Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480-1720 [Reprint ed.] 1409438236, 9781409438236, 113810745X, 9781138107458, 9781315603070

Citation preview

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

For Anthony Musgrave (1937–2008) Merryl Carlisle Tingle (1914–2009) Lily Hayward (1915–2009) Ray Warren (1920–2007) De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine (Psalm 129/130)

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720 Elizabeth C. Tingle University of Plymouth, UK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Elizabeth C. Tingle 2012 Elizabeth C. Tingle has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tingle, Elizabeth C. Purgatory and piety in Brittany 1480-1720. -- (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700) 1. Catholic Church--France--Brittany--History--16th century. 2. Catholic Church--France--Brittany--History-17th century. 3. Death--Religious aspects--Catholic Church--History of doctrines--16th century. 4. Death-Religious aspects--Catholic Church--History of doctrines--17th century. 5. Purgatory--History of doctrines--16th century. 6. Purgatory--History of doctrines--17th century. 7. Brittany (France)--Church history--16th century. 8. Brittany (France)--Church history--17th century. 9. Brittany (France)--Religious life and customs. 10. Counter-Reformation--France. I. Title II. Series 282.4’41’0903-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tingle, Elizabeth C. Purgatory and piety in Brittany, 1480-1720 / Elizabeth C. Tingle. p. cm. -- (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3823-6 (hardcover) 1. Brittany (France)--Religious life and customs. 2. Prayers for the dead--Catholic Church. 3. Purgatory--History of doctrines. 4. Counter-Reformation--France--Brittany. 5. Catholic Church--France--Brittany--Doctrines--Modern period, 1500- I. Title. BX1531.B7T56 2012 236’.209441--dc23 2011041168 ISBN: 9781409438236 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315603070 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations   Acknowledgements   Series Editor’s Preface   1 Introduction: Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany   2 3 4

vii ix xi xiii xv

1

Setting the Scene: The Catholic Church and Religious Life in Early Modern Brittany  

11

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation in France 1480–1720  

49

Strategies for Eternity: Perpetual Foundations for Intercession and their Evolution Over Time 1480–1720  

87

5 The Individual Alone Before God? Motives of Donors and the Functions of Perpetual Masses  

129

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance before Eternity: Parish, Confraternity and Indulgences  

175

7 The Prayers of Priests: Chaplains and Intercession for the Dead  

221

8

263

6

Conclusions  

Bibliography of Cited Works   269 Index285

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Figures 2.1

Map of Brittany. The Dioceses of Brittany before 1790  

12

4.1 Founders of Masses in Nantes 1480–1720   4.2 Founders of Masses – Vannes Diocese 1480–1720   4.3 Movement of Foundations 1480–1720   4.4 Types of Foundations – Vannes Diocese 1480–1720   4.5 Location of Foundations – Nantes 1480–1720   4.6 Location of Foundations – Léon Diocese 1480–1720  

98 99 104 107 109 111

Costs of Foundations in Nantes 1480–1720   Costs of Foundations in Vannes Diocese 1480–1720  

168 169

5.1 5.2

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Tables 5.1 Augmentation of Saints’ Feasts at Vannes Cathedral   5.2 Litanies founded in Saint-Patern, Vannes  

140 142

7.1 Priests serving in six of Nantes’ parishes, 1563   7.2 Numbers of priests in the deaneries of Retz and Clisson, diocese of Nantes   7.3 Examples of the incomes of seven choral chaplains of Nantes Cathedral, 1622   7.4 Value of benefices in Allaire, 1690  

227 229 250 253

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Abbreviations ADF Archives Départementales de Finistère ADLA Archives Départementales de la Loire-Atlantique ADM Archives Départementales du Morbihan AMN Archives Municipales de Nantes AB Annales de Bretagne ABPO Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest AESC Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations BSAF BSAHN BSAHNLI BSHPF BMSAIV

Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de Finistère Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de Nantes Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de Nantes et la Loire-Inférieure Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme Français Bulletin et Mémoires de la Société Archéologique d’Illeet-Vilaine

FH FHS

French History French Historical Studies

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

P&P

Past and Present

RBV RBVO RH RHEF RHMC

Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée Revue de Bretagne, Vendée et des pays de l’Ouest Revue Historique Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de la France Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine

SCH Studies in Church History SCJ The Sixteenth Century Journal TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements The writing of this book has incurred many debts of gratitude. I would like to thank the staff of the Archives Départementales of Loire-Atlantique, Morbihan and Finistère and the Archives Municipales of Nantes, for their help and efficiency. I am grateful for financial assistance from the Finzi Trust and Scouloudi Foundation. Particular thanks go to The Gladstone Library at Hawarden for the Canon Symonds Memorial Scholarship, which enabled me to revise and prepare the final manuscript in the setting of the wonderful library there. Grateful thanks go to the members of the European Reformation Research Group, where I aired a number of ideas arising from the project over the years. Particular thanks and gratitude go to Professor Andrew Spicer, who read and commented on the final draft of the work. I am also grateful to the staff, students and librarians at Plymouth University for their support and to the Faculty of Arts for financial assistance with the project. Finally, I thank Martin, Katie and William, who accompanied me on many trips to Brittany and without whose support this work would not have been possible. I dedicate this book to a father, mother-in-law and two grandmothers, who passed away before the book was finished. Requiescant in pace.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part,

xvi

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer, Augustana College

Chapter 1

Introduction: Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany In the early 1640s, Ollive Blandin was passing the Fontaine de Ruellan in the parish of Plancoët when she heard, ‘a voice pleading, repeated three or four times’. Looking around her, she could not see anyone, which made her believe that it was her daughter who had died a short time before, asking her to say some prayers.1 Some years before, two brothers, both masons, had discovered a granite statue of the Virgin and Child in the waters of the spring. For a short while there were pilgrimages to the site, then all was forgotten. But Ollive’s encounter was followed by other healing miracles. It was clear to contemporaries that the Virgin, not Ollive’s recently-deceased daughter, had been heard. The statue was restored and the fountain dedicated to Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, supported by the bishop of Saint-Malo, another example of the expansion of the cult of Mary seen across Europe in the Counter Reformation. Locals no doubt had an eye on the more successful pilgrimage site of Saint-Anne-d’Auray, also based on the discovery of a holy statue. Without the miraculous events at Ruellan, however, this simple encounter with a recently-departed relative would have been an everyday, unrecorded tale. The obligation of the living to remember and honour the dead is one the oldest of human beliefs. By the later Middle Ages in western Europe, the relationship between the living and the dead was mediated in large part by the Catholic Church. The souls of the departed went to Hell or to Heaven, the latter usually after a time in Purgatory. The celestial or infernal destination of the soul was determined by an individual’s actions in this life but the length of time it took a departed soul to reach heaven was influenced also by the ongoing community of the living. This responsibility was discharged through the process of intercession, a petition made to God on behalf of others, either directly, through Christ, or through the mediation of the saints and the Church. Community and commemoration defined the relationship of the living with the dead. The Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century saw this eschatology challenged. Purgatory was denied, as non-Biblical; the intercession of saints and the living for the dead was rejected, for faith in Christ eliminated the need for mediation with God, while an afterlife of Heaven or Hell, after final judgment, was accepted. In 1

 Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 382.

2

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

regions won for Reform, the complex institutions which had grown up to service the needs of souls, funerals and post-mortem masses, priests and colleges, memorials and chapels, were swept away. Such destruction of ideas and institutions also affected Catholicism. Purgatory and its edifices had to be justified anew and rebuilt, at Trent and afterwards, in the face of religious wars. In France, this took several decades, with a tripartite eschatology emerging strongly once more in the seventeenth century, until its decline during the Enlightenment. It is the contestation and rebuilding of Purgatory and contemporaries’ ‘management’ of the experience of souls after death, that is the subject of this study. The nature of beliefs in the afterlife and methods of intercession for the dead in the French province of Brittany are examined across the Catholic and Counter Reformation centuries, as a means of studying religious change over time. The dead, who were the subject of such intercession, have received much attention in French historiography. Since the pioneering study of the demography of the Normandy village of Crulai by Louis Henry and Étienne Gautier in 1958, quantitative studies have charted the statistics of dying, death and disposal in early modern France.2 In an influential work of 1960, Pierre Goubert published a demographic model of the city of Beauvais and its region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which he argued that death and mortality conditioned structures of life more than birth.3 François Lebrun’s landmark study of early modern Anjou similarly examined demographic structures, mortality cycles, death rates and their change over time and inspired numerous other regional studies during the 1970s and early 1980s, in which historians measured and analysed the contours of death.4 For scholars trained in the Annales School, mortality was a problem of nature rather than of culture and formed a fundamental structure of early modern society.5 Many of these works went beyond the compilation of statistics, however, and their authors examined the impact of demographic structures on popular attitudes to death. This had its roots in a wider interest in the history of mentalities, again pioneered by the Annales School and by ethno-anthropologists concerned with rites of passage. John Bossy’s work on Catholic belief and practice across the Reformation centuries made an important contribution, with its emphasis on social and cultural 2   Étienne Gautier and Louis Henry, La population de Crulai, paroisse normande. Étude historique (Paris, 1958). 3   Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730. Contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1960). 4   François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques (Paris, 1971). 5   Michel Bee, ‘La société traditionelle et la mort’, XVIIe siècle 106–7 (1975): p. 81.

Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany

3

dimensions of religious experience and on the ‘history’ of the believer as much as the belief.6 Of particular significance for Bossy and other historians in the 1970s and early 1980s was the debate about the origins of the ‘rise of the individual’, often associated with the emergence of capitalism and ‘modernity’ towards the end of the Middle Ages. Studies of death contributed greatly to seeing the early modern period as a watershed in the change from collective to individual mentalities.7 The most influential work of this genre was that of Philippe Ariès. Using a wide range of sources, literature, memoirs, religious and administrative records, monuments and pictures, Ariès developed a periodization of attitudes towards death, from antiquity to the present day. He argued that the early modern centuries witnessed a move away from death as a collectively-experienced event to the individualization of mortality. This was accompanied by a rise in a belief in particular judgement at death rather than the final, collective ‘doomsday’ of humanity.8 Michel Vovelle, who has written extensively on the demography and culture of death in the Midi of France, criticised Ariès for his assumption of an undifferentiated European experience and particularly for his lack of discussion of spiritual context. In the 1970s, the great studies of mortality began to consider the fate of the soul as well as that of the body. However, Vovelle’s periodization remains similar to that of Ariès. Using pictorial evidence and wills, he argues that new, individual attitudes to death and the afterlife emerged in the later Middle Ages, based on the increasing importance of belief in Purgatory. This was reinforced during the Counter Reformation, which taught that the whole life of humankind should be lived with the end in mind, culminating in the great baroque ceremonial of death.9 This cosmology changed in the eighteenth century and affected the ‘practice’ of death as well: the fear of hell and the role of corporate salvation declined and mortality was contained within the family, a private individual tragedy, part of what Vovelle calls ‘de-Christianisation’.10 Pierre Chaunu’s work on Paris likewise combined demographic work with a history of attitudes towards the afterlife. He largely supports Vovelle’s 6

  John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985).   Allan Mitchell, ‘Philippe Ariès and the French Way of Death’, FHS 10 (1978): p. 685. 8   Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London, 1983). 9   Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses de testaments (Paris, 1973); La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983). 10   Craig Koslofsky has commented that as an historian of mentalities, Vovelle ‘is concerned primarily with death as understood and experienced in daily life’, a focus which characterises French historians’ approach to studies of death more generally. Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: death and ritual in early modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 5. 7

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

4

model of the rise of individual sensibilities in the early modern period. He shows that in the capital, there was a move towards a belief in particular rather than collective judgement after death, but with continued cooperative forms of mutual assistance between the living and the dead, and of permeability between their worlds. He sees this world view declining after 1720.11 Recently, Vanessa Harding has added to these debates in a study of Paris and London, where she argues for the increased ‘privatisation’ of death rituals and funerary arrangements for the elites of the two capital cities during the seventeenth century.12 Studies of print culture concerned with dying and death have also reinforced the chronology and motors of change in attitudes to mortality, again privileging the Counter Reform of the seventeenth century. Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche’s works on ars moriendi literature have shown that during the Middle Ages, dying a good death was vital to salvation, but by the early modern period, living a good life in preparation for eternity was more important.13 Ritual, as a site for the representation or reconstruction of the social order, has also received much attention. The ‘classic’ French studies of mortality also included discussions of burials and funerals, although there has been little work on commemoration and memorialization. Paul Binski has written on the Middle Ages while Ralph Giesey has examined the political functions of royal obsequies in Renaissance France.14 Comparative studies of death and its associated rituals come from other European regions as well, such as Sara Nalle’s work on Cuenca in Spain, Sharon Strocchia’s study of Renaissance Florence and Samuel Cohn’s examination of Siena.15 The most recent studies have been of German, mostly Lutheran, territories, for example by Craig Koslofski, whose study of death rituals across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has incorporated sites and representations of authority.16 Burial place, funerary rituals, forms and sites of commemoration, have been reconstructed in detail for many regions, as indicators of belief, social and civic status and values and as places 11

  Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978).   Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge, 2002). 13   Rogier Chartier, ‘Les Arts de Mourir 1450–1600’, AESC,31 (1976): pp. 51–76; Daniel Roche, ‘La mémoire de la mort. Recherche sur la place des arts de mourir dans la librairie et la lecture en France aux 17e et 18e siècles’, AESC 31 (1976): pp. 76–119. 14   Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London, 1996); Ralph Geisey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960). 15   Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: religious reform and the people of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore and London, 1992); Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore and London, 1992); Samuel K. Cohn, Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800. Strategies for the afterlife (Baltimore and London, 1988). 16   Koslofsky. 12

Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany

5

of conflict, as meaning changed over time or was contested by different individuals and groups. The dead are particularly important in the historiography of Brittany. Alain Croix’s magisterial thesis and the work of the anthropologist Ellen Badone, have charted the demography and rites of passage of dying across time.17 They argue that the macabre played a special role in popular Breton culture, rich in traditions of the collectivity of the dead known as the Anaon, and in the skeletal personification of death, Ankou.18 Croix remarks that ‘the society of souls remained very close to the living’ and that ‘one of the essential internal relationships within this society was that between the living and the dead.19 Croix provides a detailed description of mortality trends and an ‘essay on the culture of the macabre’, with special attention paid to last rites, funeral ceremonies, burial place and commemoration. He argues that this special focus on death had ancient, Celtic, cultural roots.20 In Brittany, the cult of the dead is seen as especially important in the dissemination of Counter Reformation ideas after 1600. Croix argues that Brittany was ‘an ideal terrain for a pastorate based on death’, a marked feature of church teaching after 1640.21 To enhance spirituality, augment participation in the sacraments, eliminate superstition and promote morality, clergy preached on themes of death, judgement and repentance, although this was not confined to Brittany, for it was a feature of much reformed Catholic pedagogy. As evidence of the reformers’ success, Croix cites the construction of monumental parish closes with ossuaries and high cemetery walls, greater ritualization of the use of sacred space and an increase in church burial in this period. For example, in Lower Brittany, almost all adults were buried inside parish churches, at least for a number of years, until they were displaced by fresh burials and their remains removed to the ossuary. Vovelle argues that Brittany retained an archaic culture of the dead, where Hell and judgement continued to dominate discourses about death, when elsewhere in France the mitigation of post-mortem torments by a life lived well predominated. Croix and Roudaut conclude that Catholic reformers were thus faced with a popular Celtic religious tradition, where familiarity with the dead was too deeply rooted to be truly subverted and tension remained between old mentalities 17

 Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: la vie, la mort, la foi (2 vols, Paris, 1981); Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour (Berkeley, 1989). 18   See folkloric records of these traditions in Anatole Le Braz, La légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Paris, 1893). 19  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 943, 1046. 20  Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 387. 21  Ibid., p. 391.

6

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and new discourses on particular judgement.22 They argue for a limited and late adoption of Purgatory in popular religious culture, which distinguished the province from the rest of France. The nature and extent of Celtic Catholic distinctiveness therefore raises wider questions about the relationship between centre and periphery in a period of a strengthening and centralizing state and Church authority, of whether distant regions, linguistically and legally distinct from the main kingdom, were able to maintain Breton cultural particularism over time. It is clear that the material aspects of death – demographic profiles of mortality, funerary rituals, descriptions and quantification of postmortem commemoration – have received much attention for France. The treatment of the body and the attitude of the living towards the dead are well studied.23 But the fate of the soul, the relationship between the living and the dead and the long-term ‘management’ of the experience of the hereafter has received less systematic coverage. There has, however, been a growth in interest in the history of the afterlife, in particular in the role of Hell in the Christian soteriology of the Latin West, both Catholic and Protestant.24 Pietro Camporesi used mostly Italian sources to reconstruct changes in the nature and representation of Hell in the Baroque period; Georges Minois surveyed biblical and devotional texts for his short Histoire de l’enfer and recently, beliefs in the afterlife generally have been examined in a range of works, of which Peter Marshall’s, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, John Casey’s Afterlives. A guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory and Carlos Eire’s A Very Brief History of Eternity are a few examples.25 Heaven, too, has had its historians with Jean Delumeau’s Une Histoire du paradis in French and Alistair McGrath’s, A Brief History of Heaven in English.26 A central theme of histories of the afterlife in the Christian West is the importance of the emergence of beliefs in Purgatory in the central Middle 22  Alain Croix and François Roudaut, Les Bretons, la mort et Dieu de 1600 à nos jours (Paris, 1984). 23  A useful comparative collection of essays is Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000). 24   See for example ‘The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul’, SCH, 45 (2009). 25   Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell. Images of damnation and salvation in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1991); Georges Minois, Histoire de l’enfer (Paris, 1994); Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002); Jerry L. Walls (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford, 2008); John Casey, Afterlives. A guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Oxford, 2009); Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Oxford, 2009). 26   Jean Delumeau, Une Histoire du paradis (Paris, 1992) revised as A la recherche du paradis (Paris, 2010); Alistair McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford, 2003).

Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany

7

Ages. Eamon Duffy argues that Purgatory was the single most influential factor in shaping both the organisation of the Church and the physical layout and appearance of its buildings in the Middle Ages.27 The significance of Purgatory was that it reduced the finality of eternal damnation and made redemption ‘contingent on the efforts of both the living and the dead’.28 For the Medieval period, the ‘rise’ of the doctrine of Purgatory has been studied for many European regions. The classic work on the origins of the ‘third place’ is The Birth of Purgatory of Jacques Le Goff, although this study ends in the fourteenth century.29 Following on from Le Goff’s work, a number of studies of written and visual depictions of Purgatory and of methods of intercession for the dead have been undertaken for late medieval France, for example by Jacques Chiffoleau on Avignon and Michelle Fournié for the Toulouse region, again in the tradition of mentalités.30 This interest has spilled over into studies of the Reformation centuries, across Europe. For Spain, Carlos Eire examined beliefs about the afterlife and practices of intercession for Madrid and for two welldocumented individuals, Philip II and Teresa of Àvila.31 For France, a number of recent regional and local studies have begun to examine the impact of the Catholic and Counter Reformations on mortuary practice associated with Purgatory, especially commemoration and intercession, usually as part of wider studies of seventeenth-century reform on clergy and parish life. The works of Pierre Goujard, Serge Brunet and Bruno Restif, on Normandy, the south east of France and eastern Brittany respectively, are good examples.32 There remains no detailed history of Purgatory for the early modern period, however, despite its continuing importance across the Reformation centuries. The institutions, personnel and practices which evolved to mediate between the living and the dead held in Purgatory, formed an 27   Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 301. 28   Richard K. Fenn, The Persistence of Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), p. 47. 29   Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981). 30   Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (c.1320–c.1480) (Rome, 1980); Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (c.1320–c.1520) (Paris, 1997). 31   Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. The Art and Craft of Dying in SixteenthCentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995). 32   Philippe Goujard, Un catholicisme bien tempéré. La vie religieuse dans les paroisses rurales de Normandie (Paris, 1997); Serge Brunet, La vie, la mort, la foi. Dans les Pyrénées centrales sous l’Ancien Régime: Val d’Aran et diocèse de Commingues (Aspet, 2001); Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en HauteBretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006).

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

8

enormous part of the Catholic Church. Trevor Johnson observes that the infrastructure of post-mortem piety was re-established and extended in the Baroque, from obits to confraternities and indulgences.33 What we do have, the great studies of Vovelle, Chaunu and Croix, were written a generation ago and their conclusions merit reconsideration. Also, while testamentary masses and confraternities have received a lot of attention by these and other historians, institutions such as cathedrals, collegiate and parish churches have received less consideration in the context of intercessory provision, although all of them received a great deal of their income from mortuary functions. Likewise, indulgences and new devotions have not been systematically studied in terms of their intercession for the dead. The men who serviced these institutions – chaplains and stipendiary priests – who lived primarily from funerals and post-obit services, have also received little attention for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in contrast to the later medieval and Counter-Reformation parish priest or curé. These institutions merit a more detailed, systematic and comparative treatment, to build on and test existing works. Finally, few studies cross the boundary of the Middle Ages and early modern period; existing works frequently end around 1540 or, as with most of the great volumes on death, commence in 1600. There is little on the transformatory period of the sixteenth century, when Purgatory was at issue between Protestant and Catholic. In a recent study of the city of Nantes during the French wars of religion, evidence emerged which suggests that Catholic reform in Brittany was earlier, more indigenous and polymorphous than Croix’s model for the wider province suggested. The early religious wars saw an enhanced role for the parish in religious life and at its heart, devotions to the eucharist, at the expense of many other devotional practices. Traditionally these are seen as CounterReformation developments. Rather than a movement of the seventeenth century, changes in religious practice therefore clearly occurred in the mid-sixteenth century, associated with sectarian conflict and religious war in the wider kingdom. Further, changes in Catholic piety did not always coincide with ‘classic’ Tridentine concerns.34 For example, penitential and reflective spirituality seen in new devotions came from old-style mendicant influences rather than new religious orders, whose popularity was limited and whose patronage extended very little beyond that of the nobility and urban elites in Brittany.35 Evidence is also emerging which suggests that the 33

 Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), p. 190. 34   Elizabeth C. Tingle, Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion, 1558–98 (Manchester, 2006). 35  Georges Minois, Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1989).

Intercession for the Dead in Early Modern Brittany

9

model of Breton exceptionality is overplayed. The towns and much of the countryside of Brittany was far more open to outside influences than has hitherto been claimed. The aim of the present work is to examine the impact of Catholic revival and Counter Reform on the theology of the afterlife and on practices of post-mortem intercession, through a case study of Purgatory and of postobit provision for the dead in Brittany, across the period 1480–1720. Questions raised include what did contemporaries believe happened at death with regard to the destination and experience of the soul? How far and by what means could the living prepare themselves for the next world? How could the living influence the experience of departed souls, to ensure their eventual repose in heaven?36 The emphasis will not be on the disposal of the body and its accompanying rituals, but on beliefs and practices surrounding the departed soul. Permanent post-mortuary intercessory institutions, which perpetuated long-term relationships between the living and the dead, offer a useful lens through which to examine wider changes in belief and practice across the Counter Reform centuries. As Peter Marshall has observed for England, throughout the early modern period, the dead continued to be ‘an elaborate cultural construction and a complex social presence’ and further, ‘the fate of the dead in the afterlife was the hub around which the theology of the Church revolved.37 The objectives of the present study are threefold. They are to examine beliefs about the afterlife, above all, Purgatory, in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury France. Elite formulations of the doctrine, in sermons, pamphlets and tracts, will be examined but also its ‘understanding’ by regional lay and clerical society, to comprehend better the inter-relationship of ‘popular’ and ‘official’ religion. To this end, the reception of the doctrine of Purgatory in Brittany will be tested by examining the relationship between departed souls and the living through an investigation of the permanent institutions and personnel created to ‘manage’ their relations. Finally, the continuities and changes within theology and practice, across the long time span of the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, will be investigated. It is argued here that beliefs in Purgatory continued to be important across the period of Catholic and Counter Reform, although its importance of the scheme of salvation changed over time, for the nature and purpose of the debts owed by the living to the dead underwent transformations. There were changes in the types of investment in mortuary intercession, reflected in the size and functions of intercessory institutions, although they remained extensive and vital until the early eighteenth century. After 36   These questions develop similar research issues raised in the introduction of ‘The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul’, SCH 45 (2009). 37  Marshall, Beliefs, p. 1.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

10

1700, however, changing perspectives on salvation and a kingdom-wide financial crisis served to end many traditional intercessory forms. In 1721– 22, fiscal collapse in France associated with Law’s System led to a serious crisis in ecclesiastical finances. As a result, churches were forced to reduce greatly their provision of post-mortuary intercession. This date, therefore, marks the end of much traditional practice in the province. The present study focuses on the southern and western regions of the ancien régime province of Brittany, the former bishoprics of Nantes, Vannes, Cornouaille-Quimper and Saint-Pol-de-Léon, the present day départements of Loire-Atlantique, Morbihan and Finistère. The focus on southern and western Brittany was chosen because it allows for comparison between larger and smaller towns within Brittany, as the region includes the largest city, Nantes, along with Vannes, Quimper and Saint-Pol, but also smaller centres such as Carhaix and Guérande. It allows for comparisons to be made between towns and rural areas, maritime and inland regions (the Armor and Argoat in Breton) and also between the French-speaking eastern half of the province and the Breton-speaking west, frequently seen as different cultural as well as linguistic zones. Further, eastern Brittany, the département of Ille-et-Vilaine comprising the bishoprics of Rennes, Dol and Saint-Malo, has been the subject of a recent book by Bruno Restif and the northern region of the Trégor has been studied by Georges Minois, both regions providing useful comparative material for this study.38 The results will provide a case study of the relationship between the ‘Tridentine’ reforms of ecclesiastical and lay elites and the evolving beliefs and practices of ‘ordinary’ members of the lower clergy and laity. As Mary Laven argues, ‘the Counter Reformation was not a one-way process. Rather, there was a dialectic in which, to a greater or lesser extent, literally anyone could participate’.39 This included living and departed souls.

38

  Restif; Georges Minois, La Bretagne des prêtres: le Trégor d’Ancien Régime (Brasparts, 1987) and Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1989). 39   Mary Laven, ‘Encountering the Counter Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): p. 710.

Chapter 2

Setting the Scene: The Catholic Church and Religious Life in Early Modern Brittany ‘The faith of [the people of] Brittany has always been so constant and so pure that the heresy of the last century, so widespread in all the provinces of the kingdom, was not able to penetrate this one, and four of her bishoprics never suffered from its shadow’.1

Antoine Boschet’s preface to his ‘Life’ of the Jesuit missionary Julien Maunoir reflected the belief of seventeenth-century Bretons that they were among Europe’s oldest Christians. By the early seventeenth century, an important part of Breton identity and culture, among both elite and popular groups, was a millennium-old Catholicism pur et dur. Down to the present day, the religious culture of Brittany, particularly in the west, has been based on two historical traditions. The first of these is that the Bretons were always faithfully and enduringly Catholic from the earliest days of Christian conversion. In the fifth and sixth centuries, missionaries had come from Ireland, Wales and Cornwall to evangelise post-Roman Armorica. Corentin came from Cornwall and founded the diocese of Quimper-Cornouaille, Paul Aurélien founded Léon, and both Brieuc and Malo worked in sees (dioceses) that were to bear their names. In the central Middle Ages, the wastes and lands of Brittany were populated by monks, whose monasteries went on to stimulate the growth of towns. In the fifteenth century, religion was revitalised by the preaching of the Spanish Dominican Vincent Ferrer, who died in Vannes. The Bretons of the west were little affected by the Calvinist church that appeared in France after 1555, and later in the century fought against the Protestant king Henri IV for longer than any other French province. These traditions proved the enduring nature of the Catholic faith in Brittany.2 The second tradition is that Catholicism’s strength and endurance down to modern times was caused in good part by the work of missionaries and

1   Antoine Boschet, Le Parfait Missionaire ou la vie du Reverend Père Julien Maunoir (Paris, 1697), p. iv. 2   Guy Devailly (ed.), Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne (Chambray, 1980), p. 125.

Figure 2.1 Map of Brittany. The dioceses of Brittany before 1790

Setting the Scene

13

counter reformers in the seventeenth century.3 Despite strong attachments to Catholicism, the quality of rural religion was found wanting by reformers who worked in the province after 1600. In 1607, when the priest and early missionary Michel Le Nobletz returned to the Léon after his studies, he found the religious life of the region to be in a miserable state. The majority of priests lived in ignorance, unable to read fluently in either French or Latin, while humble folk ‘stagnated in extreme blindness, without catechism. In the majority of parishes there were perhaps only six people who understood the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation and who knew even the Ten Commandments. The majority confessed and took communion only at Easter. Drunkenness, superstition and other sins … were everywhere widespread’.4 These contemporary criticisms were taken up by later historians. Jean Delumeau, writing in the 1970s, argued that at the end of the Middle Ages, peasants throughout Europe were only superficially Catholic, with limited knowledge of doctrine, and that religion exercised few moral and behavioural constraints.5 Historians of Brittany agreed. Croix has argued that pre-Tridentine spirituality was largely a matter of ritual action, with an emphasis on outward expression rather than interior faith.6 Ellen Badone has argued that before the seventeenth century ‘laxity on the part of the laity and the clergy, including … drunkenness and promiscuity of clerics, was largely tolerated … Levels of church attendance were low and comportment differed little from that in secular settings such as the tavern’.7 Guy Devailly added that ‘One thing seems certain, religious knowledge was very weak and religious instruction of the laity and even the majority of the clergy, remained rudimentary … often it lacked even the essential dogmas of the Catholic faith’.8 This behaviour changed in the seventeenth century, with conscientious bishops, better-educated parish priests and missionary religious orders working in the countryside, seeking to implement the rulings of the Council of Trent and the values of Catholic reform. Reformers and missionaries promoted doctrinal correctness, greater emphasis on the sacraments, especially the 3   ‘The religious conversion of Brittany in the seventeenth century is one of the most popular phenomenon of her history.’ Barthélemy Pocquet, ‘Les évêques de Bretagne dans la renaissance religieuse du 17e siècle’, AB 54 (1947): p. 32. 4   Julien Maunoir, La Vie du Vénérable Dom Michel Le Nobletz (ed.) H. Pérennès (Saint-Brieuc, 1934), p. 91. 5   Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter Reformation (London and Philadelphia, 1977). 6   Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, p. 1251. 7   Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 174–5. 8   Devailly, p. 92.

14

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

eucharist, a penitential piety of contemplation, meditation and devotion, and an altered internal relationship with God.9 There was a massive attempt at Christianisation through the catechising of common people, ‘superstitions’ were attacked and there was a drive to reform manners through increasing self-discipline and moral control.10 Historians therefore concurred with the assessments of Nobletz, Maunoir and other reformers. This traditional view of a ‘top down’ Counter Reformation is being revised by work on sixteenth-century religion. The work of Marc Venard and others has shown the richness of Catholic piety in the pre-Tridentine period, with new interests in penitentialism, good works and pastoral renewal among the clergy.11 Denis Crouzet and Larissa Taylor have shown the popularity of religious instruction among all social groups and its importance in fashioning the devotional life of the ‘ordinary’ Catholic.12 Further, measurement of faith in terms of ‘knowledge’ appears increasingly anachronistic for this period, where the emphasis of church teaching and daily piety was on behaviour. Devotion was distinguished from theology. Barbara Diefendorf argues that it was sufficient for ordinary men and women to attend mass regularly and to attempt to live in conformity with the faith; complex doctrine and ‘mysteries’ were best left to God’s special servants, the clergy.13 A good Christian ‘prayed, attended mass, received the sacraments, went on pilgrimage, supported the church, gave alms and worked on behalf of the souls in Purgatory’.14 Above all he or she should strive to imitate the life of Christ, as revealed in the gospels, taught by the Church. Also, although Protestantism was limited in western Brittany, it was certainly present in the towns of the east of the province, with between twelve and twenty-four congregations in the mid-sixteenth century. Some of these, such as Nantes, Rennes, La Roche-Bernard and Vitré, survived until the Revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685. Further, reforms labelled ‘Tridentine’ can actually be seen announced, taught and even imposed many years before 1600 and the ‘great reform’ of the seventeenth 9   Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (Ithaca, 1984), p. 84; R.P. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal (Cambridge, 1998), p. 5. 10   Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), pp. 234–5. 11   See for example Marc Venard (ed.), Le catholicism à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIème siècle (Paris, Le Cerf, 2000). 12   Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu (2 vols, Paris, 1990); Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Oxford, 1992) and Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris: François Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation (Leiden, 1999). 13   Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 1991), pp. 30–31. 14   Virginia Reinburg, ‘Books of Hours’, in Andrew Pettegree, Philip Nelles and Paul Connor (eds), The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book (Aldershot, 2001), p. 69.

Setting the Scene

15

century would never have succeeded if the terrain had not been prepared in advance.15 Vitality and plurality as much as decadence, continuity as much as change, marked Breton religious life across the Reformation centuries. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the history of the Church and the piety of its people in Brittany, to provide context for changes in intercessory practice across the Counter and Catholic reform period. The Institutions of the Catholic Church in Brittany The Secular Clergy At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the institutions of the Catholic Church in Brittany mirrored those of the rest of Western Europe. The duchy belonged to the ecclesiastical province of Tours and its Church structures and liturgies had long been open to French and wider international influences. Brittany had nine dioceses, the largest and wealthiest of which was Nantes, followed by Rennes, three middle-sized sees of Vannes, Quimper-Cornouaille and Saint-Malo, and four smaller sees, Saint-Brieuc, Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Tréguier and Dol. In addition to the Episcopal sees, around nine towns had collegiate churches which resembled the organisation of cathedrals, with colleges of canons or secular priests, although on a smaller scale. Morlaix had eight canons attached to the church of Notre-Dame du Mûr and smaller towns such as PointCroix, Carhaix and Guérande also had collégiales and chapters which dominated their communities, physically, topographically and socially. After the incorporation of Brittany into the French kingdom in 1532, cathedral chapters no longer chose bishops, this was a prerogative of the ruler, although they were responsible for their diocese during periods of Episcopal vacancy. In additional to cathedral affairs, canons participated in municipal administration and poor relief. However, little is known of these groups. The history of the collegiate institutions remains to be written for Brittany.16 The bishops of the province reflected the French episcopacy more generally.17 Technically appointed by the papacy, the prelates of the fifteenth century were mostly candidates favoured by the dukes; many 15

   

Devailly, p. 164. There is a study for the eighteenth century, Olivier Charles, Chanoines de Bretagne: carriers et cultures d’une élite cléricale au siècle des Lumières (Rennes, 2004). 17   For a detailed study see Étienne Catta, ‘Les évêques de Nantes des débuts du XVIème siècle aux lendemains du concile de Trente et aux origins de la “Renaissance catholique”’, RHEF 51 (1965): pp. 23–70. 16

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

16

did not reside or occupy themselves greatly with diocesan affairs and there was much movement of individuals between sees. While the dukes appointed political favourites and servants to bishoprics, some were notable churchmen. François Hamon of Nantes (1511–32) fulfilled his duties conscientiously. He visited his diocese, revised the breviary, missal and ritual and gave generously to the poor.18 The Dominican Yves Mayheuc, bishop of Rennes from 1507 to 1541, was known for his modest lifestyle and his charitable work. Some bishops at least were active in pastoral leadership. Thirty sets of synodal rulings were published in the province before 1488. Their chief concern was the behaviour of the clergy, clerical residence and participation in the sacraments. In Nantes diocese, for example, annual visitations were ordered in 1508, although not always observed.19 The priests of the diocese were ordered to wear the tonsure, while concubinage and participation in popular festivities were condemned.20 Bishops Guillaume and Denis Briçonnet of Saint-Malo, father and son, issued and revised synodal statutes regulating the behaviour of clergy and laity at least five times between 1494 and 1515; Denis also published L’instruction des curez pour instruire le simple peuple in 1518, to aid the pastoral work of his parish priests.21 The bishop of Tréguier was concerned with religious education. In a statute of 1496, rectors were ordered to examine yearly all parishioners on their Credo, Confiteor, Pater Noster and Ave. They were instructed to teach children every Sunday and to exhort them to say their prayers every day.22 There was also a concern to regulate the comportment of the laity. From the early fifteenth century there had been a growing concern throughout Brittany about appropriate marital unions, sexual morality and illegitimacy. This was reflected in a series of episcopal injunctions ordering the public registration of baptisms, to prevent marriages between spiritual kin and to shame women who lived in concubinage or produced illegitimate children. Parish registers in eastern Brittany are the earliest in Europe; the first injunction to keep records occurred in Nantes diocese in 1406 and by the early sixteenth century, some parishes in all Breton dioceses were keeping registers. Behaviour, at least on sacred ground, was also subject to sporadic regulation. For example, in 1462, an episcopal injunction from Tréguier ruled against the playing of games, mummeries and dancing in churches and cemeteries.   A. Jarnoux, Le diocèse de Nantes au XVIème siècle 1500–1600. Étude historique (Paris, 1976), pp. 23–4. 19   Yves Durand, (ed.), Le diocèse de Nantes (Paris, 1985), pp. 68–9. 20   Ibid., pp. 68–9; Devailly, p. 163. 21   Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006), p. 99. 22   Devailly, p. 163. 18

Setting the Scene

17

The concerns of Catholic reformers of the seventeenth century thus had distant roots. After union with France, an attempt was made by the province’s elite to retain a semi-autonomous Breton church. The papacy had greater powers in Brittany than in the wider French kingdom. The Pope had the right to appoint to benefices for six months of the year, although this meant the preference of alien clerics and to pluralism and absenteeism. At Vannes, the Pope appointed three members of the Pucci family to the see between 1514 and 1544, leaving the diocese to be administered by the vicar general André Hamon.23 Between 1540 and 1544, the bishop of Tréguier was Hypolyte d’Este, Cardinal of Ferrara.24 The special relationship between the Breton church and the papacy remained after the marriage of Duchess Anne to Louis XII for Brittany was exempt from the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. The Act of Union of 1532 stated that only natives or men in the royal entourage were to be appointed to Breton dioceses. But Francis I and his successors interpreted these provisions widely; in practice Breton bishoprics were exploited for royal patronage, to foster political support from aristocratic families or to reward service to the Crown. Preoccupied with interests in the wider kingdom, the bishops were largely absent in the sixteenth century. In the diocese of Nantes, Louis d’Acigné (1532–42) did not visit his see until his eighth year as bishop and spent only two months there. Jean de Lorraine (1543–50) and Charles de Bourbon (1550– 54), came not at all.25 The bishops of Vannes were absent between 1490 and 1569, while at Tréguier, bishops were absent for a total of 100 years between 1481 and 1619.26 These statesmen bishops used the revenues and dignities of their sees to further their individual and dynastic interests. They undertook no religious initiatives and failed to provide any spiritual direction of their flock. The administration of the dioceses was dependent upon vicars general and archdeacons. The Council of Trent envisaged the bishop as the keystone of reform in his diocese, a leader in the education of the clergy and in the instruction of the laity. Already during the wars of religion there was some improvement in the residence and activities of the Breton episcopacy. Bishop Philippe du Bec of Vannes then Nantes, attended the Council of Trent in 1562–63 and thereafter frequently resided and preached in his diocese, held synods and issued regulations more frequently than his predecessors.27 Nicolas Langelier at Saint-Brieuc and Aymar Hennequin at Rennes, also introduced     25   26   27   23 24

Jean-Pierre Leguay (ed.), Histoire de Vannes et de sa région (Toulouse, 1988), p. 154. Devailly, p. 129. Ibid., p. 130. Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 359. Leguay, p. 157.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

18

aspects of Tridentine practice into their dioceses. In 1588, Hennequin issued a missal based on the Roman rite of Pius V of 1570 and surviving parish accounts show that the work was purchased by churches over the next decade.28 After 1600, Breton bishops served for longer in their dioceses and there was less movement between sees.29 More ‘local’ men were appointed, at least in the west, who were expected to reside, as part of the royal administration of the province. Breton bishops also began to reform their sees. These men were still royal appointees and political servants, but the increased influence of Tridentine reforms brought a new concept of appropriate duty amongst the episcopacy. The practical means of reform were traditional ones, but applied with more exactitude: diocesan synods, publication of rulings and visitation of parishes. The first reforming synod was held by Guillaume, Le Gouverneur of Saint-Malo, in 1612. This served as a model to others. Many bishops undertook personal visitations. René du Louët visited his diocese of Quimper annually; later in the century, François de Coëtlogon visited the same see in the company of the missionary Julien Maunoir. The introduction of the Roman rite was also an essential part of reform. In 1604, the bishop of Saint-Malo published a translation of Robert Bellarmine’s Catechism into French. The Ritual of Paul V was introduced into Nantes diocese over the period 1610–15, to Vannes in 1613 and into Saint-Malo in 1617. Nantes also produced a Roman Processional (1613) under Charles de Bourgneuf.30 Bishops also sought to reform the religious life of the laity through modification of behaviour, at home and in church. Some of these men died in the odour of sanctity. Frélat de Boissieu, bishop of Saint-Brieuc, restored the cathedral at his own expense and became a pensioner in the seminary. The tomb of Balthasar Grangier, bishop of Tréguier, who died in 1679, became a pilgrimage site for mothers with sick children.31 Such men worked to introduce then consolidate reform in the dioceses, acted as examples for their clergy and inspired devotion among ordinary Catholics after their death, no doubt encouraged by the clergy of their cathedral chapters keen to promote the sanctity and prestige of their churches among pilgrims.

