feminist scholars and historians, culminating in the move towards a cultural history of correspondence within Anglo-American scholarship.61 Letters are now seen as texts which should be mined for their tropes and writerly qualities.62 These disciplinary developments are important for our understanding of seventeenth-century female letters, which were often crafted with the enjoyment of the reader in mind and sometimes read aloud to a collective audience. The epistolary sociability of rigorist penitents should also help to combat the assumption that letters were conducive to privacy and introspection.63 As Mary Morrisey and Gillian Wright have argued, manuscript letters reveal how early modern women could dispense and receive spiritual advice.64 Correspondence enabled the transgression of boundaries and allowed women to converse with friends and associates in their absence.65 Letters not only tell us about individual womens religious sensibilities; they also tell us about discursive communities who were bound by a commitment to devotion. Letters have also interested scholars as material objects. In the 1990s, A. R. Braunmuller used space in the manuscript letter to decode social hierarchies embedded in correspondence.66 Seventeenth-century letter guides such as Antoine de Courtins Nouveau trait de civilit of 1671 advised that after the address written at the top of the page, a space was to be left which would be greater or lesser depending upon the status of the recipient.67 In his work on womens letter writing in early modern England, James Daybell pointed out other ways that the palaeographic form of a letter might be analysed, such as the hand that they were composed in and the use of abbreviations and contractions.68 The attention paid by French historians to the material letter has been limited and Giora Sternberg is one of the first to take up this mantle for early modern French letter writing.69 His important work on status interaction has shown that letters conformed to certain social norms, where forms of address, subscriptions, the ceremonial of expression and non-verbal features such as spatial intervals and graphic parameters were all signifiers of the relationship between sender and receiver.70 Dena Goodman has been the first to explore the culture of consumption that the vogue for letter writing generated, including the supply of commodities such as porcelain inkstands, veneered writing desks and decorated paper.71 Many of the letters analysed in this book took a similar form. They were most often billet letters, generally no greater than fifteen centimetres in length. Conse-

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Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France

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quently, the pages were usually filled with text, rarely with salutations or spaces. Most of the letters were written in an informal italic hand which was generally used in letters to family, friends and social inferiors, whereas a formal italic hand signified a relationship with a social superior or politically influential friend.72 Words were often abbreviated something which women were instructed not to do in letters to a social superior by French letter-writing manuals and spellings were usually phonetic.73 It is clear that, in some cases, the letters were not intended to be kept. Longueville was particularly private and she was nervous about her letters being intercepted or being read by third parties. She often reminded the recipients of her letters to burn them and so probably discussed most of her plans in person.74 The letters occasionally betray aspects of the mechanics and logistics of letter writing. Letters exchanged within Paris were usually delivered by valets-de-pied, despite the formalization of the French postal service in our period.75 Where the letters are originals and not copies, it is clear that most were sealed in the same way. The most common form of closing and sealing a letter in this period was what is known as the tuck and seal format: the letter was folded twice both horizontally and vertically, tucked together and sealed with wax.76

Figure I.6: Letter from the comtesse de Maure to the marquise de Sabl, 1660. BnF, Ms. Fr, 17050, fo. 293, comtesse de Maure to the marquise de Sabl, 1660. BnF, Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9061716j [accessed 17 February 2014]; reproduced courtesy of the Bibliothque Nationale de France.

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The clues that palaeographic analysis can give the historian add to the value of returning to these manuscript letters to explore rigorist devotional culture. These sources do not provide one continuous narrative from 1650 to 1680 and, in parts, the disproportionate survival of some womens letters results in a heavier concentration upon them. Where the letters are silent on some aspects of the organization of rigorist devotional lives, I have also looked to a selection of other sources including probate inventories, household accounts, spiritual autobiographies and testaments in order to offer a fuller account of the devotional routines and rituals underpinning this culture of worship, as well as its material style.