   

28

Restif, p. 78. For details on French Counter Reformation bishops see Joseph Bergin, French Bishops: The Making of the French Episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven and London, 1991) and Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1730 (New Haven and London, 2009), chapter seven. 30   Poquet, ‘Les évêques’, pp. 47–8. 31   Ibid., pp. 53, 59. 29

Setting the Scene

19

For most Bretons, the bishop was a distant figure. Religious life centred on the parish church.32 The parishes of Brittany were large, particularly in the west. The parish centre, or bourg, had a church and cemetery, but there could also be numerous outlying chapels. In Faouët in Cornouaille diocese, for example, in addition to the parish church, there were three chapels outside of the bourg in 1550, with at least three more added during the seventeenth century. In the neighbouring parish of Langonnet, there were five chapels in addition to the parish and abbey church.33 However, baptism and burial centred on the parish church, which the vast majority of parishioners were expected to attend on Sundays and feast days. As for parish clergy, Croix argues that their fundamental characteristic in the sixteenth century was their extraordinary density, with perhaps one priest per 100 inhabitants.34 In the two rural deaneries of Retz and Clisson, to the south of Nantes, a visitation record of 1550 listed 1,057 priests.35 Most were poor, a clerical ‘proletariat’, without regular income. Others, more fortunate, acquired small benefices as chantry chaplains, choir priests or worked as paid vicars for absentee recteurs. This density was also found in towns. In 1638 in four of Nantes’ parishes, there were between 15 and 25 priests, of whom about 50 per cent were prêtres habitués, attached without benefice to the parish church.36 In the countryside, while the recteur lived in the bourg, others were distributed throughout the hamlets of the parish. Most were from local families with close ties to the laity. Their ‘histories’ will be examined in chapter 7. In the sixteenth century, residence rates of the beneficed recteurs was poor: 50 per cent of the priests of Nantes’ diocese were absent from their parishes in the sixteenth century.37 In the city of Nantes, nine out of twelve parishes were held as prebends by cathedral canons, for example, Gilles de Gand, vicar general in the 1550s, held the parishes of SaintNicolas and Saint-Similien in plurality.38 To attend to the needs of such parishes, a vicar was appointed and paid a stipend. There were periodic 32   A good summary of developments in historiography of the French parish is Bergin, Church, chapter nine. 33   Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 348. 34   Ibid., p. 354. 35   Devailly, p. 135. 36   ADLA G 45. Episcopal Visitation 1638. 37   Recteur was the term given to the parish priest in Brittany, the equivalent of the French curé, irrespective of whether the priest was a rector or a salaried vicar. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 480. 38   Charles Dugast-Matifeux, Nantes ancien et le pays nantais (Nantes, 1879), pp. 76– 9; Georges Durville, Le Chapître de l’Église de Nantes. Aperçu sur son histoire du VIIème siècle au Concordat (Nantes, 1907), pp. 17–20.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

20

complaints to archdeacons about negligence and absenteeism from services, drunkenness, games playing, swearing, violence and quarrels. But by and large, communities seem to have been satisfied by their priests, so long as the sacraments were dispensed with dignity. In the parishes, laity and clergy worked closely together. Parishioners intervened to ensure conscientious performance of the sacraments and pastoral care, they paid supplements to vicars, hired curates and provided extra masses in churches.39 In Nantes a number of foundations in parish churches were made to augment the incomes of the poorly paid choir priests. In 1549 in Sainte-Croix, a donor founded two weekly masses, the chaplaincy of which was to rotate between the choir priests and the rights of presentation were held by the churchwardens.40 Hostility towards priests was unusual, caused by particular circumstances, not an endemic feature of parish life. We have little evidence for the educational standards of the rural clergy, but in the towns at least, there were few complaints about ‘ignorance’. In Nantes, parish priests were adequately educated while chaplains and choristers were competent in singing and Latin. The two choir schools of Nantes, at the cathedral and the collegiate church of Notre-Dame, gave instruction to their choristers in music, religion and Latin grammar. There were similar psallette schools in Vannes, Quimper and Saint-Pol. The majority of these boys became priests.41 To augment clerical educational standards, the Council of Trent, followed by a royal ordonnance of 1562, ordered the use of one prebend in each cathedral for the employment of a lecturer in divinity (théologal), who was to preach every Sunday and feast day and to give three public lectures on Holy Scripture every week. In 1562, Vannes cathedral appointed a théologal to give lectures in theology and sacred history to future clerics and lay notables. The first appointment was Olivier de France, doctor of theology from the University of Nantes.42 In 1566, the position of théologal was created at Nantes cathedral. The holder was to preach on Sundays and major feasts and teach two or three classes of theology at the university during the week.43 The first incumbent was Jacques du Pré, followed in the 1570s by Jean Christi, student of the famous Parisian preacher, Simon Vigor.   Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community. The Rise and Reform of the English Parish 1400–1650 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 128–33. 40   Anatole Granges de Surgères, ‘Fondations pieuses à Nantes 1549–1691’, BASHNLI 24 (1885): p. 36. 41   A. Jarnoux, Les Anciennes paroisses de Nantes (2 vols, Nantes, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 53–4. 42   Leguay, p. 156. 43   Nicolas Travers, Histoire civile, politique et réligieuse de la ville de Nantes (c.1750) (3 vols, Nantes, 1837), p. 387. 39

Setting the Scene

21

The seventeenth century is seen as an age of clerical improvement, with absenteeism, rough and drunken behaviour, and ignorance of scripture and doctrine, seen as increasingly unacceptable by elites and ordinary parishioners alike.44 There emerged, slowly, the model of the ‘good priest’ throughout Brittany. By 1660–70, visitation records show that drunkenness and violence were rare and it was no longer acceptable for priests to visit inns, games and dances. Residence was expected from recteurs and vicars. In 1646, during a visitation to Monterfil in Rennes diocese, the official was horrified to find that certain priests had become godfathers, carried arms and went hunting, while the majority went out in public without wearing cassocks. By 1678, things had changed. The recteur of Bazougessous-Hédé said of the three priests who assisted him that only one could be reproached, for drinking cider and smoking tobacco, but even he was a very good priest, assisted at services and did his duties well.45 Education levels improved. While seminaries were not founded until the second half of the seventeenth century – Vannes in 1660, Tréguier in 1672, Dol in 1697 – synods, visitations, rural missions, reading of devotional works and biblical commentaries, penetrated the countryside and contributed to a slow reformation of clerical manners. Parish priests were sent away from their communities of origin: in the diocese of Vannes, recteurs were systematically sent to ‘alien’ parishes when they left the seminary to avoid their close integration into family and community life.46 The later seventeenth century also saw a decline in the numbers of lesser rural priests throughout Brittany as the financial and educational demands on prospective priests served to diminish recruitment. In the deanery of Clisson, the 350 priests of the mid-sixteenth century had reduced to 200 by the time of the visitations of Archdeacon Antoine Binet in the 1680s.47 By the eighteenth century, Tridentine norms seem to have been accepted everywhere. The Regular Clergy Monasticism was a key feature of Breton religious life and culture in the Middle Ages. Before 1200, a large number of monasteries and priories were founded in the Breton countryside, although urban development frequently followed. The earliest foundations were Benedictine houses. Landévennec, originally a Celtic house founded by St Gwénolé, became     46   47   44

See Bergin, Church, chapter 8. Restif, p. 140. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 480. Jacqueline Ghenassia, ‘Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: la visite d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–98)’, RHEF 57 (1971): p. 87. 45

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

22

Benedictine in 818; Saint-Sauveur of Redon, founded by Conwoion before 834; St Gildas de Rhuys, St Melaine and St Georges of Rennes, SaintMéen near to Saint-Malo, were all founded before 1100. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Cistercians founded twelve abbeys among the landes and wildernesses of Brittany, of which Bégard near Guingamp was the first in 1130. But the chief characteristic of the central Middle Ages was the creation of small priories, some of which were dependent on larger monasteries while others were independent houses under the rule of St Augustine, such as Notre-Dame of Doualas founded in 1171. As monasteries came to control the advowsons of many parishes after 1100, both on their own estates and as a result of endowments made by local lords, many Breton houses had widespread networks of direct patronage and influence within the duchy. Saint-Mélaine of Rennes controlled twentysix priories and forty parishes in the diocese of Rennes and seven priories and eleven parishes in the diocese of Saint-Malo. Saint-Sauveur of Redon held the priory of Sainte-Croix in Josselin and around thirty parishes in the modern-day département of Ille-et-Vilaine.48 By 1550, the traditional houses had undergone some decline in numbers. Perceptions of their functions had also changed. The practice of abbeys and priories being held in commendam, by the laity or absentee clerics, greatly reduced their revenue and their spiritual contributions to the local community. The abbé did not exercise personally his charge and he did not reside; most often, the revenues of the house simply went to augment his property. The priors who were appointed as their deputies lacked sufficient authority, observation of the Rule declined and the number of monks fell. At Bégard in the Trégor, studied by Georges Minois, there were only twenty monks by 1512 and, with a commendataire from 1559, the number reduced to nine by 1625.49 The spiritual impact of the old, rural houses on their localities declined, other than for pilgrimages to their shrines. The most dynamic contribution to late Medieval religious life in Brittany was made by the mendicant orders. The earliest foundations date to 1232, when a house of Dominicans was created in Dinan and a convent of Franciscans was founded in Quimper. The Observant Franciscan movement was particularly popular in Brittany during the fifteenth century, with sixteen male and two female ‘Poor Clare’ houses founded, mostly in the smaller towns. Carmelites received ducal patronage across the fourteenth century. Their church in Nantes became a mausoleum for the ducal family. Brittany even had its own order, the Trinitarians, small houses of 12–20 brothers founded in the shadow of several châteaux,    

48 49

Ibid., p. 61. Georges Minois, Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1989).

Setting the Scene

23

Châteaubriant, Sarzeau and Rieux for example, where they provided collegiate services for the residents and worked with the poor and sick.50 By the end of the fifteenth century, most towns had at least one mendicant convent. The friars played an important role in the spiritual life of the province. The lower nobility and bourgeoisie of towns patronised their convents with gifts and legacies, in return for burial in their churches. The friars attended marriages and funerals, begged in towns, sold indulgences in the countryside and encouraged the creation of confraternities. In the first half of the sixteenth century in Rennes, for example, the Carmelites founded a confraternity of Notre Dame which recruited throughout the diocese and a fraternity of Sainte-Barbe in their church, while the Dominicans created a confraternity of the rosary in honour of Notre-Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle.51 Above all, they preached, for the cycles of Advent and Lent, and all year round in their convent churches. These activities brought the mendicants close to all sections of the population. The later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a great resurgence of religious orders.52 A number of traditional monasteries were restored to the strict rule of their founders. The Benedictines of Brittany reformed themselves into the Congregation of St Maur while the Observant Franciscans, returning to the original severity of their rule, were gradually replaced by the Récollets between 1612 and 1642. The Dominican Pierre Jouault of the convent of Bonne Nouvelle of Rennes led the reform of the order in the province.53 But the great novelty was the rate of new foundations. Between the late sixteenth century and 1675, 123 convents were founded in Brittany, 47 male and 76 female houses. Croix identifies two main waves: an early one of contemplative foundations, Carmelites and Visitandines, between 1620 and 1630, then the great charitable ‘wave’, of hospital and educational orders.54 The Capuchins led the way, with a house at Nantes in 1593 then 14 more between 1601 and 1604, in the larger towns and also ports such as Le Croisic, Roscoff and Audierne. The Society of Jesus was planted in Rennes, Quimper, Vannes and eventually Nantes. For women, there were 40 Ursuline houses founded between 1610 and 1680. From 1640 numerous hospitals were reorganised for sisters and the Daughters of Charity created by St. Vincent de Paul, appeared. The urban landscape was transformed, although often in the face of municipal opposition to increased numbers of fiscally and legally privileged communities. For example, Morlaix, with a collegiate     52   53   54   50 51

Devailly, p. 76. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 351. For France, see Bergin, Church, chapters four and five. Pocquet, ‘Les évêques’, p. 33. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 483.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

24

church, Medieval Dominican and Franciscan convents, saw foundations of Capuchins (1611), Carmelites (1619), Récollets (1622), Calvariennes (1625), Ursulines (1638) and Minimes (1660).55 The impact of the new orders is debated, however. On the one hand, their activism and mystical spirituality seems to have touched many people, from their elite recruits, to labourers who were members of their fraternities, to the poor. On the other hand, Georges Minois argues that the new orders were never well received beyond the nobility and urban elites, for their houses were seen as a drain on the local community.56 The experience of contemporaries probably lay somewhere between the two. The Spiritual Life of the Faithful: Elements of Continuity Across the Longue Durée The model of an archaic or, worse, decadent late medieval Catholicism moulded by missionaries into a more devout, interior faith during the seventeenth century, has a long history in Brittany, reflecting a wider traditional view of religion in France and other parts of Catholic Europe. In the classic model, Brittany came out of the long period of civil wars of the sixteenth century with a pastoral deficit at the top and bottom of the Church and a religious crisis amongst the laity, who were badly instructed and ignorant of even the basic elements of the Christian faith. The Tridentine reforms of the seventeenth century renewed and revitalised Breton Christianity. The eighteenth century then saw the beginnings of decline, in religious vocations, works of piety and observance, although less in Brittany than in other regions. But there is a counter-argument to this view, seeing in the synods and regulations of the fifteenth-century bishops a first stirring of reform. Studies of religious life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries beyond Brittany have pointed to a different model, of a rich Catholic practice before 1560, of early and fervent Catholic reform during the wars of religion followed by continuities as well as changes in the ‘century of saints’.57 It is likely that the religious culture of Brittany was just as intense and diverse in 1500 and equally clear is that many of the features present in the early sixteenth century survived and flourished across the Counter and Catholic Reformation periods. Part of the purpose of the present work is to test these hypotheses.     57   55

Ibid., p. 488 Georges Minois, Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1989). Anne Bonzon, L’Esprit de Clocher. Prêtres et paroisses dans le diocèse de Beauvais 1535–1650 (Paris, 1999); Nicole Lemaître, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris, 1988). 56

Setting the Scene

25

The first notable feature was that religious identity continued to be rooted strongly in place. The landscape of mountain, landes and sea was an old one, filled with sites associated with the deeds of saints and heroes. Townscape and countryside were sacred places, in space and time. In Nantes, for example, the city landscape was filled with holy sites and monuments. The oldest cult site lay on a former Gallo-Roman cemetery to the east of the city walls, the traditional place of the thirdcentury martyrdom of Saints Donatien and Rogatien, the ‘children of Nantes’. On the western side of the city was the basilica and burial site of St Similien, a fourth-century bishop, used as a parish church by the sixteenth century. These early saints protected the city and interceded on behalf of its inhabitants. During the Middle Ages aristocrats and bishops had founded mausolea and shrines. Saint-Saturnin church had a piece of the true cross, while Notre-Dame, founded by Alain Barbe-Torte, duke of Brittany, was the burial place of several of his descendants. By 1550, there were twelve parishes and six convents in the city and suburbs, each with their sacred objects, serving a range of spiritual functions. The relationship between old and new sacred spaces and the different zones of the city is shown most clearly in the processional routes taken during the Easter season, when ancient protectors and new spiritual patrons of the city were venerated. On Palm Sunday, the city clergy processed from the cathedral to the cemetery of Champ-Fleuri, in the suburb of Saint-Clément. After a sermon, they returned to the city through the gate of Saint-Pierre, where the first choir of the cathedral sang Gloria laus, while the second choir replied from the top of the rampart walls.58 On Easter Mondays, the college of Notre-Dame processed to the church of Saint-Donatien. Along the way, they stopped at the Carthusian church for prayers. Individuals identified closely with these spiritual journeys. In 1537, Jean Huard left property to Notre-Dame to pay for a Libera and a De profundis on the grave of his parents in the cemetery of Saint-Donatien during this Easter journey. In 1564, André Thebaud left property for the same orations to be sung in his memory at the Carthusian church, along the way.59 Outside of the cities, in rural parishes there were holy wells and fountains, chapels, and literally hundreds of wayside and field crosses of all periods, again making the community into a sacred landscape. Annual processions known in the west as pardons wove this landscape into a spiritual whole, such as those dedicated to St Yves at Tréguier in May and the Troménie pardon at Locronon held every six years in early July.

58   Georges Durville, Études sur le vieux Nantes, d’après les documents originaux (2 vols, Nantes, 1901–15), vol. 1, p. 63. 59   ADLA G 330. Collégiale de Notre-Dame. Fondations.

26

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Within this landscape of sacred sites and monuments, individual Bretons expressed and experienced their faith through a series of ritual activities. The acquisition of grace came through four main activities: prayer, saintly intercession, sacraments of the church and communal rituals, although levels of individual devotion varied. Prayer was the fundamental activity of late medieval Catholicism; there was an ‘intense and persistent effort to solicit the prayers of others’.60 Examples are numerous. Throughout the province and across the centuries, men and women left donations to the poor, to hospital, to the religious orders and the parish, for prayers. Prayers to saints were a vital component of this economy of salvation. Statues and representations of the saints were everywhere. The most visible saint was Mary. In 1515, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of SaintMalo ordered that each parish church in the diocese should have an altar dedicated to the Virgin. There were also figures of Mary on ‘glory beams’ across the chancels of parish churches, representations of the life of the Virgin in wall paintings and stained glass, images of Virgin and child: indeed her presence was ubiquitous.61 Churches also abounded with others saints’ images. By the mid-sixteenth century, in Saint-Saturnin of Nantes there were statues of the Virgin and Child, Notre-Dame de Lorette, Saints Anthony and Sebastian; there were pictures on wood and tapestries of Saints Saturnin and Symphorien; there were relics including a bone of Saturnin and a piece of the true cross.62 In the quest for saintly intercessions, pilgrimage was an important activity, locally and farther afield. For example, the parishioners of Saint-Nicolas of Nantes undertook a yearly pilgrimage to Saint-Sebastian d’Aigne, in recognition of the saints’ protection against plague; during an epidemic in the summer of 1563 they undertook three special journeys on successive Mondays and sent a large wax candle to burn for them there.63 Across the early modern period, Bretons developed new pilgrimage sites as at Saint-Anne d’Auray and they also travelled to Rome and to Santiago de Compostela, for which Nantes was a transit port for pilgrims taking the sea route to the shrine. Croix has argued that in western Brittany, local Celtic saints continued to be favoured rather than the general saints of the international church. Certainly, there continued to be veneration of local saints, related to the early conversion of Brittany. Mamert, who cured stomach ailments, Hubert who protected against rabies, Cornély who cured cattle and Meriadec, an early bishop of Vannes, who cured headaches. There was also a lively 60   Alan Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA, 1976), p. 17. 61   Restif, pp. 84–5. 62   ADLA G 506. Saint-Saturnin Fabrique. 63   Travers, vol. 2, p. 382.

Setting the Scene

27

popular culture of Celtic saints’ lives and deeds. From the ninth and tenth centuries onwards, Breton monasteries had produced a rich corpus of Vitae of early saints such as Samson of Dol, Paul Aurélian and Winwaloe of Landévennec. Their stories and themes were well known among all sections of the population, spread orally as well as in printed texts by the mid-sixteenth century.64 This tradition of hagiography persisted and was reinforced after 1600. In 1636 the Vies, gestes, mort et miracles des saints de la Bretagne Armorique was published by the Morlaix Dominican Albert Le Grand, and from the middle of the seventeenth century, the Maurist congregation in Brittany undertook a massive work of historical synthesis and publication of primary documents. This work resulted in a number of publications in the eighteenth century including the Vies des Saints de Bretagne of Guy-Alexis Lobineau in 1725. But generally from the later Middle Ages onwards there was a shift away from local saints, to international and especially gospel saints, as in many parts of Europe. Of the free standing chapels erected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Nantes, none was dedicated to a Breton saint; Notre-Dame de Bons Secours, St Anthony of Padua and St Catherine were the chosen patrons. In Notre-Dame church of Nantes in the midsixteenth century, there were seventeen altars and chapels in addition to the high altar. One was dedicated to the Trinity, four were Marial altars, three to the apostles and the rest to wider Church saints of various provenance, Catherine, Margaret, Eustace, Maurice and Fiacre.65 In the seventeenth century, on a small scale and largely in cities, new cults of Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola and François de Sales were diffused by their religious orders. This might be expected in the French-speaking cities, but it is a trend seen in the Breton-speaking countryside as well. Above all, veneration of the Virgin persisted across the period. Altars, masses and shrines continued to receive Marial invocations, such as the fountain of Notre-Dame at Plancoët, near to Corseul. The importance of Mary is reflected in the continued popularity of her mother and also a growth in the cult of her husband. In 1625, the discovery of a statute of St Anne in a field called Keranna in the parish of Pluneret by Yves Nicolazic, led to the development of an important pilgrimage shrine near to Auray after 1621. The cult of St Joseph was instituted by royal ordonnance from 1661 and celebrated in Rennes from 1665.66 The development of rosary use among all social groups from the fifteenth century onwards grew out of the role   Bernard Merdrignac, ‘L’apport des sources hagiographiques à l’histoire de la Bretagne médiévale’, in Noël-Yves Tonnerre (ed.), Chroniqueurs et historiens de la Bretagne du Moyen Age au milieu du XXe siècle (Rennes, 2001), pp. 32–3. 65   Jarnoux, Anciennes paroisses, vol. 1, pp. 47–9. 66   Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 500. 64

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

28

of Mary as prime intercessor after Christ and was widespread across the region. The sacraments of the church were a second vital component of spiritual life, the focus of the church’s annual cycle of festivals and of the daily round of ordinary worship. By the later Middle Ages, the mass was the primary rite of the faith, symbol of the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ.67 The extent of popular participation in the eucharist before 1600 was once questioned. The complexities of the doctrine of transubstantiation were little taught in the early sixteenth century and most lay people took communion infrequently, once a year. The congregation was physically distant from the consecration of the mass, separated from the chancel by the rood screen while the priest stood with his back to his flock. But the importance of the mass can be seen in the volume of lay investment in its provision for individuals and communities, living and dead. By 1555, Saint-Saturnin of Nantes had thirty weekly foundations in addition to parish masses.68 Infrequent communion was compensated for by the weekly distribution of blessed bread to the congregation. In 1570, Jeanne Lucas endowed the parish of Saint-Nicolas of Nantes with a rent to provide bread and wine for parishioners attending Easter masses, to relieve the fabrique of the costs of this devotion.69 One of the features of early modern Catholicism was the continuing growth of eucharistic piety. Holy sacrament devotions and Christological cults expanded across, Brittany from the later fifteenth century onwards. The festival of Corpus Christi was an important part of the liturgical year well before 1550.70 In Nantes in 1462, a confraternity of the Holy Sacrament was founded in the parish church of Sainte-Croix, with members from across the city: there were 200 brethren in 1554.71 The religious wars after 1560 witnessed a huge upswell in individual and public devotions to the body of Christ. Conflict between confessional groups refocused attention on the eucharist and there arose among Catholics, a heightened sense of the mass’s value and purpose in salvation for the whole community. This was underpinned by the rulings of Trent, which in 1562, upheld the doctrine of the mass and confirmed its place as the central intercessory institution for the living and for departed souls. The religious wars witnessed an expansion of devotions linked to the sacrament, with processions carrying the host and its public adoration in activities such as the ‘Forty Hours’.     69   70   67 68

Will of 1589. ADLA G 46.7 Sainte-Croix Fondations. ADLA G 501. Saint-Saturnin Fabrique. Travers, vol. 2, p. 422. See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge,

1991).

 

71

Jarnoux, Anciennes paroisses, vol. 1, p. 64.

Setting the Scene

29

Nantes shared in these eucharistic impulses. In December 1562, the host was carried in a general procession from the cathedral then displayed for adoration for a week thereafter, for the first time.72 During the second war of 1567–8, the host was paraded around the city on several occasions and in April 1568 Bishop du Bec preached an important sermon on the eucharist and transubstantiation.73 After 1580, eucharistic devotion intensified further. New devotions appeared as a result of Tridentine influences, such as the oratoire, the display of the holy sacrament and relics on the altars of churches for a week at a time.74 In the seventeenth century, eucharistic cults continued to expand. The mass itself was celebrated with greater magnificence and enhanced participation through visibility of the rite became a priority of new liturgical reforms. This required the modification of church interiors. Chancels were enlarged and the high altar was made more visible to the body of the church by elevating it on a platform. Screens enclosing chancels were frequently demolished.75 Low balustrades were erected instead, to separate off the altar to but keep it visible. Retables were frequently built behind the altar, to concentrate the eye down on the central focus of the church.76 All views converged on this central point, over which burnt one or a series of lamps, in perpetuity. Special objects were used to enhance the visibility of the host and ensure its protection, such as candles and baldachins. For example, at Lampaul-Guimilau, the church was rebuilt between 1609 and 1627 to create a vast rectangle with clear sight down the church to the chancel.77 At Sizun, the alignment of the ribs of the roof vault and light from lateral windows was designed to conduct the eye naturally to the vast chancel and its high altar. The altar was also backed with a magnificent retable of c.1670, with images of the Holy Family, Peter and Paul, the four evangelists and St. Suliau, the parish patron.78 The expansion of devotion to the real presence can be seen further in the material acquisitions of parish churches. Monstrances, particularly the ‘solar’ type, became popular, for displaying the consecrated host for veneration. Tabernacles on altars     74   72

Durand, Nantes, p. 90. Travers, vol. 2, p. 403. See Bernard Dompnier, ‘Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des quarante-heures’, RHEF lxvii (1981): pp. 5–31. 75   Bernard Chézodeau, Choeur clos, choeur ouvert: de l’église medievale à l’église tridentine: France XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), p. 42. 76   For a detailed discussion of Breton retables see Victor L. Tapié, Retables baroques de Bretagne et spiritualité du XVIIe siècle. Étude sémiographique et religieuse (Paris, 1972). 77   Yves-P. Castel, Lampaul-Guimilau (Rennes, 1979), pp. 13, 15. 78   Michel Le Goffic, Georges Provost and Henri Thérin, Trois enclos de l’Arrée: Sizun, Commana, Locmélar (Quimper and Léon, 2005), pp. 11–12. 73

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

30

became obligatory in most parishes from the 1620s. Statutes of 1619 of the diocese of Saint-Malo ordered tabernacles to be constructed in each parish church; accounts show that most communities had acquired one by the 1630s.79 The concern to make visible the real presence also translated into an obligation to provide an oil lamp to burn permanently before the tabernacle. These had existed in the sixteenth century but were not common; after 1617 in Rennes diocese they appeared in greater numbers and parish purchase of olive oil expanded everywhere.80 A feature of Christological piety which linked the Middle Ages to the period of ‘classic’ Catholic reform was a desire to emulate the life of Christ, through activism in the community. The theology of good works in late medieval Catholicism gave prominence to charitable giving. Charity, to the Church but above all to the poor, was essential, for Christ’s sake and to merit salvation. It was a vital means of soliciting prayers, especially those of the unfortunate, whom Christ particularly favoured. It was common to give to the poor in wills. A favoured practice was to give small amounts to large numbers of paupers, to elicit the widest possible number of prayers. For example, in 1512, Jehanne Bazire of Nantes left 22 livres for the poor who attended her funeral and clothes to thirteen poor torchbearers; she also gave 100 livres to provide dowries for poor girls, and 20 sous to each of the city’s three hospitals.81 The Council of Trent upheld and further promoted good works; in the Tridentine Catechism, almsgiving was an act that ‘redeemed our offences against man’ and that served as ‘a medicine suited to heal the wounds of the soul’.82 The seventeenth century saw a massive impulse towards ‘good works’, as a means of saving one’s own soul and that of others. Religious orders, confraternities and individuals were encouraged to engage practically with the poor and sick. At the same time, poor relief became more institutionalised, rationalised and linked to discipline, as poverty and sinfulness were seen as companions. The most clearly observable movements were the creation of new, active groups such as the Dames de la Charité of St. Vincent de Paul and the reform of hospitals. Existing hospitals which had been created in the Middle Ages, such as Saint-Yves at Vannes, were reorganised and staffed with the newly-emerging orders of sisters. In Quimper, the hospital of Saint Catherine was rebuilt 1615– 31 and in 1645 its administration was given to the Augustinian sisters

    81   82   79

Restif, p. 291. Ibid., p. 293. Will of 1512. ADLA G 494. Saint-Saturnin Fondations. Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. The Art and Craft of Dying in SixteenthCentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995), p. 233. 80

Setting the Scene

31

of the Miséricord of Jesus.83 The movement of the hôpital-général also developed from the mid-seventeenth century and attracted the donations of many. In Nantes, an hôpital-général, to enclose the poor and infirm, was founded in 1640. In 1662 in Quimper, the medieval hospital of St Anthony was converted into a hôpital-général for the elderly, poor, orphans and abandoned children.84 Donations were sought for these institutions while random gifts to the poor were discouraged. Finally, communal ritual and collective activity were essential in the search for God’s grace, for the unity and fraternity of the faithful gathered for worship were pleasing to Him. The central institution of collective piety was the parish. From the late fifteenth century there was a drive to strengthen the parish as the focus of lay devotion. Nantes’ bishops issued synod rulings ordering obligatory annual confession to the parish priest.85 Sunday mass was to be attended in the parish church, and the recteur rather than a substitute or a visiting friar was to be in attendance at all the great events of the life cycle, baptism, marriage, last confession and extreme unction. By the mid-sixteenth century, parish registers show that the majority of Nantes’ population was attending the parish church at some time, although the extent of individual use is difficult to reconstruct. Parish life was busy. In Saint-Saturnin of Nantes, for example, there were daily offices with more elaborate ritual cycles on Sundays and feast days. Private masses were held in side chapels; in 1545, there were at least three on Mondays, two on Wednesdays, four or five each on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.86 In most of Nantes’ larger parishes there were several baptisms every week and funerals were frequent. Processions were regularly held, on Sundays, on liturgical feasts such as the Annunciation and each parish had an annual pilgrimage, Saint-Saturnin to Chantenay, for example.87 Rural parishes also had busy liturgies, with mass and vespers on Sundays and feasts, a range of chantry and obit foundations, as well as frequent baptisms, marriages and funerals. The seventeenth century saw further clerical emphasis on the role of the parish and its priest in religious life. The recteur was to become the example and guide of his flock. Certainly, there does seem to have been a great affection for the parish in this period. One manifestation of this was the great rebuilding of parish churches, particularly in the west of Brittany from c.1530 increasing after 1630. Particularly distinctive was the construction of a suite of religious monuments known as parish     85   86   87   83 84

Jean Kerhervé (ed.), Histoire de Quimper (Toulouse, 1994), p. 132. Ibid. Durand, Nantes, p. 69. ADLA G 500 Saint-Saturnin. Instructions des procureurs. Jarnoux, Anciennes paroisses, vol. 1, p. 15.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

32

closes which comprised embellishment of the parish church, its tower and south porch; construction of high walls around the cemetery, pierced by a monumental gateway arch; a calvary, and a monumental ossuary or charnel house, added either to the south side of the church or built as a free-standing chapel in the cemetery. For example, at Argol, the parish church was rebuilt in the mid-sixteenth century, a monumental gateway and walls enclosed the cemetery precinct in 1569, a calvary was erected in 1617, and an ossuary added in 1665. At Saint-Thégonnec, the parish church was rebuilt after 1563 and the tower after 1589. High cemetery walls and an archway were built in the 1580s, a calvary followed in 1610 and an ossuary after 1676. There was a clear definition, elevation and separation of the sacred domain at the heart of parish life. Further, the interiors of churches underwent great embellishment. Chancels were reordered, pulpits were constructed, confessionals were introduced and there was increased use of incense, flowers on altars and lights.88 Frequently associated with the parish, confraternities were smaller associations of individuals that honoured a specific devotion, along with prayer, masses and good works. The popularity of confraternities arose at least partly from the view that salvation was a collective enterprise needing mutual prayer and pious works.89 In Nantes in the early 1550s, there were around thirty confraternities.90 Each had an altar, held an annual mass to honour the patron and remember deceased brethren, organised members’ funerals and undertook some form of charitable work. Parishes had their own fraternities, such as Saint-Nicolas in the parish of that name. Some confraternities were for special groups: the Passion (founded 1364) and the Veronica (1414) were for members of the urban elites while the confraternity of Saints Peter and Paul in the cathedral was limited to clerics. Trading groups and artisans founded others. The bakers held a weekly mass and honoured St Honoré, the shoemakers had a fraternity of St Crispin in the Franciscan church and the tailors venerated the Holy Trinity in Sainte-Croix.91 The mendicant orders were active in promoting collective devotions for wider groups, the Franciscan convent housed a tertiary order and guilds of the Holy Name of Jesus and of Notre-Dame de la Recouvrance. Notre-Dame des Carmes, in the Carmelite convent had 435 members in 1532.92 Other towns had similar guilds. In Vannes, two are known for the sixteenth century, the Conception-de-Notre-Dame in 88

   

Restif, pp. 210–12. Diefendorf, Beneath, p. 34. For an overview of French developments see Bergin, Church, chapter fourteen. 90   A.M.N. GG 726. Quêtes et taxes 1531–1780. 91   Edouard Pied, Les anciens corps d’arts et métiers de Nantes (3 vols, Nantes, 1903). 92   Durville, Vieux Nantes, vol. 2, pp. 166–7. 89

Setting the Scene

33

the Franciscan convent and the Trépassés (Departed Souls) in the parish of Saint-Pierre, while six confraternities are known to have had altars in Quimper cathedral.93 Rural confraternities also existed but have left few records for the period before 1600. Examples are the frairies blanches and the confraternity of St Gregory in Saint-Grégoire parish, in Rennes diocese. Historians once saw the relationship between confraternity and parish as one of tension, the guild offering an independent focus of loyalty and activity. Beat Kümin and others now argue that the majority of fraternities were based within and worked for the parish. They had the same interest in sacraments and intercession as other parish institutions, they expanded the provision of worship through funded masses and chaplains, and often it was the parish itself that supervised the property, finances and discipline of guilds.94 For example, the confraternity of Notre-Dame de Chandeleur in Saint-Nicolas church was under the overall supervision of the churchwardens, whose permission was needed for masses and burials associated with the guild’s altar. In the seventeenth century, one of the major features of renewed Catholicism was the diffusion of devotional confraternities in towns and countryside of Brittany. Above all, confraternities of the rosary and of the holy sacrament were founded in large numbers. For example, in the diocese of Saint-Malo, by 1710 in 155 parishes and 23 chapelries, there were 82 rosary confraternities, 46 confraternities of the Holy Sacrament and 32 saints’ fraternities.95 Encouraged by the regular orders and often maintained by the local secular clergy, the success of these confraternities was also facilitated by their acquisition of indulgences, which also underwent a revival in this period. Traditional confraternities were also revived or revised. In Vannes, in 1592 the tailors and laundresses founded a confraternity dedicated to St John, at the altar of Saint Anne in the Franciscan convent. In 1687, they had around 100 tailors and 200 laundresses as members.96 Judi Loach argues that by through encouraging confraternities in their churches, the new and revitalised religious orders refocused lay devotional activity in their convents rather than in the parishes, as in late Medieval cities such as Lyon.97 The confraternities of the religious orders certainly became popular, but urban parishes still supported many guilds and in the countryside, there was little alternative.     95   96   97   93

Leguay, p. 155; Kerhervé, p. 85. Kumin, Shaping, pp. 153–4. Restif, p. 181. Leguay, p. 163. Judi Loach, ‘The consecration of the Civic Realm’, in Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (eds), Defining the Holy. Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 277–300. 94

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

34

The role of confraternities in intercession for the living and the dead will be examined in chapter 6. There were however, groups which were less integrated into parish worship. Throughout the period, the ducal family and the aristocracy of Brittany patronised the mendicant orders and the urban collegiate churches, a practice that set them apart from the parish-based artisans and merchants. Duke Francis II and his wife Margaret were buried in the Carmelite church of Nantes; the hearts of his daughter and grand-daughter, Queens Anne and Claude of France, were also interred there. Francis I commissioned a fine marble altar for the church, to commemorate his mother-in-law and his wife, to dignify the mausoleum of the ancestors of his children and future kings of France.98 Foreign merchants were a second group that patronised the mendicant orders. In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan church of Nantes was favoured by the Spanish community which had a chapel here, and several wealthy families founded masses, the Darandes in 1510s, the Mirande-Compludos in the 1540s and the Ruiz family in 1578.99 The decoration of the chapel included Spanish arms, emblems and decorative elements such as tiles. Paul Jeulin suggested that they had their own traditions such as the dressing of statues, particularly the Virgin.100 Thirdly, there were social and gender differences in parish life. In the sixteenth century, women’s religious life was less well organised than that of men and they were less likely to join confraternities; this changed in the following century as certain confraternities, such as rosary groups, became heavily feminised.101 As for the poor, their devotions and allegiances can only be surmised. Contemporaries knew that these people were not always attached to the Church; the University of Nantes distributed 20–30 livres of blessed bread every week after its Sunday mass at the Franciscan church, to attract the hungry poor to divine service.102 But unlike aristocrats and foreign merchants who were outsiders to the parish, women and the poor were integral members of the community. Even if they had a subordinate place in parish politics and society, they still had rights in and duties towards the church there.

98

   

Durville, Vieux Nantes, vol. 2, p. 144. Jarnoux, Anciennes paroisses, vol. 2, p. 63. 100   Paul Jeulin, ‘Aperçus sur la Contractaction de Nantes 1530 environ – 1733’, AB 40 (1932–33): p. 495. 101   Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 75–6. 102   Travers, vol. 2, p. 324. 99

Setting the Scene

35

Factors of Change across the Reformation Centuries While there are notable continuities in Catholic belief and religious practice in Brittany across the Reformation centuries, there were clearly also developments and changes over time. Catholic piety of 1700 has a flavour distinct from that of 1500, although many basic themes remained the same. The causes of such shifts were various, economic, political and religious. But it cannot be denied that the greatest cause of change was the seismic disturbance to all of Europe caused by the Protestant Reformation. This had a massive impact on Catholic life even in a region as far from the heartlands of Luther and Calvin as Brittany. Historians such as Alan Galpern have argued that belief and participation in traditional rituals declined in many regions of France after 1530. In a study of the Champagne region, he argues for a decrease in religiosity in the 1540s and 1550s, shown by changing styles of religious art, which became less emotionally intense, transformations in poor relief, with the rise of centralised municipal institutions and a drive against beggars and indiscriminate alms giving, and declining confraternity membership. Men and women became less interested in public, collective religion and less devoted to the Virgin and saints. Instead, he argues, there was an internalisation of piety, which became more personal and private, and a distancing of elites from popular groups. The wealthy preferred to worship in separate chapels, to use their own pews and retreat into private reading or meditation. A minority of people even rejected established religion and became Protestants.103 With the growth of cities in the sixteenth century, new migrants could also be excluded from traditional religious life, particularly communal devotions. Natalie Davies argues for Lyon that although big city parishes were increasing in size by the midcentury, the church took virtually no steps to increase its personnel or pastoral provision for such groups.104 Rituals tied to the local landscape did not permit easy assimilation of outsiders while priests rarely spoke the dialects of rural migrants, for preaching or confession. The mass of the labouring poor simply fell through the pastoral net. The conclusions reached by these historians are that traditional religious forms visibly declined in many parts of France in the mid-sixteenth century. There have been challenges to these views. Bernard Chevalier has argued against declining religiosity in French cities in this period; religious culture was communal because it was shared by bourgeois and the menu people, and traditional piety maintained its strength into the 1550s because

   

103 104

Galpern, p. 97. Davis, ‘City Women’, p. 74.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

36

it was not seriously challenged before this decade.105 Andrew Pettegree and others have argued that France’s Catholic culture had earlier defenders against Protestant critics than elsewhere in Europe, clerics who rapidly developed vernacular preaching and printing to defend doctrine and condemn heresy.106 David Nicholls has even suggested that France may have preceded other states in attempting reforms in some dioceses. Calls for renewal of the Church at the ‘national’ level were widespread although rarely carried out, but at city level some bishops, such as Guillaume Briçonnet of Meaux (son of the bishop of Saint-Malo of the same name), did attempt reforms, even if results were mixed.107 As for the increased separation of elites and popular groups, this too has its critics. William Christian argues that differences between rich and poor were solely of style. Noblemen kept private chapels, venerated saints of distant places and the wealthy had more time to spend on their devotions, but the rituals they used and their beliefs were shared with the poor.108 In Brittany, the evidence for early to mid-sixteenth century change is largely confined to Nantes because of a dearth of studies of other regions. Here it seems there were changes in devotional practices – reductions in church building, donations to religious institutions and in confraternity membership – but that these were a result of shifting interests rather than widespread disillusionment with tradition. Declining economic fortunes in the second quarter of the sixteenth century is another factor that affected gifts and endowments. Plague and poor harvests blighted the 1530s while war with Spain interrupted trade intermittently in the 1540s and 1550s. However, Hoffman argues for Lyon that religious provisions in wills fell off long before economic problems hit the city, which began there in earnest in the 1560s.109 This may be true for Brittany as well and other factors of change therefore have to be considered. A prime cause of disenchantment with the Church in much of France was anti-clericalism. Complaints abounded about pluralism, absenteeism, excessive financial demands, legal immunity and the shortcomings of parish priests. The cahiers of the third estate at the Estates General of Orléans and Pontoise of 1560 and 1561 show a widespread desire among   Bernard Chevalier, Les Bonnes Villes de France du XIVème au XVIème siècle (Paris, 1982), p. 241. 106   Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book Project’, in Andrew Pettegree et al, The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book (Aldershot, 2001), p. 1. 107   David Nicholls, ‘Looking for the Origins of the French Reformation’, in C. Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550 (Woodbridge, 1989), p. 134. 108   William A. Christian Jnr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981), p. 147. 109   Hoffman, p. 29. 105

Setting the Scene

37

lay elites for reform of the French church, although this was as much an attempt to ensure appropriate behaviour as anti-clericalism.110 Demands were made for good quality bishops, of appropriate age, sound doctrine and morals, ordained and resident, who would undertake visitations and maintain their dioceses. Parish priests were to be educated in seminaries and paid a decent living. They should be resident, of good morals and learning and aged over thirty. They were to instruct and console, to teach scripture through free religious instruction, to make pastoral visits and to aid the sick and dying.111 In Nantes, dissatisfaction centred largely on priestly inattention to duty through neglect and absence. In the late 1540s the parishioners of Saint-Jean took their priest to the prévôtal court for absenteeism and failure to administer the sacraments.112 In 1562, the parishioners of Saint-Nicolas obtained a sentence against their recteur, Gilles Hamon, ordering him to preach sermons, which he failed to do. The following year the parish seized the revenues of the benefice on account of the non-residence of the priest and appointed a former curate in his place.113 Overall, however, anti-clericalism was not common in Nantes. A third cause of change may have been a decline in confidence in an elaborate intercessory framework for achieving salvation, a result of the influence of Reformed ideas. In Nantes, devotional practice certainly seems to have been affected by humanism. In common with many other towns in France, in the 1550s the Conseil des bourgeois founded a college for boys with a humanist curriculum. The master was a renowned humanist teacher brought in from Lisieux, Pierre Bintin. Humanism had a religious programme of enhanced piety and reform of church life, stripped of superstitious accoutrements, centred directly on Christ and His holy sacrament, purified of cults and elaborate ritual including veneration of saints, images and relics.114 Further, humanist reformism put increased emphasis on activism, on good works and charity and also on the outward comportment of individuals. The lived experience of faith was to be shown through morality and personal discipline. An austere piety based on faith, good works and outward behaviour was emerging by the mid-sixteenth century. Protestantism itself may also have been an influence, although to a lesser degree than humanism. Reformed ideas were introduced into   André Stegman, ‘Transformations administratives et opinion publique en France (1560–80)’, Francia 9 (1980): pp. 604–5. 111   Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy 1598– 1789 (2 vols, Chicago, 1979), vol. 1, p. 360. 112   ADLA G 482. Paroisse de Saint-Jean. 113   Travers, vol. 2, p. 368. 114   Hoffman, p. 30. 110

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

38

Brittany later than in many French towns and regions. Their introduction is traditionally dated to the visit of François d’Andelot to the province in 1558, with his ministers and retainers. In fact, there were signs of Protestantism before this.115 In the episcopal visitation of Nantes’ diocese in 1554, one of the objectives was to look for heresy. Three ‘signs’ were sought: attitudes to the mass and the sacraments, doubts about the powers of saints, and diffidence about the existence of Purgatory.116 Nonattendance at mass was widespread but was not in itself considered an indicator of heresy. More serious was refusal to take Easter communion or to participate in the annual parish Corpus Christi procession. At SaintViaud and Saint-Michel-Chef-Chef none of the local nobles attended Corpus Christi, while at Gestigné the Seigneur du Gast and Dom René Le Roy stayed in the church porch during the consecration of the host.117 At Fresnay, the brothers Jean and Pierre Longespee, both clergymen, affirmed that they did not pray to the Virgin Mary, did not participate in rogationtide processions, nor did they give money to the church. Pierre did attend mass but left during the elevation of the host. Finally, it was reported that travelling preachers were welcome in some households. At the château of Plessis-la-Ghaisne in Corsept parish there was a resident minister; before each meal he read aloud from the Gospels while the family and their servants knelt and listened. The household also did not attend mass.118 Rural noble Protestantism was indeed a feature of the whole province. Even in the distant region of Quimper-Cornouaille, there were rural nobles who supported Protestantism, documented by Canon Jean Moreau of Quimper Cathedral, in his history of the League wars in the west, families who would support royalist forces in the 1590s.119 Outward behaviour resembling Protestantism was therefore encountered in many parishes although it was more likely to be anticlerical than heretical. Protestantism as a faith was that of a small minority, noticed by their neighbours and revealed to the ecclesiastical visitors because of its eccentricity. In sum, there was some unorganised heterodoxy confined to a small but visible number of the rural elites. In Nantes itself, the situation was similar to that of the countryside, with small numbers of people with heterodox ideas meeting clandestinely in little groups, where    

115

Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 392. David Nicholls, ‘The Nature of Popular Heresy in France’, Historical Journal 26 (1983): pp. 271–3. 117   A. Bourdeaut, ‘Le clergé paroissial dans le diocèse de Nantes avant le Concile de Trente. Les infiltrations protestantes’, BSAHNLI, XXIV (1940): p. 96. 118   Ibid., pp. 97–8. 119   Jean Moreau, Histoire de ce qui s’est passé en Bretagne durant les guerres de la ligue et particulièrement dans le diocese de Cornouaille (written c.1605), (Brest, 1836). 116

Setting the Scene

39

they communicated at all. An ordonnance of the Conseil des bourgeois of 1554 forbade all private lessons, directed against people who met to read together at night.120 In 1555 there was a heresy case before the parlement sitting in Nantes, of an Augustinian friar from Carhaix in Lower Brittany, accused of unorthodox preaching.121 Also, in the late 1550s the widowed Vicomtesse de Rohan, Isabeau de Navarre, retired to the château at Blain near to Nantes. Her three sons, raised in the household of Jeanne d’Albret, Isabeau’s niece, became important supporters of the Reformed religion in Brittany. Rennes and Vitré also saw the foundation of Protestant churches at this time. But the Breton churches remained small. In 1565, there were 27 communities of Protestants, of which only 15 had pastors, about 3,000 Protestants in total.122 After 1563, increasing pressure was placed on Protestant communities, which began to decline. During the League wars many went into exile to La Rochelle or Jersey. During the seventeenth century, the churches of Nantes, Rennes, La Roche Bernard, Vitré and a few others survived, sheltered in larger towns or near to seigneurial châteaux. But numbers were small and the community was frequently harassed, for example the temple at Rennes was burnt down several times in the mid-seventeenth century.123 By 1685 there were only six places of marriage.124 Protestantism remained the religion of a small number of elites, of noble families such as the Acigné, Avagour and Rohan, and of some bourgeois and artisans. But it did persist until the Revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685.125 Perhaps the most important cause of shift in sixteenth-century Catholic devotional practice was religious war in France after 1562. A recent study of Nantes has shown that the origins of revived and reinvigorated Catholicism lay not in the seventeenth century, but were a product of confessional conflict. The religious culture of the city underwent a profound radicalisation and there were important changes in practice. Throughout France, Protestant attacks on Catholic sacred places and objects, and the experience of hostilities after 1562, stimulated popular   A.M.N. BB 4, Délibérations et assemblées du Conseil des bourgeois, 1555–62, 209v and in Jacques Vailhen, Le Conseil des bourgeois de Nantes (Thèse du Doctorat, University of Rennes), 1965, p. 278. 121   Bourdeaut, ‘Le clergé paroissial’, p. 98. 122   Devailly, p. 192. 123   Bruno Isbled (ed.), Moi, Claude Bordeaux. Journal d’un bourgeois de Rennes au XVIIe siècle (Rennes, 1992), passim. 124   Ibid., p. 195. 125   Philippe Le Noir, Histoire ecclésiastique de Bretagne depuis la Réformation jusqu’à l’édit de Nantes (written c.1683), (ed.) B. Varigaud (Paris and Nantes, 1851). 120

40

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

responses of outrage and reaffirmation of faith. Greater efforts were made to teach correct doctrine, through preaching and printed works, which expanded throughout France in these years.126 We have seen the creation of divinity lectureships in the cathedral towns from the early mid-1560s to educate clergy and laity. Linked with sermons, Catholic vernacular literature expanded in the 1560s, shown by Andrew Pettegree, Luc Racaut and others to be vital in ‘shaping the successful defense of French Catholic identity in the face of the Huguenot onslaught’.127 Many works came from the lower clergy, a largely unofficial campaign of renewal. While the parish clergy of Brittany do not seem to have contributed to this literature, in Nantes the théologal Jacques du Pré, Bishop Philippe du Bec and in the 1590s, the Benedictine Jacques Le Bossu, published sermons and pamphlets, while the second théologal, Jean Christi, edited and published Simon Vigor’s sermons.128 Only Rennes had a successful printing press in the sixteenth century, but books were certainly traded in the towns of the province. Nantes had an active book trade, with exports to other Breton towns and particularly to Spain. The registers of the merchant André Ruiz show that between 1557 and 1564, he sent 1,072 cartons of books through the port of Nantes, printed in Lyon, Paris, Tours and Antwerp.129 Some of these books stayed in the city and there were around five booksellers in the early 1560s.130 Christi himself and the archdeacon of Nantes, Pierre Le Gallo, amassed large libraries.131 In Vannes, there was at least one bookseller in the sixteenth century and the first permanent printer arrived in 1585.132 The episcopal cities at least were therefore wellinformed by the literature and ideas circulating throughout France. The result was an informed, recharged and militant Catholicism among the educated clergy, disseminated among all social groups through preaching. Above all, what stands out during this period is the increasing control of religious initiative by the laity, an important factor of changing religious 126   See Nicole Lemaître ‘L’éducation de la foi dans les paroisses du XVIeme siècle’ in L’Encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au Concile de Trente (Paris, 1985), pp. 435–6. 127   Andrew Pettegree, ‘The sixteenth-century religious book’, pp. 1–17; Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print. Catholic propaganda and Protestant identity during the French wars of religion (Aldershot, 2002). 128   Simon Vigor, Sermons Catholiques pour tous les jours de caresme at feries de Pasques, faits en l’eglise Saint Estienne du Mont a Paris, (ed.) Jean Christi (Paris, 1588). 129   Henri Lapeyre, Une famille des marchands: les Ruiz (Paris, 1955), p. 566. 130   Travers, vol. 2, p. 358. 131   Marcel Giraud-Mangin, ‘La bibliothèque de l’archidiacre Le Gallo au XVIème siècle’, BSAHNLI LXXVI (1937): pp. 105–20; will of Jean Christi 1608, reproduced in Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1372–3. 132   Leguay, pp. 156, 174.

Setting the Scene

41

practice. A.E. Barnes observes that ‘in no other era was the clergy so dependent upon lay support and the laity so free to take the initiative in shaping its own religious life. Popular preachers abounded during this period, but lay participation in the devotions they propagated was based on the appeal of these devotions to laymen … [who] … were free to create or to support devotions which expressed their spiritual needs with comparatively little clerical interference’.133 One clearly observable feature of the religious wars was greater emphasis on individual participation in public ritual activity, processions and pilgrimages.134 Barbara Diefendorf argues that ‘religious unity personally felt and publicly displayed was … a vital condition for individual and collective salvation. Society was perceived as an organic whole, “one bread and one body”’.135 This continued into the Catholic League of the 1580s and 1590s, which was associated with an austere, penitential yet ostentatious piety often mobilised by the political leaders of the rebellion to promote and sanctify their revolt against the king. The rebel governor of Brittany, the duke of Mercoeur, together with his family, led the way. The duke founded a mass in the Dominican church and the ducal couple augmented the fiscal base of the confraternity of the rosary.136 Church reform was promoted by the estates of the League, held in Vannes in 1592, which ordered the official recognition of the rulings of the Council of Trent in the province, confirmed by the parlement of the League seated in Nantes. After 1600, elite Catholic piety in Nantes moved away from the public devotions that had been important in the League. There was a flowering of mystical spirituality, marked by a confidence in God, a concern with penitence and a death-focused humility.137 There was also a notable resurgence of traditional, rather old-fashioned devotions, such as pilgrimage, confraternity membership and the use of indulgences. The causes were institutional and ideological. The restitution of traditional practices can be linked in part with resurgent clericalism and the assertion of Tridentine reform objectives in the early seventeenth century. In cities such as Nantes, after the relative freedom of the laity to set the religious agenda during the religious wars, bishops and clergy sought to reassert their authority and bring religious life more closely under their supervision, through its institutionalisation, closer regulation and enhanced clerical involvement. But Catholic reform ideals were also vital. Salvation 133   Andrew E. Barnes, ‘Religious anxiety and devotional change in sixteenth-century French penitential confraternities’, SCJ XIX (1988): p. 391. 134   Venard, Le catholicism à l’épreuve, p. 194. 135   Diefendorf, Beneath, pp. 35–6, 38. 136   Travers, vol. 3, p. 54. 137   Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 486.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

42

necessitated a more active engagement with God. The Church militant did not want a faith based only on gestures, but a system of values; reformers promoted personal responsibility for sin before God, minute examination of conscience, interiorisation of faith and regular use of confession and sacraments. The new values, promoted by a renewed clergy, were to have a great impact on the institutions and spirituality of seventeenth-century Bretons, to a greater or lesser extent. Firstly, this religion had to be learnt so there was an important education ‘campaign’ across the century. This was not a new idea but the constancy of the effort and its systematic character was novel.138 Catechism taught widely was the great innovation of the period. General education expanded, with the growth of colleges in the towns and for some girls at least, of female schooling in Ursuline convents. Adults were also to receive instruction, throughout their lives, through sermons and reading. Printers and booksellers became permanent features of the episcopal centres. In Vannes, the Moricet and Doriou families produced books over several generations and additional printers set up businesses during the exile of the Breton parlement to Vannes after 1675.139 Printing in Breton began with a small number of devotional works in the later fifteenth century and continued sporadically throughout the sixteenth century. But it expanded in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Jesuits producing several works in Quimper such as the Doctrine chrestienne of Père Ledesme in 1635 and the Cantiquo spirituel of Julien Maunoir in 1642.140 While literacy rates were never high in the province – in the late seventeenth century they are estimated as 37 per cent for men and 25 per cent for women in the far west – they were growing.141 In any case, reading was far from the sole means of religious teaching. Public and collective confession disappeared from the mid-century, as private confession became the opportunity for individual instruction. Charity was accompanied by religious learning and the poor at home were required to say prayers. Canticles sung to popular tunes and many artistic forms were also used to teach doctrine. The objective was to enable all people to know the articles of faith and to draw upon them in everyday life.142 Despite the emphasis of contemporary written texts on interior spirituality and intellectualisation of faith, outward behaviour was still     140   141   142   138

Ibid., p. 493. Leguay, p. 175. Kerhervé, p. 144. Ibid., p. 146. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 477; Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor. Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism c.1500 – c.1800 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 13. 139

Setting the Scene

43

the central object of episcopal regulation. Catholicism continued to be a religion of actions and gestures for both elites and popular groups. As gesture could represent interior thought, so reform of outward behaviour could modify internal piety. From 1610–20, confessors’ manuals and synodal statutes denounced ‘superstitious’ practices. There was a renewed campaign to eliminate profane activities from sacred ground, within churches and cemeteries, and to separate religious sites physically from the everyday world. Boschet complained in his ‘Life’ of Maunoir that the peasantry ‘regarded the church less as a holy place where God wished to be honoured than as a meeting place where they made up their parties for debauchery and vengeance such that after high mass, everyone went to satisfy their passions’.143 In common with dioceses throughout France, in the Léon there were injunctions against holding seigneurial courts in churches (1624) and against drying grain in porches (1630).144 Ceremonies were to be orderly, disciplined and subject to clerical control. The church was not to be a place for socialising but ‘for holiness and prayer, where mingling and gossip were inappropriate. Silence and contemplation were to be enforced’.145 Festivities were to be banished from the sacraments, such as after baptisms. There was a particular effort to define behaviour during religious services and on holy days.146 In the Léon, there were rulings in the late 1620s against frequenting taverns and dances, particularly on Sundays and feast days.147 The aim was to impose a distance and a respect with regard to the values, places, usages and persons of the church previously treated with familiarity by the laity. An important movement of mysticism and piety grew up in Brittany. In Nantes, a dévôt movement was certainly evident in the city, involving clerics and laity, although its details remain to be studied. For example, Etienne Louytre, dean of the cathedral, who knew Bérulle in his youth, was notable for his piety, sponsoring the introduction of Carmelites into the city, supporting the Oratorians and creating a confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in his parish.148 Further evidence for this is a wave of vocations and foundations of religious orders, for example a house of Récollets was founded in 1617, Carmelites in 1619 and Ursulines in 1626– 29. In the west, mystical piety was closely associated with the foundation and direction of the Jesuit colleges of Quimper and Vannes, under Jean Rigoleuc and Père Seurin, both disciples of Hierosme Lallement, and their     145   146   147   148   143 144

Boschet, Le Parfait Missionaire, p. 187. Croix, L’Age d’Or, pp. 367–8. Hoffman, p. 85. Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 500. Ibid., pp. 367–8. Ibid., p. 487.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

44

associate, Vincent Huby. The movement was active as well as spiritual; its initial aims were the foundation of retreats and training of priests, along with the production of devotional texts. An intense interior spirituality, abnegation of all for God and exterior works, were key features of this piety.149 In many ways, the greatest significance of the ‘Vannes school’ of mystics was their involvement in missions to rural parishes and particularly their support of the Jesuit missionary Julien Maunoir.150 This was to change religious practice in the countryside by introducing many new devotional forms. The first missionary to work in the west was the priest and mystic Michel Le Nobletz, born into the rural nobility of the parish of Plougerneau in Léon in 1577. After training for the priesthood in Bordeaux, Agen and Paris and a year spent as a hermit on the north Breton coast, in 1608 he began to evangelise in the countryside, preaching and catechising in rural parishes and small fishing ports in the Trégor, Léon and Cornouaille. His method was that of the wandering preacher of the Middle Ages, working alone or assisted by his friend the Dominican Père Quintin, mixing evangelism with a strongly mystical brand of piety of prayers and severe penances, denunciations of lay habits and sins. He attracted a great deal of hostility from the local nobility and clergy because of his spectacular poverty and moral judgements.151 While his missions had limited success, Le Nobletz was to be influential through the methods he developed, pioneering the use of painted tableaux for teaching and the singing of canticles in Breton, and through the friends he made among the newly-founded Jesuit college at Quimper. Inspired by Le Nobletz, Maunoir began work in Brittany. Between 1640 and his death in 1683, Maunoir conducted 375 missions, mostly in Cornouaille but also Léon, Tréguier and the western part of the diocese of Vannes. Devailly estimates that in 40 years, every parish in the diocese of Quimper was touched by a mission, directly or by neighbouring a mission parish. Some of these missions were on a huge scale, in Landivisiau 30,000 communicants attended in a single day.152 Other groups also contributed to missionary work. Jean Eudes worked around Saint-Malo in the 1630s and 1640s, and Lazarists, Capuchins and Grignon de Montfort evangelised in eastern Brittany. They taught catechism, preached simply and frequently, heard confessions and held masses. At the end of their stay, there was a general procession often accompanied with theatre, crosses were frequently    

149

Guy Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Édit (La Crèche, 1998), pp. 230–31. Devailly, pp. 172–3; Guy-Alexandre Lobineau, Les vies des saints de Bretagne, (ed.) Abbé Tresvaux (Paris, 1837). 151   Devailly, p. 180. 152   Ibid., p. 184. 150

Setting the Scene

45

erected as tangible symbols of the mission and most missionaries founded an institution to follow up and support the work undertaken. Père Honoré de Canes founded a bookshop in Quimper where pious works were sold while the Capuchins frequently revived or founded a confraternity in their mission parishes.153 The eighteenth century is traditionally seen as a period of ‘deChristianisation’ in France, with a slow erosion of religious beliefs. The impact of Enlightenment ideas is beyond the scope of this study, but one notable change was the slowly increasing influence of Jansenism on the province. Jansenism had little impact in the seventeenth century. A number of Jansenists were exiled to Quimper for their views, such as Charles Duhard, curé of Saint-Merri in 1655 and the Beauvais Canon Antoine Roger de Bridieu 1687–96, but they had little impact on local clergy.154 After 1700, this began to change. The first evidence came from Nantes. In 1716, the faculty of theology profited from the new climate following the death of Louis XIV to revise its acceptance of the bull Unigenitus. The bishop of Vannes, François d’Argouges, refused to receive priests into holy orders if they had studied at Nantes, where they were ‘suckled with a gangrenous milk and feasted on a pestiferous doctrine, and were capable of infecting all others with whom they might be in contact’.155 The 1720s saw Jansenist priests in Vannes diocese as well, however. Nantes diocese was particularly troubled with Jansenism, particularly among parish priests of the city, directors of the seminary and professors of the Faculty of Theology.156 But in Brittany the eighteenth century is better seen as a period of transformation rather than of decay. The Catholicism of 1750 was certainly not that of 1650. One indicator of change was declining vocations to the priesthood and a reduction in the numbers of parish priests. In Nantes diocese, there was a fall of 60 per cent between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries; in Vannes, there was a decrease by a third in ordinations between 1650 and 1750.157 Yet the parish priest became more prominent in religious life as a director of conscience, education and morals. The bon prêtre of the parish became the standard of the Catholic Church. Similarly, the numbers of the male religious orders, including the mendicants, declined, as did their popularity and role in the church in contrast to the parish priest. Female religious houses maintained their recruitment but their revenues fell, leading to impoverishment and calls     155   156   157   153 154

Devailly, p. 177–8. Kerhervé, p. 137. Leguay, p. 171. Durand, Un couvent, p. 253. Devailly, p. 137.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

46

for their dissolution in some dioceses.158 For the parishioner, the material fabric of religious life changed. Burial inside churches gradually ceased during the century, concepts of the miraculous shifted, for example recorded miracles at the shrine of Saint-Anne d’Auray fell away by the mid-century and bishops reduced the number of saints’ days to be kept as solemn feasts.159 Yet on the other hand, votive objects continued to be deposited in churches and chapels in large numbers and social activism remained an important part of religious and cultural life. Church interiors continued to be embellished such as Brasparts in 1720 and SaintThégonnec in 1710–76 as recteurs introduced pulpits, confessional boxes, more light in the chancel to illuminate the eucharist and better organs to provide high quality music for the mass. By the end of the ancien régime, piety had changed but beyond certain regions and districts in the larger towns, the Bretons were still firmly Catholic. While bequests in wills and confraternity membership declined, a rise in popularity of Sacred Heart devotions indicates a more affective, individual and life-time oriented piety and not a rejection of religion altogether. Conclusions So the nature and causes of change in the institutions of the Catholic Church and in religious life in sixteenth and seventeenth century Brittany can be drawn with a broad brush. One of the chief differences in the Catholicism of 1500 and 1700 was that of authority. The increased clericalisation of religious life from the end of the wars of religion is striking. The place of the parish and its priest in religious life strengthened; secular and regular clergy were instrumental in creating general confraternities to draw in wide groups of people, whereas in the past they had been equally the creation of communities or special interest groups; there was a heightened agenda of religious education overseen by clergy, whether the teaching of catechism to children or preaching and publishing devotional works for adults. There were continuities as well, the significance of the eucharist and popularity of Marial devotions as well as participation in collective rituals, from the mass to pilgrimages, again under augmented clerical influence in the seventeenth century. Historians of Brittany have raised the question of whether there is evidence for a distinctive Breton piety in the early modern period and within that, a distinctive western, Celtic, practice. This is difficult to answer. Before 1600, the dioceses had their own missals and breviaries, but so did 158 159

   

Minois, Les religieux de Bretagne, chapters 9 and 10. Devailly, pp. 170, 190.

Setting the Scene

47

all pre-Tridentine sees. Wide regional variety in pre-reformed Catholicism throughout France and Europe make the nuances of Breton devotions unremarkable. After 1600, Breton piety became less particularist, whether in east or west. There was also a greater sense of a shared Catholic culture after the religious disputes of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which some historians have called confessionalisation. This was encouraged by the widespread use of the Roman liturgy, an increase in ‘international’ cults and practices and missionary work by religious orders whose members were educated outside the province, across the region. But important questions remain about religious continuity and changes. How were they understood by contemporaries? How did they affect everyday religious understanding and practice? Also, while Nantes is relatively well documented, less is known about western dioceses – was religious change the same for the Breton-speaking rural dweller as it was for the French-speaking townsperson in the east? In order to examine and refine models of change over time, the central focus of this work is a case study of a particular belief and devotional practice. Ideas about Purgatory and methods of intercession for departed souls offer a window into the devotions of different social groups, in varying geographic regions, over time. They are found in clerical and lay milieu. So, we turn to examine teachings about Purgatory and the institutions and practices of intercession that this created, to see how the transformations in religious culture identified in this chapter operated, and how they were experienced on the ground.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 3

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation in France 1480–1720 ‘If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire’. [I Corinthians 3:15]

For Christians of early modern Europe formal belief in an afterlife and in an ultimate Last Judgement were basic tenets of faith, restated with every recital of the Apostles’ Creed.1 But contemporary understandings about the hereafter are difficult to reconstruct with certainty. Few people recorded their beliefs. Levels of literacy were relatively low among rural populations and artisans. Even literate elites seldom left descriptions of their hopes and fears for their souls. What is certain is that the nature of the afterlife was under debate in this period, between Catholics with a tripartite afterlife of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory and a Protestant divine geography of paradise and inferno alone. The impact of these debates about soteriology on Catholic perceptions of the afterlife is the subject of this chapter, through an examination of the evolution of beliefs about the ‘third place’ of the hereafter, Purgatory. Since the 1970s, historians have made great progress in the study of the afterlife in the medieval and early modern periods. Annaliste and other historians interested in structures and mentalités have used sources such as wills and parish records to reconstruct ritual mortuary actions and their theological underpinnings. Historians influenced by the text-based methodologies of post-modernism have analysed the content of printed literature such as sermons, tracts and theological handbooks to reconstruct ideas and their changes over time. Using a combination of these sources, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Chaunu and Michel Vovelle in particular have proposed a ‘history’ of Purgatory, with a rise in its belief up to the early sixteenth century, a subsequent ‘fall’ with the Reformation, followed by even greater prominence in the seventeenth century of Catholic/Counter reform, until its undermining by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth

1

 

p. xvii.

‘Introduction’, The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, SCH 45 (2009):

50

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

century.2 This model has proved durable in many local and regional studies of death and mortuary practice. But the ‘history’ of beliefs in Purgatory and its impact on pious behaviour in France is more nuanced than has been stressed in an historiography which has privileged either the later Middle Ages or the ‘century of saints’.3 A study of polemical literature shows that significant developments in Catholic theology and practice emerged during the later sixteenth century in the context of the wars of religion in France, which had an impact on perceptions of Purgatory. Also, there existed a variety of ideas about the nature of Purgatory and the most efficacious means of aiding souls, even in the seventeenth century. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to reconstruct what was written and taught about Purgatory across the Reformation and Counter Reformation centuries in France. The focus is on contemporary ideas about the function, location and punishments of Purgatory; how individuals could ‘manage’ the experience, for themselves and for others, and how these ideas changed over time. In subsequent chapters, the relationship between this theology and practical devotional behaviour will be explored. The literature examined in this chapter falls into four categories. Across the period, clerical pastoral concerns led to the production of ‘handbooks’ of how to live and die well, with details of how to ‘manage’ the experience, on the deathbed and afterwards. This was by far and away the largest category of literature concerned with the afterlife published in this period and has been studied for France by Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche. A second, hitherto neglected category is polemical works on Purgatory that emerged from the 1550s onwards in France, in opposition to challenges from Protestantism. These tell us a good deal about the contemporary rationale for Purgatory and its influence on religious practice. By the seventeenth century, following the publications of the Council of Trent, catechisms and teaching material produced for clergy and laity was increasingly important in disseminating ideas of Purgatory, to most social groups. Finally, popular forms of ‘literature’, songs, poems, paintings and stories are useful sources of information for the period; visual culture has received magisterial attention for the south of France by Michel Vovelle

2   Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978); Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1973), La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983), Les âmes du purgatoire ou le travail du deuil (Paris, 1996). 3   A recent study by John Casey similarly ends discussion of Purgatory in the early sixteenth century. Afterlives. A guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Oxford, 2009), pp. 225–86.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

51

and Michelle Fournié.4 The impact of ideas disseminated in print on Brittany is difficult to assess but the towns of the region housed clerics and preachers from throughout the French kingdom while the higher Breton clergy and members of the regular orders at least were frequently educated outside the province and open to new ideas. Friars travelled through the countryside, preaching, teaching and in the seventeenth century, holding missions, while the population of even remote rural areas travelled for work, to market and on pilgrimage, picking up new ideas as they did so. It is likely, therefore, that directly through reading and particularly through sermons, the ideas of these texts reached many people. The Growth of Purgatory Across the Middle Ages In the theology of the late Medieval Catholic Church, death was not the end of things but a gateway through which the immortal soul passed towards its eternal destination of Heaven or Hell. Hell was for those who died in a state of mortal sin or for those who were not baptised, including pagans, heretics and infidels. Here, the damned spent an eternity of torment by a fire specially created to burn body and soul, and by the spiritual deprivation of the sight and succour of God.5 However, most medieval Christians hoped that their lives were not so bad as to merit eternal damnation. They hoped to pass eternity in celestial bliss, close to God, with the saints and martyrs of the Church. But it was rare for a soul to be ready to enter heaven immediately, for most individuals lived a lifetime of sin. The rationale for Purgatory therefore lay in the doctrine of satisfaction. Sins committed had two results; guilt, disgrace in the eyes of God, for which people could be deprived of His love and even entry into Heaven, and penalty, the need for punishment for the offence against the creator. God, in his infinite mercy, and because of the sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ upon the cross, forgave all those who repented of their sins. He forgave newborn children through baptism, without demanding any satisfaction. But Christians who offended after baptism had to make amends through penitence and temporal penalties. This is satisfaction.6 If satisfaction were not completed during a person’s lifetime, the debt remained after death. Therefore there emerged across the central Middle Ages a belief in a ‘third place’ in the afterlife, Purgatory, where all who died in a state of venial sin or who had not completed penances imposed 4   Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (c.1320–c.1520) (Paris, 1997). 5   Georges Minois, Histoire de l’enfer (Paris, 1994), pp. 65–6. 6   See John Bossy, ‘Practices of Satisfaction 1215–1700’, SCH 40 (2004): pp. 106–118.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

52

in confession were ‘purged’ of their faults. Once satisfaction was achieved, the soul would be released to heaven.7 The origins and nature of Purgatory have been the subject of detailed historiographical enquiry. Jacques Le Goff has mapped the development of these beliefs in Western Europe after 1000 AD, although some recent historical studies have sought the origins of Purgatory in the early Middle Ages.8 Le Goff argues that there is little evidence for belief in Purgatory before the twelfth century; previously, the afterlife consisted of only Heaven and Hell. He argues that the ‘take off’ of Purgatory can be dated quite precisely, between 1170 and 1180, with the production of the work ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’ by the English Benedictine Henry of Saltrey. This was quickly translated from Latin into French and other vernacular languages and was influential throughout Western Europe.9 Paul Griffiths argues that Purgatory had its origins in three areas of Christian thought, the conviction that living Christians had an ongoing relationship with the dead, that there is an intermediate place and state between individual death and the Last Judgement and that even good Christians died owing penance for sin.10 In the Middle Ages, prayers for the dead were sanctioned using the Old Testament book of Maccabees and the writings of Saints Paul and Augustine, among other authorities. The Church promoted the theology of Purgatory when in 1254 Pope Innocent IV recognised its existence. In 1274 the Council of Lyon ruled that purgation was suffered after death and the existence of Purgatory was formally promulgated as an article of faith at the Council of Florence in 1438–39.11 The timing of the adoption of Purgatory as a popular belief in France is debated by historians and it must be concluded that the belief appeared at different times in different places. Pierre Chaunu argues that the doctrine of Purgatory remained that of elites during the central Middle Ages and that it exploded into a tenet of popular piety in the fifteenth century, in northern France at least.12 Jacques Chiffoleau argues for an earlier appearance of Purgatory in the papal territories of Comtat Venaissin and Avignon as well as Provence and Languedoc, in the thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, brought in by mendicant preachers and disseminated by secular priests. Here, bequests for prayers multiplied among the laity from 1330–40,   Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 341. 8   For a discussion see Sarah Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon Purgatory’, SCH 45 (2009): pp. 87–96. 9   Le Goff, Purgatoire. 10   Paul J. Griffith, ‘Purgatory’ in Jerry L. Walls (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford, 2008), p. 430. 11   Chaunu, La mort, pp. 132–4. 12   Ibid., pp. 38, 976. 7

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

53

becoming widespread in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.13 Michelle Fournié argues that in south-west France it was the second half of the fifteenth century when belief became widespread, shown by the frequency of church wall paintings depicting Purgatory and an increase in the numbers of priests to serve obit masses.14 Whenever its origins, in most regions of France Purgatory was established as a fundamental religious belief amongst all social groups by 1500. In explaining the ‘rise’ of Purgatory in the later Middle Ages, Chaunu developed the thesis of Philippe Ariès on the individualisation of the experience of death in this period.15 Ariès argued that as death came to be seen as the fate of individuals rather than a collective experience, the Christian doctrines of Last Judgement at the end of time and of the permanency of Hell, were increasingly modified. Chaunu took up the argument, stating that ‘the thought of hell [was] more insupportable than that of death itself. Hell [was] total death, a second death’.16 To modify this dreadful fate, the concept of the ‘third place’ developed. Historians also related the concept of Purgatory to a second intellectual shift, the idea of particular, instant judgement of the soul by God immediately after death, when the individual was sentenced to Hell or to Heaven, the latter usually after a specified time in Purgatory. The theological implications of particular judgement were far reaching. The Last Judgement or Doomsday, when Christ would return in glory to judge the living and the dead, remained central to Christian soteriology. Chaunu argues, however, that in practice, it was downplayed, with one consequence being a reduction in the importance of the body after death for ‘the destiny of the individual was entirely assumed to be the destiny of the soul’.17 Chaunu’s model needs modification, however. The Last Judgement remained a central theological tenet of Catholicism, as did corporeal resurrection. Although the relationship between particular and general judgement was never clearly resolved, souls would be reunited with their bodies on Judgement Day and the whole being would then spend eternity in Heaven or Hell. Evidence for this comes from wall paintings and sculptures in churches, where the day of Doom was frequently represented. The dissemination and penetration of ideas about Purgatory are crucial questions. Sermons were the most influential means of teaching religious knowledge in the later Middle Ages, for illiteracy rates were high and this 13   Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (c.1320–c.1480) (Rome, 1980), pp. 390, 408. 14   Fournié, p. 528. 15   Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London, 1983). 16   Chaunu, La mort, p. 139. 17   Ibid., p. 248.

54

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

was a society with a high dependence on oral culture. But in her study of early sixteenth century vernacular French sermons, Larissa Taylor argues that Purgatory received relatively little attention, compared with other penitential themes. Hell and damnation were more commonly preached, in calls to repentance and penitence. Taylor hypothesises that Purgatory was more likely the special domain of indulgence preachers, who raised money by promising relief for the souls there. For example, two Paris doctors of theology, Nicolas Cappelly and Nicolas Payen, were censured by the faculty in 1518 for preaching that donations to the crusade they were promoting, would directly deliver a soul from Purgatory to paradise. When preachers did discuss Purgatory, they did not dwell on physical descriptions of its nature and pains: the best means of mitigating the suffering of the souls held there predominated in the discourse. Listeners were urged to pray for souls, to lessen their suffering and the length of their sentence. Better still, people should seek to avoid Purgatory by making satisfaction for their own sins and doing good works while they were still on earth.18 For the historian, a major source for beliefs about Purgatory is devotional works. This was probably not the case for contemporaries, but even for the illiterate, there was a complex interplay between written and spoken ‘texts’, with preachers, teachers, employers, family and friends who could read, ‘moving’ writing into words. One of the most important genres of devotional literature on the afterlife is the Ars moriendi, or handbooks on how to ‘die well’. The origins of the Ars moriendi seem to lie with the Speculum artis bene moriendi written in 1415 by an anonymous Dominican friar, based on the tract De arte moriendi of Jean Gerson. This was translated into most European languages and was among the earliest books to be printed. Ars moriendi traditionally consisted of six chapters, mostly devoted to deathbed rituals. The first chapter explains that dying has a good side and consoles the reader that death was not to be feared; the second chapter outlines the temptations that beset the dying and the best methods to avoid them; the third lists questions to ask the dying and the consolation to be given through the redemptive powers of Christ’s love; the fourth stresses the need to imitate Christ’s life, the fifth outlines the rules of behaviour for family and friends gathered at the death bed and the sixth chapter contains prayers to be said for the dying person. In the mid-fifteenth century in the Netherlands, a ‘short’ version of the Ars moriendi emerged based largely on the second chapter of the longer version. It was illustrated with eleven woodcut pictures of the temptations that beset the dying person, the means of resisting these and a final ‘scene’ of the good death, where demons are vanquished. The long and short 18   Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Oxford, 1992), pp. 19, 95.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

55

versions of the Ars were popular: there were nearly 100 printed editions in Europe before 1500. Roger Chartier shows that Paris was the most important single production centre, followed by Leipzig and Cologne. His study of Ars moriendi has shown that they were at their most popular in the first third of the sixteenth century, although they declined in popularity and production after 1530.19 Although the Ars moriendi literature was undoubtedly popular, it contains little discussion of the nature of the afterlife. The function of the books was to provide guidance on salvation. The assumption underpinning the literature was that an individual’s eternal fate was determined in large part at the moment of death. Of course, there was a constant admonition to live well, to avoid the necessity for final acts, but this did not prevent contemporaries from privileging the process of dying and the final moments as a site of salvation. Thus, an elaborate series of rituals and gestures, of prayers, masses and almsgiving, assisted by clergy, friends, family and saintly intercessors, were prescribed, to assist an individual’s transition to the next world, to elicit a favourable judgement from God. Purgatory received little discussion in the Ars moriendi literature. Other than warning of the ‘pains of Purgatory’ and recommending suffrages to shorten time spent here, we learn little of the nature of the place or the underpinning doctrines of purgation and satisfaction. Readers were assumed to know what any allusions meant. The best literary guides to the nature of Purgatory and advice on how to ‘manage’ the experience of souls there, were popular saints’ lives and stories, read and recounted, at home and as exemplars in sermons. Many of these works had long lives. They were reprinted and passed on in second-hand copies. Dante’s second book Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy written between 1308 and 1321, was printed in France throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It gave a rather refined view of torments and remissions; it was not ‘popular’ in the true sense but its images were influential among elite groups.20 But by the later fifteenth century there were plenty of clerical writers who provided more conventional descriptions of Purgatory for pious readers and exemplars for preachers. Bernardino da Siena’s published sermons included several short discussions of the fires of Purgatory.21 Honorius of Autun’s Elucidarium, written in the twelfth century and translated into    

19 20

Roger Chartier, ‘Les Arts de Mourir 1450–1600’, AESC 31 (1976): pp. 51–76. Dante, The Divine Comedy. II. Purgatory trans. D.L. Sayers (Harmondsworth,

1955).

  For example, Bernadino da Siena, The chirche of the euyll men and women wherof Lulyfer [sic] is the heed, and the membres is all the players dyssolute and synners reproued (Paris, 1511). 21

56

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

many vernacular languages including French, gave explicit discussion to the causes and remission of Purgatory. Raymond of Capua’s fourteenthcentury Life of St Catherine of Siena detailed her earthly Purgatory, taken upon herself to save her father from post-mortem torment.22 Catherine of Genoa’s Purgatory, written down c.1514, circulated in manuscript and was printed in 1551.23 Collections of miracle stories of the Blessed Virgin Mary frequently contained accounts of individuals in Purgatory who had been released after their appeal to Our Lady’s intercession. Above all, the Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragine provided examples of saints who had experienced Purgatory. His Lives of Saints Gregory, Patrick, Martial and Dominic all mention the pains of purgation and some of the printed editions contain a section on the commemoration of All Souls, with discussion of the importance of suffrages for their relief.24 In Brittany, the earliest texts printed in the province were Ars moriendi and similar works. The first to be published were the poem Loys des trespasses and Denis Le Chartreux’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, both in 1484.25 In 1530, the Breton-language Buhez mab den (The Life of Man) had a similar theme.26 While printers came and went in Brittany in the early sixteenth century, booksellers were established in Nantes by 1480 and in Rennes, Vannes, Quimper and Morlaix around 1500, importing books from Rouen and particularly Paris.27 The message of these texts was that works and prayers were necessary to expiate sin. There was no stress on the fear of Hell, but rather the promotion of the good life to prepare for Heaven.28 With access to texts published in France and a small-scale, local production of devotional books in French and Breton, even in the preReformation period in Brittany we see books helping to foster a religious culture of individual meditation, personal prayer and interior dialogue with God typical of the rest of northern Europe.29 While the printed works 22   Written in Latin, an English-language version is Raymond of Capua, Here begynneth the lyf of saint katherin of senis the blessid virgin (Westminster, 1492). 23   Catherine de Gênes, La Vie et les oeuvres spirituelles (Lyon, 1610). 24   Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée en françois (Lyon, 1497). There are earlier printed versions for example in 1477 in Lyon by Bartholomieu Buyer. 25   Jehan de Mung, Les loys des trespasses, avecques le pélerinaige de maistre Jehan de Mung (Brehant-Lodéac, 1484); Denis Le Chartreux, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (BrehantLodéac, 1484). 26   Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 362. 27   Diane E. Booton, Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (Farnham, 2010), pp. 118–24. 28   Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 364. 29   Alexandra Walsham, ‘“Domme Preachers?” Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, P&P 168 (2000): p. 77; Jean-François Courouau, ‘L’imprimé religieux en langue bretonne’, ABPO 115 (2008): pp. 57–79.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

57

were only accessible to a minority of the population, their messages were mediated by the clergy, particularly preachers. Interacting with and influencing written texts were visual representations of Purgatory, which directly portrayed its location and the suffering of souls there. Woodcut prints played a considerable role in the eschatology of ‘particular’ judgement, often associated with Ars moriendi works. In Brittany, Alain Croix has located around 50 sculptures and images of Purgatory or Hell in churches that date before 1700. For example, the fifteenth-century chapel at Kernascléden has wall paintings and stained glass of devils and inferno and there are numerous representations on monumental calvaries such as Guéhenno (1550) and internal roof beams in churches such as Grâces (1505–7).30 Kate Giles has suggested that wall paintings and other images ubiquitous in medieval churches were also an important way of teaching doctrine, ‘visual sermons’, explained by clergy, used as preaching exemplars and also the focus of personal devotions. By such visual means, ordinary Christians learnt about Purgatory, Hell, judgement and salvation.31 So, how would the Medieval Christian have imagined Purgatory? In terms of its location, Eamon Duffy comments that while Dante’s Purgatorio was a place of hope, a mountain by which souls ascended towards heaven, other views were grimmer: Purgatory was an outpost of Hell rather than an ante-chamber of Heaven.32 French representations shared Thomas Aquinas’s image of a subterranean place on the borders of Hell. Commonlyheld visions of the location, nature of Purgatory and types of punishment can be exemplified by the work The Purgatory of St Patrick, with its many translations and emulations across the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. In the 1545 Paris edition of Jean Bonfans, for example, a knight relates the details of a pilgrimage to the monastery and ‘Purgatory’ of Lough Deorg in Ireland. Here, penitents took part in a range of rituals, the culmination of which was confinement for 24 hours in an underground cave, fasting, praying and meditating upon sin. While in the cave, the narrator/pilgrim witnessed the torments that befell sinners in Purgatory. He describes the awful noises, horrible visions of devils and terrible fires of punishment. He travelled through a field of sorrows, where men and women lay naked, nailed to the ground by their hands and feet, tormented by a dragon, while being beaten by demons. In a second field, serpents gnawed and toads ate the souls’ ‘flesh’. Souls were attached to a wheel of fire and plunged   Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, p. 1049. 31   Kate Giles, ‘Seeing and Believing. Visuality and Space in Pre-Modern England’, World Archaeology 39 (2007): pp. 105–121. 32   Duffy, p. 343–4. 30

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

58

into a river of stinking, molten metal. But the souls thus tormented were alleviated of their pains by prayers and good works performed for them by the living. The pilgrim himself was delivered from the clutches of demons on several occasions by invoking the name of Jesus Christ.33 Almost a century later, in a version produced by François Bouillon in 1643, the description had changed little, although he added a great freezing lake, with ice and snow, for sinners.34 Other authors’ descriptions of Purgatory derive from this source. There were some alternative visions of Purgatory. Robert Swanson observes that in late medieval writings on ghosts, souls might mingle together in a general or common Purgatory or they might have an individual Purgatory, a specific terrestrial site associated with their major sins. However, he questions how widespread such an understanding was.35 While the image of Purgatory was one of dreadful torment, it was not meant to inspire fear for its own sake, but to affect a reform in self and spirituality. The best way to avoid Purgatory was by living a virtuous life while on earth: penance, alms giving, good works, avoiding sin, these were far more easily achieved in life than after death.36 But even after death, the soul in Purgatory was not without aid. Although subject to the purgation of fire and torment, souls were comforted by the fact that their time in Purgatory could be reduced by the intercession of the living community of the faithful. Underpinning Purgatory was a belief in the efficacy of suffrage and intercession and the solidarity of the living and the dead. There was permeability between the earthly kingdom and that of God. Chaunu argues that the popularity of Purgatory came from links maintained between the living and the dead, relationships placed under, controlled and tempered by ecclesiastical mediation.37 But from the 1520s, the tenor of writing about the afterlife began to change. Humanists and reformers preferred to place the ‘art of dying’ within a broader ‘art of living’ a good Christian life, which included constant reflection upon and preparation for death with a wider repertoire of devotional behaviour than deathbed acts. In France, three authors were influential. Josse Clichtove’s De doctrina moriendi was published in Paris in 1520.38 Cardinal Cajetan disputed with Luther about indulgences and     35  

33 34

Jean Bonfans (ed.), Le purgatoire de sainct Patrice (Paris, 1547). François Boüillon, Histoire de la vie et du purgatoire de S. Patrice (Paris, 1643). Robert Swanson, ‘Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages’, SCH 45 (2009):

p. 155.

    38   36

Duffy, pp. 342–3. Chaunu, La mort, p. 141. Josse Clichtove, De Doctrina moriendi opusculum necessaria ad mortem foeliciter oppetendam preparamenta declarans (Paris, 1538). 37

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

59

wrote on penance and purgation. For Cajetan, Purgatory was the antichamber of Heaven rather than a substitute for Hell.39 These were Latin texts, however, for debate among theologians. A work that moved into a more popular realm was Erasmus’s De preparatione ad mortem of 1536, published in French in 1543.40 This was one of a new type that ‘emphasised the doctrines of grace and forgiveness over those of punishment and damnation, but insisted that these benefits could be gained only through deliberate effort and preparation’.41 By the mid-sixteenth century, therefore, images of the afterlife in spiritual literature were changing. Among spiritual reformers, the soteriology of Purgatory was often sidestepped. The fifth exercise of Week 1 of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises offered a systematic meditation on Hell, where the participant was invited to consider the sight, sound, smell, taste and feel of the awfulness of inferno and to recall the persons lodged there. There was no similar meditation on Purgatory.42 For Teresa of Avila, again, Hell rather than Purgatory was internalised. Teresa describes being plunged into Hell in chapter 32 of her Life; the experience was granted to enable her to ‘understand that the Lord wished me to see the place that the devils had ready for me there, and that I had earned by my sins’.43 Hell was a lived reality at the interior of the soul, for which human language was incapable of explaining the intensity of its awfulness. There was little discussion of Purgatory although Teresa mentioned it when she witnessed souls of people she had known being raised from there to heaven. She also stressed the value of suffrages. One All Souls’ Night, Teresa’s prayers were disturbed by the devil, who tried to prevent the deliverance of souls to Heaven. Aided by holy water, Teresa drove away Satan and witnessed several souls ascending to God.44 The fear of Hell was used as a means of bringing the soul to God, ultimately merciful and compassionate, not for its own sake. For Loyola, the vision of Hell was to ‘keep before me my wish to grieve and feel sorrow, and remind myself more of death

  Thomas Cajetan, De indulgentia plenaria concessa defunctis, quibus et quomodo prosit (1519); Chaunu, La mort, p. 146. 40   Desiderius Erasmus, Préparation à la mort, nouvellement composé et publié par le discret docteur Érasme avecques aulcunes prières et pseaulmes de la saincte Escripture, moult prouffictables à tous christiens (1543). 41   Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. The Art and Craft of Dying in SixteenthCentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995), p. 24. 42   Ignatius Loyola, ‘Spiritual Exercises’ in Personal Writings, trans. J.A. Munitiz (London, 1996), pp. 298–9. 43   The Life of Teresa of Avila by herself, trans. J.H. Cohen (London, 1958, 1987), p. 235. 44   Ibid., p. 225; Minois, L’enfer, pp. 87–90. 39

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

60

and judgement’.45 It is likely that the works of Loyola and others were read largely by clerical elites in France in the mid-sixteenth century. For example, Loyola’s work was published in Latin from 1548, but this and other Spanish devotional writings were translated into French only in the early seventeenth century. But their readership included men who were to write for wider audiences from the 1550s onwards and who were to write about Purgatory in new ways with the outbreak of religious war in France. The Reformation and Confessional Conflict in France 1550–1600 From 1517 onwards, Purgatory and its attendant framework of intercessory actions and institutions came under severe criticism from Protestant reformers. Martin Luther rejected Purgatory at the diet of Augsburg in 1530 and Jean Calvin vigorously condemned it in the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.46 Justification by faith eliminated the reason for purgation of sin; an individual relationship with God negated the need for third-party intercession, while the centrality of scripture as the sole source of truth cast doubt on this non-biblical doctrine. Purgatory was ridiculed as a make-believe place, invented by greedy clerics to fill the innocent with fear and to line the pockets of the Church. Calvin adhered to the theology of a single last judgement and corporeal resurrection. Protestants denied the redemptive value of prayers for the dead or any form of human works, and insisted that souls were saved only by faith in Christ.47 The only satisfaction that God required had been made once and for all in the sacrifice on the cross; to demand perpetual prayers was to think Christ’s death to be insufficient.48 Protestant criticisms of Purgatory may have undermined confidence in post-mortem intercession even among those who remained Catholic. Some humanists were already mocking practices linked to beliefs in Purgatory. Erasmus’s essay ‘The Exorcism or Apparition’ in The Colloquies of 1518 showed skepticism about elaborate post-mortem intercession.49 Later, this view emerged from other reformers as well. For example, at a Privy Council meeting at Blois in August 1562, the Cardinal of Lorraine put forward five proposals for adoption as policy by the French delegation at the Council     47   48   45 46

Loyola, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, p. 300. Fournié, pp. 13–14. Eire, Madrid, p. 171. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), pp.