A Rigorist Culture of Worship

This investigation of rigorist devotional culture is carried out over the course of five chapters, which are thematic but also follow a loose chronological thread. The book begins with a short preamble to the history of our penitents conversions, locating their experiences within a longer narrative which preceded their involvement in the noble rebellion, the Fronde. This opening discussion overhauls the backstory to the history of their conversions by instead identifying their spiritual heritage within the female arm of the dvot movement in Paris. This, it suggests, may have predisposed them towards a rigorist turn in the 1650s. Conversion was a dramatic turning point in the individual lives of the penitents featured here. Their spiritual autobiographies, testaments and letters show that many revisited the experience years later to reflect upon the transition they had made from sinner to penitent. Chapter 2 explores these transformative experiences which took place in the middle decades of the century at the moment when the dvot movement went into decline and the broader rigorist turn within the French Church began to be felt among the laity. The chapter uses surviving spiritual autobiographies written by Longueville, Liancourt and Conti and finds evidence that these converted penitents began to embrace a new form of piety which was informed, in some cases, by their self-perception as Gods elect and, in others, by a more general sense of spiritual confidence. Chapter 3 reconstructs the friendships these eight rigorist penitents began to form in the aftermath of their conversions. The intimate relationships revealed by their correspondence tell us that draconian regimes designed to punish sin and evoke the fear of God actually generated grounds for amity with fellow spiritual friends. These penitents acted as guardians of the soul who shared their spiritual anxieties and supported each other in the search for a good spiritual director. This chapter argues against the hegemonic view of post-Tridentine Catholicism as highly anti-social by exploring the commitment that women such as Conti, Longueville and Sabl had towards their female friends. These female spiritual friendships are found to be exclusive relationships which were even elevated

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Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France

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above spiritual bonds with male spiritual directors. The chapter also questions what impact their sense of spiritual elevation had upon rigorist womens sociability during the early 1660s. It scrutinizes the dismissive treatment of the court in their correspondence and finds evidence that their disillusionment with the world was heightened by the persecution of Port-Royal. Chapter 4 is devoted to a closer and more extensive study of the penitential rituals rigorist women adopted and aims to recover the distinct style of piety they practised in the decades after their flight from the world. In order to offer a fuller picture of the hours they spent in the cabinet, as well as their participation in more formal services in the chapel, this chapter investigates the material realm of their devotional culture using the surviving post-mortem inventories taken at the residences of Liancourt, Longueville, Gumn and Brienne.77 These documents are used in conjunction with other sources as indicators of the material environment in the spaces which their culture of worship was conducted, as well as evidence of the devotional media which rigorist women possessed, before a final section using funeral orations and testaments explores the ceremonies rigorist women planned for after their deaths. It also presents some evidence for the devotional reading that structured rigorist womens days, using a case study of the books owned by the duchesse de Liancourt. Using these sources, this chapter contends that our penitents spiritual identities and devotional practices found a unique material expression in their homes. It argues that the infrequency, and in some cases total absence, of devotional aids and ornamentation in rigorist htels, might be understood as a shift away from dvot piety and, more importantly, a reaction to the ostentation and extravagance of Baroque Catholicism sanctioned by the establishment. Finally, it proposes that the understated, simple style of worship practised by rigorist women was in imitation of the early Christians with whom, I argue, they had a spiritual affinity. Aristocratic estates in the Paris hinterland provided rigorist women the opportunity to create spiritual and moral sanctuaries which offered respite from the city and court. Chapter 5 recovers the importance of the estate as a space for the pursuit of an exclusive devotional culture among spiritual friends in the 1660s and 1670s. The chteau is found to be a place which could be devoted to worship, but also as a means of circumventing the court and city. The chapter uses correspondence as a starting point for mapping rigorist penitents journeys away from Paris, and builds up an impression of how they passed the time using household accounts and the records of charitable donations. Correspondence was a medium for keeping them in contact with discursive networks in Paris when they were at the estates and thus uncovers how their devotional culture and pious sociability extended beyond the city. As will become clear, recreation was a moral issue for rigorist women and one further way which the devotional

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culture of the spiritual elite could be distinguished. This chapter shows that the rigorist retreat to the country estate was more than just part of the annual aristocratic season, but a way to spurn Parisian pleasure-seeking high-society and spend time in the pursuit of salvation with spiritual friends. Across these five chapters, we will chart the progression that a band of society women made over thirty years to becoming a coterie of converted penitents and, in doing so, unveil a portrait of the lay, aristocratic brand of rigorist piety. The longer-term legacy of this devotional culture for the history of female piety in seventeenth-century France will be discussed in the concluding chapter. The narrower focus of this book on one informal network of eight spiritual friends is also offset by what their culture of worship and pious sociability can tell us about the broader histories of female piety and the unfolding of the Catholic Reformation in France. The Belles Amies may be well-known to historians of Port-Royal and, indeed, to scholars of seventeenth-century France. This book is the first attempt to investigate if, and how, the austerity of the rigorist spiritual vision played out in the social and religious lives of the lay, aristocratic women who adopted it.

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