62–3. 49   Desiderius Erasmus, ‘The Exorcism or Apparition’, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. N. Bailey (2 vols, London, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 391–401.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

61

of Trent, including trimming the canon of the mass by omitting prayers for the dead.50 In general, regional studies have shown that overt adherence to the doctrine of Purgatory may have declined in the mid- and later sixteenth century. Stéphane Gal argues for Grenoble that by the 1580s, wills make no mention of Purgatory at all; testators saw eternity in terms of Heaven and Hell.51 But it is clear from a study of French pamphlet literature of the midsixteenth century that the doctrine of Purgatory played a key role in polemical debates between Catholics and Protestants. From the late 1550s, Protestant attacks on Catholic doctrines and rituals stimulated a renewal and reaffirmation of traditional beliefs and practices among the majority confession. Christopher Elwood has remarked that by the early 1560s, the need to stem the tide of Protestant propaganda successes provoked an extraordinarily large number of Catholic responses in vernacular pamphlets and treatises. Sermons and published tracts in French, largely authored by clergy, refuted attacks on doctrine by Protestants and sought to educate the laity in the central tenets of Catholicism. Instruction was necessary to safeguard Catholics against heresy, a view also emerging from the Council of Trent at this time.52 The largest number of these polemical works was on the eucharist.53 But sermons and publications also discussed the cult of saints, intercession and baptism. As part of this ‘campaign’ there emerged more doctrinally-focused and instructional works on Purgatory. Already in 1523, Johann von Eck published De purgatorio in which he argued against Luther’s rejection of Purgatory. In this, he developed four main themes: there was Biblical evidence for Purgatory; the souls in Purgatory were assured of their salvation; Luther’s contention that the concept of suffering in Purgatory led to despair was wrong, and that passivity before God’s will was essential.54 Other Catholic theologians from the Holy Roman Empire also published Latin tracts in support of Purgatory against Luther, such as Johannes Aepinus Liber de Purgatorio of 1549 and Johannes Tavernius De Purgatorio Animarum which appeared in Paris in 1551. But in France, it was Bernadino Ochino’s  

50

Stuart Carroll, ‘The Compromise of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine’, JEH, 54 (2003):

p. 474. 51   S. Gal, Grenoble au temps de la Ligue. Étude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité (vers 1562–vers 1598) (St Martin d’Hérès, 2000), p. 248. 52   Luc Racaut, ‘Education of the Laity and Advocacy of Violence in Print during the French Wars of Religion’, History 95 (2010): pp. 159–76. 53   Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken (Oxford, 1999), pp. 114–15; François Higman, ‘Theology in French Religious Pamphlets from the Counter-Reformation’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies IV. The Counter Reformation (London, 2004), pp. 69–75. 54   Chaunu, La mort, p. 147.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

62

Dialogue touchant le purgatoire, which appeared in Latin in 1555 and French in 1559, that sparked a vociferous response from authors refuting the Protestant position.55 Ochino’s Dialogue was an attack on the doctrine of Purgatory and on the mortuary practices of the Catholic Church. In it, the character Theodidacte was imprisoned for denying the existence of Purgatory and forced to defend his views against the arguments of five monks from different religious orders; and ‘because monks and priests … live for the most part from [the fees] of mortuary services and burials and even from Purgatory itself, it was certain that they would all be [Theodidacte’s] enemies’.56 But Theodidacte won the case. Using Holy Scripture, he affirmed that Purgatory was a nonsense, for Jesus Christ had cleansed all sins through His precious blood. The publication of this work coincided with the beginning of serious sectarian troubles in France, following the death of Henri II. Its refutation was part of a wider campaign of resistance to Protestantism. Over the next five years, sixteen works devoted at least in part to a direct discussion of Purgatory, were published or republished in France. Ten of these works are known from 1562 alone, part of what Andrew Pettegree has called a ‘pamphlet moment’.57 The defense of Purgatory had two objectives: to combat Protestant denial of its existence and at the same time to justify it to Catholics and uphold the necessity of aiding the souls located there. The images in these polemics ran counter to those of the pre-Tridentine Renaissance Ars moriendi and other spiritual works, with their stress on Christ’s infinite mercy. In the works of the 1560s there was more emphasis on the infernal nature of Purgatory and on judgement. The best way of saving souls from a sojourn in Purgatory or residence in hell, was through the application of the sacrifice of the mass, to the living and the dead, for eucharistic themes emerged strongly in this literature as they did elsewhere during the religious wars. Melchior de Flavin, an observant Franciscan from Toulouse, published two works in the 1560s which exemplify the themes discussed by these authors. De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent estans du corps séparées et des purgatoires qu’elles souffrent …’ was first published in Toulouse in 1563, then De la preparation à la mort en trois traitez was

  Bernadino Ochino, De purgatorio (Tiguri, 1555); Bernadino Ochino, Dialogue de M. Bernadin Ochino, Senois, touchant le purgatoire (1559). 56   Ochino, Dialogue, p. 3. 57   Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson (eds), French Vernacular Books. Books published in the French Language before 1601 (2 vols, Leiden, 2007); Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 177–84. 55

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

63

published in Paris in 1566.58 Flavin’s purpose was to justify Purgatory theologically and to advise faithful Catholics on how to reduce their purgation and that of others in that place. Purgatory existed so that God could render reward or punishment to everyone, according to their merits; ‘we see in this world the wicked prosper … On the other hand, we see the wise poor, persecuted and afflicted … Therefore there needs to be another place where the wicked are punished according to the quantity of their faults … .’59 Purgatory was thus a grace bestowed by God on Christians to allow a time and place for penitence, after death, for those who had not accomplished it during their lifetimes and who therefore really deserved to go to hell.60 An even stronger attack on the Protestant denial of Purgatory was the Brief discours touchant le fondement du Purgatoire of René Benoist, published in Paris in 1566. Benoist, chaplain to Queen Marie of Scotland and from 1569, curé of Saint-Eustache in Paris, was a prolific author and defender of Catholicism in sermons and in print. The central topic of this tract was the doctrine of satisfaction, atonement and penitence after the forgiveness of sins, linked to penances, indulgences and Purgatory. Benoist provided proofs and arguments for the existence of Purgatory. He argued that, ‘It is a notable fact … that no-one was ever crowned in celestial glory and eternal life, if they had not truly battled … These pains are of two types. Firstly, those things endured by true Christians who for love of God give up pleasures and vain contentments brought by sin and who resist temptations with pains and difficulties. The second is penitence, either in this temporal life or in Purgatory, where they render satisfaction for God’s justice.’61 Purgatory was linked to sin. God did not always remit the penalty due for sin when he remitted the sin itself. He wants mankind to give satisfaction to His justice, by temporal penalties, according to the gravity of the sin and He demands interior restoration in individuals as well.62 The pamphlets of the 1560s provided little discussion of the nature of the Purgatory itself. Their chief concern was with penitence and the best ways in which this could be achieved. As with Hell, the pains of Purgatory 58   Melchior de Flavin, De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent estans du corps séparées et des purgatoires qu’elles souffrent en ce monde et en l’autre après icelle separation (Toulouse, 1563; edition used here Paris, 1579) and De la preparation à la mort en trois traitez (Paris, 1566, the edition used here Paris, 1578). 59   De Flavin, Des âmes, p. 9v. 60   Ibid., p. 124r. 61   René Benoist, Brief discours touchant le fondement du Purgatoire après cette vie, des Indulgences & Pardons & Satisfaction, troisième part de Penitence (Paris, 1566), pp. 8–9. 62   Benoist, Brief discours, pp. 15, 27.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

64

were used primarily as a call to a reformation of lifetime sinfulness. The chief suffrages were the sacrament of the eucharist and devotions to Christ. De Flavin argued, as did all late medieval preachers, that purgation of sins was best achieved while alive and could take a number of forms. He used the frequently-employed image of purgatorial fire, for the living and the dead, as a cleansing agent of souls. The first ‘fire’ which purges is faith in Christ and His sacrament, for grace comes from God alone. The second is baptism, by which the Holy Spirit regenerates the soul, through grace. The third ‘fire’, which comes from the spirit, is charity and especially almsgiving, which ‘delivers from death and cleanses of all sin … Repurchase your sins by justice and your iniquities by giving mercy to the poor …’.63 A fourth ‘fire’ of purgation was tribulation, persecution, sorrow, our crosses and afflictions, which are holy and pacify the wrath of God.64 Above all, meditation on the passion of Christ was recommended.65 Likewise, Benoist stressed lifetime activity as the best route to heaven. Quoting Acts 14 and Paul’s letter to Timothy, Benoist argued that the most important ‘work’ of a Christian was endurance. Men and women who desired to be saved had to resist temptation, endure pain and avoid sin. Those who endured hardship in the form of illness and death, would not be punished a second time. Those who succumbed to sin had to endure pain to satisfy the justice of God; those who endured with Christ, would reign with Him.66 Suffrages by the living for departed souls, to ease their pains of Purgatory, were recommended. De Flavin stated that the souls in Purgatory were our brothers and sisters in grace and together with the living were members of the body of the Church under the head who is Jesus Christ. St Peter instructed Christians to bury the dead and perform funeral rites for them, to pray and give charity in their name. Above all, the sacrifice of the mass was the most powerful suffrage for them.67 A striking feature of Benoist’s commentary on penance was the centrality given to the role of the Church. The Church had long gathered to itself the primary function in co-ordinating prayers and suffrages for the dead in Purgatory, based on the idea of the mystical union of the living and dead body of Christ. But Benoist had a particularly clericalist view. ‘As the Father has devolved judgement and power for the remission of sins to the Son, it is impossible to have remission without the Son … Thus the Son has delegated this power for the remission of sins, received from his Father, to the Church, in the persons of his legitimate ministers and     65   66   67   63 64

De Flavin, Des âmes, p. 86v. Ibid., p. 92v–93r. De Flavin, Des âmes, p. 166r. Benoist, Brief discours, p. 29, 35. Flavin, De la preparation, p. 77v.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

65

pastors … without which there is no salvation.’68 This emphasis was to receive greater stress in the Tridentine reforms of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Simultaneously with the flowering of polemical works on Purgatory during the early civil wars in France, the Council of Trent was defining the doctrine and associated devotional practices. The first decree to uphold Purgatory was that on justification, of Session VI in 1547. Canon XXX of chapter XVI ‘On the merit of good works’ stated that, ‘If anyone saith that, after the grace of Justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out, in such wise that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged, either in this world or in the next in Purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of heaven can be opened, let him be anathema.’69 The decree on the doctrine of the mass of Session XXII in 1562 upheld the sacrifice as propitiatory for the living and the dead, that is, for those departed who are not yet fully purged.70 Finally, in session XXV of December 1563, a decree concerning Purgatory was issued, upholding that ‘there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’.71 Of enormous significance in the dissemination of the doctrine of Purgatory from the mid-sixteenth century was the catechism of the Council of Trent. Designed to instruct clergy, its contents were widely taught from the pulpit and copied in derivative publications throughout Catholic Europe. Chapter VII of the Roman catechism comprised a discussion of the destinations of the soul in the afterlife. Purgatory received a brief discussion, as the place ‘in which the souls of the pious are purified by a temporary punishment, that they may be admitted into their eternal country into which nothing defiled entereth’.72 In line with the Tridentine decrees, the catechism mentions Purgatory again in the definition of the eucharist, for ‘the sacrifice of the mass is also available to the dead … such is the efficacy of this sacrifice that it is profitable … to all the faithful, whether living with us here on earth or already numbered with those who are dead in the Lord, but whose sins have not yet been fully expiated’.73    

Benoist, Brief discours, p. 31. J. Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London, 1848),

    72  

Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 232–3. Jeremiah Donovan (ed.), The Catechism of the Council of Trent (London, 1854),

68 69

p. 48. 70 71

p. 59.

 

73

Donovan (ed.), Catechism, p. 248.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

66

Further mentions occur in the sections on the Decalogue and on Prayer, where exhortations are made for prayers for the dead, ‘that they may be liberated from the fires of Purgatory’.74 The publication of the decrees of Trent and the Roman Catechism were vital in stimulating the teaching of the doctrine and its suffrages. In Spain, a number of historians argue for the enhancement of the status of Purgatory in the aftermath of Trent. For example, Sarah Nalle argues that in La Mancha, before 1555, only one third of testators made provision for souls in Purgatory, usually for their relatives. By 1565, most men and women among all social groups were setting aside some money for the souls in Purgatory and two thirds of these provided masses for anonymous souls.75 In France, there were earlier catechisms available. The Jesuit Edmond Auger published a Catéchisme et sommaire de la doctrine chrétienne in 1563, to answer the ‘errors’ of Calvin’s teachings.76 Even earlier, and quickly to overtake Auger’s work in popularity, was Peter Canisius’s Summa doctrinae Christianae of 1555, translated into French and published in 1557 in Antwerp, under the title Catéchisme ou Sommaire de la doctrine, nouvellement composé par demande et par réponses and published in Breton in 1576.77 But what is notable about these early Tridentine publications is their lack of details on the location and punishments of Purgatory. Peter Marshall observes that early continental counter-reformation catechisms and commentaries gave Purgatory minimalist treatment.78 These texts confirmed the veracity of the doctrine and the value of suffrages, especially the mass, but gave almost no specific information. This was to be the work of other authors, who filled in descriptions of the place and gave advice on suffrages, so that the faithful might more fully engage with the purpose of Purgatory. In France, we see the beginnings of this ‘detailing’ of Purgatory in the 1580s and 1590s, which saw a new wave of militant Catholicism across the kingdom. Denis Crouzet has suggested that the wars of religion were marked by an eschatological anxiety, particular during the League wars after 1584 and perhaps there is something of millennial anguish in these

74

   

Ibid., pp. 403, 480. Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha. Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 191–2. 76   Edmond Auger, Catechisme et sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne avec un formulaire de dievers prieres catholiques (Lyon, 1563). 77   Peter Canisius, Summa doctrinae Christianae (Vienna, M. Zimmerman, 1555); Catéchisme ou Sommaire de la doctrine, nouvellement composé par demande et par réponses (Antwerp, 1557); Courouau, ‘L’imprimé religieux’, p. 61. 78   Marshall, Beliefs, p. 119. 75

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

67

new publications.79 This had local causes associated with visitations of the plague, food shortages and economic hardship, and a wider context in the political turbulence of the Holy League and its war with the French crown. It also had wider stimulus in the form of new Tridentine devotions and mentalities which began to be introduced into France at this time, again frequently associated with the holy sacrament. As part of the reactivation of Catholic militancy, the 1580s saw another flurry of pamphlets on Purgatory and the afterlife. One of the most interesting is by the Franciscan Noel de Taillepied, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits … published in Paris in 1588.80 The central paradox of the doctrine of Purgatory, acutely criticised by Protestants, was that it appeared to negate the redemptive act of Christ’s death on the cross for all sins. Taillepied explained the relationship between the two succinctly: while Christ has made satisfaction for our sins, for us to participate in his merit we have to receive baptism and have faith. Also, so that sins might be pardoned, we must show penitence through tears, fasts, prayers, alms and good works, the ‘fruits’ of penitence.81 Two hugely influential authors on Purgatory of the later sixteenth century were Robert Bellarmine and Jacques Suarez de SainteMarie. Both men had been responsible for defining Purgatory at Trent and put forward biblical references in support of the doctrine.82 Subsequently, both men produced influential works, particularly Bellarmine’s shorter catechism, part of a commission by Pope Clement VIII of 1598–99 and published in French in 1604 and in Breton in 1612.83 Suarez, a Portuguese Observant Franciscan who ultimately became bishop of Sées in France, also published a number of theological tracts in this period, including on Purgatory, discussed below.84 These latter works combined polemics with a more pastoral concern with how Catholics should approach their ends. There is more detail on the nature of Purgatory in the works of the 1580s and 1590s than in earlier tracts. Physical descriptions of Purgatory had changed little since the early sixteenth century. According to Suarez, the geography of the afterlife was clearly mapped out. Heaven was in   Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (c.1525–c.1610) (2 vols, Paris, 1990). 80   Noël Taillepied, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits à scavoir des âmes séparées, fantosmes, prodigies et accidents merveilleux qui precedent quelquefois la mort des grands personages ou signifient changements de la chose publique (Paris, 1588). 81   Taillepied, Psichologie, p. 235. 82   Le Goff, Purgatoire, p. 41. 83   Robert Bellarmine, Petit catéchisme universel. Catéchisme et ample déclaration de la doctrine chrétienne, trans. Robert Crampoz (Lyon, 1604); Courouau, ‘L’imprimé religieux’, p. 61. 79

84   For example, Jacques Suarès, Torrent de feu sortant de la face de Dieu pour desseicher les Eaux de Mara, encloses dans la chaussée du Moulin d’Ablon (Paris, 1603).

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

68

the sky, the seat of God, and entry was only allowed to humans because of the death and passion of Jesus Christ. Then there was Hell, for the damned, underground. As part of the subterranean complex, there was limbo, which contained the patriarchs, prophets and spiritual men who lived before Christ and also, unbaptized babes. Purgatory was another infernal place, again underground, but this time a temporary abode of souls destined ultimately for Heaven, after their purgation.85 There were a few variants and additions, but using the same themes. Taillepied, in 1588, claimed that apart from the ‘normal place’, there were rivers and mountains where some souls would be purged, and special places where the living had sinned, that could also be used for purgation.86 One of the greatest works on purgation, the Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross, which emphasised despair and purification in this life as a sort of anti-chamber to Purgatory, also dated to the 1570s–1580s. In it, the author describes the mental torment of the soul who despairs of finding God, but who once purged, is illuminated by divine light and achieves union with its creator. This may have been circulating in France by the 1590s and was printed in French in the early seventeenth century.87 The necessity of suffrages for the dead received greater stress than in the 1560s. Taillepied related that the appearance of ghosts was frequently linked to demands for suffrages. He wrote that ‘oftentimes, spirits are heard at night … who, when questioned … as to how they might be helped, request that masses be said for them, that pilgrimages are made and by these means they will be delivered’. Afterwards, he noted, these spirits appear in magnificence and brightness and greatly thank their benefactors, promising to intercede for them before God’.88 Of course, this was not new. Robert Swanson has examined late medieval works on ghosts, particularly by James of Chusa (d.1465) and Bartholomaeus Sibylla (d.1493), whose stories those of Taillepied resemble. But Taillepied’s is one of a number of ‘resurrections’ of ghost stories to reinvigorate and ‘prove’ Purgatory, in a period when militant Catholicism sought to validate its legitimacy in traditional values and ideas.89 Ghost stories confirmed Catholic views of an afterlife challenged by Protestants and served to reinforce the doctrine of Purgatory, ‘the returning dead were important informants on the afterlife. They had an active role in constructing awareness both of what

    87   85

Suarès, Torrent, pp. 4–9. Taillepied, Psichologie, p. 261. St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, London 2009; Les Oeuvres spirituelles were published in Paris in 1621 by Michael Sonnius. 88   Taillepied, Psichologie, pp. 134–5. 89   Swanson, ‘Ghosts’, see all. 86

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

69

happened after death and of the need for individuals to establish strategies for eternity.’90 One theme that continued to strengthen was the vital role of the institutional Church in salvation. Chartier argues that in the later sixteenth century, the authors of works on death and the afterlife sought to enhance the authority and importance of the priest.91 Carlos Eire observes that Tridentine Ars moriendi placed greater emphasis on the freedom of the will, the power of the sacraments and the intercessory role of the Church and the saints.92 The prayers and intercessions of the saints could also comfort the repentant sinner and Taillepied commented that apparitions of the dead sometimes requested the prayers of saints to help them.93 The ‘Classic’ Catholic and Counter-Reformation in France Michel Vovelle argues that the seventeenth century was the ‘great century’ of Purgatory. It was with the ‘classic’ Counter Reformation in France that the doctrine once more became prominent as a driver of elite and popular religious practice.94 Chaunu argues similarly that Purgatory was important in Paris between 1580 and 172030, with the height of its popularity occurring between 1640 and 1660. The root cause of this progressive concern with Purgatory was, according to Chaunu, the total victory of particular over final judgement in beliefs about the fate of the soul after death. The eternal destiny of women and men no longer needed the body, it was entirely assumed by the fate of the soul, what Chaunu calls a ‘second eschatology’.95 Evidence for increasing preoccupation with Purgatory is the rising demand for intercession, shown in numerous studies, of Paris, the Lyonnais, Anjou and beyond France, in Italy, Spain and Germany.96

    92   93   94   95   96   90

Ibid., p. 173. Chartier, ‘Les Arts de Mourir’, p. 69. Eire, Madrid, p. 24. Taillepied, Psichologie, p. 269. Vovelle, La mort, p. 308. Chaunu, La mort, p. 248. For example Chaunu, La mort; Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984), chapter 4; François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques (Paris, 1971); Eire, Madrid; Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: the Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009). 91

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

70

What has also been striking for many historians is the Counter Reformation’s stress on death, judgement and Hell.97 François Lebrun writes in his work on Anjou that the most frequently used theme of catechists and preachers, was that of Hell. In the catechism, children learnt that the pains of Hell were corporeal and spiritual. Linked to Hell was judgement, when all Christians would have to account for themselves before God the sovereign magistrate, without recourse to appeal. The judge was incorruptible, inflexible and inexorable. He would demand account for graces received but not utilised, good works which remained undone and sins of thought, word and deed. Heaven received little attention here and neither did its preparatory chamber of Purgatory.98 In Paris, Chaunu similarly observes that preaching discourse was dominated by the God of Judgement. While the Son mitigated this judgement by his redeeming death, it was fear of God rather than love, which was widely taught.99 Piero Camporesi has similarly argued that ‘over no other age did hell exert such an attraction and repulsion and in so spasmodic and obsessive a form.’100 Hell was solid, terrible, a site of physical corruption and dreadful smell, with a fearsome capacity to terrorise.101 However, this eschatological stress on Hell had a pastoral function, to inculcate a fear of God in order ‘to renew affection for the suffering Christ and to bring about a change of conduct in the lives of the audience.’102 Moral transformation was the goal of preachers and writers, not fear for its own sake. This was hardly new, however, for it was a constant them of medieval preaching. Daniel Roche’s study of seventeenth-century Ars moriendi literature has shown that during the grand siècle, spiritual interests changed, to a greater emphasis on lifetime actions. The ‘old’ style works of Gerson, Clichtove and even Erasmus, went out of fashion. Handbooks still occupied an important place among devotional works across the century, however. Vovelle argues that the main period of production of literary works was before 1640 although Roche claims that the second half of

  John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), pp. 228–9; Carlos Eire, ‘The Good Side of Hell: Infernal Meditations in Early Modern Spain’, Historical Reflections, 26 (2000): p. 286. 98   Lebrun, Anjou, pp. 445–6. 99   Chaunu, La mort, p. 376. 100   Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell. Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1990), p. 28. 101   Camporesi, pp. 69–70, 101–2. 102   McManners, pp. 228–9. 97

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

71

the century was more productive.103 Works such as La Douce et sainte mort of Père Crasset (1681) ran to over forty editions. L’avant-coureur de l’éternité (1643) of Jérémie Drexel, L’Ange conducteur (1681) of Jacques Coret and other such tomes were the new bestsellers of the era. In these works, preparation for death was the work of a whole lifetime. A wellregulated life and the performance of good works were the best guarantees of eternal life: spiritual combat necessitated permanent mobilisation. To avoid damnation, preparation for death was a daily necessity. It was not to be left until late in life, as mortality could strike suddenly; it was to be part of a regular routine and life of prayer for all ages.104 Further, Roche argues, religious practice emphasised interiorisation and individual action rather than collective ritual.105 The ‘sites’ of salvation strengthened: Christ and his sacrament of the altar, devotion to Mary and participation in good works. R. Po-Hsia comments that action rather than fear was the Counter Reformation’s answer to the fragility of human existence. Through good works the Church ‘anchored the existence of the faithful to this-worldly pursuits and prevented its drift to despair over ultimate fate in the next world.’106 However, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, many French works on Purgatory were still written in response to Protestant attacks. Around the year 1600, the Protestant pastor and polemicist Pierre du Moulin preached against Purgatory in Grenoble and published a long tract directed against the writings of Suarez, called Eaux de Siloé pour esteindre les feux de purgatoire, contre les raisons et allegations d’un Cordelier Portugays.107 This led to a number of virulent refutations, from which emerged changing perspectives on the nature and functions of Purgatory.108 The authors typically developed Tridentine concerns, particularly Christology and the role of the Church in salvation. There was also greater 103   Vovelle, La Mort, pp. 308–10; Roche, ‘La mémoire de la mort’, pp. 83–6. Roche states that in the first half of the seventeenth century, one to two per cent of all books produced were on dying, a figure which rose to five per cent after 1650, but which fell off thereafter. 104   McManners, p. 199. 105   Roche, ‘La mémoire de la mort’, pp. 105–6. 106   R. P. Hsia, ‘Civic Wills as Sources for the Study of Piety in Münster, 1530–1618’, SCJ XIV (1983): p. 347. 107   The earliest extant pamphlet appears to be Pierre du Moulin, Eaulx de Siloé pour esteindre le feu de purgatoire et noyer les traditions, les limbes, les satisfactions humaines et les indulgences papales, contre les raisons et allégations d’un cordelier portugais défendues par trois escrits dont l’un est du mesme cordelier, intitulé : ‘le Torrent de feu’, etc. (La Rochelle, 1608). This is at least a second edition of the earlier pamphlet as it comments on works by Catholic authors, to be discussed below. 108   Another Protestant author who wrote after the initial debate was waning, was J. Brun, Le Purgatoire des chrestiens, par un nourrisson de l’Eglise (1608).

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

72

emphasis on the physical body as the site of sin and corruption while the origins of punishment in love rather than judgement began to emerge. Above all, there was a refutation of the Protestant claim that Catholics had established an alternative form of salvation to Christ, where they had to pay down to their last penny, or be roasted in Purgatory.109 Thus, in Catholic literature, the relationship between the existence of Purgatory and Christ’s atoning death on the cross was stressed, to a greater extent than in earlier periods. The earliest and most influential of the counter-blasts to du Moulin was by Pierre Victor Palma Cayet. Palma Cayet was for many years a Protestant, an officer in the household of Catherine de Bourbon, sister of Henri of Navarre, but in 1595 he converted to Catholicism and became a prolific writer and publicist for Henri IV. In 1600 he published Le purgatoire prouvé par la parole de Dieu, an examination of the scriptural evidence for Purgatory and a refutation of the Reformed interpretation of these passages.110 This may have been written in response to du Moulin, but his 1603 La fournaise ardente et le tour de reverbere, pour évaporer les prétendues eaux de Siloé et pour corroborer le Purgatoire … was constructed as a point by point refutation of du Moulin’s tract.111 Traditional Catholic writers saw in the text of Isaiah 8:6 a metaphor for Purgatory: as the people refused the gentle, purifying waters of Siloe, God would make the rivers overflow to cleanse the land with greater fury. Thus, sin had to cleansed through purgation. In the work of 1600, Palma Cayet upheld the traditional view of the function of Purgatory but gave the role of sinful flesh greater stress: souls have to be purged because they are infected by the contagion of the body and have to be free of stains before they can appear before God. Although Christ’s sacrifice on the cross remitted all sins, the individual still erred because of its connection with the body. A purgatorial remedy was necessary to purify the soul before it faced God.112 However, Purgatory came from God’s love. The waters of Siloe were also used by Christ to heal the blind man (John 9: 1–7). If He wanted to submit us to the full rigour of his justice for our sins, he would commit us to eternal damnation. But God remits our sins and gives us life, allowing the soul the opportunity to be cleansed in Purgatory so that it might become

    111   109

Ibid., pp. 8–9. P.V. Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire prouvé par la Parole de Dieu (Paris, 1600). P.V. Palma Cayet, La fournaise ardente et le four de reverbere, pour évaporer les prétendues eaux de Siloé et pour corroborer le Purgatoire, contre les heresies, erreurs, calomnies, faussetez et cavillations ineptes du pretend minister du Moulin (Saint-Germain lez Paris, 1603). 112   Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, p. 6r. 110

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

73

pure and return to Him.113 In the 1603 work, the medicinal imagery was taken still further, for Palma Cayet likened the pains of Purgatory to a ‘cathartic medicine’, which healed through affliction, as rhubarb was used to cure a sick stomach.114 Similarly Hugues Burlat, Canon of Orléans and militant Catholic, published Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare in 1603, which linked the redemptive self-sacrifice of Christ to Purgatory, ‘because although Our Lord has made an infinite satisfaction, he wishes that, as he suffered bodily for us, so we, who are members of his mystical body … should endure and suffer in our turn, for the servant is not greater than the master’.115 André Duval, theologian at the Sorbonne and close to dévots such as Bérulle, published another refutation of du Moulin’s arguments in 1603, Feu d’helie pour tarir les faux de Siloe. He similarly used scripture to prove the existence of Purgatory and to justify suffrages for the dead.116 While the passion of Christ is sufficient price paid to redeem souls, this had to be applied, by the sacraments, the mass, good works or by enduring evil with patience, for the love of God.117 Sins are like debts, the payment of which is penalty and satisfaction. God remits our debts but we have to make some contribution, by the penalty we suffer.118 In 1603, Suarez also preached and published a reply to du Moulin, entitled Torrent de feu sortant de la face de Dieu, pour desseicher les Eaux de Mara …119 His defence of Purgatory was threefold, that it was an ancient doctrine because prayers for the dead had been upheld by the Church for 1,368 years; that it was a real place below ground where souls were held until purged, when they would enter heaven and that the Bible exhorts us to pray for each other, living and dead.120 These beliefs and the fiery nature of Purgatory were based on biblical proofs, quoted at length. In 1605, Charles Durand published Le purgatoire des fidelles deffuncts dedicated to Marie de Medicis, justifying Purgatory using St Paul, stating that he threatened the Corinthians with     115   113

Ibid., p. 7v, 26v. Palma Cayet, La fournaise, p. 10–11. Hugues Burlat, Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare Par lesquels est verifiée l’intercession des saints, la confession auriculaire et le Purgatoire (Paris, 1603), pp. 67r–v. 116   André Duval, Feu d’helie pour tarir les faux de Siloe, auquel est amplement prouvé le Purgatoire contre le Ministre du Moulin & respond aux raisons & allegations contraires (Paris, 1603). 117   Duval, Feu d’helie, p. 70. 118   Duval, Feu d’helie, p. 72. 119   Megan Armstrong, ‘Adjusting to Peace: the Observant Franciscans of Paris and the reign of Henri IV’. In A. Forrestal and E. Nelson (eds), Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 45. 120   Suarès, Torrent, pp. 10–17. 114

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

74

the fire of Purgatory, for this apostle and the first Christians advocated penitence in the name and in favour of departed souls.121 Descriptions of Purgatory emerge more strongly from these works than from those written during the religious wars; there was a real effort to impart the terrors of the place. Burlat’s Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare followed medieval descriptions, that Purgatory was located at the ‘gates’ of Hell, near to the upper regions whose punishments were not as severe as in the lower regions. But the same fire burned in Purgatory and Hell, although in the former, the sentence was of limited duration.122 Charles Durand reiterated the subterranean location, while refuting a series of other beliefs. He related that some people claimed that Purgatory existed in bad conscience, others, that it must be in the valley of Josephat or at the end of that place called Tophet, yet others claimed that Purgatory was in the air. But he stated that all of these were false, for it was most likely that Purgatory was situated in the bowels of the earth.123 But for Duval, the Church had never defined the location of Purgatory, whether it was above or below the earth. The precise location of Purgatory was not an article of faith. He believed that a soul judged by God after death is punished in the place that He wishes, above or below ground, for as long or as little as He pleases.124 He supported this with the text of the mass for the dead, in which God was implored to ‘deliver the souls of the faithful departed from infernal punishments, from the deep lake, from the mouth of the lion, from the fear that the pit of Hell will swallow them and that they will fall into darkness’.125 As for punishments, fire remained important. Using biblical proofs, Palma Cayet concluded that because stains adhered to our souls, they had to be removed by an efficacious method, which can only be by fire for this was the only element that could cleanse souls. The fire of Purgatory was not the same as the flames of Hell, which would burn the resurrected body, for it was for souls alone.126 In addition to the tracts, the writings of late medieval and sixteenth-century writers were reprinted and became popular. The Purgatory of Catherine of Genoa was published in French in 1610 and then at least eight more times in Paris and Lyon before 1668.127 François de Sales was a devotee of the works of Catherine,   Charles Durand, Le purgatoire des fidelles deffuncts (Poitiers, 1605). This was a copy of Anon, Purgatoire des catholiques contre le debordenments des eaux du lac de Genève (1605). All citations here are taken from the Anonymous pamphlet. 122   Burlat, Deux sermons, p. 62r–64r. 123   Anon, Purgatoire des catholiques, p. 271. 124   Duval, Feu d’helie, pp. 33, 43–4. 125   Ibid., pp. 57–8. 126   Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, p. 19v; 21v. 127   Catherine de Gênes, La Vie et les oeuvres spirituelles (Lyon, 1610). 121

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

75

whose works also influenced Cardinal de Bérulle. Teresa of Avila’s works were also popular, linked to the discalced Carmelite movement which was widely patronised at this time.128 From 1600, increasing emphasis on good works within Catholic theology led to elaboration on the importance and nature of suffrages for the dead. As in earlier periods, the primary importance of lifetime activities was stressed. Fear of Purgatory made even good people more diligent, to perform good works without waiting on others, so as not to fall into the pains of Purgatory’s fires. The rich had especial need of this diligence, for wealth caused people to develop earthly passions and was often, in itself, ill-gotten.129 Burlat argued that good works built upon the foundation of faith are the obligation of the Christian. Those who built permanent good works on these foundations would receive immediate eternal glory, while those who built venial sins on their foundations, would be delayed in Purgatory until entirely purified of their faults.130 Already in 1600, Palma Cayet wrote that ‘devotions and prayers were not sufficient to enter into paradise, if they were not accompanied by good works’, which were judged on their quality and their intention. Purgation was for all souls who had hesitated in faith and for those who had not promoted their faith by good works.131 But the souls in Purgatory could be aided by the good works of the living. As Palma Cayet wrote, we can have done by our friends after our death, that which we have not done sufficiently ourselves while alive: ‘We must pray for the souls in Purgatory; God notices the prayers of good people and delivers souls from their pains.132 Although souls in Heaven no longer needed prayers, the faithful living did not know where a soul resided, so all should be prayed for out of charity. If a soul no longer needed prayers, they would return to our benefit.133 The role of the Church emerges with even greater force. As Palma Cayet wrote, ‘the Church is a body where the members carry each other’s burdens, both during the course of this life and after death’.134 He emphasised the role of the Church in the remission of the sins of the living, through administering the word of God and the sacraments.135 Duval also stressed the centrality of accomplishing satisfaction or penance, ordered 128   Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Counter Reformation in Paris, (Oxford, 2004), p. 94. 129   Palma Cayet, La fournaise, p. 33. 130   Burlat, Deux sermons, p. 77r. 131   Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, pp. 17v–19r, 21v. 132   Ibid., p. 24v, 26r. 133   Palma Cayet, La fournaise, p. 12. 134   Ibid., p. 16. 135   Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, p. 17v.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

76

by the superiors of the Church in order to profit from Christ’s sacrifice and to receive salvation.136 For this reason, indulgences and jubilees, with their associated pilgrimages, were once again strongly promoted, as both offered plenary remission of sin and statements against Protestant heresy. Palma Cayet wrote of the 1600 Papal jubilee, that it brought remission of sins for those who participated in its rites, as well as for the dead, if suffrages had been performed in their names.137 Works on Purgatory of the 1620s and 30s began to leave behind polemic debate and to concentrate increasingly on sin and suffrages, blending into more general literature on the Christian life and death. The greatest development was a move from emphasising Purgatory as a place of judgement and justice where satisfaction was achieved for sins committed, to ‘charity’ as the motive for punishment and for its remission. Good works became increasingly privileged as the best suffrage for souls in Purgatory. Also, it is in the works of this period that we find the most detailed descriptions of Purgatory and of the suffrages necessary for the souls lodged there. The argument for the existence of Purgatory was now secure; their authors concentrated on how to ‘manage’ the experience. The work of the Italian Capuchin Alexis de Salo, Le triomphe des âmes de purgatoire, translated and published in Lyon in 1621, is an early example of this genre. The work provided a justification, proof and description of Purgatory and its punishments, but the main content was a detailed description of useful suffrages for the souls there. The Jesuit Étienne Binet’s tract of 1635, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames suffrantes en Purgatoire et des moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu of 1635, is as much a manual on good works as a tract about Purgatory. The central premise was that ‘there is no satisfaction more important in this world than to comfort suffering souls’.138 The high point of Christian perfection was charity. Binet proposed that of all the works of brotherly love and mercy, the most sublime, purest and most advantageous was the service rendered to souls in Purgatory. He gave ten reasons for this assertion, which included the incomparable torment of souls in Purgatory; the higher nature of works of spiritual mercy than those of corporal relief; the gratitude and obligation of souls for charity, compared to the ingratitude of the poor and their abuse of a donor’s goods, and the importance of populating paradise by helping souls get to heaven.139 Binet’s work contains a rare amount of detail on the nature     138   136

Duval, Feu d’helie, p. 73. Palma Cayet, La fournaise, p. 37. Étienne Binet, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames suffrantes en Purgatoire et des moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu (Rouen, 1635), p. 1. 139   Ibid., pp. 9–21. 137

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

77

and punishments of Purgatory. As with Hell, the two punishments were deprivation of the sight of God and torment by fire. Purgatory was full of braziers where souls were held captive. God had chosen fire to chastise souls because it was the most active, penetrating and insupportable element.140 As well as fire, Binet described other torments, such as a great ‘worm’ which gnawed souls, perhaps an echo of St Patrick’s Purgatory. But it was the realisation that it was by their own fault that they had been deprived of glory which made Purgatory particularly dreadful for souls.141 By the mid-seventeenth century, hope as well as punishment was stressed as in Renaissance works, in contrast to those of the religious wars. Robert Bellarmine’s De Arte Bene Moriendi, published in Rome in 1620 was a handbook on living and dying well, with precepts on virtue and on the sacraments as means to salvation. Discussion was of Hell rather than Purgatory, which received little mention; the best means to die well was to live well.142 This was very popular, with at least five Latin editions known in France between 1620 and 1665 and an early translation into French in 1620 by S. Cramoisy.143 Jean-Pierre Camus wrote that the Holy Spirit made it clear to souls in Purgatory that they numbered among the children of God; they knew that they were in charity and thus with God, they praised and blessed God and they had hope, whereas souls in Hell had only despair.144 While for Camus fire remained the main torment, he took up the medieval debate and argued that souls were not tormented by demons, ‘because for children of God who died in grace, who had remained victorious up to the point of death, it did not seem likely that they would be put for a time in the hands of demons they had vanquished’.145 French-language polemical works continued to appear after 1630, but were mostly produced in the French-speaking cities of the Spanish Netherlands, such as Lille, Tournai and Verdun. A relatively late defence of Purgatory against Protestant teaching was published in 1638 in Tournon by the Capuchin Andel de Lodève. His Defense du purgatoire et de l’honneur des ecclésiastiques et des religieux mesprizez et calumnies sans raison par les ministres de la religion pretendue reformée uses the traditional scriptural texts to refute the Protestant denial of Purgatory and to justify suffrages, particularly clerical-centred practices such as

    142   143   144   145   140 141

Ibid., pp. 62–3, 65. Binet, De l’estat heureux, pp. 79–80, 104. Robert Bellarmine, De Arte Bene Moriendi (Rome, 1620). Robert Bellarmine, L’art de bien vivre pour heureusement mourir (Paris, 1620). Jean-Pierre Camus, Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire (Paris, 1641), p. 36. Ibid., p. 39.

78

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

indulgences.146 As with the French works of the 1610s, he was concerned to relate the merits of Christ’s passion to the doctrine of Purgatory. He argued that the blood, death and passion of the Saviour were applied to the faithful in four ways, by means of the sacraments, by a fervent and ardent charity, by works of satisfaction such as alms, fasts, vigils and prayers, and indulgences.147 Similarly, the Jesuit Marc de Bonnyers offered a refutation of Protestant claims with a detailed handbook of good works to be offered to souls in his L’advocat des ames de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider, published in Lille in 1640.148 As with the French works, there was a move towards giving information and advice rather than merely justify the doctrine of Purgatory. From the second quarter of the seventeenth century, perhaps the most powerful and widely disseminated information about Purgatory came in catechisms developed from the Roman version, produced in many of the dioceses of France. While the structure of the Roman decrees and catechisms were followed and incorporated, the local catechisms filled in extra details on Purgatory and its suffrages, often in simpler language and using a more direct question and answer format. Jean-Pierre Camus published an Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire in 1641 solely on the doctrine, in this style. The first question, ‘what do you understand by the word Purgatory’ was clearly answered with ‘the purgation of souls by Jesus Christ, the tribulations and afflictions which purified the good, as gold was purified in a furnace and a ‘third place’ between paradise and Hell where souls of the faithful paid temporal penalties due for their sins, once remitted of their sins and of eternal damnation’.149 One of the most influential catechisms in Brittany was that produced for the diocese of Nantes by the Sieur Menard, priest and director of the seminary, under the patronage of Bishop Gilles de Beauvau. The catechism comprised three sections, one for small children, one for older children preparing for their first communion and a third, ‘where the Christian truths are more amply explained’. The most detailed discussion of Purgatory comes in the second catechism, designed for adolescents. This defined who went to Purgatory and taught that it was essential to comfort the souls there by prayers and good works, ‘not only by praying but in fasting and giving alms … We pray willingly; the rest costs a little more but it is 146   Andel de Lodève, Defense du purgatoire et de l’honneur des ecclésiastiques et des religieux mesprizez et calumnies sans raison par les ministres de la religion pretendue reformée (Tournon, 1638). 147   Ibid., pp. 102–104. 148   Marc de Bonnyers, L’advocat des ames de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider (Lille, 1640). 149   Camus, Instruction Catholique, p. 30.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

79

also sometimes more agreeable to God and more capable of comforting the poor, suffering souls’.150 Again, emphasis on good works was given equal place to masses, unlike the sacramental emphasis of the original Tridentine documents. Above all, to avoid Purgatory it was necessary to live well. Those who died well ‘thought often about death and undertook actions as though each day would be the last one of their life.’151 In the third, advanced, catechism, the efficacy of the mass for souls was stressed more. There was also a section on the rites of the feast of All Saints, when suffrages for the dead were advocated as a vital good work.152 Breton catechisms were also produced in the mid-century, for example by Julien Maunoir in 1659.153 The clearest characteristic of the writings on Purgatory from this period, then, is the continued and heightened stress on good works as a site for salvation, for the dead as well as the living.154 Claude de la Barre, a priest from Verdun, wrote in Resolution à scavoir si l’on doit apprehender et craindre ou bien aymer et souhaiter la mort of 1628, ‘charity must be the first spiritual good for our souls … one day we will be called before the tribunal of Jesus Christ to receive payment for our works, good or bad’.155 As in the past, lifetime activities were the best remedy for avoiding Purgatory. This life is the time to gain mercy, the time for accruing merit ends with death.156 Heirs were not reliable for suffrages. While they enjoyed the good life and the goods and property of their parents, they might not even assist the departed with a Pater Noster. Binet proposed a number of ‘works’ for avoiding Purgatory or having only a short stay there. The first was by having great contrition for sin, certainly on the deathbed but preferably on a regular basis throughout life. The superior calling of the religious life was also stressed, for to die in orders and preferably to renew vows before death gave plenary grace while to be a preacher zealous for the salvation of souls was of great merit. Those who served the plague-stricken and died of the disease to save others had all sins erased. A soul perfectly dedicated to the Blessed Virgin would not go to Purgatory, or would spend very little time there. Those who suffered great hurt and tribulation in this     152   153   154   150

Jean de la Noë-Mesnard, Catechisme du diocèse de Nantes (Nantes, 1689), p. 55. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 580–83. Courouau, ‘L’imprimé religieux’, p. 61. Théophile Brachet de la Milletière, Response du sieur de la Milletière à la letter d’un de ses amis sur son ‘Traité de la nécessité de la puissance du pape en l’église ou la doctrine du Purgatoire suivant le concile de Trente (Paris, 1640), p. 36. 155   Claude de la Barre, Resolution à scavoir si l’on doit apprehender et craindre ou bien aymer et souhaiter la mort (Paris, 1628), p. 60. 156   Binet, De l’estat heureux, p. 223. 151

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

80

life, with steadfast faith, would have little suffering in the next. Those who were liberal with their charity to the poor and to departed souls, those who were chaste or humble or were obedient and courageous in faith would be saved. Finally, frequently-received communion was an antidote to Purgatory.157 The nature of suffrages for the departed received particular attention in this literature. De Salo asked the reader to consider the possibility that one suffrage for a soul would release it from ten years of punishment. That soul would always remember the good deed and never forget its benefactor, for whom it would pray to God in return.158 For Binet, comforting and assisting souls was the highest and most perfect form of charity. After all, we would all be in Purgatory one day and the souls as well as their guardian angels would pray for their benefactors in return.159 Souls were entirely dependent on the suffrages of the living for comfort. As Binet argued, the living could escape, change and help themselves but souls had no means of fleeing their tribulations. So, what better good work than to help the helpless, rather than those who could help themselves.160 Prayer was considered by de Salo to be the most convenient, popular and easiest of all suffrages, which could be undertaken by people of whatever quality. He recommended a wide range of prayers for the dead. The faithful should say a Pater Noster and also an Ave and a De Profundis, when passing a cemetery or entering a church, for all the dead buried there. A rosary could be recited every day for departed souls and de Salo recommended a special rosary cycle for the departed, where the Ave was substituted with ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis’. Another efficacious prayer for departed souls was to say, with arms crossed, five Pater Nosters and five Aves, in memory of the five wounds of Christ. For those with more time or ability, a daily De Profundis, with a Requiem aeternam at the end for specific souls, the seven penitential psalms or even reciting a nocturne with lauds or the office for the dead.161 Binet considered that suffrages carried out for specific individuals were the most efficacious. If prayers were said for a particular person, the merit would be applied to them. If prayers were said generally, God put this into the general treasury of the Church. It was better to pray for a few than for many, as the merit of an individual’s devotion was finite and if spread thinly among many,    

157

Ibid., pp. 428–529. Alexis de Salo, Le triomphe des ames de purgatoire, (Lyon, 1621). References here are from the edition published in Rouen 1637. p. 17; Matt. 7; De Salo, Le triomphe des ames, p. 144. 159   Binet, De l’estat heureux, p. 25. 160   Ibid., p. 47. 161   De Salo, Le triomphe, pp. 26–8, 31, 34, 235. 158

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

81

did not have so great an effect. Binet therefore recommended alternate prayers, for one person one day, than for all souls, in turn.162 De Bonnyers had great faith in the psalm De Profundis and recommended that it be said at night, as one entered bed, which he likened to entering the tomb, on getting up in the morning, as if rising from the grave, when drawing near to a fire, remembering that souls burned, upon hearing bells for funeral processions or vigils, when a corpse was seen being taken to burial, when passing cemeteries or just during mass. One should always hold the souls of Purgatory in remembrance, with prayers.163 Linked with prayer, fasting and other good works for souls were recommended, such as corporal disciplining and pilgrimage. Fasting in some way could be offered to God for souls. Even the faint-hearted could avoid the tavern on Sundays and cease swearing, which cost nothing but merited grace.164 The intercessions of saints were also efficacious. According to Binet, the saints prayed to God to inspire the living to perform suffrages and good works for suffering souls. The saints tried to shorten the time an individual was sentenced to spend in Purgatory and some underwent penitence and performed satisfactions so that God would transfer their superabundant merits to souls. The saints also prayed to the Blessed Virgin to apply some of her merit and to Christ for his infinite merit, to suffering souls.165 In imitation of medieval writings, de Salo’s work on Purgatory devoted a final section to accounts of saints’ experiences of Purgatory and the return of spirits asking for suffrages. For example, Yves of Brittany, Provincial of the Holy Land, was asked by a disturbed spirit for masses to alleviate his torments in Purgatory. Yves took communion and prayed for the dead monk; the following night, the brother returned to thank Yves for his prayers, dressed in white and bathed in light, having been released into heaven by Yves’ devotion to the holy sacrament.166 Of course, the mass, continued to be advocated by writers. In de Salo’s work of 1621, masses for particular souls continued to be given prime place. Especially efficacious was giving money to poor and needy priests to say masses, for this way the sacrament and charity was combined.167 Like prayers, masses were best applied to a single person but if general masses were offered, the merits were shared.168 The strength of the mass was so  

162

Binet, De l’estat heureux, p. 247; de Bonnyers, L’advocat, pp. 79–83, 90–91,

101, 103.

    165   166   167   168   163 164

de Bonnyers, L’advocat, p. 109. Ibid., pp. 40–50. Ibid., pp. 223–6. Ibid., pp. 330–31. De Salo, Le triomphe des ames, p. 22. Ibid., p. 204.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

82

strong that for each one, two souls were more quickly taken to paradise and it was likely that two or three masses would therefore deliver many souls. Prayer during masses was also efficacious. Binet recommended that during the Confiteor individuals should pray with hands together for the souls in Purgatory, that at the elevation of the host one should say ‘O Lord, by your death have pity on the soul for which I pray’ and at the elevation of the chalice, ‘O Lord, see the blood sufficient to deliver them’ then ‘Permit, O God, that this chalice descends to the flames of Purgatory’.169 For those who were priests, if they had periods of time without having to say prescribed masses, he recommended that they celebrate a weekly mass, or at least say a collect, for souls. For the laity, they could take communion in the name of souls.170 Above all other suffrages, charity was recommended. De Bonnyers and de Salo emphasised that alms-giving to the poor, recommended by Christ, would draw a soul from Purgatory even better than any masses: ‘I do not deny that the sacrifice of the mass is not, of all the suffrages, the most powerful and efficacious for departed souls and that it does not give them the greatest comfort, but I dare to say that charity, in that it helps the needs of the poor, can sometimes be more agreeable to God and more satisfactory for the departed than a great number of masses’.171 Of the best ways of helping souls, de Bonnyers gave first place to alms for the poor. The rich can give a great deal, the poor can share their food and those who have little, can pray for the poor, so everyone, no matter what their estate, can do something.172 The role of the institutional church continued to strengthen; for ‘we believe in the Holy Church to deliver souls from Purgatory, and in the same church who holds jointly with St Paul the sword, and with St Peter the keys, to facilitate our exit from Purgatory’.173 In the version of St Patrick’s Purgatory produced by François Bouillon in 1643, the reader was urged to pay greater diligence to accomplishing the penances imposed by his father confessor and to participate in indulgences and jubilees, so there was less to make satisfaction for in the next life, because each sin and fault will be exactly accounted for in that other place.174 In 1665, Claude de la Sainte-Marthe published a handbook in French of prayers, sermons and offices for the dead, including writings of Saints John Chrysostom, Cyprian, Gregory, Bernard and Catherine of Genoa. The words of the     171   172   173   174   169 170

de Bonnyers, L’advocat, pp. 60, 65. Ibid., p. 72–4. De Bonnyers, L’advocat, pp. 57–8; de Salo, Le triomphe des ames, p. 44. De Bonnyers, L’advocat, p. 21. Anon, L’enfer, le purgatoire et le paradis temporel de la France (1649), p. 6. Boüillon, Purgatoire de S. Patrice, p. 315.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

83

saints and the mediation of the offices of the mass were the best way to console the living and help them with prayers for the dead.175 The revival of indulgences was part of this reactivation of the authority of the Church over the souls in Purgatory. However, from the 1650s, works devoted solely to Purgatory began to disappear. Discussion of the afterlife and salvation were mostly confined to a wider literature of spirituality and living and dying well. The management of a soul’s destination was increasingly the work of the living individual. Certainly, it appears that with Jansenism and other influences from the mid-seventeenth century, the details of Purgatory became more muted. Jansenists attacked ‘the frivolous concept of a God whose punishment could be bought off so cheaply, by human intercessions’.176 Pierre Nicole saw Hell as a place where souls were deprived of the love and sight of God. Despair was the real punishment of Hell and physical elements were downgraded.177 Théophile Brachet de la Milletière’s work on Purgatory of 1640 stressed the need to pray for the dead and to perform charitable acts in their name, but denied the ‘superstition’ of Purgatory as a harsh place of punishment. Rather, he was vague about the abode of souls after death but before judgement day, although conceded that penalties could be exacted in the next life. Stress was on prayer and good works rather than purgation.178 By the later seventeenth century, John McManners argues, most devotional works did not dwell on death. While their message was clearly that we die but once and must ensure that we make no mistakes, it was important that preparation was not left too late. For all age groups, preparation for death was part of a regular routine of prayer. In most writings, hope and salvation outweighed the burden of judgement and fear. Even gloomy spiritual writers advocated a way of life of charity, prayer and austerity daily offered to God, as the best preparation for the end.179 Also, Roche argues that the readership began to change. The art of dying was above all the reading matter of the clergy and seminarian rather than the laity.180 Even among orthodox Catholics, there was an increased downplaying of Purgatory in the later seventeenth century. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet did not describe hell at all in any of his numerous works. His was a more spiritual conception of the afterlife, where hell is sin itself, it exists in each of us when we live in sin and Christ descended     177   178   179   180   175 176

Claude de Sainte-Marthe, De la piété des chrestiens envers les morts (Paris, 1665). McManners, p. 127. Vovelle, La Mort, pp. 306–7. Brachet de la Milletière, Response, passim. McManners, pp. 198–202, 438. Roche, ‘La mémoire de la mort’, p. 97.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

84

permanently into our individual hells to offer us salvation.181 In 1695, Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu wrote that ‘my God is not a cruel god’ and for Pierre Bayle, the notion of infernal suffering was completely incompatible with the goodness of God. Georges Minois comments that the ideas of Origen about universal salvation resurfaced, quietly at first, but quickly spread within the clergy.182 Camporesi argues that across the eighteenth century, there was a transformation of God the Judge into the God of Mercy, which attenuated the fear of Hell.183 This changing view of Hell impacted on that of Purgatory as well. McManners shows that devotional writers systematised the intercessory duties of the Christian year, with individuals counselled to make petitions for the dead on the anniversaries of their death, one day a month and on All Souls’ Day.184 This decline in Purgatory continued into the Enlightenment, a part of the process which Vovelle calls ‘de-Christianisation’. Conclusions This examination of polemical, pedagogical and devotional works on Purgatory shows that writings about the doctrine fall into four main phases. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most discussion about the afterlife occurred in sermons and ‘handbooks’ on dying, which emphasised lifetime works but ultimately privileged the deathbed as the site of salvation for souls. There was little specific detail on Purgatory in this corpus. Renaissance writings moved away from discussions of torment after death to emphasise Christ’s redeeming role in salvation. But the wars of religion revived Purgatory. Mid-sixteenth-century Protestant attacks on Catholic doctrine and practices led to a major publication campaign to justify and disseminate orthodox theology, including Purgatory. Between 1560 and 1620, numerous works devoted solely to Purgatory were issued, which gave elaborate justification for purgation and for suffrages for the dead. To this material was added the powerful support of the rulings of the Council of Trent and its catechism, which began a more systematic teaching of the doctrine and associated religious practices, particularly highlighting the role of the eucharist. In the early seventeenth century, although polemical literature continued to be produced, it became less important over time and there was a move back to ‘handbook’ literature. It is here that we find the greatest detail on the nature of Purgatory and the     183   184   181 182

Minois, L’enfer, p. 102. Ibid., p. 109. Camporesi, p. 47. McManners, p. 127.

Purgatory and the Counter Reformation

85

appropriate devotions to be practiced. Authors were less concerned to justify the doctrine than to teach and instruct, while good works began to emerge as a central focus of suffrages. Gradually, texts devoted to Purgatory or to souls alone disappeared after the mid-century and the afterlife was more frequently treated in general works on piety and salvation, emphasising lifetime meditations and actions rather than suffrages for the dead. A central question about literature on Purgatory and the afterlife is that of readership. Who were these works aimed at and what impact did they have? To what extent did ideas reach down into different social groups and cut across cultural boundaries in France? Luc Racaut argues that such works were enormously significant. He claims that a determining factor in the majority’s continuing adherence to Catholicism in the Reformation period was the large body of Catholic literature that came from the presses after the mid-1550s, which contributed strong and persuasive arguments in doctrinal debates. Written by secular and regular clergy, vernacular French was quickly adopted and the printing industry in France actively supported the production of orthodox works. There was a conscious targeting of ‘the masses’, to make Catholic ideas accessible to them, so that Protestant arguments would not win over the unlearned.185 But while it is clear that such tactics were important at a time of polemical and political conflict, to define a confessional position, such literature was less popular in the seventeenth century as the move back to ‘handbooks’ for living and for the treatment of souls shows. In any case, low literacy rates are always a sticking factor in such debates, especially in regions where French was not the first language of the population, as in western Brittany. Yet there was great inter-connectedness between the written and the oral in the early modern period. The printed word could be read aloud, in households, inns and in presbyteries and mediated from one language to another by a bilingual population. Ideas read in tracts were quickly passed on in sermons, particularly by the Dominicans and Franciscans, then in the seventeenth century by parish clergy and missionaries, who preached in Breton and French. To translate ideas from one medium to another, songs and poems were written by clerics as well. In 1656, the Carmelite Bernard du Saint Esprit of Lesneven wrote a canticle entitled ‘A Dialogue with Death’ to be sung to music. In this, different sorts and conditions of people spoke with death, kings, royal officers, merchants, young men and women. The final message was that everyone should pray ceaselessly to Jesus Christ for his protection so that

185   L. Racaut, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 2, 5, 19–22.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

86

death should not come as a surprise.186 A number of Breton vernacular works have been collected by Alain Croix. The poem La Gwerz ar Garnel or The Complaint of the Ossuary, known by 1750, is typical of such works. In this poem of 21 verses, the bones lying within an ossuary or charnel house speak to the living and ask them for suffrages, to release them from Purgatory. Verses 9 and 10 state ‘If you ask us where our souls have gone/ We will reply ‘to Purgatory, because that is our land/ They burn in the fire to acquit the debt/ contracted on earth by God’s justice’/ From among the flames they do not cease to cry/ Asking for your prayer to be able to leave/ These sombre prisons where they were thrown/ Make haste to help them, do not tarry. The rest of the poem is devoted to useful suffrages. Prayers and alms feature in two verses, while six of the verses show the value of the mass.187 The missionary Grignion de Montfort also wrote a song of the souls in Purgatory. ‘Alas that we suffer/Who can understand it/We weep, we cry/Without anyone wanting to listen’, for his work in the rural parishes of eastern Brittany.188 While the surviving literature on Purgatory emanated from clerical elites, doctrine was never solely a ‘taught’ belief disseminated downwards. Purgatory was a theological construct but it also had to be acceptable and accessible as a belief system for the faithful if it was to succeed and to influence behaviour. To test the impact of these writings and ideas on regional societies far from the printing centres of Paris and Lyon, we turn to the study of ‘faith in practice’, to examine suffrages for the dead and their evolution over time. How far did the teachings of clerics influence what people believed and practiced in the provinces? Did popular piety follow the interests of the clerical elites? As Clive Burgess states, a more instructive source of evidence for the nature of belief, and one that occurred more widely than text, is the services and good works commissioned by individuals to achieve post-mortem satisfaction and thus liberation from Purgatory.189 We turn now to the best documented of postmortem intercessory practices, the foundation of perpetual masses and their evolution over time, to test the impact of theology on practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Gwennolé Le Menn, ‘Dialogue avec la mort. Poème en moyen-breton’, Études celtiques XV (1978): pp. 633–45. 187   Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1349–51. 188   Vovelle, La mort, p. 310. 189   C. Burgess, ‘An Afterlife in Memory. Commemoration and its effect in a late Medieval Parish’, SCH 45 (2009): p. 196. 186

Chapter 4

Strategies for Eternity: Perpetual Foundations for Intercession and their Evolution Over Time 1480–1720 ‘Pray for us, you who are alive on earth, pray for us, poor and sorrowful souls who are in this bitter and harsh prison … do not turn a deaf ear to our piteous clamour’.1

The relationship between the living and the dead in Brittany has long been the subject of debate. Travellers and folklorists from the nineteenth century onwards observed that the dead played a particularly prominent part in Breton popular culture. After a visit to the west in the 1830s, Prosper Mérimée described the macabre sight of ossuaries full of defleshed corpses in Breton churchyards and a départemental administrator who toured Finistère in 1829–31, remarked ‘nothing is more sacred … than the veneration given to the dead, than the religion of the tomb’.2 Alain Croix has argued that this distinctive veneration of the dead was largely a result of the dissemination of Counter Reformation ideals into the Breton countryside after 1600. By the later Middle Ages, the mental world of rural Bretons was coloured by the presence of the Anaon, the collective society of the souls of the departed. Croix argues that the resurgent Catholic Church promoted this existing cult of the dead ‘to raise levels of spiritual awareness and to increase formal participation in the rites of the … Church’.3 Croix also argues for the distinctiveness of the western Breton understanding of the afterlife: emphasis was on Heaven and Hell rather than Purgatory and there was only a limited belief in the ‘third

  Jean Gerson, ‘Complainte des âmes en purgatoire’ cited in J. Le Goff and R. Remond (eds), Histoire de la France religieuse, vol II Du christianisme flamboyante à l’aube des Lumières (Paris, 1988), p. 167. 2   Prosper Mérimée, Notes d’un voyage dans l’Ouest de la France (Paris, 1836), pp. 164–5; Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1–2. 3   Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, chapter 18 is an essay on the culture of the macabre. 1

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

88

place’.4 This model of a late and under-developed concept of Purgatory in Brittany, at least in the countryside of the west, contradicts the chronology and evolution of the doctrine shown in the previous chapter’s discussion of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French print culture. Croix’s model suggests that rural Brittany was excluded from these wider concerns with Purgatory, at least until the seventeenth century. The aim of this chapter is to examine the timing of the reception of the doctrine of Purgatory into Brittany, to compare the chronology of devotional activities related to intercession for departed souls with the evolution of ideas about doctrine seen in the sermon and pamphlet literature. The central question is whether wider ecclesiastical and kingdom-wide debates are reflected in actions on the ground in Brittany. This will be done by an examination of a practice strongly linked to belief in a ‘third place’, the founding of perpetual masses, across the period 1480–1720. To do this, collective patterns of activity reflected by statistical series will be combined with case studies of individual founders. Differences between town and countryside, east and west Brittany are considered. Finally, the nature and causes of similarities and differences between doctrinal teachings and real practice are considered. It is argued that the evolution of perpetual masses shows that the traditional historiographical model of a limited reception for the ‘third place’ in Brittany needs to be revised, although Breton responses to Purgatory did not always follow the chronology of polemical campaigns or the interests of their authors. A quantitative study of the evolution of foundations shows that the later Middle Ages and then the seventeenth century saw a great deal of Breton wealth invested in postmortem intercession, although the period of the wars of religion saw the practice decline. Qualitative study of foundation contracts also shows that the nature of intercession underwent modification over time, in terms of donors, locations and types of masses. All of this indicates that the doctrine of Purgatory was embedded in Breton culture by the later Middle Ages, although the best means of interceding for individual souls changed over time. Mitigating Judgement: Temporary and Short-term Intercession After Death The enormous number of spiritual bequests found in the wills of the later Middle Ages and post-Reformation Catholic Europe show that the desire for intercession for departed souls before God was widely internalised across the continent.5 By far the most important form of intercession was 4 5

   

Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 390. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 27.

Strategies for Eternity

89

the mass. All over Europe, the numbers of testators requesting masses was high. In the Avignon region in the thirteenth century there were no such bequests but between the second half of the fourteenth century and the early sixteenth century, 65 to 70 per cent of testators requested masses to be said for their souls.6 Towards the end of the period under scrutiny here, at the end of the seventeenth century, 80 per cent of Provençal testators requested masses.7 By far the most frequently-requested forms of postmortem intercession were short-term mass cycles. Partly this was a result of practical economics – individuals commissioned affordable intercessory forms – but it was also a result of changing views about the fate of the soul immediately after death in the later Middle Ages. Arthur Bissenger argues that during this period, funerary practice changed. The most striking transformation was the concentration of masses in the period immediately after death, with the first year afterwards being particularly important.8 Jacques Chiffoleau supports this, arguing that funeral obsequies show that death was less of an instantaneous act than a process, involving stages which had to be passed through, closing at the end of twelve months with a ‘year’s mind’ service. At this point, the deceased passed definitively into the world of the dead.9 Short-term or time-limited intercession for the soul began with the funeral, which ‘unleashed the first massive updraught of prayers of intercession’ and about which a great deal has been written.10 The late medieval funeral was a lengthy series of rituals. It began on the eve of burial with the vespers of the office of the dead followed the next day by matins of the dead and a requiem mass. The introduction of the Roman rite in the early seventeenth century shortened funeral obsequies as matins and other offices lost their popularity while the requiem and its absolution grew in importance.11 Simultaneously with the funeral and also following it, multiple masses could be commissioned, to be celebrated as close as possible to the death and burial of the deceased. They were often divided among several altars, churches and convents, to widen the scope of prayer. An octave service, eight days after burial, would repeat the funeral service and a ‘month’s mind’ could repeat the obsequies again, one month later. Trentals, cycles of thirty masses of ‘St Gregory’ usually over a period of   Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (c.1320–c.1480) (Rome, 1980), p. 341. 7   Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983), p. 347. 8   Arthur Bissegger, Une paroisse raconte ses morts. L’obituaire de l’église Saint-Paul à Villeneuve (XIVe–XVe siècle) (Lausanne, 2003), pp. 80–81. 9   Chiffoleau, p. 147. 10   Marshall, Beliefs, p. 18. 11   Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident, p. 336. 6

90

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

30 days, were common as were annuals, daily masses said for a year. The intercessory cycle usually ended with ‘year’s mind’ mass, another repetition of the funerary rites, twelve months after burial. Pierre Chaunu shows that in later seventeenth-century Paris, in the parishes of Saint-Paul and Saint-Germain, 70 per cent of testators demanded masses, more than half stating ‘as soon as possible after death’.12 A particular concentration of intercession was requested during the three days after death, when it was widely believed that God’s judgement was pending and it was still possible for the prayer of the living to influence His verdict.13 Of 284 Parisian wills for the period 1646–72, 156 testators demanded ‘annuals’, a daily mass for one year, with poorer people asking for trentals which lasted only 30 days.14 Similarly, Catherine Marle’s study of Valenciennes in the later seventeenth century, after it had been incorporated into the French kingdom, shows that around 50 per cent of testators asked for masses and 90 per cent of these asked for short-term cycles, with a figure of 100–299 most frequently demanded.15 In Brittany, Croix’s study of early modern wills has shown that among testators, requests for masses were as frequent as elsewhere in France. For the whole province, male testators’ bequests grew from 77 per cent of all wills to 82.2 per cent across the period 1588–1668, while the proportion of female requests grew from 83.1 per cent to 93 per cent. Most testators requested between one and 500 masses, although almost a half of these asked for fewer than 100 masses. But Croix also found that requests for intercession extending beyond the funeral service were the act of a minority of testators. For example, in the parish of Visseiche in the diocese of Rennes, there were 1,254 burials 1607–39, but only 21.6 per cent of these individuals requested trentals. In Saint-Nicolas in Nantes, the number of requests grew over time but remained a minority of all individuals. Between 1588 and 1660, requests for octaves grew from 12 per cent of people buried to 25 per cent. But requests for trentals only grew from 5.4 per cent to 7 per cent and those for annuals remained roughly the same, around 1 per cent of all deceased. The rural parish of Plabennec in the diocese of Léon shows the same pattern. Seventy-seven wills survive for

12   Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978), pp. 424, 427. 13   Pierre Chaunu, ‘Mourir à Paris (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles), AESC 31 (1976): pp. 44–5. 14   Chaunu, La mort, p. 417. 15   Catherine Marle, ‘Le salut par les messes: les valençiennois devant la mort à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, Revue du Nord 79 (1997): p. 54.

Strategies for Eternity

91

the parish 1645–55; 76 testators requested masses, 68 requested octaves and 48 trentals, while only 13 requested annuals.16 Historians of the late medieval English church have shown that ‘temporary’ chantries – for three, seven or other specified numbers of years – were also important in individual strategies for salvation. There is little evidence at present for this practice in Brittany for the same period, before 1540. What we do have comes only from the second half of the seventeenth century. The will of Fiacre Le Toullec from Cléguer in 1668, asking for two monthly services over a period of ten years, is one of only a very few examples.17 This is supported by Bruno Restif’s work on the rural parishes of Rennes diocese, where he sees the setting of time limits on chantries as a new departure in the later seventeenth century.18 The same is observed in other provinces. In Anjou, de Viguerie counted 137 temporary chantries among 859 studied but with one exception all of these post-dated 1680.19 Rather than temporary chantries, Bretons requested specific numbers of masses, a practice that continued across the period under study. For example, in 1550, François Fabry, canon of Rennes, Vannes and Quimper, asked for 10,000 masses after his funeral and octave services.20 In Nantes, requests for 100 low masses and perhaps one or two other short-term intercessions were typical in the sixteenth century. In his will of 1559, André Le Gallois, a chorister at Notre Dame, asked for 100 masses at Notre Dame, 50 at Rouvier church and for a trental at Saint-Denis in Nantes.21 In the countryside, Jean Tacquet, laboureur from the parish of Questembert made a will in 1664 in which he asked for the ‘service accoustomé’ for his funeral and a ‘huitaine’ of eight services, one each day, for a week.22 Levels of wealth are partly a cause of these differences but the importance of very short-term intercession among all testators is clear.23 The most striking trend of funerary and short-term intercession was a growth in the numbers of masses requested over time, in all regions of Catholic Europe. In his study of Paris, Chaunu shows that the numbers of masses requested in wills increased sharply after 1600. In the early sixteenth     18   16

Croix, La Bretagne, vol 2, pp. 1140–42. ADM G 878. Cléguer. Fondations. Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006), p. 219. 19   Jean de Viguerie, ‘Les fondations et la foi du peuple chrétien. Les fondations des messes en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, RH 520 (1976): p. 295. 20   ADM 55 G 2. Chapître de Saint-Pierre, Vannes. Fondations. 21   ADLA G 313. Collégiale de Notre-Dame de Nantes. Chapellenies et fondations pieuses; ADLA H 253. Chartreux de Nantes. Fondations. 22   ADM 6 E 964. Notaire Le Mauff. Questembert 1661–5. 23   Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1151. 17

92

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

century, the standard practice for Parisians – except for the very rich or the very poor – was to ask for a few dozen masses for the repose of the soul, preferably immediately after death, while the body was still present. Between 1550 and the later seventeenth century, the demand for masses grew. Chaunu’s results are supported by the work of Vanessa Harding, who has found that the proportion of Parisian testators asking for more than 60 masses – implying a more extended period of commemoration – was small in the sixteenth century but increased in the seventeenth century.24 Outside of Paris, the wars of religion initially led to diminution in some regions. Claire Dolan has found that in Aix-en-Provence demands for masses declined from 96.1 per cent of testators in 1550s to 40.7 per cent by 1594, although thereafter bequests increased.25 Croix has showed similar results for Brittany, where during the 1600s the average number of masses demanded by testators more than doubled.26 The principal cause of increased bequests for short-term intercession was a growing belief in particular judgement at the time of death, the expectation of immediate sentencing of the soul. It was widely believed that the gaining of a favourable judgement from God would be greatly aided by prayers and masses said for the departed. For this reason, intercession was concentrated in the period immediately following death.27 Chaunu further argues that in the seventeenth century, the desire for masses augmented still further, as there was a shift from a late medieval practice of collective prayer, to one where the technical prayers of specialists – clergy and their masses – became vital.28 Croix argues that in Brittany, testators preferred to spend their money on a defined number of masses celebrated by priests they knew, rather than trust to an uncertain future.29 Concentration of prayer near to the moment of death was a better insurance for salvation for both temporal and spiritual reasons, than stretching it out over time. There was also the impact of Tridentine reforms on masses for the dead. Carlos Eire comments that one of the striking changes in popular piety in Spain caused by the reforms of Trent was the gradual extirpation of devotions deemed ‘superstitious’. This included trentals and other specific mass cycles, with their complex, detailed arrangements which promised 24   Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 193. 25   Claire Dolan, Entre tours et clochers: les gens d’église à Aix-en-Provence au XVIème siècle (Sherbrooke, 1981), p. 142. 26   Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1143. 27   Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha. Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore, 1992), p. 194. 28   Chaunu, La mort, pp. 417–18. 29   Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1143.

Strategies for Eternity

93

specific results in return for observance of their special instructions. The new Roman Missal of 1570 standardised worship and over time it displaced local usage missals and many numerically-minded mass cycles. Local diocesan bishops reformed their liturgies in line with Rome. In Madrid, trental masses disappeared by the 1570s.30 Similar results were found in Cuenca diocese by Sara Nalle. Between 1575 and 1585, mass cycles such as the trental were discouraged and were replaced by large numbers of low masses.31 This process took longer in France, for the adoption of the Roman rite occurred mostly after 1600, but by the end of the seventeenth century it was an important factor in the decline of intercessory cycles and the rise of large numbers of ‘ordinary’ masses. The latter claimed effectiveness through the simple, redemptive force inherent in the mass itself and not by magical or numerical rituals.32 Perpetual Intercession: Long-term Strategies for Salvation and Their Evolution Over Time While the massive volume of funerary and short term masses requested by contemporaries show us the immediate concern of testators about death and judgement, it does not reveal detailed beliefs about the nature of the afterlife or how the experience of the departed soul could be managed by individuals and families. For this reason, the study of perpetual intercession is important. The foundation of a perpetual mass by or for an individual was based on the expectation that ongoing intercession was necessary, to help free a soul from its time-limited resting place in Purgatory, a stay which was likely to be lengthy. Eire raises the question of the purpose of perpetual masses, of how such intercession could add merit to one’s account given that it was commonly believed that judgement followed immediately after death. He argues that there was clearly residual uncertainty about the afterlife that no amount of short-term masses could efface. Those who requested perpetual masses were insuring themselves against the worst possible scenario, that the other masses would be insufficient and that more would have to be said, until Purgatory itself ceased to exist at the end of time.33 Catherine Marle argues that there existed two strategies for intercession, which could be contradictory but in practice frequently inter-twined and complimented each other. The first was a desire for the accumulation and concentration of 30   Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. The art and craft of dying in sixteenthcentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 228–9. 31   Nalle, p. 190. 32   Eire, Madrid, pp. 228–9. 33   Ibid., pp. 201–202.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

94

intercession in a short time, determined by a belief in individual judgement at death. The second was the desire for long-term, repeated intercession, across many years, ultimately underpinned by a belief in final judgement at the end of time.34 Perpetual masses therefore offered a second layer of intercession, a scheme of intervention which followed after death and judgement of the soul, once it was lodged in Purgatory. Thus, ‘for those who could afford them, [perpetual] masses apparently offered a singular kind of spiritual security. According to the complex ranking assigned to different kinds of masses by theologians, perpetual masses were considered the best kind of suffrage’.35 The volume and importance of perpetual masses founded in the early modern period has been understated by many studies of piety based on wills. In fact, foundations were made in large numbers. J.M. Matz, in a study of chantries in the diocese of Angers in the later Middle Ages has found evidence for 1,238 foundations before 1550, 448 in the city of Angers and 790 in the rest of the diocese.36 Chaunu’s data shows that in Paris, testators requesting perpetual foundations increased over the period: from 11 per cent of men in 1550–1600, to 17 per cent in 1600–50 and 19 per cent in the second half of the century. Thus, almost one in five male testators requested perpetual intercession.37 In Valenciennes in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, about 30 per cent of testators asked for some form of perpetual foundation.38 In Brittany, diocesan visitation records show that many parishes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had foundations of weekly and/or anniversary masses. In urban churches, post-mortem foundations were part of the daily and weekly experience of the liturgy, a topic that will be considered in more detail in chapter 5. For example, in 1555, in Saint-Saturnin of Nantes, there were foundations for 30 weekly low masses as well as intercessory services on each apostle’s feast day, Christmas, St John the Baptist’s day, the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin and a matins every Sunday from Easter to Pentecost.39 In rural parishes also, foundations were a ubiquitous part of church life, across the period. A visitation of the western part of the diocese of Vannes in 1633 showed that more than one third of the rural and small town parishes had chantries. Whereas a number of parishes resembled Carnac with one,

    36   34

Marle, p. 46. Eire, Madrid, p. 200. J.M. Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains dans le diocèse d’Angers (1350–1550): éléments d’enquète’, RHEF 91 (1996): p. 375. 37   Chaunu, La mort, p. 412. 38   Marle, pp. 58–9. 39   ADLA G 501. Saint-Saturnin, Nantes. Fabrique. 35

Strategies for Eternity

95

others such as Kesven and Ploemur had two and Cléguerec had four.40 By the time of the visitations of Archdeacon Antoine Binet in the diocese of Nantes in the 1680s, there was an average of around seven chantries and 8.6 anniversaries in each of the parishes of the deanery of Clisson and six of each type in the parishes of the deanery of Retz.41 Perpetual intercession was therefore more widespread and involved more social groups than has hitherto been stressed. The main reason why perpetual foundations have been understudied is because they were frequently created during donors’ lifetimes and were not included in wills. Clive Burgess has written that analyses of wills have failed to reveal the true extent of pious investment. They disclose little of day-to-day piety and they misrepresent obit provision and the donation of moveable goods, which were frequently given during a lifetime. Burgess argues that apart from property disposal, wills were used for detailed prescription of funerary services and little else. Long term provision was occasionally entrusted to them, but as perpetual stipendiaries and charitable bequests were complicated and expensive to found, men and women discharged as much as they could themselves; such foundations are rarely prescribed in wills. Therefore, wills convey a meagre impression of post-obit provision and may distort our impression of popular religious practice and experience, biasing it towards the short rather than the longer term view.42 This was certainly the case in Brittany. A foundation created an institution in public law guaranteed by Church and state.43 There were a number of stages in its creation. After informal discussions between the potential donor and the recipient church, a notarised document was drawn up, in the presence of a chapter, parish fabrique or their representatives, agreed and signed by all parties. The financial aspects of the foundation, the transfer of property and other goods, was often ratified in the local royal or seigneurial court. In addition foundations might also be approved by the court of régaires or bishop’s temporal court. Perpetual foundations have left a rich but little-studied corpus of documentary sources. While many other church documents were destroyed during the French Revolution and later, the transfer of property into state hands after 1790 meant that foundation documents recording ownership were also transferred. Evidence for the existence of permanent chantries    

40

ADM 41 G 1. Diocese of Vannes. Visitation 1633. Jacqueline Ghenassia, ‘Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: la visite d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–98)’, RHEF 57 (1971): p. 88. 42   Clive Burgess, ‘By Quick and By Dead. Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, English Historical Review CII (1987): pp. 837–58. 43   Viguerie, ‘Les fondations’, p. 289. 41

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

96

therefore survives for many parishes in southern and western Brittany. For this study, a sample of almost 2,500 perpetual mortuary foundations in the dioceses of Nantes, Vannes, Quimper-Cornouaille and Saint-Pol-deLéon were studied for the long period 1480–1720.44 The majority of these foundation documents – almost 70 per cent – were notarised acts by living donors, although these include kin and executors acting for the deceased. The remaining documents include will extracts, copied for the churches’ archival records, and registers of obits, where they include details of the original foundations. A flavour of the relationship between lifetime and testamentary provision for perpetual intercession can be seen from the actions of the Barbiers, uncle and nephew. In 1554, Hamon Barbier, archdeacon and canon of Saint-Pol-de-Léon and abbé of Saint-Mahé, wrote his will. In it, he requested a requiem service in each of the parishes for which he was recteur and a daily mass for the duration of one year. He also recorded that he had already made several perpetual foundations. Indeed, separate foundation documents show that between 1530 and 1549, Barbier had founded annual obits on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Easter Day and a weekly sung mass every Saturday, all in the Cathedral of SaintPol. In his will, Barbier also founded a weekly low mass in the Carmelite church of Saint-Pol, an anniversary mass in the Cathedral for the day of his death and two weekly masses, on Fridays and Sundays, in the parish church of Plounevez.45 In 1578, Hamon Barbier, canon of Saint-Pol and nephew of the first Hamon Barbier, was buried next to his late uncle in the Cathedral. By the terms of his will, he founded two anniversary masses in the Cathedral and a weekly mass in the Carmelite church of Saint-Pol.46 The Barbier family had built up a substantial patrimony of intercession between them, in life as well as at death. Who Founded Perpetual Masses? The foundation of perpetual intercession was clearly the action of the better-off during the early modern centuries, but it was not the sole preserve of social elites. A wide variety of foundations was possible, with varying costs to suit different donors. Bissegger’s study of the obits of St Paul’s church at Villeneuve, shows that the majority of people commemorated were small proprietors and artisans and that the majority of foundations   Breton documents do not survive in the same numbers as in the Paris region and the Midi. For example, Alain Croix used just under 1700 wills for his study of Breton religious culture. 45   ADF 6 G 141. Chapitre de Saint-Pol de Léon. Titres et fondations. 46   ADF 6 G 141. 44

Strategies for Eternity

97

were by people of modest fortunes.47 Chiffoleau agrees that by the end of the Middle Ages obits were widespread among the urban middling sort, merchants and artisans.48 In Anjou, donors also came from a wide range of social groups, although here foundations were largely the preserve of the wealthy. Priests were responsible for almost one third (31 per cent), nobles 7 per cent, officers and bourgeois 50 per cent and artisans, servants and peasants only 11 per cent.49 These figures resemble those of the eastern dioceses of Brittany although there are differences with the more rural west. In Nantes, the social groups patronising post-mortem intercession changed over time. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the clergy were the most important founders of post-mortem intercession with about 40 per cent of all foundations in this period. In the decades 1520–50, they declined proportionally to other groups, but increased again greatly in the 1550s and 1560s. Across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, clergy foundations again declined proportionally, to around 20 per cent of donors across the period. The proportion of lay male founders remained remarkably stable across time, around 25 per cent of the total, while that of married couples oscillated greatly. The real change across time was the proportion of female founders. While this group made up around 25 per cent of donors across the sixteenth and into the early seventeenth centuries, from the 1620s women became the most important donors, responsible for more than 50 per cent of foundations in the decades after 1630. This gendered pattern of change is seen even more strikingly in Vannes and Quimper dioceses. Clergy foundations dominated in the period up to 1560; thereafter the proportion of female donors grew, to dominate foundations by 1630. The proportion of lay male founders and married couples was always relatively small and altered little across time. In StPol-de-Léon, clergy dominated foundations down to 1550 after which the proportion of women grew. Throughout southern and western Brittany, therefore, clergy remained important founders of post-mortem intercession across time, in relation to their absolute numbers in the community. However, proportionally, their participation declined as more lay people, above all women, made foundations in greater numbers in the later sixteenth and across the seventeenth centuries. The ‘feminisation’ of founders is a striking example of a wider Counter Reformation development in spiritual life. Women were noticeably important as patrons of convents and founders of religious orders at the top of the social hierarchy and members of confraternities and perpetrators of good works throughout France, after 1600. Women seem to have been able to     49   47 48

Bissegger, p. 37. Chiffoleau, p. 339. Viguerie, ‘Les fondations’, p. 312.

Figure 4.1 Founders of Masses in Nantes 1480–1720

Figure 4.2 Founders of Masses – Vannes Diocese 1480–1720

100

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

dispose of more property in the seventeenth century and it seems that men left much intercession to their wives, who as widows, founded chantries and anniversaries for both partners. With regard to the occupations of lay founders, there are always problems defining economic groups in early modern communities. Householders who were defined by their occupations were amongst the wealthier of their parishes, although the relationship between economic rank and profession is not a simple one. A recognised occupation was a badge of respectability and of an identified position within society, a mark of social distinction as much as an economic category. Also, the middling and upper sort preferred to be recognised by their titles of land ownership rather that their professions or trades. Wealth, parish, kinship and household rather than economic function remained the main determinants of status and identity in early modern Brittany. That stated, there are clear changes over time in the given occupation of founders. In all dioceses, nobles were important founders in absolute terms across the centuries. In Nantes, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, nobles created about 20 per cent of all foundations, well beyond their numbers in the community. After the mid-sixteenth century, the proportion declined, although was subject to fluctuation, to 10–15 per cent of all foundations. In the more rural western dioceses, nobles were even more dominant as founders and along with the clergy, made the majority of foundations across the sixteenth century. In St-Pol, where there were large numbers of rural nobles, few large towns and relatively small numbers of royal administrative posts, foundations remained the preserve of gentry and clergy even across the seventeenth century. In dioceses other than St-Pol, the proportion of nobles as founders decreased across time, however. The groups which displaced clergy and nobles as predominant founders were from the middling sort. Initially, in fifteenth-century Nantes, individuals and families labelled ‘merchant’ and/or ‘bourgeois’ increased in number. Their position was then matched by a rising group of royal officers. In Nantes, these emerged as a defined occupational group in small numbers in the period 1530–50, then increased visibly from 1580. Thereafter officers never comprised less than 30 per cent of all founders. In Vannes and Quimper dioceses, merchants emerged as a visible group of founders from the mid-sixteenth century and royal office holders appear from the 1580s. We see here the growing importance of royal office-holding as a mark of status and the shift of merchant families into office holding as soon as they acquired the means to do so. Families such as the Loriot in Nantes, merchants and bourgeois in the 1550s and 1560s, were describing themselves in terms of their offices by the 1590s. Merchants and royal officers both used the titles of their estates – sieuries

Strategies for Eternity

101

rather than seigneuries – to describe themselves as well, again reflecting the importance of landholding in this traditional society. From at least the 1520s, families whose male head was an artisan or a farmer, were also founding services, typically anniversaries, in all dioceses. Around 10 per cent of stated occupations were those of artisans, of all kinds of crafts, or laboureurs. Many founders without stated occupations – especially widows – may also have come from this group. While the foundation of post-mortem intercession was typically the work of the social elites, it was not exclusively so and may indeed have been a means by which status was gradually acquired. What perpetual foundations tell us is that a wide variety of social groups was prepared to invest in longterm intercession. Types of Foundations There were two main forms of perpetual foundation. The chantry – daily or weekly masses – was served by a permanent chaplain, funded by an endowed benefice supported with land or rents. Here the founder hoped to be the beneficiary of prayers and masses offered by an endless succession of dedicated priests.50 Chantries were usually founded at an existing altar of a church, monastery, college or even hospital, although occasionally a more lavish foundation might be associated with a private altar or chapel. Chantries were often founded close to the burial place of the donor. The foundation in Saint-Nicolas’ church, Nantes, by Jean Seron, merchant and bourgeois, in 1502, was typical: a weekly low mass, on Mondays, at the altar of Notre-Dame-de-Chandeleur, followed by the recitation of the De Profundis on his tomb.51 The anniversary or obit was a commemorative service held annually, usually on the day of death of the founder. It was conducted by a priest and a choir, who were paid fees from the revenues produced by the foundation. Generally, the anniversary copied the funeral service, with a requiem mass and often with the subsidiary services of vespers and matins as well, at least before the mid-seventeenth century. Again, the foundation of Françoise Bouschier in Sainte-Croix of Nantes in 1544 is typical: a high mass, preceded by a vigile des morts, was to be celebrated each year on 27 February.52Another common anniversary was the ‘service’ of three masses, of Saint Esprit, Beata and requiem. Often, two of these masses would be ‘low’ celebrated by a single chaplain while the requiem mass 50

 

Alan Krieder, English Chantries. The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge MA, 1979),

   

ADLA G 493 Saint-Saturnin. Fondations. ADLA G 463 Sainte-Croix. Fondations.

p. 5. 51 52

102

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

was sung by a priest and choir. Similar to the anniversary was that of the ‘annual’ service, which took place on a special feast day or during a liturgical season. This could take the form of either a requiem mass or the specific office of the feast day on which it was founded, frequently again with vespers and matins as well. For example, a foundation of 1618 in Saint-Michel of Vannes by Christophe Lorans and Yvorée Lenet, was made for 28 August the feast of Saints Julian and Augustine. There were to be nocturnes and vigils with three lessons on the eve, then a procession and a sung mass with blessed bread, on the feast day itself.53 At anniversary and annual obits, the church hearse was often set out, draped with a mortuary cloth, with candles burning at the head and feet, often on the tomb of the founder. There might also be bells rung to inform family and neighbours of the service.54 The introduction of the Roman ritual into much of Brittany after 1614, which advocated a sole requiem mass for funerals – and therefore for anniversaries and obits – was slow to affect the province. In the western dioceses, the ‘service’ of three masses was still popular at the end of the century: in 1684, Jeanne Brunet, Dame de Levion, founded an anniversary mass in Notre-Dame-du-Méné (Vannes) of a ‘service’ of three sung masses.55 How did an individual select a particular form of intercession? Cost was a factor here, but so was personal choice. It is possible with record linkages, to trace the intercessory strategies of a number of individual founders. The majority of founders created either a single weekly mass or a single annual/anniversary obit. The next most popular strategy was to create a weekly and an annual/anniversary mass. In 1594, Michelle Guido, widow of a Vannes notary, founded an annual obit for the Sunday before the feast of All Saints in the chapel of Saint-Michel in Vannes; in 1604, she also founded an annual obit on St Michael’s day in the Cathedral, both foundations dedicated to her patron saint.56 In 1639, Louis Colin, prêtre et vicaire of Crucifix parish, founded two anniversaries in the church of SaintPierre in the town of Saint-Pol, for 3 and 4 February. In 1644, now titled recteur of Crucifix, Colin founded an annual obit on St René’s day, in the cathedral.57 Some founders created all their intercessory masses in one act. In 1593, René Euzenno, canon of Quimper Cathedral, was buried in the parish church of Guichrist, near to his parents. By the terms of his will, his executors made two foundations, each of three annual services for the feast     55   56   57   53

ADM 57 G 3. Cathédrale de Vannes. Confréries. Clive Burgess, ‘An Afterlife in Memory’, SCH 45 (2009): pp. 212–13. ADM G 1025. Notre-Dame-du-Méné. Fondations. ADM 57 G 3. ADF 9 G 1. Confrérie des Trépassés, Saint-Pol; 6 G 142. Chapitre de Saint-Pol de Léon. Titres et fondations. 54

Strategies for Eternity

103

days of Saints René, Mary Magdelaine and Giles – perhaps the patrons of himself and his parents – one in the Cathedral of Quimper and one in the collegiate church of Saint-Trémeur in Carhaix. It is surprising that there is no foundation for Guichrist church, the burial place, but provision here may have been made during Euzenno’s lifetime, evidence for which does not survive.58 Others built up provision over time, perhaps as resources became available. In the mid-seventeenth century, Yvonne Martin, the unmarried daughter of a merchant, founded a series of intercessory masses in Saint-Patern church in the suburbs of Vannes. Her earliest foundation was of an annual mass on St Joseph’s day, using the office of St Joseph, in 1651. In 1654, there followed a low weekly mass founded for Saturdays at the altar of Notre Dame; in 1666 followed an annual obit on the feast of St Michael, using the saint’s office and in 1670, another weekly mass for Sundays and another annual for the second Thursday of August. Finally, in 1672, four further annual obits were founded, for Christmas, Epiphany, Ascension and Pentecost, each service being accompanied by the display of the Holy Sacrament on the altar. The result was a commemorative ‘package’ of two weekly masses and seven annual obits.59 It is clear that donors had a range of motives for intercession, economic and devotional, which will be explored in chapter 5. Evolution of Foundations Over Time The foundations of chantries and obits and the relative popularity of different types, changed over time and at slightly different rates in eastern and western Brittany. In the city of Nantes, post-mortem foundations increased in number after 1450. This may reflect loss of earlier documents, but it also reflects real growth. From 1460–70, foundations increased suddenly in number and between 1480 and 1550, maintained a rough level of about 27 foundations per decade across the city. The years of the religious wars 1560–1600, saw reduced rates of foundations, about 18 per decade, with the exception of the 1580s when the levels of the earlier sixteenth century were again attained. A new departure occurred after 1610, when foundations rose steeply. The decades 1620–60 saw almost a doubling of the early sixteenth-century rate of foundation, with an average of about 42 per decade. After 1670, rates declined rapidly, however, to fewer than five per year after 1710.

58 59

   

ADF 38 G 24. Collégiale de Saint-Trémeur, Carhaix. Fondations. ADM G 1042. Saint-Patern, Vannes. Fondations.

Figure 4.3 Movement of Foundations 1480–1720

Strategies for Eternity

105

In the diocese of Vannes, the surviving evidence for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is less detailed than for Nantes, when few records other than those of the Cathedral chapter survive. Also, the archives of the religious houses have not been catalogued for the diocese and are unavailable for use, reducing the scope of this investigation. In the Cathedral of Vannes itself, there was a rate of foundation of between five and ten per decade observed from c.1440 to the 1580s. From the 1590s, there is better documentary survival from the parishes of the diocese and evidence for a great increase in foundations at parish church level 1600– 30. The highest rate of foundation was achieved between 1630 and 1680, slightly later than for Nantes, but similarly falling off rapidly after this date. A similar pattern is again observable in the diocese of St-Pol-de-Léon. Low levels of recorded foundations in the fifteenth century gave way to an increase after 1511, with a rough plateau of about 25 foundations per decade between 1520 and 1560. After a fall in the 1570s, foundations rose to a new level of about 38 per decade between 1580 and 1610, followed by yet higher rates between 1610 and 1650 when, despite some fluctuations, around 50 foundations per decade are evidenced. Thereafter there was slow decline, to negligible levels of foundations after 1690. The chronological evidence for Quimper diocese is relatively poor. There is a rich collection of fifteenth-century obit foundations for the Cathedral and again from the 1580s, but other periods have left scarce records. Within the diocese, the collegiate church of Saint-Trémeur in Carhaix has a relatively good sequence of foundation records: here again we see a midseventeenth-century peak of foundations, falling off after 1660–70. So, while each diocese has its own specific pattern of foundations, exacerbated by lacunae in the documentary record, certain trends stand out. From the 1480s into the mid-sixteenth century, there was a persistent rate of foundation of obits and chantries across the south and west of Brittany. The rate of foundation declined around the time of the onset of sectarian troubles in France in the mid-sixteenth century. The 1560s and 1570s were relatively lean years for foundations, but there is evidence for an upturn in the later 1580s. Between 1600 and 1620 there was increase, to levels a little above the rates of the early sixteenth century, but then a great increase in the period 1620–60, the high water mark of post-mortem intercession in Brittany. After 1660, numbers of new foundations fell, at different times in different places and after 1680 they greatly declined. This pattern is mirrored in the dioceses of eastern Brittany where the high point for foundations occurred 1641–80.60

60

 

Restif, p. 217.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

106

The type of intercession favoured by donors also changed over time. Generally, across the period, there was a move from the foundation of weekly masses to anniversary or annual masses, with monthly masses holding an important position from the mid-sixteenth to the midseventeenth centuries in the smaller dioceses of the west. In Nantes, between the 1440s and 1550s, the favoured form of chantry endowment was the weekly mass, sometimes in association with an anniversary obit as well. These types of foundations made up 70 per cent of the total across this period. A small number – cabout 5 per cent – of monthly or fortnightly foundations were made, with one quarter to one third of all foundations being anniversary or annual services. In the second half of the sixteenth century, weekly masses fell as a proportion of overall foundations while anniversaries and annuals rose to over 40 per cent of the total. The trend of declining weekly masses continued after 1600, from 55 per cent in the 1610s to 35 per cent in the 1670s. Joint foundations of weekly and anniversary masses constituted another 20 per cent or more, while monthly masses became more important (25–30 per cent of foundations). After 1670, when foundations declined, anniversaries came to constitute at least 70 per cent of the total.61 In Vannes diocese, the difference between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is even more striking. Weekly masses were also the most popular form of foundation 1500–70, with between 45–65 per cent of the total, thereafter falling by a third. During the seventeenth century, weekly masses, often with an anniversary obit as well, comprised 25–30 per cent of all foundations, with anniversaries and annuals making up at least 70 per cent. Evidence from Quimper diocese, although more fragmentary, is similar, with monthly and annual or obit ceremonies replacing weekly masses as the more favoured form of intercession in the seventeenth century. Finally, in Léon diocese, a similar although more nuanced picture emerges. Across the first half of the sixteenth century, the proportion of weekly masses rose, to around 50 per cent of the total by the mid-century. During the religious wars they fell to around one third of foundations, although there was some improvement after 1590. In this diocese, monthly foundations were important, especially 1550–1630. What is striking is that during the period of high levels of foundations, across the mid-seventeenth century, the proportion of weekly, monthly and annual foundations was roughly the same. Of the weekly forms of masses, these could range from daily to onceweekly, with everything in between. In the diocese of Angers, Matz has shown that up to the middle of the fifteenth century, the foundation of 61

 

Again this is mirrored in Rennes, Saint-Malo and Dol dioceses. Restif, p. 121.

Figure 4.4 Types of Foundations – Vannes Diocese 1480–1720

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

108

one mass a week was the most common. By the end of the century, two masses per week predominated, among all social groups.62 In Brittany, single weekly masses were the most frequent, although two masses per week are also evident. Founders of weekly masses almost always stated the day or days of the week when their chantries should take place. There was no overwhelmingly favourite day in any of the dioceses of southern and western Brittany, although Tuesday was the least favoured day. In the city of Nantes, Friday (the day of Christ’s Passion) closely followed by Saturday (Our Lady) were the most frequently requested days, with Mondays (associated with prayers for the dead) in third place. In the west, in both Vannes and Saint-Pol-de-Léon dioceses, Thursday was the favourite day, followed by Monday and Friday in Vannes and Wednesday and Sunday in St-Pol. The results from Léon reflect the larger survival of chantries from rural parishes, where Sunday was a favoured day for foundations. This is because on Sundays, there was a high rate of church attendance at parish mass, which gave a better potential audience for post-mortem intercession. There was little observable change over time in the choice of days for foundation masses. Within this overall trend away from weekly masses towards anniversary and annual obits, there was also a clear movement away from low to high masses and to a more elaborate liturgy in the mid-seventeenth century. Donors came to prefer fewer, richer ceremonies to more frequently-held, simple rites. The evolving liturgies for the dead will be discussed in chapter 5. Location of Foundations The location of foundations, frequently linked with the donor’s burial place, also underwent change over time. In Nantes, the collegiate churches of the Cathedral and Notre-Dame received around 30 per cent of foundations at the end of the fifteenth century. Although their share declined a little over time, they continued to attract around 25 per cent of foundations across the sixteenth and 20 per cent across the seventeenth centuries. Convents, particularly the mendicant churches, received around a quarter of foundations. The greatest and most striking development in the city was the changing relationship between parish church and convent. For about a century, between 1470 and 1550, the parish church was the principal site for foundations, attracting about 50 per cent of bequests. After 1580, this declined, to around 30 per cent of foundations by the 1630s and even fewer in the later seventeenth century. The favoured sites in Nantes became the convent churches of the mendicant orders. Between 1580 and 1610 they received around a third  

62

Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, p. 381.

Figure 4.5 Location of Foundations – Nantes 1480–1720

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

110

of foundations, which rose to around 60 per cent by the mid-seventeenth century. This broad pattern is mirrored in the western bishoprics. Vannes diocese lacks accessible evidence for the monastic houses, but in Quimper, there is a clear growth in foundations in convents from c.1571–80, although the mid-seventeenth century saw a resurgence of collegiate foundations, especially in the Cathedral of Quimper. The more detailed evidence from Saint-Pol-de-Léon shows that the Cathedral and convents dominated foundations in the fifteenth century, but after 1510 parishes gained ground, as they did in Nantes. Here, their dominance persisted until the end of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, parish foundations remained more important in the Léon than they did in the other dioceses, with rates oscillating around 40 per cent of the total. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, convents attracted 15–30 per cent of foundations, never a majority as they did elsewhere. The difference in the Léon was made up by foundations in the Cathedral. Before the mid-sixteenth century it had attracted up to 40 per cent of foundations per decade, with a decline during the religious wars. But in the seventeenth century foundations here rose to around one third of totals, roughly equal with the parish churches. Secular clergy in parish and Cathedral were thus preferred as intercessors in Léon diocese, probably because the number of regulars was smaller than elsewhere in the province. What is striking across all four dioceses is that the type of founders who patronised particular locations, changed. Cathedral and collegiate foundations were typically those of secular clergy, with a small number of lay patrons, across the period. Lay elites continued to favour religious houses of the mendicants, across time. In the parishes, donors were mixed, artisans, local notables and parish clergy. It is this group which favoured the parish churches then shifted its allegiance to the mendicant churches in the seventeenth century, particularly to the Franciscans and the Dominicans. A comparable trend towards favouring parish churches can be seen in a number of other regions. In the diocese of Angers, in the period up to 1570, certain foundations were made for private oratories, for hospitals or monasteries, but the vast majority were made for parish and collegiate churches.63 In Aix-en-Provence, convents received the majority of foundations in the sixteenth century, but parishes gained ground between 1550 and 1594.64 Thereafter, the seventeenth century saw the predominance of conventual churches in post-mortem intercession all over France, exceeding their – already notable – rate of the later Middle    

63 64

Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, p. 378. Dolan, p. 169.

Figure 4.6 Location of Foundations – Léon Diocese 1480–1720

112

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Ages. Megan Armstrong, in her study of the Franciscans of Paris, shows that founders in the later wars of religion already favoured the friary there. From just two or three foundations per decade in the 1550s and 1560s, they leapt to 13–14 per decade from the 1570s to the 1590s and peaked at 20 in the 1600s.65 Croix has noted that in terms of funerary practice, the role of the mendicant orders changed around 1600. During the sixteenth century, testators frequently requested the presence of friars at their obsequies. This became rare in the seventeenth century and came to coincide almost exclusively with the election for burial in a convent church. Further, in Nantes the collegiate churches and convents increasingly separated themselves off from popular funerary rites. In 1591, Nantes’ Cathedral chapter decided only to attend the funerals of ‘persons of quality’ and in 1597, the canons decided to raise their fees for participation in funeral processions to 100 livres. In 1632, the Carmelites of Nantes refused to take part in funerals other than in their own church and from 1640, only the Capuchins took part in city funerals.66 In Rennes, in 1631, the Cathedral chapter and the monks of Saint-Mélaine both charged 100 livres while the cost of participation of parish priests was 4 livres 3 sous.67 So, by the midcentury, the participation of the religious orders in funerals had become the preserve of the wealthy elite, and a particular section of these, those with traditionalist tastes. It also meant that those wanting intercession from the mendicants had to be buried in their churches. Intercession might be spread across a number of different institutions, however. Sebastien Nicollazo, scholastique and canon of Vannes Cathedral and recteur of Elven, is an example. In 1607, he founded a weekly mass, on Sundays, in the Cathedral. Then, in 1612 and 1614 he founded weekly masses on Sundays and Mondays and seven annual services on the principal feasts of Mary, in the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Lices of Vannes, for the newly-founded confraternity of the Holy Sacrament based there. Finally, in 1616, his executors founded an anniversary mass for him, on 20 September, to be said at the altar of St Sebastian in the cathedral, near to where he was buried in the nave.68 While the most lavish intercessory ‘packages’ were founded by clerics, secular examples also occur. In 1662, David de Cléguenec and his wife Jeanne du Mur, Seigneur and Dame de Meslien in the parish of Cléguer, founded weekly masses in five different 65   M. Armstrong, The Politics of Piety. Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion (Woodbridge, 2004). 66   Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 963–6. Around 80 people were buried in the Carmelite church of Nantes 1590–1668. Y. Durand, Un couvent dans la ville. Grands Carmes de Nantes (Rome, 1997), p. 177. 67   Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 964–5. 68   ADM 55 G 3. Chapitre de Saint-Pierre, Vannes. Fondations.

Strategies for Eternity

113

churches. Three were founded in their family chapel in the parish church of Cléguer, one in the Dominican church of Quimperlé, one in the Récollet church of Port-Louis, one in the Carmelite church of Hennebont and one in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Moustoir in the parish of Keruel. There was thus a mass for each day of the week, with intercession spread over five institutions.69 Explanation of Changes Over Time: the Rise and Fall of Purgatory? The high rates of chantry and obit foundation in Brittany between 1480 and the mid-sixteenth century point to a deep-rooted belief in Purgatory across the province, well before the years of Catholic Reform. Perpetual intercession is a clear indicator of belief in a lengthy stay in a ‘third place’ where individuals could be relieved by the actions of the living. This mirrors conclusions from many regional studies of France. For the diocese of Angers, Matz has shown that the period 1480–1530 saw the peak of late medieval foundations, after the end of the Hundred Years’ War.70 There is good evidence for teachings on Purgatory in late medieval Brittany filtering down to all social groups, which underpinned the desire for foundations. For the literate and their circles, the earliest printed books in Brittany include ars moriendi, such as Jean de Meung’s Les loys des trespassés avecques le pèlerinage of 1484, which advised on the importance of intercession for souls about to enter Purgatory.71 All parishioners were encouraged to pray for souls. For example, in 1495, the bishop of Nantes ordered the appointment of a ‘réveilleur’ or ‘waker’ in each parish, to rouse the faithful at midnight with a handbell and a loud reminder to the faithful to pray for the dead.72 In the more westerly diocese of Vannes, the founding statutes of the Confraternity of the Departed (Trépassés) of 1543 also contained a clear statement on belief in the ‘third place’. The motive of the founders was to relieve ‘the souls of the departed tormented by the burning flames of Purgatory’.73 Evidence indicates that all parts of Brittany were in the main-stream of theological developments and that there was no lack of understanding of Purgatory in the later Middle Ages. The most striking feature of sixteenth-century Breton foundations is their mid-century decline, at a time when preachers and polemicists     71   69 70

ADM G 878. Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, p. 376. Jean de Meung, Les loys des trespasses avecques le pelerinage (Bréhan-Loudéac,

1584).

   

72 73

Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1133. ADM 57 G 3.

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

114

throughout France were involved in an intense campaign to justify and elaborate on Purgatory. Similar observations have been made for other regions of France. Matz’s study of Angers shows that foundations fell after 1530–40.74 Nicole Lemaitre’s work on the Rouergue shows that mass requests and foundations were at their height in the years 1530–50 and declined thereafter.75 Philip Hoffman’s study of the Lyonnais also shows a decline in popularity of post-mortuary intercession after 1530; in the Lyon parish of Saint-Nizier, the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Grace recorded five foundations 1481–1530, but no more thereafter until the seventeenth century.76 In Brittany, foundations held up for longer than in many other regions. In Nantes and Saint-Pol-de-Léon, the best documented dioceses, the real decline in foundations did not occur until after 1550–60, but then the drop was steep.77 Hoffman argues that the evidence ‘points to a stunning shift in religious attitudes’; in his view, the conclusion is inescapable that people from all social classes came to question the efficacy of Catholic ritual for the dead.78 The main explanation for a decline in confidence in post-mortem intercession and by implication, Purgatory itself, is the influence of Protestantism. As we have seen, by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Purgatory and its attendant framework of intercessory actions and institutions came under severe criticism from Protestant reformers convinced that justification by faith eliminated the reason for purgation of sin and that the doctrine had no basis in scripture. While Protestantism itself gained only limited ground in Brittany, Galpern’s suggestion that even in parts of Catholic Europe where Reform gained limited converts, their criticisms may have undermined confidence in post-mortem intercession, seems to be correct.79 Even without the radical views of Protestants, confidence in traditional devotions was undermined by humanist attitudes to ritual. Brittany was wide open to humanist influences as elsewhere in France. The diocesan centres had clerics who came from many parts of the kingdom as well as choir and grammar schools influenced by humanist educational curricula. Humanism had a religious programme of enhanced piety and reform of church life, centred directly on Christ and the eucharist, 74

   

Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, pp. 375–6. N. Lemaitre, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris, 1988), p. 351. 76   Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984), pp. 28–30. 77   Dolan, p. 142. 78   Hoffman, pp. 28–30. 79   Alan Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA, 1976), p. 199. 75

Strategies for Eternity

115

stripped of elaborate intercessory ritual. Salvation was given to those who believed rather than to those who tried to earn it. New impulses towards religious simplicity and austere piety, a form of spirituality long advocated by the mendicant orders, may have contributed to reduced lay investment in elaborate mortuary intercession. The mid-century decline in foundations also relates to local conditions. One factor may have been declining economic fortunes, begun in the 1550s as war with Spain affected overseas trade. Prosperity was further affected during the religious wars, for high levels of inflation, plague, military conflict, enhanced taxation and piracy disrupted agricultural production, textile manufacture and commerce in western France throughout the second half of the century.80 There was less surplus wealth to spend on foundations. Above all, it was the experience of sectarian tensions and civil war from 1560 that engendered religious shifts, even in places far from open conflict. Sectarian troubles began in Brittany in the small port of Le Croisic in 1558, when Bishop de Crequi led a procession to demonstrate against Protestant preaching in the town. In Nantes, Rennes and Vitré there was sectarian strife between Huguenots and Protestants in the early 1560s. For example, in Nantes, in February 1561, Protestants returning from a sermon threw stones at the windows of one of the city’s churches where mass was being held. This provoked a riot in which Protestants were stoned.81 In July, the Reformed congregation held a demonstration of faith when an armed company marched in ranks through the city. There followed two weeks of violence as the Catholic population reacted heatedly to Protestant ‘provocation’.82 John Bossy has argued that the result of the early years of conflict was a seismic shift in Catholic perspectives and postures.83 The religious wars saw a resurgence of Catholic activism and the emergence of new pious forms. Another effect was a decline in traditional devotions particularly postmortem intercession. Despite high-profile debates about the doctrine of Purgatory which we see in the printing campaigns of the mid-century, mortuary foundations and traditional funerary practices declined, at least in cities. The decline in post-mortem intercession occurred in other French towns as well. In Aix-en-Provence, the low point for foundations   Elizabeth C. Tingle, Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion 1558–98 (Manchester, 2006), chapter 5. 81   Barthélemy Pocquet, Histoire de Bretagne, tome V (1515–1715) (Rennes, 1913, reprint Mayenne, 1975), p. 57. 82   Report of the seneschal 18–22 July 1561 in P.-H. Morice and Charles Taillandier, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne (3 vols, Paris, 1756), vol. 2, pp. 1276ff. 83   John Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism’, SCH, 23 (1986): pp. 171–89. 80

116

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

occurred 1570–95.84 Similarly in Lyon, the old funeral ceremonies, from psalms and processions to tolling bells, declined.85 The chief reason for this seems to be that the spiritual and financial energies of individuals were increasingly concentrated on the living parish and community at this time. Barbara Diefendorf argues that there was a drive to strengthen the parish as the focus for religious life and a greater emphasis on parochial worship, part of a larger ‘campaign’ for greater public order and more austere morality.86 Kathryn Jackson-Lualdi observes a similar process in the southern French diocese of Grasse. Parish worship assumed a greater significance, both as an external manifestation of orthodoxy and as a place where the beliefs of individuals were formed. Good Catholics were judged in terms of their attendance at and conformity with public, parish rites and ceremonies.87 Therefore instead of intercession for the dead, individuals participated in public and collective ritual activity, processions and pilgrimages.88 External, visible actions became important, as ‘a defence and illustration of both institutional resilience and enduring truth’.89 The adaptation of devotional practices to demonstrate confessional identity was a distinguishing characteristic of sixteenth-century piety.90 Also, the role of the laity as sources of spiritual authority increased during the religious wars. French Catholics were not content to sit idly by as division engulfed their society. The intensification of Catholic devotional practices was a means to restore themselves and their society to purity.91 Put simply, the actions and concerns of the living community took precedence over the interests of the dead. Linked with a preference for public action, a third cause of declining foundations was the increased importance given to good works during the religious wars. There was an inverse relationship between investment in perpetual intercession and donations to the poor in strategies for the afterlife in Brittany. In the mid-sixteenth century, charity seems to have gained at the expense of foundations. Some historians of sixteenth-century Catholicism have shown a decline in pious bequests in many wills. In Lyon,     86   84

Dolan, p. 142. Hoffman, p. 40. Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in SixteenthCentury Paris (Oxford, 1991), pp. 35–8. 87   Kathryn Jackson-Lualdi, ‘Obéir aux commandements de Dieu et de l’Église: culte paroissiale et contre-réforme gallicane’, RHEF LXXXIV (1998): p. 18. 88   Marc Venard, Le catholicisme à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIème siècle (Paris, 2000), p. 194. 89   Galpern, pp. 158, 199. 90   Armstrong, pp. 22–3. 91   Ibid., pp. 23–4. 85

Strategies for Eternity

117

for example, while 84 per cent of testators left money for pious bequests between 1521 and 1555, only 66 per cent did so in the following halfcentury.92 But charity was to be a lifetime activity, not just a last reflex and is therefore under-represented in wills. Barnes’s study of later sixteenthcentury penitents’ confraternities in southern France found a new emphasis in their statutes on charitable activity, representing for the first time a fusion of penitential piety with the idea of social service.93 In Nantes, charity was a constant theme of Bishop du Bec’s preaching; when, in October 1568 a municipal bureau des pauvres was created to co-ordinate the city’s poor relief, he publicised the new regime from the pulpit and urged the Nantais to ‘sell what you have and give alms and you will store up treasure in heaven that will never … fail … Invest alms in the pauper and he will pray for you … as water extinguishes fire so almsgiving extinguishes sin’.94 Alms placed the recipient in debt to the giver, so testators could ask for spiritual favours in return, particularly prayer.95 Later, in the context of dire economic problems in the 1580s, charity was important in preserving the social as well as the religious fabric, for Christ’s poor were visible on every street. Good works in this life rather than an emphasis on Purgatory helps to explain the decline of foundations after 1560. Fourthly, there was a direct correlation between decreasing foundations of post-mortem intercession and a great increase in individual and public devotions to the body of Christ during the religious wars. In mid-sixteenth-century France, conflict between Catholic and Protestant refocused attention on the eucharist, supported by the rulings of Trent which privileged the mass as the primary site of salvation. Christopher Elwood argues that in this time of crisis, communities ‘turned to the eucharist to display it and deploy it in the public realm … to recreate communal solidarity and sanctity by turning the attentions and energies of the members of society to the potent centre of the community … Through the public display of this symbol of social cohesion, the social body itself might be reconstituted and restored to health’.96 Brittany shared in these eucharistic impulses, although the only detailed evidence comes from Nantes. The feast of Corpus Christi came to have a special significance for the public expression of confessional allegiance. At Corpus Christi 1564,    

92

Hoffman, p. 29. A.E. Barnes, ‘Religious anxiety and devotional change in sixteenth-century French penitential confraternities’, SCJ XIX (1988): pp. 391, 401. 94   Philippe du Bec, Exhortation sus le Reglement et Police faictz à Nantes pour l’entretien des paouvres: aux Clergé, Nobles et Bourgeois, habitans de ladicte ville (Paris, 1570). 95   Eire, Madrid, p. 246. 96   Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken (Oxford, 1999), p. 9. 93

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

118

several Protestants were arrested in Nantes for failing to hang tapestries on their houses. The seneschal claimed that street decoration was required of all citizens, to honour God and to prevent disorder between confessions. The dispute continued into the Corpus Christi season of 1565.97 All over France confraternities of the Holy Sacrament were established, a ‘sort of urban mission, symbolically defending Catholic doctrine’.98 The holy sacrament confraternity of Nantes saw its membership expand. Before this decade, the master and provosts were typically lower clergy, priests and chaplains from parishes in and around the city; by the 1570s, Guillaume Tual, master chaplain of the Cathedral, was in charge. Some foundations were used to enhance its work. In 1566, Guillaume Garnier, priest, founded a weekly mass in the suburban chapel of Champ-Fleuri, to be said by one of the priestly members of the fraternity. He also founded an annual memorial in the parish church of Sainte-Croix, of psalms and prayers to be said by the fraternity during their annual feast day procession around the city’s churches.99 Religious conflict made necessary the symbolic display of confessional allegiance. Participation in public rituals was a statement of belonging to the Catholic community, a form of works signifying faith. The decades of the 1580s and 1590s saw some resurgence in the traditional practice of mortuary foundations in Brittany. Evidence from the episcopal towns of southern and western Brittany is supported by evidence from Guingamp: foundations in the houses of the Dominicans and Franciscans here doubled 1580–99, compared to the period 1540– 80.100 This was part of a huge up swell of an austere yet ostentatious piety associated with the Catholic League movement from 1584, fuelled also by dire economic conditions, famine, war and plague after 1579. Already by 1578, Claude Haton noted that the people of Provins became ‘more fervent in devotion’, setting out on pilgrimage in even greater numbers than before, a movement which continued into the 1580s.101 In the cities of the Catholic League, which includes most of those of southern and western Brittany, between 1588 and 1597, waves of penitential piety swept over the population, with frequent religious services and processions to invoke God’s aid and to implore his mercy. Fasting, strict moral codes

97

   

AMN GG 644 Religion reformée. For example, Troyes (1547) and Rouen (1561), Galpern, pp. 132–3; Philip Benedict, Rouen During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 83–8. 99   See Georges Durville, L’ancienne confrérie de Saint-Sacrement à Nantes (Nantes, 1909), passim. 100   Georges Minois, Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1989), p. 88. 101   Galpern, pp. 184–6. 98

Strategies for Eternity

119

and intense devotions characterised these years.102 Armstrong argues that Franciscan preachers in particular encouraged lay devotion by insisting that even the ordinary believer could save French society. Outward behaviour manifested one’s inner condition and was the means by which a Christian could effect inner spiritual change. Personal and societal salvation were interdependent, for through intense devotion, individuals cleansed themselves of spiritual impurity and in doing so, eradicated a measure of sin from society.103 The institutions of the Catholic League in Brittany reinforced these ideals. In 1592, the provincial estates of the League ordered the official recognition of the decrees of the Council of Trent in the duchy and the parlement of the League at Nantes undertook to reform the Church by scrutinising appointments to benefices, enforcing clerical residence, sponsoring preachers and publishing the Tridentine decrees. The moral shortcomings of the laity were also targeted, with rulings on blasphemy and Sabbath breaking, gambling and playing games. The parlement here was deliberately putting its authority ‘to the service of the honour of God’, as one arrêt stated.104 Echoes of this militant piety are seen in several foundation documents from Brittany, presaging the dévôt wills of the early seventeenth century. The only foundation document known to mention the Last Judgment comes from 1588, when Jacques de la Croix, canon of Notre-Dame of Nantes, founded a mass ‘because he would have to give account [of his life] before his Sacred Majesty’ and fearing this, he wanted ‘with all his heart’ to do something to honour the blessed Trinity.105 A notable change in documents of this period is the conscious labelling of the Roman Catholic Church. Whereas a 1515 foundation of Jean Gandeur in Saint-Nicolas church of Nantes was for the increase of divine service ‘in the holy church of God’, the foundation of 1584 of Renée Burot in Saint-Saturnin was for masses in ‘the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church’.106 Similarly, the foundation of Gilles de Poulhon and Guionne Hamon in Carhaix in 1585 stated that they both desired ‘prayers to be said and celebrated in the Holy and Catholic Church for the salvation of faithful, true and good souls’.107 This new penitential and austere piety led some of the faithful back to

  Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Counter Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004), pp. 32–3. 103   Armstrong, pp. 104–105. 104   Robert Harding, ‘Revolution and Reform in the Holy League: Angers, Rennes and Nantes’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981): p. 398. 105   ADLA G 46. Diocese of Nantes. Visitation 1573. 106   ADLA G 487. Saint-Nicolas, Nantes. Fondations pieuses. 107   ADF 38 G 24. 102

120

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

the traditional practice of post-mortem foundations and the comfort of perpetual masses. A further feature of the Catholic League was the desire by the political elites to demonstrate their religion in public, to legitimise their revolt against the Crown. The rebellious governor of Brittany and his wife, the duke and duchess of Mercoeur, chose a combination of traditional and new rituals to validate their authority, thereby encouraging others to emulate their deeds. The duke founded a mass in the Dominican church of Nantes and the ducal couple augmented the foundation of its confraternity of the rosary.108 In 1592, the duke founded a mass of Notre-Dame-de-laVictoire in the parish church of Saint-Vincent of Nantes, to give perpetual thanks for his victory at Craon, along with a little office of the Virgin in Notre-Dame church.109 The foundation document stated that it was ‘to recognize the great goodness and power of God who armed [the duke] to uphold the Holy Roman Catholic Church against the oppression and violence of schismatic heretics and their political supporters’.110 In 1594, his mother-in-law Madame de Martigues also founded two weekly masses in Saint-Vincent.111 The duchess took part in nocturnal processions and invited paupers to be godparents for her baby son. By these actions, the Mercoeurs highlighted the religious basis of their political cause in overt acts seen by all sections of the city’s population. Similar details are lacking for the western cities, but increased rates of perpetual foundations suggest that this piety was also evident at least in the larger, episcopal towns. After the end of the religious wars, the period 1600–50 is seen by many historians of France as the golden age of chantry and anniversary foundation and thus of Purgatory itself. In the Lyonnais, while in 1550–90 only 15 per cent of rural testators left money to the church or charity, this rose to 54 per cent in 1625–49; in Lyon itself, the mid-seventeenth century saw 48 per cent of testators making pious bequests, rising to 72 per cent in the last quarter of the century.112 This was part of a shift away from the public, parish-based devotions that had been important in the League years, at least among elites. There was a notable resurgence of traditional, rather old-fashioned devotions, such as mortuary foundations. As with the spirituality of the wars of religion, early initiatives of the Catholic 108   Nicolas Travers, Hi mstoire civile, politique et réligieuse de la ville de Nantes (c.1750) (3 vols, Nantes, 1837), vol. 3, p. 54. 109   Pierre Biré, Alliances Généalogicques de la Maison de Lorraine illustrées des faites et gestes des princes d’icelles (Nantes, 1593), p. 247. 110   ADLA G 330. Collégiale de Notre-Dame de Nantes. Chapellenies et fondations pieuses. 111   ADLA G 521. Saint-Vincent, Nantes. Chapellenies. 112   Hoffman, pp. 119, 121.

Strategies for Eternity

121

‘reconquest’ of the early seventeenth century were lay-inspired. Armstrong argues that the coming to prominence of a Jesuit and Borromean model of lay devotion offered a more restrained, passive and less publicly emotional role in religious rites and practices and a more ‘dignified’ model of spirituality. She argues that among elites at least, there was a shift ‘from a millenarian form of piety that emphasised active engagement in the spiritual reformation of society to one focused on the interiority of faith and devotion’, although this also meant direct involvement in the religious reformation of France.113 As John Bossy has written at length, the chief hallmark of this new spirituality was an intense interiorised discipline for the individual.114 In its most intense form, this was seen in the Parisian circles of Barbe Acarie. Drawing on traditions of late medieval mysticism, progress in spiritual life was to be achieved by purgation, becoming a hollow vessel so that Christ could enter, but also actively propagating this message in society at large. In this ‘movement’ former Leagueurs were prominent. Diefendorf, developing ideas of Denis Richet, stresses the strong continuity between League religious fervour and the dévôt movement.115 Michel Cassan also argues for close links between the League and Catholic reform: their political enterprise checked, the soldiers of the League became zealots of the Counter Reformation. Both battles were inspired by the spirit of crusade and a desire to establish the city of God on earth.116 The links between former Leagueurs and dévôts can be seen in the Breton episcopal cities. In Nantes, for example, in four gifts made between 1607 and 1613, Michel Touzelin, a Leagueur city échevin and member of the rebel Chambre des Comptes, together with his wife Françoise Fradine, endowed the prison of Bouffay with low masses for all Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, all major feasts and saints’ days, and the chaplain was to confess and give communion to the prisoners as well.117 Good works for the living in return for their prayers, and formal post-mortem intercession for the founders through frequent masses, tied together the donor and recipient in an economy of mutual salvation. Traditional devotional forms were deployed to achieve new spiritual ambitions. The restitution of traditional institutions such as chantries and obits and the renewal of interest in Purgatory can be directly linked with    

113

Armstrong, pp. 101, 168. For example John Bossy, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, TRHS Fifth Series 25 (1975): pp. 21–38. 115   Diefendorf, From Penitence, pp. 86, 97. 116   Michel Cassan, ‘Laics, Ligue et réforme catholique à Limoges’, Histoire Économie et Société 10 (1991): pp. 164, 167. 117   ADLA G 330. 114

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

122

resurgent clericalism in the Tridentine-influenced reform of the early seventeenth century. Bishops and clergy sought to reassert their authority and bring religious life more closely under clerical supervision, through its institutionalisation and regulation. The importance of professional, clerical intercession grew, which was a direct cause of greater lay investment in masses. The episcopal resurgence coincided with a wider growth in the Church, with the foundation of new religious orders, whose prayers and masses were also highly valued, especially those of the mendicants who pioneered many of the new spiritual forms. In Vannes, for example, Capuchins were founded in 1614, Carmelites were founded at Bondon in 1624, discalced Carmelites and Ursulines in the city itself in 1627 and further, smaller, houses of new religious orders followed in the 1630s.118 Even the smaller convents attracted some foundations. The laity was heavily involved in all of these movements, encouraged by the clergy. In Vannes, for example, the discalced Carmelites were founded at the initiative of Jean Morin, President of the Présidial, who had two children professed in the order. Pious women such as Jeanne de Quélen and Catherine de Francheville in Vannes and Claude-Térèse de Kermero in Quimper, were patrons of Vincent Huby’s retreat houses for women. In Quimper, the Ursulines were established with the assistance of Sébastien de Rosmadec, governor of the city, for his sister Madelaine, who was the first abbess of the house, and the Third Order of the Franciscans was likewise founded by Christophe Fouquet de Chalais, President of the Parlement of Brittany, for a daughter.119 Lower down the social ladder, the servant Armelle Nicolas, who spent her life working at the château de Roguedas in Arradon parish, died in 1671 ‘in odour of sanctity’, with close links to the Vannes Ursulines.120 The study of pamphlet and handbook literature in chapter 3 showed that Purgatory was the subject of great interest in the early to midseventeenth century, when publications greatly increased. This interest was certainly reflected in practical devotional life in Brittany, for the numbers of foundations soared. Perpetual intercession was a concern of all groups, not only those who founded permanent masses. Croix has revealed numerous examples in Brittany of popular practices shaped by Purgatory after 1600. Parish devotions included the ‘bourse des defunts’ in Rannée and a ‘boîte des trépassés’ in Saffré and Châteaubriant in Nantes diocese, to assure a minimum of regular prayers in memory of those who were too poor to pay

118

 

Jean-Pierre Leguay (ed.), Histoire de Vannes et de sa région (Toulouse, 1988), p.

   

Jean Kerhervé (ed.), Histoire de Quimper (Toulouse, 1994), pp. 132–4. Leguay, p. 164.

161. 119 120

Strategies for Eternity

123

for their own masses or who lacked family members to pray for them.121 In the western dioceses, there was a resurgence of confraternities of departed souls to be discussed in chapter 6. The teachings of theologians and devotional writers about the afterlife had a direct influence throughout Breton society, through individual reading and mediated through sermons and teachings of the clergy. But from the mid-century at least, shifts in conceptions of the afterlife appear in Brittany, again in correlation with the themes of wider French literature on preparing for death. After 1660, there is clear evidence of this in the dramatic decline in foundations across the province. In neighbouring Normandy, the same trends are seen, for new foundations fell by 75 per cent after 1700 where Philippe Goujard argues for changing conceptions of eternity, an idea of time more rooted in history.122 There was also an upgrading of the importance of Hell with a downplaying of its physical punishments. One reason put forward has been the influence of Jansenism. However, the impact of Jansenism on Brittany is hard to assess before 1720 as discussed in chapter 2. Some Breton nobles at the royal court were sympathisers, such as the Prince de Guéméné, who had the abbé de SaintCyran as his director of conscience, although his direct influence on the province is not known.123 The Jesuits were absent from Nantes for much of the century, because of the hostility of the city council, who preferred to give the direction of their municipal college to the Oratorians.124 Later, this order was linked to Jansenism. But Paul Bois comments that there was little Jansenism in Nantes, even in the Oratoire, before 1716.125 Purgatory was still an inevitable destination for most souls, but Vovelle argues that it was becoming more of a place of cure than of punishment.126 Therefore the best way of managing the passage of the soul through Purgatory began to change. An important cause of shift was that emphasis on living a good life and spending a lifetime in preparation to meet God overtook the importance of dying a good death, according to Daniel Roche’s study of Ars moriendi literature. Across the seventeenth century, the ideology was increasingly promoted that one’s whole life should be constructed in the thought of death; there was less stress on the deathbed, more on the whole of

   

121

Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1135. Philippe Goujard, Un catholicisme bien tempéré. La vie religieuse dans les paroisses rurales de Haute-Normandie 1680–1789 (Paris, 1996), p. 363. 123   Guy Devailly (ed.), Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne (Chambray, 1980), p. 196. 124   Guy Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Edit (La Crèche, 1998), p. 228. 125   Paul Bois (ed.), Histoire de Nantes (Toulouse, 1977), p. 225. 126   Vovelle, La mort, pp. 308–10. 122

124

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

life, as preparation for the end became a daily necessity.127 In 1704, the directors of the retreat of Vannes published an Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir which stressed asceticism and continual effort as the key to eternal life.128 The notion emerged that the highest form of union with God might best be achieved through an active life of Christian service.129 Above all, a vital part of the ‘good life’ as opposed to the ‘good death’ was a continued and growing devotion to works in emulation of Christ. Diefendorf has argued that by the 1630s, among female elites in Paris at least, a preference for charitable service came to supplant penitential asceticism as the dominant spiritual mode, reflecting a gentler Salesian spirit and more optimistic view of God. Economic disruptions brought on by the Thirty Years’ War, widespread misery and pauperisation caused many elites to redirect their alms to the suffering poor. A rise in charitable giving was a widespread feature of testamentary behaviour. In central Paris, across the mid-seventeenth century 1646–72, Chaunu found parity between the sums left in wills for masses and for charity, although women gave a little more for masses while men privileged the poor.130 In the Lyonnais, charitable bequests in wills rose, from 54 per cent of testators in 1625–49, to over 90 per cent by 1700, with the relative size of donations also increasing.131 Almsgiving was still a mutual service; the request for prayers still paramount, even when the donor was anonymous. This does not deny a belief in Purgatory but the best means of transit through it were changing. Prayer, for one’s self and for others, through the medium of charitable giving, seems to have grown, to the detriment of permanent masses. In Brittany as a whole, the devout moved away from permanent postmortem intercession to ‘work’ in the world. The nature of charitable giving changed, however. The practice of giving alms on the days of burial and octave service declined, from about 50 per cent of testators in 1590–1650 to fewer than 25 per cent after 1650. This corresponded with a decline in other forms of personal giving to the poor. Instead, there was a great rise in giving to the ‘deserving poor’ in the first half of the century through institutions of relief, particularly hospitals.132 Relief was also reformed in this period. In Quimper, for example, the city’s hospitals were reorganised. Sainte-Catherine was rebuilt 1615–31, Saint-Yves was finally suppressed in 1656 after it had been destroyed by fire some years before     129   130   131   132   127 128

Ibid., p. 359. Leguay, p. 171. Diefendorf, From penitence, pp. 171, 243. Chaunu, La mort, p. 421. Hoffman, p. 121. Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1129–30.

Strategies for Eternity

125

and in 1662, Saint-Antoine was made into a hôpital-général for the elderly, orphans and foundlings. Charitable giving through these institutions rather than as an individual act was encouraged. In Nantes the decline in attendance at funerals of mendicant friars after 1630 was matched by their replacement by paupers, especially the enclosed poor of the hospitals and children: Croix argues for ‘a transfer of the weight of ostentation towards the poor’.133 Even in the small Breton town of Montfort, during the seventeenth century the service of the poor took over spiritual life, with particular concern for sick and destitute pilgrims passing through the town.134 Writers on Purgatory of the mid-late century also prioritised good works, as we saw in chapter 3. By the late seventeenth century, it seems to have become a widespread view that charitable works during a person’s lifetime was more efficacious for salvation than generous actions postponed after death. When good works were left until the end, moralists taught that charitable donations were the best form of piety.135 Attitudes to burial place also began to change from the later seventeenth century. F. Lebrun has observed for Anjou that the practice of inhumation inside churches began to be criticised at the end of the century by clerics, who judged it to be a sign of too great an attachment to this world and of superstition. The value of suffrages of the living did not need to be tied to the burial place of the deceased.136 New views on health and hygiene also emerged. In 1719, an edict of the Parlement of Brittany forbade all inhumations in churches, except for those with family tombs, although at first this was poorly applied.137 The physical link between the resting place of the body and intercession for the soul shifted as beliefs about sacred sites changed. The soul was gaining in importance over the body, with intercession dissociated from the earthly remains of the deceased. Particular judgement came to be the culmination not the beginning of the journey into eternity. Finally, the progress of inflation and the taxation of foundation benefices meant that religious institutions were increasingly unlikely to accept the obligations of intercession. In Nantes in 1698, a taxe d’amortissment was imposed on all foundations made since 1600. This meant that a capital donation of 2,000 livres was taxed at 440 livres, leaving 1,560 livres for the    

133

Ibid. Marcel Sibold, ‘La vie religieuse d’une petite ville bretonne au XVIIe siècle’, RHEF LXIX (1983): pp. 209–32. 135   John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), p. 241–2. 136   François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques (Paris, 1971), p. 475. 137   Leguay, p. 163. 134

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

126

benefice, a considerable deduction.138 A royal edict of 1703 created a new insinuation or duty for acts including foundations by wills or donation, taxed at 1 per cent. Further, an edict of 1708 ordered that all foundations of masses were subject to droits d’amortissment within a year and a day of their acquisition.139 While the tax had previously existed, it had been collected only irregularly. Fiscal pressure on foundations was certainly one cause of their decline. Another important cause was the devaluation of the currency in the early eighteenth century and above all, the effects of the crisis associated with Law’s system. For example, in 1728, the Carmelites of Nantes were forced to reduce their post-mortem celebrations. At this date, the convent was celebrating 1139 low masses and 103 high masses a year. Many of these foundations brought in little revenue. The foundation of 1423 of Jean de la Noë of a weekly low mass produced only 18 livres a year, instead of the original 30 livres, so it was reduced to two masses per month; the foundation of Duchess Anne of Brittany of a daily high mass, originally worth 200 livres per annum, was now only worth 104 livres, so her intercession was reduced, with the bishop’s consent, to a weekly high mass. Some foundations were wound up because their benefices no longer paid any revenue at all. There is evidence throughout the province that in the 1720s, fiscal difficulties forced many existing foundations to be reduced or discontinued. The age of perpetual intercession was over. Conclusions The study of perpetual mortuary foundations shows a widespread reception of the doctrine of Purgatory in Brittany by the later fifteenth century and the continued vitality of the belief over the following two centuries. But what is also clear is that practice on the ground in terms of the funding and founding of permanent post-mortem intercession did not always follow the ‘fashion’ for the doctrine among theological writers and polemicists. This was not merely a received doctrine; it was one in which the laity and even the lower clergy engaged on their own terms. In the later Middle Ages and early sixteenth century, the volume of teachings on Purgatory in sermons and publications and the rate of perpetual foundations in southern and western Brittany show that there was correlation between the interests of clerical authors and ‘ordinary’ Catholics in town and countryside. Also, when Renaissance writers began to sidestep Purgatory as a theme, we see a decline in foundations in Breton cities at least. But the period of the religious wars was a crucial    

138 139

Durand, Un couvent dans la ville, p. 184. Viguerie, ‘Les fondations’, p. 318.

Strategies for Eternity

127

era of change. While there was an upsurge in clerically-authored literature defining Purgatory and urging post-mortem intercession, there was a decline in rate of foundations of perpetual masses. Instead, in strong reaction to Protestantism or at least Renaissance sensibilities and particularly because of the uncertainties of civil war, public, collective ritual, especially devotion to the Holy Sacrament and charitable works, received enormous emphasis, while investment in mortuary intercession declined. After 1600, traditional practices reasserted themselves, encouraged by Tridentineinspired devotions and renewed clericalism which was marked also by an upsurge in literature on the afterlife. Again, clerical agendas and ritual practice influenced each other closely in the west. Similarly, the midcentury saw changes in priories, evidence in literature and in activities on the ground. Elite and popular groups turned to greater engagement with the world through good works; intercession came from engagement with the living rather than the dead. Social activism gained ground over private, individual mortuary foundations. Within this general evolution, certain themes emerge. Women became increasingly prominent as founders of perpetual intercession in the seventeenth century, reflecting the growing role for females in the Church seen in their enhanced role in the patronage of convents, charities and confraternities. The growth of prominence and dignity of the eucharist is evidenced, as ritual moved from simple, weekly masses to more elaborate, but less frequent services. Also, a shift in patronage from parishes to convent and collegiate churches by the middling sort became the hallmark of the devout, keen to emphasise and display an interior, individual relationship with God and is a sign of the enhanced role of clerical authority in the Church after the end of the wars of religion. The evolution of perpetual foundations therefore shows us something of the timing and causes of broad changes in spirituality over time, and of the responses of ‘ordinary’ Catholics to the writings and teachings of polemical and devotional literature. What it cannot tell us is how individuals and communities ‘understood’ the doctrine, what their motives were in participating in intercession and what they hoped to achieve. The relationship between the interior and the individual, the public and the collective, is the issue to which we now turn in a study of the motives of those who invested in foundations.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 5

The Individual Alone Before God? Motives of Donors and the Functions of Perpetual Masses ‘Let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For every man shall bear his own burden.’ [Galatians 6: 5–6]

The foundation of chantry and obit masses across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that different groups in Breton society were influenced by the teachings and writings on Purgatory emanating from the wider French Church. But the question remains of why Bretons chose to found perpetual masses for their souls when a range of intercessory strategies were open to them? The endowment of masses was clearly an attempt to harness the intercessory powers of the wider Church to affect individual salvation. But the foundation of perpetual masses has also been interpreted as a signifier of an important cultural shift which occurred between 1450 and 1700 in Europe, the ‘rise’ of the individual, seen as both cause and consequence of the Reformations. Medievalists have argued that this transformation had already commenced in the later Middle Ages. Mystical and devotio moderno traditions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries encouraged withdrawal and self examination. Advice given to devout lay people stressed that there should be constant meditation in private and routine reflection upon personal unworthiness and sinfulness.1 The individual was alone before God even before Martin Luther developed his theory of justification by faith. But it is John Bossy’s interpretation of transformation from a communitarian and social environment, to an individual and personal one that has been most influential in studies of early modern Catholicism. In his words, ‘the effect of the Counter-Reformation … was … to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorised discipline for the individual’, the purpose of devotion becoming reconciliation to God rather than obligation to the community.2 1

  Felicity Heal, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 97–8.   John Bossy, ‘The social history of confession in the age of the Reformation’, TRHS Fifth Series xxv (1975): p. 21. 2

130

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Part of this process, was ‘a transfer of potency within the societas Christiana away from the lateral group, from forms which included the … religious community and associations of artificial and natural kinship. … [to] the vertical group of which the visible embodiment was the nuclear family and the domestic unit’.3 The mass changed from a ‘public ritual offered by those present for themselves and the whole community of Christians, into a private ritual, offered by the priest for the benefit of a specific group of individuals, living or dead’.4 This took place all over Europe. For example, in the Spanish diocese of Cuenca, Sara Nalle argues that during the sixteenth century, spiritual life turned inward. Religious persons ‘adopted wholeheartedly the practice of mental prayer and the faith underwent a process of internalisation and turning towards Christ’.5 By the seventeenth century, the Church had succeeded in implanting a more personal faith, in which payments for priests and prayers were substituted for community actions.6 For France, in a study of Champagne, Alan Galpern sees the Reformation as a period when demographic and economic stresses led to social tensions. As a result, religious forms based on the organisation of people into tightly-knit groups that sought to achieve solidarity in society at large, became less meaningful. He cites the sixteenth-century decline in confraternity membership in cities such as Troyes as evidence for ‘a softening in the drive towards solidarity’.7 Individual consciousness led to private strategies for salvation. But revisionist historians argue that it is difficult to unpick individual and community motives, both in the later medieval and the Reformation centuries. They stress the ‘seamless dovetailing of self-interest and altruism and the reciprocal character of a flow of spiritual and material benefits between living and dead members of the community’.8 Eamon Duffy argues that in the later Middle Ages, while the wealthy and literate had increasing access to and interest in types of spirituality hitherto confined to the monastery, there was a ‘remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum, a shared repertoire of symbols, prayers and beliefs which crossed and bridged even the gulf

3

  John Bossy, ‘Holiness and Society’, P&P 75 (May 1977): p. 136.   John Bossy, ‘Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’, SCH 10 (1973): p. 137. 5   Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha. Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore, 1992), p. 135. 6  Ibid., p. 171. 7  Alan Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA, 1976), pp. 94–9, 103. 8   Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 25. 4

The Individual Alone Before God?

131

between the literate and the illiterate’.9 This was ‘a Christianity resolutely and enthusiastically oriented towards the public and the corporate … [with] … a continuing sense of the value of co-operation and mutuality in seeking salvation’.10 For early modern Spain, William Christian argues that devotion was not a matter of wealth or social class; joint religious devotions probably helped hold local communities together in the face of wracking disparities of wealth and opportunity. Wealth certainly allowed for differences of style. Noblemen kept private chapels; the devout wealthy were able to pay more attention to salvation, but all people faced the same problems of disease, death and damnation.11 As for the central rite of Catholicism, the mass, Virginia Reinburg comments that from the evidence of vernacular treatises and from the form of the ceremony itself, the mass for the laity was a communal rite of greeting, sharing, giving, receiving and making peace; the late medieval liturgy can be viewed as the establishment of social and spiritual solidarity among God, the Church and the lay community.12 Revisionists therefore reject the view that in most communities the gentry and urban elites chose to withdraw from communal worship, but argue that they chose to dominate it instead. This was not a process of privatisation of religion.13 The motives of founders of perpetual masses are therefore the focus of this chapter. The central question is why individuals and families chose to invest significant amounts of property and money into perpetual intercession for their souls: what did they hope to achieve from this investment and did aspirations change over time? Was the inspiration that of individual recognition and salvation, or was endowment an act for the benefit of the wider community? Justifications for founding masses, the form and function of liturgies, their material setting and cost, are explored across the period. It is argued that motives varied and overlapped, that the salvation of an individual’s soul was a complicated affair involving a variety of agents, living and dead, and that there was a mutual relationship of interest between the communities of this world and the next. There was no simple trend towards individualisation within religious life and the separation of elites from communal culture should not be overstated.

9   Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 3. 10  Ibid., p. 131. 11   William A. Christian Jnr, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981), p. 147. 12   Virginia Reinburg, ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France’, SCJ 23 (1992): pp. 526–47. 13   Duffy, p. 131.

132

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

The Motives of Donors: Individual Aspirations in the Economy of Salvation The aspirations of the founders of perpetual masses can never be reconstructed with certainty for they lie buried with the individual. But a documentary source that gives an insight into motive is the foundation document itself. Foundation documents invariably contain a justificatory preamble outlining the wishes of the founders. Of course there are limitations with such sources. As with wills, the role of clerks and scribes in shaping the contents of documents, the use of model contracts and the influence of devotional treatises were all important. J.D. Alsop argues that will making had become a cultural ritual by the early modern period, that preambles were formalised and provide impersonal statements of questionable utility.14 The frequently standardised format of foundation documents might lead to similar conclusions. But as Duffy argues for wills, so with foundations, these were in principle religious documents. For the especially devout, these documents gave opportunities for explicit and sometimes detailed declarations of faith. Even for the conformist majority, who used preambles and explanations drawn from models, ‘the formulaic character, offers evidence not of shallowness but of overwhelming social consensus in religious convictions and priorities’.15 Testators and founders viewed the recording of their bequests as devotional acts, even if the words were provided by the notary. Their words can thus be used as guides to interior belief, most of which was conformist and shared with the wider community, but still genuinely felt. One of the striking features of foundation documents is their silence about donors’ understanding of the nature of the afterlife. Pierre Chaunu observes for Paris a phenomenon that is seen everywhere: wills almost never mention Purgatory.16 Similarly in Breton foundation documents, Purgatory was mentioned rarely and only from later in our period, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. For example, in 1662, David Le Cléguerec and Jeanne du Mur founded an obit in the parish church of Cléguer ‘for the remission of their sins and for the prosperity of their family., to pity them and exempt them from the flames of Purgatory’.17 In the same year, in the parish of Languidic, Henriette Colle was moved to found a mass in perpetuity ‘by the spirit of God, by charitable zeal and by commiseration for the pains which the faithful departed suffer in the flames of Purgatory, where they are held until full satisfaction and perfect 14   J.D. Alsop, ‘Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae’, JEH XL (1989): pp. 19–27. 15   Duffy, chapter 15 for a discussion of wills. 16   Pierre Chaunu, La mort a Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1978), p. 149. 17  ADM G 878. Cléguer. Fondations.

The Individual Alone Before God?

133

expiation is achieved for the sins they committed through weakness or otherwise during their lives’.18 In 1677, Louise Lair founded a mass in the Carmelite convent of Nantes ‘to acquire rest and redemption for the souls in Purgatory by the holy sacrifice of the mass’.19 The direct articulation of belief was rare, however. Despite silence on the nature of the afterlife, the salvation of the soul – and the fact that this might take some time – was clearly the primary motive for perpetual masses. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most commonly-stated reason for pious bequests was ‘wanting to arrange for the well-being and salvation of their souls’ (Robin L’Admiral and his wife Jeanne Ginet, Nantes 1440), or ‘to pray God for the soul of the founder’ (André Le Gallois, Nantes, 1559) or for ‘the repose of his soul’ (Patrice Martin, Nantes, 1653).20 In 1645, a foundation of Jean Beloeil and family in Nantes was ‘to obtain general pardon for their sins, both penalty and guilt’.21 Across the period, a key desire was for remembrance, so that the living would not forget the founder’s name and his/her continuing spiritual need. In the words of the foundation of Gillet Barbe in SainteCroix of Nantes in 1529, ‘so that the parishioners and their successors would have memory and remembrance of the souls of Gillet, his mother and father, to recommend them to God in their prayers’.22 In 1581, Symon Le Goff of Auray linked a foundation with a bequest for maintenance of the chapel of Notre-Dame in the cemetery of Saint-Goustan, ‘so that he, his predecessors and successors will be participants in the masses, prayers and devotions that will be said and made in the chapel’.23 In 1601, the will of Adelice Nuz founded an obit in the Cathedral of St-Pol-de-Léon ‘to pray God for her soul and to participate in the merits of the masses, prayers, orations and suffrages which will be said there’.24 In 1657, Ollivier Bottin gave money to the hôpital-général of Nantes, ‘desiring to participate in the prayers, merits and sufferings of the poor’.25 Temporal concerns also emerge from foundation documents. Endowments of masses gave the devout a means of thanksgiving, in recognition of the earthly goods that God had given to the founders and a

18

 ADM 6 E 1815. Notaire Cadic. Hennebont 1654–66.  ADLA H 231. Carmes de Nantes. Titres de fondations. 20  A.M.N. GG 613, Confréries Saint-Saturnin de Nantes; ADLA G 313; ADLA G 323. 21  ADLA H 228. Carmes de Nantes. Titres de fondations. 22  ADLA G 461. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 23   ADM 6 E 2182. Notaire Kermadec. Auray 1561–82. 24  ADF 9 G 7. Confrérie des Trépassés. Fondations. 25  ADLA H dep 3/1 B3. Hôtel Dieu de Nantes. Dons et legs. 19

134

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

way of turning some of these into spiritual treasure.26 Jacques de la Croix, canon of Notre-Dame of Nantes, founded a mass in 1588 ‘not wanting to be ungrateful for the small amount of temporal goods that it has pleased God to give him in this mortal life and for which he will have to render account before His Sacred Majesty’.27 In 1604, Pierre Fournier and Gratienne Roux founded a mass in the Carmelite church of Nantes ‘recognising the grace which it has pleased God the Creator to allow them to live together for 35 years’ and in 1648 Marguerite Guiton of the parish of Nivillac made a foundation ‘in recognition of the benefits, graces and assistance that she has always received from God’.28 Foundations might also seek temporal favours. The foundation of Mathurin Demezière of Malestroit of 1634 is typical: ‘for the repose of his and his predecessors’ souls and for their good prosperity and health’.29 In 1666, Gilles de Brénézay founded a mass in the church of Sainte-Radegonde, Nantes, in gratitude to the Church, for ‘since 1606 he has been raised, fed and maintained by the revenues of the Cathedral church of Nantes in which he was choir boy then chorister, master of music and latterly Head Vicar Choral of the church’.30 His mass was to give thanks for his blessings. Obligations to family and friends emerge strongly. Foundations were rarely made for individuals alone. While the names of founders or of couples were central to the document, masses were usually for small groups, typically spouses, parents and ancestors, benefactors and friends. The ‘tag’ of ‘parents, alliés, amis’ to which might be added ‘bienfaiteurs’ was standard on foundation documents and personal obligation was sometimes stated. In 1587, Jan Le Ray, recteur of Saint-Patern of Vannes founded a mass for himself, ‘for his father, mother and other relatives and for all those for whom he has obligations to pray’.31 Others named benefactors and relatives, particularly clerics who owed preferment to their kin. Thus, François Cousturier, canon and scholastique of Vannes Cathedral, founded a cycle of masses for Corpus Christi, for himself, his parents, for Jean Juhel, archdeacon and canon, his uncle, and Sebastien Nicolas, former scholastique.32 In 1703, Jean Callier, canon of Quimper, 26   Dominique Viaux, ‘L’Economie du salut dans les textes des fondations de messes aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Essai théologique’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Religions, 72 (1992): pp. 157–8. 27  ADLA G 461. 28  ADLA H 226. Carmes de Nantes. Titres de fondations; ADM G 934. Nivillac. Fondations. 29  ADM G 1131. Malestroit. Chapellenie de la Guyondaie 1634. 30  ADLA G 491. Sainte-Radegonde de Nantes. Titres de la fabrique. 31  ADM 55 G 2. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations. 32  ADM 55 G 3. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations.

The Individual Alone Before God?

135

founded an obit for Jean Callier his uncle ‘in recognition of the goodness he showed towards him and the education which he gave him while alive’.33 Promotion of the status of the kinship group and lineage was central to many foundations. The perpetual chantry offered families a vehicle for social prestige while patronage of religious institutions helped establish their worldly honour. In 1630, Guy de Rieux, Marquis, founded a daily mass in the Franciscan church of Nantes, ‘for the seigneurs of Rieux his predecessors, reputed founders of the convent’.34 In 1634, Mathurin Demezière, Sieur de la Guyondaie in the parish of Malestroit, made a clear statement of lineage by founding a weekly mass in Malestroit church for the seigneurs of Guyondaie and their predecessors.35 Foundations were a form of conspicuous consumption; not only were intercessory prayers purchased but the act of donation also publicised the family’s wealth, emphasised their piety and allowed them to ‘bask in a reflected godliness’.36 Foundations served as a memorial to the deceased, like a monument, that reminded the living of their ancestors and confirmed their social status.37 They were also recorded on monuments and wall plaques in private chapels, for posterity. Intercession for a wider group, particularly unknown people, was rarer. In 1514, Jan du Plessix founded an obit on the Île d’Ars, for the soul of his brother Jan, for his parents, friends and for all the departed.38 In 1664, Françoise Guillouche wanted masses in Questembert ‘for the repose of her soul and for those of the faithful departed’.39 In 1676, René Denys, priest of the parish of Guidel, gave a rent in grain and money to the parish church to augment the revenue of the Monday mass and weekly procession for the dead of the parish, which was in danger of falling into disuse because of a decline in funds for the service.40 In 1677, Charles Lequenderff’s foundation in Notre-Dame-du-Méné near Vannes, stated that ‘as a good Apostolic and Roman Christian’ he wanted ‘to comfort as much as he could under the bounty and misericord of God, the souls of all the faithful departed, notably his father and mother, brothers and sisters and other relatives and friends’ and those who were buried in the 33

 ADF 2 G 99. Chapitre de Quimper. Fondations.  ADLA H 286. Cordeliers de Nantes. Fondations pieuses. 35  ADM G 1131. 36   Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Counter Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004), p. 19. 37   Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. The art and craft of dying in sixteenthcentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995), p. 202. 38  ADM 56 G 3. Chapitre de Vannes. Chapellenies. 39  ADM 6 E 964. Notaire Le Mauff. Questembert 1661–4. 40  ADM G 898. Guidel. Fondations. 34

136

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

parish church of Le Méné.41 These examples stand out because of their singularity. Institutional intercession was particularly important for people without families. In 1585 in Carhaix, Gilles de Poulhon and Guionne Hamon founded a mass for their souls because they lacked children and heirs.42 In 1591, René Monharon, farmer and wool fuller of the parish of Congé near Châteaubriant, without children and heirs, gave his house and property to the Hôtel Dieu of Nantes in return for maintenance for the rest of his life and once dead, for prayers and an anniversary low mass.43 In 1670 Louise Le Stang founded a mass in Saint-Trémeur of Carhaix, because ‘her succession is in the hands of many different collateral heirs, who will not take care to pray God for her soul’ and in the same church and year, Marguerite Lebleis founded an obit ‘because of her great age and indisposition, and not having any relations in this town who would have prayers said for her’.44 Finally, in a rare number of cases, foundations could also be political. Ducal foundations in Vannes and Nantes created lavish centres of display, where spiritual power was harnessed for the well-being of the ruling family. The daily sung masses in Vannes Cathedral, founded by the duchesses Jeanne in 1430 and Isabelle of Scotland, second wife of Duke François II, in 1494, made the Cathedral a site of ducal power and propaganda, displaying the ruling house’s piety and wealth. Above all, the period of the Catholic League stands out. The duke of Mercoeur’s foundation of a mass in Notre-Dame of Nantes in 1592 stated that ‘the exploits and events of war [reveal] the goodness and power of God who has armed [Mercoeur] to uphold the Holy Catholic and Roman Church against the oppression and violence of heretics, schismatics and politiques their supporters; against them several signs and victories have been given to [Mercoeur] and he has been used [by God] to dispel their wicked designs’, in order to give perpetual thanks for this, the duke founded his mass.45 The duke also founded masses in the Dominican Church and his family made foundations in Saint-Vincent parish church, to similar ends. So the primary motive for the foundation of perpetual masses was intercession for individuals, their families and friends. Yet in order to achieve this, the wider community had to be drawn in to the ritual activity. While a chaplain or choir would be employed to serve the masses and obits, the involvement of a wider group was desirable. To achieve this, a 41

 ADM G 1025. Le Méné. Fondations.  ADF 38 G 24. Collégiale de Saint-Trémeur, Carhaix. Fondations. 43  ADLA H Dépôt 3/1 B3. 44  ADF 38 G 24. 45  ADLA G330. Collégiale de Notre-Dame, Nantes. Fondations. 42

The Individual Alone Before God?

137

foundation had to provide a function for the wider church and community. This was achieved largely by contributing to the liturgy and to the funds of the church fabric, in perpetuity. There was little change over time in the motives of founders; remembrance of a small group of souls by as wide a group of the living as possible remained central to perpetual intercession. The individual and community were inter-dependent, for the salvation of the former rested on the actions of the latter. The Purpose of Perpetual Foundations: The Increase in Divine Service of the Mass While prayer was the central objective of post-mortuary foundations, by 1500 its most important forum was of course the mass. Bossy comments that the mass had three functions: to honour God and the saints, to pray for the living and the dead and to apply the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice to their respective needs.46 The fundamental function of perpetual intercession was to harness the merits of Christ’s redemptive passion, so that through the intention of the celebrant it could be applied to the needs of an individual.47 Bossy observes a long-term transformation in the notion of the sacrament, into a privileged occasion for the transmission of substantive grace to the individual soul.48 Thus by the late Middle Ages, there had developed many forms of votive or private masses, which might be specifically applied to particular persons or objects. But the mass was a communal as well as an individual devotion. Duffy observes that contemporaries distinguished between the essential sacrifice which constituted the mass, which was efficacious for all the living and the dead, and the particular prayers which formed the proper of each mass, which could be directed to specific purposes or persons, like any other prayers.49 Carlos Eire observes that across the sixteenth century the primary concern of testators asking for masses, temporary and permanent, was the self, followed by parents and spouses. But to be saved, individuals also had to request masses for others; no one could enter heaven without works of mercy so one was under the obligation of looking after the welfare of other souls as well.50 Masses for the dead conferred advantages 46

  John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, P&P 100 (1983): p. 36.   Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), p. 50. 48   John Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism’, SCH 23 (1986): p. 189. 49   Duffy, p. 373. 50   Eire, Madrid, pp. 210–12. 47

138

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

on the living as well as on the departed, for it was believed that great benefits flowed from seeing Christ in the form of the transubstantiated host. Founders conceived of perpetual masses as a good work, for the benefit of the whole the community. The stated purpose of perpetual intercession in Breton foundation documents throughout the period was ‘pour l’augmentation du service divin’ (for the increase of divine service). Thus in 1567, Jullien Bonnyer and Marguerite du Boys founded a mass in Nantes Cathedral ‘so that divine service will be augmented in the Holy Church for the salvation for their souls and of their parents, friends and benefactors, to the honour and praise of God the creator, the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints of heaven’.51 In 1611, Jean Guiaut, archdeacon and canon of QuimperCornouaille, founded a mass ‘to participate in the prayers and suffrages, orations and divine office which are normally held in the Cathedral church, for the increase in the honour of God and the expiation of sins’.52 Some founders went further in describing the importance of the mass for their own salvation but also for that of the wider Church. Thus, in 1588, the foundation of Jacques de la Croix in Sainte-Croix of Nantes was for a mass of the Holy Sacrament liturgy ‘in remembrance of His painful passion and for our consolation and the nourishing of our souls’.53 In 1684, Jeanne de Guiguen of Cléguer stated that she wished ‘the increase or maintenance of divine service, recognising that there is nothing more efficacious, meritorious and agreeable to God than the oblation made to him of the precious body and blood of the august sacrifice of the mass, which serves as an incomparable propitiation for the salvation of the souls of the faithful deceased and for the prosperity of the living’.54 Individual and communal benefits of the mass were seen as inseparable. The majority of chantry and obit foundations augmented the provision of divine service simply by adding to the number of masses said in churches during a week or liturgical year. This was meritorious in itself, for the volume of prayer offered to God was important. Most perpetual weekly masses were low masses, frequently of the office for the dead and they augmented divine service in a general way. Some founders were more specific about the offices, however, drawing in different intercessory prayers, hoping to attract a wider audience to the mass. In 1515, Yves de Quirissec founded four weekly masses in the chapel of St Luke of Vannes Cathedral. The Sunday mass was to have the collect for the dead and the final collect of the Trinity; the mass of Monday was to be for the dead with 51

 ADLA 4 E 2/1389. Notaire Lemoine. Nantes 1564–93.  ADF 2 G 99. 53  ADLA G 461. 54  ADM G 878. 52

The Individual Alone Before God?

139

its three collects, that of Wednesday a mass of St Sebastian with collects for the dead, of St Peter and the Virgin and the Friday mass was to be of the office of the Cross, with collects of the dead and of St Vincent Ferrer.55 The foundation thus expanded the range of masses on offer to be heard. What is striking about many foundations is that they were purposefully designed to augment the variety and splendour of the liturgy of the churches in which they took place, above all that in collegiate and parish churches. In monastic churches, the motives for foundations of masses were slightly different, for they were conceived of as a form of alms for the community. The Spanish author Alonso de Orozco explained the superiority of the mass over other forms of suffrage by saying that it counted twice, as Christ’s sacrifice and as alms-giving, for the money paid to have masses said for the dead was a contribution towards the upkeep of the clergy.56 In conventual foundations, there was less stress on liturgical innovation, for the religious orders had their own distinctive offices. In the secular churches, there was close communication between founders and clergy, to plug gaps and augment the liturgy as devotions changed over time. Firstly, some foundations were made to augment the provision of services and upkeep of churches, where these had been lacking. In 1647, Jeanne de la Coudraie founded a mass in the church of St Michel of Vannes, ‘for the public good, for parishioners who lack masses on feast days because of a shortage of choir priests, who are obliged to go to say chantry masses founded in the chapels of noble residences’ on those days.57 With similar objectives, in 1689, Yves Bahe, laboureur, left a perpetual rent for the priest and chaplain who held mass for the confraternity of St Mamert in the parish of Ambon, because their remuneration for these services was so little. He wished to augment their wages and be remembered in their prayers and those of their successors, for this good deed.58 The provision of new, special devotions was an important function of foundations. If we take the example of Vannes Cathedral, changing liturgical fashions and interests are shown through chantry and particularly obit endowments over time. It is clear that high status and well endowed obits were used to augment and promote the cults celebrated there. As the foundation document of Jean Le Guenol, recteur of Sérent stated in 1589, he wanted to augment the office of the conversion of St Paul, ‘seeing that the feast was kept solemnly in several churches, Cathedrals, monasteries and dioceses of the province but not in Vannes Cathedral, he wanted to

55

 ADM 56 G 2. Chapitre de Vannes. Chapellenies.  Eire, Madrid, p. 175. 57  ADM 57 G 3. Confrérie des Trépassés, Vannes. 58  ADM G 841. Ambon. Fondations. 56

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

140

ensure that it was celebrated there as well’.59 In general, existing ‘simple’ feasts – with liturgy involving chaplains – was boosted to ‘double’ feasts, involving canons and chaplains and frequently with processions and canticles. What is noticeable is the development of the practice after the mid-1580s, in conjunction with a revival of traditional devotions with the Catholic League. Interest in saints’ feasts continued in the early 1600s, slowed down, then received more attention in the 1640s and 1650s. Table 5.1 Augmentation of Saints’ Feasts at Vannes Cathedral Year

Feast

Donor

1515

Weekly hours of Our Lady

Yves de Quirissec, Canon of Vannes

1537

Purification of the Virgin

Jean Daniello, Canon of Vannes

1575

St Andrew

Charlotte Le Goff, bourgeoise of Vannes

1585

St Guillaume

Guillaume Gauche and his wife Jeanne

1589

Three Marys

Salomon Michau, priest

1589

Conversion of St Paul

Jean Le Guenol, recteur of Sérent

1593

SS Simon and Jude

Bertrand Guimarho, Canon of Vannes

1594

St Mary Magdelaine

Henri Lechet

1595

St Peter

Sieur and Dame de Kerlois

1596

SS Philip and James

Jacques Millon, Canon of Vannes

1598

St George

Jean Rolland, Conseiller du présidial, and wife

1599

St Matthew

Jean Le Ray, Canon of Vannes

1604

St Michael

Michelle Guydo, widow of a notary

1607

St Thomas

Jean Guainche, merchant, and Ollive Le Goul

1614

St Laurence

Jean Guillaume, priest

1616

Annunciation ND

Marie Guymarho

1618

St Martin

Claude Gouault, Canon of Vannes

1635

Conception of ND

1641

St Joseph

59

 ADM 55 G 3.

Françoise Regnault

The Individual Alone Before God? 1652

SS Thomas Aquinas, Anne, Bonaventure, Hervé, Hyacinthe, Julian, Francis Xavier

141

Julienne Yvon and Françoise Le Prat, Dames de Kerbillève

1653

St Cecilia

Yves de Bahuno, Canon of Vannes

1653

St Yves

Yves Noblet, priest

1653

SS Barnabas & Bartholomew

René Gouault, Archdeacon of Vannes

1654

SS Anne, St René Bishop of Angers

René Gouault, Archdeacon of Vannes

A specific example is the augmented status of St Vincent Ferrer, buried in Vannes Cathedral and canonised in 1455. In 1562, Guenäel Le Floch, canon of Vannes, founded an annual mass on St Vincent’s day in the Cathedral, including a procession with the head of the saint.60 In 1617, Jean Morin, president of the présidial court of Vannes, and Jeanne Huteau his wife, augmented St Vincent’s feast with a procession around the Cathedral carrying the saint’s head, accompanied by sacred canticles and stations. After their deaths, this was to be followed by a low mass for their souls at the altar of St Vincent.61 In 1637, Bertrand Guyomarche founded a double office on the feast of the translation of the relics of St Vincent, the mass to be said in the chapel of St Vincent, where the donor also wanted to be buried.62 In 1641, Françoise Regnault, widow of Jacques LeLiepure, conseiller in the présidial of Vannes, founded a procession around the church and over her future tomb to take place immediately after compline on 6 September, the feast of the translation of the relics of St Vincent Ferrer.63 In the same year, Sébastien de Rosmadec, bishop of Vannes, founded a night procession with the head of St Vincent around the town and ramparts of Vannes, followed by a high mass at the Cathedral altar.64 Vannes Cathedral was making large efforts to create a pilgrimage site for the saint and the chapter encouraged foundations to augment the cult’s status. In the seventeenth century, increased popularity of Marial and Holy Sacrament cults led to increased investment in their liturgies with the foundation of processions and sung litanies, instead of masses. In Vannes Cathedral in 1618, Jullien Roudault, canon and master of the psallette, founded a procession and salutation of the Holy Sacrament on 29 June, St Peter’s day, the patronal festival. It was to take place after compline and to copy the annual Corpus Christi procession, with hymns, organs and music 60

 ADM 55 G 2.  ADM 55 G 3. 62  ADM 59 G 8. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations. 63  ADM 55 G 3. 64  ADM 59 G 8. 61

142

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

accompanying the sacrament from the parish altar of the Cathedral, where it was exposed all day, back to the sacristy. After the procession had ended, a Ne recorderis was to be sung on the tomb of Roudault’s brother, linking the family with the devotion.65 Also in 1618, Christophe Lorans and Yvonne Dorlot founded a weekly salutation of the Holy Sacrament every Friday, after compline. The choir would sing Miserere mei dies and Ne Reminiscaris in the middle of the nave; two choir boys would kneel before the cross and sing Adoramus te Christe, the presiding archpriest would sing Domine Jesus Christe, pone passiorem and the sub-cantor would sing De Profondis and Fidelium in plain chant.66 In the mid-century, foundations of the display, office and procession of the Holy Sacrament became frequent. Typical is the foundation of 1658 of René Gouault, archdeacon, who founded a high mass with exposure of the Holy Sacrament on the high altar until vespers and compline, followed by a procession of the sacrament followed by benediction, every Thursday during June.67 There are many other examples; this liturgy came to replace the traditional obit ‘service’ in Vannes Cathedral during the mid-seventeenth century. The parish churches quickly followed the trends seen in the Cathedrals, Here too, new devotions were introduced through foundations. In the church of St Patern in the suburbs of Vannes, different donors founded litanies of the Virgin and St Joseph, linked to renewed interests in the rosary and the holy family. Table 5.2 Litanies founded in Saint-Patern, Vannes Year

Date of Litany

Type of Litany

Founder

1639

1st Fri of each month

Name of Jesus

Denis Mahé, merchant

1644

2nd Fri of each month

Name of Jesus

François Cousturet

1647

1st Wed of each month

ND

Pierre Bobert, weaver, and Guyonne Le Pichon

1651

1st Tues of each month

St Joseph

Jeanne Le Biboul

1657

3rd Tues of each month

ND

Allain Thebaud

1658

2nd Tues of each month

St Joseph

Mathurin Bobert and Jeanne Le Guenego

1662

4th Tues of each month

St Joseph

Jacques Huliocq

1664

2nd Wed of each month

St Joseph

65

 ADM 55 G 3.  ADM 59 G 9. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations. 67  ADM 55 G 3. 66

The Individual Alone Before God? 1666

3rd Wed of each month

ND

Catherine Feillasse

1667

4th Wed of each month

Name of Jesus

Thérèse Le Breton

1667

4th Fri of each month

Name of Jesus

François Planson, merchant

1679

Last Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri and Sat of each month

ND

Bertrand Sarzau and Yvonne Boudet

143

In addition to the litanies shown above, in 1653 François Cousturet and François Caillo, recteur and curé of the parish, jointly founded a Stabat Mater and Ave Regina for 4pm every day of Lent.68 In 1659, Julien Gambert and Michelle Bellesoeur added an exposition of the Holy Sacrament to their obit services of the second Thursdays of October and November. In the same year, Jan Bosher and wife did the same for their two annuals of 15 August and second Thursday of September. In 1660, Julien Begaud made similar provision with two annuals founded for St Patern’s day and the feast of the translation of the relics of Saint-Patern.69 Between 1660 and 1700 there were at least eleven foundations of obits with the new service form of the display of the Holy Sacrament, procession and mass.70 The same trend can be seen across Brittany. In 1652, in SainteCroix parish church of Nantes, Adrian Charter founded three annual Salutations, at Pentecost (Spiritus domini verse), the Assumption (Beata et Virgo Maria) and the Nativity of the Virgin (Hodi Nata est beata virgo Maria). After the accompanying masses, the De Profundis and ‘Deus qui inter apostolicus sacerdotes’ were sung for the founder.71 In 1665, Mathurine Raboceau founded a weekly Salutation to the Holy Sacrament on Saturday evenings after vespers comprising the hymns ‘Pange Lingua Gloriam, ‘Sans Solemnis’, ‘Verbum Supernum’ and then litanies of the Virgin Mary.72 In this parish, foundations created special services on the seven feasts of the Virgin, the second day of Pentecost and for the feast days of Saints Yves and Carlo Borromeo; also, a weekly catechism on Saturdays, an annual sermon on Easter Saturday and a procession and salutation of the Holy Sacrament every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.73 We can see the overall contribution made to parish liturgy by foundations of perpetual masses if we take the example of Nantes’ parish churches. A 68

 ADM G 1042. Saint-Patern, Vannes. Fondations.  Ibid. 70  ADM G 1043. Saint-Patern, Vannes. Fondations. 71  ADLA G 461. 72  Ibid. 73  ADLA G 47. Visitation de Nantes 1638. 69

144

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

calendar of foundations served in Saint Saturnin drawn up c.1598 then augmented in 1673, shows that parish services were greatly added to by foundations. In 1598, every day of the week was marked by a high mass for named founders; it seems that there had been an amalgamation of weekly sung obits by this date to allow for a high parish mass every day. On Thursdays, the mass was of the office of the Holy Sacrament, during which the sacrament was exposed on the high altar and on Fridays the high mass incorporated the seven penitential psalms. Certain liturgical seasons were also made more solemn by the addition of foundations: on the first Thursday of every month there was a sung mass of the Holy Sacrament; every Sunday between Easter and Trinity there were matins, lauds and a nocturne; during the octave of Corpus Christi, the entire round of monastic offices was held every day in the church and there were elaborate offices on each apostle’s feast day and during Eastertide. Between 1598 and 1673 many more elaborate masses were added to the parish calendar. For example, a daily sung mass with exposition of the Holy Sacrament, using a different office each day: on Monday the Holy Sacrament, on Tuesday the Holy Spirit, on Wednesday the Name of Jesus and on Fridays another office of the Holy Sacrament. There were also many more special feasts marked by extra masses, processions and Salutations.74 Rural churches also acquired new devotions through foundations, it was not solely an urban trend. For example, in Pluherlin church, 1668 saw the foundation by Yves Grayo and Julienne Maubec of a monthly exposition and mass of the Holy Sacrament on the first Thursday of each month.75 In the church of Le Palais on Belle-Isle, Julienne Mousseaux, widow of a merchant, founded annuals on 8 December and Ascension day with exposition of the sacrament, high mass, first and second vespers.76 In 1676, René Denys, dean of the parish priests of Guidel, endowed a Monday mass for the departed at the Trinity altar, along with a procession, litanies to the Virgin and candles for the altar.77 These elaborate services provided a spectacle of music, light and liturgy and added to the number of opportunities to attend mass in local communities. Foundations also contributed directly to the costs and upkeep of the churches in which they were founded, or they provided vessels, vestments and articles that could be used by the church. In 1512, the foundation of two weekly masses in Saint-Saturnin of Nantes by Jehanne Bazire was accompanied by a gift of mass vessels and vestments for her chantry.78 74

 ADLA G 497. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations.  ADM G 959. Pluherlin. Fondations. 76  ADM G 945. Le Palais, Belle-Île. Fondations. 77  ADM G 898. 78  ADLA G 494. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 75

The Individual Alone Before God?

145

In 1613, Canon Guillaume Le Goff gave a large quantity of vessels and vestments to the parish altar of Sainte-Croix of Vannes, including a pyx, a pax and silver gilt chalice and patena inscribed with his name and office, in return for masses and prayers.79 In 1649, Guillaume Boucher, master chaplain of Notre-Dame of Nantes, founded an anthem of O Salutari hostia during the ordinary high mass of the choir, for which he gave four music books written in his own hand, on vellum.80 A very small number also made charitable provision for the poor. In 1562, the foundation of two annual obits by Guenäel Le Floch, canon of Nantes, also included 10 livres for 5 perrées of froment rouge (a type of wheat) to be given for the poor of the hospital of Saint-Nicolas, Vannes, on the days of the services. Further, for the majority of obit foundations, the total rent deriving from their endowments was more than the service costs and the difference went into the church’s funds. Most churches found themselves in possession of increasing property and rent portfolios across the period, with urban tenements and/or rural properties scattered around the region, managed by the parish fabrique or collegiate and monastic church treasuries.81 Thus church revenues as well as divine service were increased. Again, individual commemoration through community recognition was the aim. To the end of attracting donations and patronage, the larger churches and devotional confraternities offered ‘packages’ of distinct mass cycles to attract foundations. In 1588, Louise de Berigault, widow of a notary, founded a ‘double anniversary’ in Vannes Cathedral. This comprised a vigil or vespers for the dead on the eve of the anniversary, a high or sung requiem mass held at the high altar then a procession during which the choir would sing Ne recorderis and De Profundis on the tomb of her late husband.82 This continued to be the standard ‘package’ for double obit services in the Cathedral until the mid-late seventeenth century, when the Holy Sacrament services described above became more common. In the western dioceses, the most frequently requested obit was called a ‘service’, which comprised a high mass and two low masses. For example, the foundation of Hamon Barbier in the Cathedral of St-Pol-de-Léon, comprised vespers on the eve of the anniversary, matins, three sung masses and a second vespers.83 In Carentoir at the turn of the seventeenth century, the confraternity of Notre-Dame provided a ‘service’ of 17 masses, one high and 16 low, and the confraternity of the Trépassés (Faithful Departed) of Saint-Pol-de-Léon had its own package, of vespers, one sung requiem mass, four low masses 79

 ADM G 819. Sainte-Croix, Vannes. Fondations et confréries.  ADLA G 330. 81   Clive Burgess, ‘An Afterlife in Memory’, SCH 24 (2009): p. 213. 82  ADM 55 G 2. 83  ADF 6 G 141. Chapître de Léon. Fondations. 80

146

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and five paupers to carry candles during the services.84 In some places such as Nantes, the seventeenth century saw the replacement of ‘packages’ by services which complied with the Tridentine ruling on single masses for the dead. Jean Fourché founded an anniversary in Notre-Dame in 1653, specifying ‘a solemn sung mass of the office of the dead’; at the elevation of the host Pie Jesus domine was to be sung three times and at the end of the service, a Libera and the orations Deus qui nos patram et matram, Fidelium and Inter apostolici were to be sung on the tomb of his parents and ultimately himself.85 But the distinct ‘packages’ continued in many churches. They fostered a communal identity, an opportunity for individual donors to harness the intercession of a particular church community in return for fiscal patronage, drawing the living and the dead together in a tightly localised and identifiable place. In Brittany, foundations were made to benefit the individual but also the wider community, especially through the updating of liturgical provision. Their form and function indicate the inter-relatedness of individual and communal dimensions of spirituality. The Harnessing of Supernatural Powers: The Mediation of Christ and His Saints The community of the saints was another group which founders hoped would work to their advantage in salvation. The desire to augment divine service was frequently part of a strategy to access the power of a particular intercessor, through special attention paid to a specific cult or saint. The prayers of the saints, accessed through dedicated liturgies and devotions, were powerful means of intercession for the soul. Across the period 1480–1720, a notable percentage of donors tied their foundations to the celebration of a particular cult. In neighbouring Anjou in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, around 39 per cent of anniversary and annual obits elected a particular saint’s day. The feast chosen was most frequently that of the patron of the founder or his/her parents, followed by days dedicated to the Virgin (Marial feasts and Saturdays), then days consecrated to Christ.86 In Brittany, founders who tied their intercession to a specific cult did so in three ways: requests for masses on a particular feast day, at a specified altar or using a specific office, or a combination of these. Case

84

 ADM G 1066. Carentoir. Confrérie de Notre-Dame; ADF 9 G 6. Confrérie des Trépassés. Fondations. 85  ADLA G 323. 86   Jean de Viguerie, ‘Les fondations et la foi du peuple chrétien. Les fondations des messes en Anjou aux 17e et 18e siècles’, RH 520 (1976): pp. 300–302.

The Individual Alone Before God?

147

studies of Nantes and the diocese of Saint-Pol show similarities, but also some differences between eastern and western Brittany in these practices. The least popular form of specific devotion was the choice of a special office as the intercessory mass. The vast majority of founders simply wanted low or high masses, usually requiem masses or the office of the day. In Nantes, 117 out of 730 foundations identified for the period 1480–1720 stipulated specific offices and some made multiple requests. The largest single favourite was the office of Notre-Dame, followed closely by those of the Holy Sacrament and the Holy Spirit. However, if all Christological offices – Passion, Holy Cross, Holy Name of Jesus, Five Wounds – are combined, 53 or almost 50 per cent of offices requested were for Christ’s cults. Different invocations of Mary numbered 32 in total. Offices of 25 different saints were requested, most in only one foundation. These were all saints of the universal church including apostles and martyrs. After 1640, a few new saints appeared, Catherine of Siena, Teresa and Louis, reflecting the influence of religious orders and growing attachment to the French royal state. In Saint-Pol diocese, specific offices were rarely requested: only 35 were founded. The Holy Sacrament was again the most popular individual request, while total Christological masses amounted to 21 or almost two-thirds of the total. Five masses of Notre-Dame were requested as were offices of eight different saints. Again, these were universal saints apart from one office for St Guillaume of Saint-Brieuc. The choice of specific feast days for obits – making ‘annuals’ rather than anniversaries – was more frequent: 205 were recorded for Nantes and 181 for St-Pol diocese, 28 to 30 per cent of foundations studied in both regions. Feasts were of four types. The most frequently requested feasts (25 percent of requests in Nantes) were Christological, falling on the day, octave or in the season of Christmas, Lent including Passion Week, Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi. In Saint-Pol diocese, Christological feasts were even more important, comprising 43 per cent of all requests. Second in popularity were Marial feasts (a fifth of the total in Nantes but only 14 in total in Saint-Pol). In Nantes, there was a shift, from a greater popularity of Christological feasts, especially Corpus Christi, in the sixteenth century to a preference for Marial feasts in the seventeenth century. In Saint-Pol, there was no such change. In addition to Christ and Mary, a wide variety of saints’ feasts were requested. In Nantes, 37 founders tied their obits to specific feast days. Across the period, Saint John the Baptist was the most favoured intercessor, with 19 requests. There was, however, a shift over time with regard to other saints. In Nantes, in the sixteenth century, the apostles and Latin saints such as Cyr and Julitte, Eustace, Maurice, Gilles and Claude occur. In the seventeenth century, Saints Anne and Joseph stand out, linked with the growth in popularity of the Holy Family and also the new pilgrimage site

148

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

to St. Anne founded at Auray. The feasts of ‘new’ saints also appear, again linked to the religious orders and the French Crown: Saints Vincent Ferrer, Catherine of Siena, Teresa and Elizabeth of Portugal, Charles Borromeo, René and Louis. In Saint-Pol diocese, there was an even greater range of saints’ feasts tied to intercession, for 48 saints’ feasts were recorded in foundations. As in Nantes, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Anne were the most popular; again, the feasts chosen were overwhelmingly of universal saints and there was a growth of ‘new’ monastic and royal saints in the seventeenth century. However, in the west the feast of St. Sylvester on 1 January was also important in the second half of the seventeenth century, mentioned in seven foundations. Only three ‘local’ saints’ feasts were requested, however, and then only once each, St Pol Aurélien (1565), St Maudet (1580) and St Guillaume de Brieuc (1680). Finally, All Saints or All Souls were requested by 27 founders in Nantes but were less popular in the west. By far the most popular request for specific intercession came through the demand for masses to be said at specific altars in churches. In Nantes, 380 foundations were tied to specific altars (53 per cent) although in Saint-Pol, only 67 (11 per cent). These were most commonly low, weekly masses, because obits, whether anniversaries or annuals, mostly took place at the high altar. There was a general trend over time for masses of all sorts to be said at the high altar. The increased favouring of the high altar for post-mortem masses was a result of changes in worship in the Counter Reformation. The foundation of masses at the high altars of churches was part of this movement. In Nantes, there are references to 95 separate side altars in the foundation documents studied. Some altars received multiple bequests and there was change over time in the popularity of altars and dedications. The most popular altar in the city was that of Notre-Dame in the Carmelite church, which received 34 foundations, three quarters of these after 1611. The most important change over time was from the popularity of parish church altars in the sixteenth century to those of the religious houses in the seventeenth, reflecting changes in piety and also in the location of popular confraternities. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Saint-Saturnin parish church’s altars were the most popular, in particular Notre-Dame-de-la-Cité, which attracted 14 foundations between 1500–1560. Sixteenth-century foundations in the church were also made for the altars of Saints Sebastian, Anthony, James, Matthew, Fiacre, Adrian, Mary Magdelaine and Anne. In the seventeenth century, there were fewer foundations and those made were predominantly for the high altar and for Notre-Dame-de-la-Cité. In the parish church of SainteCroix a similar pattern emerges. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation received 12 foundations and there were also requests for the altars of the Trinity, Saints Gacien, John the Baptist,

The Individual Alone Before God?

149

Anne, Mary Magdelaine and Barbara. In the seventeenth century, there was again a move to the high altar and to that of Notre-Dame-de-Pitié. Although there were already many foundations in the collegiate churches and religious houses in sixteenth-century Nantes, the seventeenth century saw their popularity increase at the expense of the parish churches. Also, the range of favoured altars narrowed. After the Carmelite altar of NotreDame, next in popularity was the high altar of Notre-Dame collegiate church. The Dominican church also had two popular Marial altars, Notre-Dame-de-Pitié and the Rosary altar, while Notre-Dame was also a popular altar in the Franciscan and the Minimes churches. The St Francis altar in the Franciscan church was also popular from the late seventeenth century. In Saint-Pol diocese, similar trends appear. The Cathedral high altar remained the most frequently requested altar across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reflecting the importance of clergy as founders and of the dominance of obits in perpetual intercession. Otherwise, a wide variety of sixteenth-century altars and the reduction to fewer, principally Marial altars, in the seventeenth century, is clear: the Cathedral’s Rosary altar and the Notre-Dame altar of the Carmelites of Saint-Pol stand out. After 1650, no specified altars appear in Léon foundation documents, perhaps indicating a ‘normative’ use of either Marial or high altars for intercessory services. If we consider changes in favoured intercessors over time, the first apparent movement was the increase in importance in Christological cults, a continuation of a late medieval trend. In the early sixteenth century in Nantes, one third of special devotions described in foundation documents were for Christological cults, particularly the Passion and the Holy Sacrament. Devotion to Christ rose to more than 40 per cent of special devotions between 1550 and 1600, coinciding with the struggles against Protestantism in France. For example, Antoine de Gravoil founded a weekly mass in Sainte-Croix in 1589 ‘to induce faithful Christians to adore with honour and remembrance His precious body which he left on this [earth] in the holy sacrament of the eucharist, so that we might remember His painful passion, for our consolation and the nourishment of our souls, until the last day’.87 This coincided with the introduction of new devotions in the city, a result of Tridentine influences, such as the oratoire.88 In seventeenth-century Nantes, Christological cults fell slightly as a proportion of those favoured by founders, to around 30 per cent of special devotions. Despite fluctuations they remained roughly at this level across the century. There was also greater interest in the eucharist. 87

 ADLA G 467 Sainte-Croix. Fondations.   See Bernard Dompnier, ‘Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des quarante-heures’, RHEF lxvii (1981): pp. 5–31. 88

150

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Catholic reformers urged greater reverence towards the host, more frequent confession and reception of the sacrament, linked to mediation and examination of conscience.89 Visual and aural splendour of the mass increased, as we have seen. New eucharistic practices touched all groups. Confraternities of the Holy Sacrament expanded enormously everywhere in France; the ceremony of the first communion, between 11 and 18 years old, spread and there was an upsurge of devotional meditation on the displayed host.90 Parallel to the rise in sacramental devotions was the rise in importance of Marial cults, at the expense of all other saints. This was a feature throughout Catholic Europe. In southern Germany, Spain and Italy, Marial shrines eclipsed those of older intercessors and protectors. In France, Louis XIII dedicated the kingdom to the Virgin in 1638 in gratitude for the Queen’s conception of the future Louis XIV. Vovelle’s work on the iconography of retables in Provençal churches led him to the conclusion that the seventeenth century was dominated by ‘Mariolatry … for her maternal presence came to have a more prominent place than reminders of the Passion’.91 Devotion to the mother of Christ transcended social group; elites and popular groups joined in her veneration, particularly promoted through the use of the rosary, for which numerous confraternities were created. Mary became ‘a highly condensed symbol of Catholic success, doctrinal purity and proper spirituality. For the faithful, she … retained the alternative meaning of a powerful protector … For reformers, the meditative recitation of the prayers counted out on the rosary promoted an individualised, sober, contemplative and therefore sincere mode of piety’.92 In Nantes, the Virgin even overtook the Holy Sacrament as the most important object of foundations. An example is the foundation of 1637 by the brothers Pierre and Jean Coupperie, priest and royal judge respectively, who founded seven annual masses to celebrate the seven feasts of the Virgin, to be said at the altar of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation in Sainte-Croix, for their late father and Jean’s late wife. Marial bequests were often associated with a particular altar or confraternity, as we have seen. The increased importance of the Holy Family, Joseph and especially Anne, was also part of the ‘rise’ of Mary encouraged by the foundation of a major shrine to Anne near to Auray in the 1630s.

89

  Philip Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984), p. 84. 90   Jacques Le Goff and René Remond (eds), Histoire de la France religieuse, vol II Du christianisme flamboyante à l’aube des Lumières (Paris, 1988), p. 439. 91   Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983), pp. 311–12. 92  Luria, p. 129.

The Individual Alone Before God?

151

A third feature was a sustained devotion to individual saintly intercessors, across time but particularly in the period up to 1650. As we saw in chapter 2, Brittany has long been considered a region where continuing attachment to local Celtic saints and cults has been seen as distinctive.93 This has been overstated. A study of the foundations of the canons of Nantes Cathedral of the later Middle Ages shows that they favoured the feast days of three groups of saints. The great figures of Latin Christianity were most honoured, such as Gabriel, Cosme, Damian, George, Andrew, Peter, Stephen, Paul and Nicholas. Secondly, Breton saints – mostly bishops – were featured a little less, Guillaume bishop of Saint-Brieuc, Saints Yves, Paul Aurélien and Brieuc. There were also some dedications to the saints of Nantes’ churches, Felix, Clair, Similien, Donation and Rogation and Martin of Vertou. But the latter were much fewer in number than the first group.94 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints chosen for foundations were more typically personal name patrons. Thomas Le Roy, who in 1515 founded an obit on the feast day of St Thomas, using the saint’s office and at his altar in Notre-Dame of Nantes, is a good example. Almost all of these patrons were international saints of the universal church. In Nantes, the ‘favourite’ personal saint was St John, both the Baptist and the Evangelist, reflecting the popularity of the name Jean. For example, Jean Christi, théologal of Nantes Cathedral who died in 1608, saluted Saints Jean the Baptist and Evangelist in his will and left money for an annual obit on the feast of St John the Baptist or St John Christosom.95 In Léon there was no clear favourite among patrons but many more female saints were patronised, reflecting the higher proportion of women favouring this practice than in Nantes. So, Marguerite Saujour (1566), Marguerite de Kersauson (1620) and Marguerite Barbier (1651) all chose the feast of St Margaret for their annual obits, in different churches in the town of Saint-Pol. The practice of naming patrons was evenly spread over the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries in both east and west Brittany. Particular devotions to other saints also emerge, stated in the preamble to the foundation document, as well as the choice of feast or altar for the commemoration. In 1594, Henri Lechet, canon of Vannes Cathedral and recteur of Ploeherlin founded a double office of St Mary Magdelaine because of his singular devotion to the saint, ‘in the belief and hope that she is and would be an intercessor and advocate for him, his parents, friends 93

 Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, p. 1115. 94   Jean-Marie Guillouet, ‘Un témoin des dévotions nantais a la fin du Moyen Age’, BSAHN 133 (1998): pp. 91–2. 95  ADLA E II 327. Will of Jean Christi 1608.

152

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and benefactors before the divine majesty’.96 Similarly, in 1618, Claude Gouault, another canon of Vannes Cathedral, founded a double office of St Martin because of his singular devotion to Martin of Tours.97 A few new saints emerged across the Counter Reformation period. The popularity of St Francis increased in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reflecting the success of Franciscan mendicant orders: In Nantes, François Le Roy founded an annual obit on St Francis’s day in Notre-Dame church, in 1590 François Padioleau founded a weekly mass at St Francis’s altar in the Cordeliers’ church and between 1640 and 1660, Françoise Fradine, François Madeleneau and François Baud, founded annuals in different convents, to celebrate St Francis’s feast day. The popularity of St René among female founders named Renée is notable in Nantes in the latter half of the seventeenth century, with specific annuals founded for his feast day in 1661, 1674 and 1689, in the churches of the Cordeliers and the Minimes. Devotions to local saints are found more commonly in wills, where single donations are made to their altars. In 1664, Louise Guégen of the parish of Plabennec left small sums of money to more than fifty chapels, convents and churches. The great majority were of Marial dedications, along with evangelists, but chapels dedicated to Saints Jaoua, Gueznou, Corentin and Goulven were included.98 Even here, the local saints were a tiny minority of those patronised. Amongst the foundations studied across southern and western Brittany, only one founder linked his obit to the intercessory powers of a local saint. In 1681 a priest, Guillaume Corre, founded an annual obit in the Cathedral of Saint-Pol-de-Léon for the feast day of St Guillaume, bishop of Saint-Brieuc. Among the elites and middling sorts of Brittany, intercession for the soul was thus tied closely to the saints of the universal church and not to local intercessors, across the period. Testators saluted local saints, people used local shrines for cures and gave donations to their patrons, but in the great expanse of eternity, they trusted more to the powerful saints of the universal church. Again, we see that salvation could not be achieved by the individual alone. The dead were dependent upon a range of intercessors, spiritual and alive; in celebrating saints’ feasts, powerful patrons were drawn upon to pray for the soul of the founder.

96

 ADM 55 G 3.  ADM 55 G 3. 98  ADF 4 E 144/10. 97

The Individual Alone Before God?

153

The Material Setting of Intercession: Public v Private Space – Chapels, Tombs and Memorialisation There is no doubt that the founding of a perpetual chantry and especially a private chapel to house it, was a mark of great social exclusivity.99 In his study of religious life in sixteenth-century Madrid, Eire comments that the ultimate investment in the redemptive system of the Church, in spiritual and material terms, was the private, family chapel. The construction and endowment of such chapels required enormous expense. Located within parish or monastic churches, they served a dual purpose. The chapel altar, the functional focus, served as a liturgical centre from which masses could be offered in perpetuity for the founder’s family’s souls, to alleviate their time in Purgatory and speed them to heaven. The chapel also served as a mausoleum. Private chapels therefore functioned on two levels simultaneously, as status symbols and redemptive acts.100 The setting of perpetual masses, particularly chantry chapels, has been studied in some detail for England. Paul Binski has argued that chantry chapels indicate a private and inherently anti-communal religion, particularly cage chapels located within larger spaces but literally fencing off a private enclosure within it.101 In contrast, Simon Roffy has a more nuanced view, seeing private and communal interests in chantry chapel foundations. Much less work has been carried out on the setting of postmortem intercession in early modern France, despite the widespread survival of physical structures. Michelle Fournié and Michel Vovelle have studied the decorative arts linked to Purgatory and prayers for the dead of churches in southern France, for the medieval and early modern periods respectively. Recently, Vanessa Harding has studied mortuary practice in early modern London and Paris and she argues that there was a marked change in the construction and use of private chapels within parish churches across the Reformation centuries. While the foundation of chapels was a long-standing practice, in the medieval capitals, chapels dedicated to particular cults or saints had been added to or created within the structures of parish churches, supported by endowments and gifts of individuals and communities. But she argues that there may not have been many structurally distinct private chapels. In contrast, a feature of parish worship and burial practice in early modern Paris was the proliferation of private chapels assigned to individual families and used by them as burial spaces. For example, in the church of Saint-André-des-Arts, by the mid-eighteenth century, the church, originally a simple rectangle, 99

 Diefendorf, Penitence, p. 19.  Eire, Madrid, pp. 205–206. 101   Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London, 1996). 100

154

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

had eighteen or nineteen chapels in rows along its north and south sides. Most of these were assigned to families for burial and the performance of commemorative services.102 As a result, an increasing proportion of space was made over to private use, which emphasised and even furthered the stratification of Parisian society by class and lineage. The picture is more mixed in Brittany. If we take the city of Nantes, there were a number of private chapel foundations across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Three phases of patronage occurred. The first was a long period, c.1480 to 1560, when new chapels were built onto churches. This period was also the high-water mark of the foundation of masses in the pre-Reformation city. A second phase occurred in the 1580s and early 1590s associated with the Catholic League movement and the beginnings of Tridentine reform, and the third phase lasted from c.1600 to 1630, the period of ‘classic’ Counter Reformation and the dévôt movement in Nantes. The latter two phases saw the refurbishment of existing chapels rather than construction of new ones. After 1630, there were some further refurbishments of existing family chapels by people claiming to be heirs of the founders, but there is little evidence of new work. Chapel foundation was therefore quite limited in time. In the other cities, towns and rural communities of Brittany, there was private chapel foundation but it was less systematic and in smaller numbers than that seen in Nantes. If we look at the sites of chapel foundation in Nantes, there are clear preferences of location. There were three types of church in Nantes where private chapels could potentially be founded in parishes, colleges/Cathedral and convents. The churches of the larger, more populous parishes seem to have allowed few private chapels across the period. These churches permitted the erection of altars and the purchase of private tombs, but seem to have been resistant to giving over large areas of floor space to private family use. For example, in Sainte-Croix, in 1473, Thomas Spadine and his wife Jamette founded a weekly mass and an annual obit for the feast of St Thomas. In 1481, his brother Jean also founded a weekly mass, and their father and another brother Jean also had links with the church.103 A generation later, in 1527, Jean Spadine, by now seigneur de Housseau and procureur syndic of Nantes and his wife Isabeau also founded two weekly masses. All of the Spadine family had to be content with tombs and not a private chapel for their use. The larger parish churches were reluctant to alienate space to individual interests. All of the larger churches had lucrative and popular confraternity altars, for example, in Sainte-Croix, the altars of the Trinity, Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance and Notre102   Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 148–50. 103  ADLA G 466. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations.

The Individual Alone Before God?

155

Dame-de-la-Consolation and in the church of Saint-Nicolas, the altars of Notre-Dame de Chandeleur. Later on, many churches had rosary and Holy Sacrament altars, linked to confraternities. Endowments of masses and chantries for these popular altars were common and burial in their chapels was sought after, by all social groups. It was not in the interest of parish churches to alienate these spaces to private interests. The smaller parishes and their churches seem to have been less protective of their spaces. In the parish church of Saint-Vincent, for example, in 1594, Madame de Martigues, mother-in-law of the rebellious governor of Brittany, the duke of Mercoeur, took over a chapel adjoining the choir and founded a chantry. This chapel had originally been created in 1502–3 by Jeanne Demoury, Dame de Briord, widow of Pierre Launay treasurer-general of Brittany.104 Saint-Vincent parish was the residence of many nobles; also, Mme de Martigues was of such political and social importance in the 1590s that she may have been a special case. When in 1628, Françoise Bruny founded a chantry, she was refused a private burial place.105 When the elite of Nantes did found private chapels, it was in the conventual and collegiate churches. In the first of these periods, 1480– 1560, the favoured locations were the collegiate church of Notre-Dame, the Franciscan and the Carmelite convents. The permitting of chapels seems to have been part of a strategy of church enlargement. So, in 1548, Françoise d’Astondelle, widow of Jehan de Compludo, built a chapel onto NotreDame and founded a lavish chantry served by a ‘college’ of six priests.106 In 1542, Bernadin d’Espinoze and his wife Jeanne Le Moyne built a chapel/ altar in the cloisters of the Franciscans and chapels were added in 1549 by Jeanne de Mirande and in 1578 by Andre Ruiz and Isabeau de Santo Domingo.107 By the later sixteenth century, space for building seems to have run out and elites had to refurbish existing chapels in order to create private spaces. In the Carmelite church of Nantes, between 1586 and 1590, the Rouxeau, Francheville and Loriot families took over chapels to use as family burial sites and founded weekly masses.108 Chapel foundation occurred with some frequency in the early seventeenth century, as in Paris. In the Franciscan church, in 1607, Pierre Fiot and Etienne Le Franc both left money for individual chapels and masses while in 1613 the aristocratic Rieux family, who regarded themselves as the founders of the convent, refurbished and laid fresh claim to burial rights and masses in the chancel, which they maintained was 104

 ADLA G 521. Saint-Vincent de Nantes. Fondations.  Ibid. 106  ADLA G 313. 107  ADLA H 284. Cordeliers de Nantes. Fondations pieuses. 108  ADLA H 225. Carmes de Nantes. Fondations. 105

156

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

their privilege, as founders.109 In 1617, Jean Charette and Marguerite Tregouet refurbished the Chapelle des Anges for their own private use and burial.110 On a small scale, altars for new devotions were founded with associated private tombs in the convent, to St Joseph in 1646 and to the Name of Jesus in 1664.111 In Notre-Dame collegiate church, in 1608, the Roussillon family paid 500 livres to the chapter for sole use of the chapel of St Marguerite. In 1609, Jean Fourche de la Courosserie and his wife Marie Jouslain founded a private chapel in the chapel of St Maurice with rights of burial for them and their successors, while in 1614, Françoise Hus founded a chapel near to the parish altar.112 More examples could be cited. However, it was a limited movement. In the Cathedral and other convent churches, private tombs rather than chapels were the norm even for highly aristocratic and wealthy patrons. In the countryside, private chapels were even more exclusively the possession of a small social group, wealthy priests or seigneurs of the parish. Manorial and small local chapels were constructed in some numbers throughout rural areas, particularly in the seventeenth century, and were endowed for masses. But for the majority of donors with sufficient means, the parish church was the appropriate setting. Above all, families who exercised or claimed seigneurial rights in a parish sought memorialisation at its centre through chantries and private chapels. In 1496, Jehan Gibon Seigneur du Grisso, received the consent of the fabrique to build a chapel onto the chancel of the parish church of Notre-Dame-du-Méné and to put there an altar to a saint of his choice. The windows were to have his arms in them and the family would have the right of burial and all rights to the chapel. For this, the family would pay a perpetual annual rent to the fabrique of 7 livres 10 sous.113 Chapels linked to specific seigneuries were a vital part of the expression of local authority. Seigneurs used the chapels associated with their fiefs, showing long-standing family connections, even if they were newcomers. Aristocrats frequently made foundations in their ‘capital’ or main ‘feudal’ centre. Thus in 1518, Pierre de Rohan, baron of Pont-Château, founded a daily mass in the parish church of the small town, served by a newly-created college of six priests and four choristers.114 In the case of the new purchaser of fiefs, lords expressed the legitimacy of their claim by continuing to use the visual symbols of the 109

 ADLA H 286.  Ibid. 111  ADLA H 286, H 287. 112  ADLA G 323; ADLA G 330. 113  ADM G 1035. Le Méné. Fondations. 114  Henri Morice, Mémoires pour servir des preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne (3 vols, Paris, 1742–1746), vol. 3, p. 945. 110

The Individual Alone Before God?

157

lordship. Most rural parish chantry chapels were founded before 1500. After 1600, there are clear signs of the refurbishment of many of these chapels and their refoundation with masses. This was part of a strategy of extending lordly status and power in the countryside as well as a response to new religious impulses of Catholic reform. Even where patrons were not buried in parishes but in nearby convents – often the case for the nobility – they founded chantries in parish chapels, for themselves and their ancestors. The seigneurie retained the advowson and the benefice’s revenues frequently took the form of rents on seigneurial properties. The will of Jehan Bouan sieur de Lorgissière of 1603 is typical. He wished to be buried in the parish church of Dourdain, in the private tomb of the Lords of Plessis-Pillat, founders of the church, where his late wife, her father and mother were buried.115 A key feature of private chapels was their signature with the coats of arms of the possessor families, the presence of their tombs and a range of decorative objects chosen by them, used in liturgy and devotion. These fittings stamped a personal mark on chapels and delineated them as private places. The parish frequently had no rights at all over these chapels, not even to repair them when their ruin threatened the fabric of the church, a situation which could give rise to disputes with lords.116 In 1549, the contract for Jeanne de Mirande’s new chapel built onto the Franciscan convent of Nantes stated that she could put her arms, either in wood or in glass. The Ruiz chapel likewise was to have their family’s arms, either in wood or painted on the walls.117 In 1618, René Rouxeau and Catherine Le Moyne founded a mass and acquired a private tomb in the Recollets’ church of Nantes; the tomb was large enough for three or four bodies and they were permitted to put their arms on it and in the windows of the chapel. A wall memorial with their names and details of the foundation could also be erected.118 What were the motives of the patrons of private chapels? Is this part of an individualisation and privatisation of religious life in the Counter Reformation? Chapel foundation was certainly linked with the creation of private, perpetual burial space for families. In this, the aristocracy led the way. Throughout the Middle Ages, individual nobles had been commemorated with monuments in high status locations within churches and family mausoleums were created by some lineages. The last duke 115

  Comte de Châteaubourg, ‘Testament de feu J. Bouan seigneur de Lorgissière (1603)’, BMSAIV LXIV (1939): pp. 105–106. 116  Georges Minois, La Bretagne des prêtres: le Trégor d’Ancien Régime (Brasparts, 1987), p. 26. 117  ADLA H 284. 118  ADLA H 334. Récollets de Nantes. Fondations.

158

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

of Brittany, François II, and his wife Marguerite de Foix, were buried in the Carmelite church in Nantes, to which their daughter, Queen Anne, sent her heart after she died.119 In 1507 the James family created a family ‘mausoleum’ in Dol Cathedral and in 1552–53 Guy II d’Epinay and Louise de Goulaine created a family space in the collegiate church of Champeaux.120 Beginning in the sixteenth century and becoming more frequent in the seventeenth, the acquisition of private burial space was also sought by middling social groups. In 1549, the recteur of Saint-Thual opened a register ‘to prove the ownership of tombs in the church’.121 By the seventeenth century, families were purchasing plots in churches and cemeteries for their sole use. Linked with the creation of ‘private’ burial space was the building of monumental tombs, which were a central feature of chapels and a marker of high status burial. Aristocratic tombs could be extremely costly and magnificent, such as that of Duke François II and Marguerite of Foix in Nantes’ Carmelite church. The main preoccupation of elites was to have a tombstone with their arms engraved on it. Mostly these were stone slabs with incised decorations and/or brass inlays or engraved brass plates. For example, in 1591 Jacques de Guerbourdel, captain of the château and town of Châteaubriand and Louise des Ridelières his wife founded a mass in the Franciscan convent of Nantes and asked to be buried before the altar of Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance, under a tombstone engraved with their arms.122 Wall mounted memorials were also frequently erected, both in private chapels and also elsewhere in churches. Most were installed above or close to the burial place of whomever they commemorated. The visible nature of the wall tablet allowed a person to be commemorated within view of a particular altar, devotional image or other monument, in a more direct manner than a slab in the church floor.123 In 1627, as part of a foundation of masses in the Franciscan church of Nantes, Marguerite de Marques asked to be buried before the crucifix in the Chapelle des Espagnols in a private tomb with a stone vault, six by seven feet in dimensions, with a floor slab in stone or bronze and on the wall, a plaque of stone or bronze, with her and her late husband’s name and the details of their foundation.124 Arms were a fundamental part of funerary monuments. They could be read by

119

 Croix, La Bretagne, II, p. 1024.  Croix, La Bretagne, II, p. 1024. 121  Croix, La Bretagne, II, p. 1025. 122  ADLA 4E1/46. Notaire Le Moine. Nantes. 1571, 1590–99. 123   Douglas M. Brine, Piety and Purgatory. Wall-mounted memorials from the Southern Netherlands c.1380–1520 (PhD Thesis, University of London, 2006), p. 66. 124   ADLA H 286. 120

The Individual Alone Before God?

159

a wide segment of society, they articulated social standing and conveyed information about the deceased’s lineage, marriage and nobility.125 But the majority of people did not have sole use of plots, even those who founded masses. For example in the Dominican church of Morlaix, Matthieu Nigeou buried one of his children in tomb 225 in 1652 and another child in tomb 189 in 1654, where he was also buried in 1667. Subsequently, this same tomb was reused four times from 1681–1753 by people with different surnames. Tombs could be bought and sold as well; Yvon Botros purchased tomb 181 in the same church from a Sieur Keriezequel and the Botros family used it over the period 1658–1740.126 In Moréac church chancel, 36 bodies were interred between 1607 and 1629; 17 of these belonged to five families, but the other 19 all belonged to different families.127 If the annual rent for plots was not paid, tombs could be passed to other families. In the church of Saint-Trémeur of Carhaix in 1653, two tombs in the chapel of NotreDame de Bonnes-Nouvelles were re-allocated to Jean du Bothou, sieur du Stang, for a yearly rent of 40 sous, because their former owners no longer paid the dues.128 One result of the pressure on church burial space was the relatively frequent recourse to ossuaries or charnel houses for corpses disturbed by subsequent burials. This practice will be discussed in chapter 6. Also, not all churches would allow private tombs. By 1500, the side chapels of the chancel and nave of Quimper Cathedral were in the possession of noble families with rights of burial; Jean Kerhervé has counted at least ten by this date.129 But in the sixteenth century, new acquisitions seem to have become difficult. By an arrêt of 16 October 1603, the Cathedral chapter of Quimper declared that no-one was able to have a private plot within the church. In December of that year, the chapter took out a suit against François Belmont deceased (or rather his heirs), who had been buried in the Cathedral and founded two obits there. Since 1599, his heirs had refused to pay the rents due for the obits, claiming that the cost was for a family tomb in the Cathedral as well as for services. The Cathedral denied this, stating that only founders and patrons had the right of private tomb space and that it was against canon practice to give such rights to others.130 Indeed in 1596, in a contract with Canon Jean du Marchallach for a tomb in one of the Cathedral chapels, he was allowed to insert his arms in the windows, on the vaulting and on the tomb itself, but he was 125

  Brine, pp. 63–4.  Croix, La Bretagne, II, pp. 1026–7. 127  Ibid., II, p. 1027. 128  ADF 38 G 28. Collégiale Saint-Trémeur de Carhaix. Inhumations. 129   Jean Kerhervé (ed.), Histoire de Quimper (Toulouse, 1994), pp. 83–5. 130  ADF 2 G 68. Chapître de Cornouaille. Cathédrale. Enterrements. 126

160

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

not able to claim any private use of the space.131 Croix concludes that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, nobles began to think in terms of private, personal burial places; by the middle of the seventeenth century, this idea was widely spread but far from being the norm. Through lack of means and also limited conviction, it was the preserve of the minority. Collective solidarity as well as relative poverty remained important forces.132 Private space, for burial and intercession, was certainly a statement of social superiority, a claim for and reinforcement of social legitimacy. In the first phase of chapel foundation in Nantes in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a large percentage of the founders were wealthy Hispanic Nantais, merchants who had recently settled in the city and were becoming assimilated into the elite by inter-marriage, purchase of royal office and participation in municipal government and finance. The d’Aronde, d’Espinose, Ruiz and other families are conspicuous here, often associated with the Franciscan convent, where the Company of Spanish Traders also kept a confraternity chapel. Chapel foundation was part of a wider strategy of assimilation. Throughout the period, individuals and families sought to heighten their social prestige through enforcing rights of use in existing chapels and thus associating themselves with the kin buried there. In Notre-Dame of Nantes, the chapel of Thomas Le Roy founded in 1515 was refurbished in 1644 by Salomon de la Tullaye, descendent of Le Roy’s nephew and heir.133 In 1651, Guionne Bouriau augmented the foundations of her husband’s family, the de la Courosseries, in the chapel of St Maurice.134 The Carmelite chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, given over to the Loriot family in 1590, was used as a foundation and burial site by their family throughout the seventeenth century, for example in 1636 by a son-in-law, Jacques Poyras, married to one of the Loriot daughters and in 1670 by a grand-daughter, Françoise Loriot. Up to this date, it was claimed that it was exclusive to the children of the eldest son of direct descendents in an attempt to limit access by collateral lines.135 After the acquisition in 1617 of the Chapelle des Anges in the Franciscan convent of Nantes by Jean Charette and Marguerite Tregouet, their son Jean founded a mass and was buried there in 1650, in 1666 Joseph Charette elected to be buried in the tomb of his ancestors there and in 1689 Renée Charette founded a mass.136 131

 ADF 2 G 99.  Croix, La Bretagne, II, p. 1028. 133  ADLA G 312 and G 330. 134  ADLA G 323. 135  ADLA H 227. Carmes de Nantes. Fondations. 136  ADLA H 286, H 287. 132

The Individual Alone Before God?

161

But while the design of private chapels publicised social status it was also intended to elicit prayer from the wider congregation and community. The foundation of a chantry chapel often provided an extension to church space, the refurbishment or modernisation of an existing area without the church having to outlay large sums of communal money. Also, it engaged wealthy and powerful families as patrons of the church. In Paris, Harding has shown that the parish community financed the enlargement and decoration of churches by conceding spaces and rights over them to wealthy individuals, in return for hefty donations. For example, in 1617, the parish of St-André-des-Arts, wanting to enlarge the church but unable to afford to do so, granted a chapel to whomsoever would give most to the building project. Claude Gallard offered 5,000 livres and 300 livres in goods. In return, he could build a burial vault under the chapel, have masses said there whenever he wished and it was to be enclosed as a private space, by a balustrade.137 In Vannes Cathedral, Renaissance design was introduced with the building of a new chapel in the 1530s by Jean Daniello, canon and archdeacon.138 The church of the Franciscans of Nantes was considerably augmented and re-embellished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by private chapels. In the nave, in a chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame-desAnges, Duke Jean of Brittany was buried in 1333. In the early seventeenth century, this was refurbished by the Charette family, who also obtained a family vault here. Next along was the chapel of Notre-Dame d’Espagne, founded by Spanish traders, where several rich Iberian merchant families had their tombs and heraldic windows. Next to this was the chapel of the Ruiz family built in 1578. Then there was the chapel dedicated to Saints Martin and Roch, built in 1515 by Martin Darande and his wife, next to a chapel constructed in 1549 by Jeanne de Mirande and her son Pierre de la Presse, both with family vaults. Finally came the chapel of the d’Espinose family. So, there were six family-linked chapels, along with other cult and confraternity chapels and altars in the church.139 Each chapel was well decorated and liturgically ‘busy’ with masses and prayers. Harding argues that such chapel building was not, at first, very different from medieval practice. But promoted on a larger scale it came to reshape churches, both physically and as experienced spaces. Grants of this kind detracted from public control and use of the church, as portions were increasingly given over to private use.140 But many chapels were located in naves and aisles, accessible to the wider public. Chantry 137

 Harding, Paris and London, p. 151.  ADM 55 G 3; 59 G 9. 139   Ferdinand Brault, ‘Le couvent des Cordeliers de Nantes, étude historique (1250– 1791)’, BSAHNLI 65 (1925): pp. 165–92. 140  Harding, Paris and London, pp. 149, 153. 138

162

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

masses here brought the mysteries of Christ’s Passion physically closer to worshippers.141 Whether the chapels were screened off or left open is not always known, although screening was common practice. Even then, partitions had apertures through which the family could see high mass if they were seated there and through which passers-by could see the chantry liturgy and symbols of the deceased. After all, a key function of chapels was memorialisation, which required a public. A memorial functioned as ‘a constant and unequivocal reminder to the living to remember the souls of the dead, languishing in Purgatory, in their prayers’, a channel of interaction between the living and the dead to ensure the deceased’s commemoration and continuing presence among the living.142 Chapels, tombs and family symbols were not only social markers. The spatial geography of the chapel, the placing of tombs, monuments and heraldic devices on direct visual lines of sight, was often juxtaposed with that of an altar or with intercessory symbols. This forged a visual and conscious link between the intercessor, perpetual ritual and the deceased’s soul.143 Peter Marshall comments that fabric and furnishings ‘comprised a field of memory on which parishioners could inscribe a post-mortem presence through pious donations of objects personalised with names and coats of arms. Where gifts were requisite to the liturgy – missals, vestments, chalices – individuals hoped to achieve a perpetual linkage of their own names with worship’, for example the silver chalice and patern, missel and set of black and violet vestments furnished in 1475 by the widow of Philippe des Essarts, Jeanne Berard, who built an altar to St Philip in Notre-Dame of Nantes, where her late husband was buried.144 Burial place, monuments, decoration and texts were above all designed to serve as foci for intercessory prayer, which could only come from a wider audience. But was social exclusivism linked to an individualisation of piety? Peter Sherlock’s work on monuments and memorialisation in early modern England reaches nuanced conclusions. He argues that memorials commemorated individuals, but with the group in mind. They provided consciously constructed messages about lineage and virtue and memorials provided sites where groups of people could create a common past.145 In Nantes, on the one hand, the use of the college of Notre-Dame and the larger mendicant convents for chapel use, and not parish churches, 141

  Simon Roffy, Chantry Chapels and Medieval Strategies for the Afterlife (Stroud, 2008), pp. 120–21. 142   Brine, pp. 68–9. 143   A key argument of the thesis of Brine, Piety and Purgatory. 144  Marshall, Beliefs, p. 24; ADLA G 323. 145   Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2008), p. 5.

The Individual Alone Before God?

163

seems to indicate a more private piety. But these churches, while not parish centres, were still very busy places. The mendicant churches housed many confraternity altars and were frequented by Nantais of all social groups. Also, for elite families who created private chapels in the collegiate and convent churches, this was one of a range of actions in a complex strategy of private and public piety. In addition to their foundation of a chapel and chantry in Notre-Dame, Michel Touzelin and his wife, Françoise Fradine made four gifts between 1607 and 1613 to endow the prison of Bouffay with low masses for all Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, all major feasts and saints’ days, and the chaplain was to confess and give communion to the prisoners as well, all very public acts.146 It should be remembered that the majority of chantries were founded at existing altars within parish, collegiate and convent churches. Even many elite individuals and families chose to be buried before popular altars and in confraternity chapels. Thus in 1591, Jacques de Guerbourdel, écuyer and seigneur de la Courtpéan, paid for a private tomb before the altar of Notre-Dame-deRecouvrance of the Franciscan church in Nantes, for himself, his wife and their children, at a cost of 600 livres cash. Twelve individual foundations were made for the altar of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation in Sainte-Croix of Nantes between 1488 and 1638, and the popularity of Notre-Damede-la-Pitié in Notre-Dame of Nantes is shown by four foundations here between 1647 and 1660 alone.147 Thus, intercession was community based, for while individual memory was publicly celebrated it drew upon the valuable prayers of the whole parish or religious community.148 It was the public display of individual, family or professional status and the prayers commanded by patronage of churches that was important to chapel founders, not privatisation of devotion. In rural seigneurial chapels, for example, this is illustrated by the foundation of masses on Sundays, before or after parish mass, when there was a good audience to offer assistance. The foundation of 1593 by Jean de Rosmadec Seigneur du Plessix in Theix parish church, of three weekly masses, provided for two low masses to be said during the week but the weekly high requiem was to be sung on Sundays after the parish mass.149 Ariane Boltanski argues that the nobility, particularly the aristocracy, felt they had a duty to their tenants to augment divine service. Not only did they have rights over the parish churches on their domains, but they also had obligations to defend the faith and extend Catholicism. Foundations thus commemorated lineage and 146

 ADLA G 330.   References scattered in ADLA G 309–32 Notre-Dame de Nantes and G 421–79 Sainte-Croix de Nantes. 148  Roffy, Chantry Chapels, p. 94. 149  ADM 56 G 3. 147

164

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

power but also added to the liturgy and devotional activities for tenants, extending Catholic reform into the countryside.150 Roffy argues that spatial analysis of many chantry chapels and their settings suggests that these monuments reflected a personalisation rather than a privatisation of church space, ‘they nourished everyone’s religious experience and cannot be seen as a symptom of mere exclusivity’.151 The Costs of Intercession – A Reassuringly Expensive Luxury? The expense of chantries and anniversaries was an important factor in their limited social distribution. The cost of founding a perpetual mass was high, well beyond the means of ordinary working people. As to be expected, costs in the city of Nantes were higher than those of Vannes; those of the towns were more than those of the countryside. But in town and countryside throughout Brittany, the chief trend was for the cost of perpetual masses to increase over time, in money and in real terms. There were three main ways in which chantries and anniversaries could be endowed, with property, rents or cash. In general, we see a move from property to cash endowments, whether raised as perpetual rents on property or as outright cash gifts. To endow masses, property could be alienated to a church where a foundation was made, so that its produce or rentals could be used to pay a chaplain. The very earliest chantries, before the mid-fifteenth century, were almost all property based. For example, an early foundation supposedly of 1064 of a chantry in Vannes Cathedral called Notre-Dame-de-Bruxères, founded by Mathurin Davagour for the Seigneurs of Plessix Geffroy, drew its income from a dîme and rente of buckwheat, 20 sous cash rent on a farm, 13 sous cash rent on other lands and 3 boisseaux of rye annually, all from the parish of Bourg La Chapelle.152 By 1500, outright alienation of property became much less frequent, although always more prevalent in rural areas than in towns. Thus, in 1504, Jan Roux, priest of Allaire parish founded a weekly mass in the parish church based on two pieces of meadow which produced hay and in 1531 in the same parish Roux Tual founded a weekly mass which he endowed with a house, garden and two pieces of arable land in the parish of Saint-Jagu.153 The urban equivalent 150

  A. Boltanski, ‘Haute noblesse catholique et fondations pieuses pendant la Ligue’. Paper given to colloquy on ‘Les Ligues catholiques et leurs alliés dans la France des guerres de religion’, ‘Université de Montpellier III, 4–5 April 2008. 151  Roffy, Chantry Chapels, p. 28. 152  ADM 56 G 3. 153  ADM G 840. Allaire. Fondations.

The Individual Alone Before God?

165

was a gift of tenements. In 1520, Agnes Ricart and her daughter gave the Dominicans of Nantes two houses and their curtilages at Bignon Lestard for two anniversaries and in 1524, the friars received a house near to their convent from Geffroy Charron and his wife, for monthly masses.154 Similarly, in 1521, Saint-Saturnin of Nantes received a house in the city from Jehan Pavaret to fund a weekly and an anniversary mass.155 Rather than alienate property to churches and convents, it became much more common to grant annual cash rentes – perpetual rents – on properties, again to provide a wage for a chaplain. The ownership of the property thus remained with the family, to be used, bought and sold as they pleased, although the rent remained a permanent charge. Larger churches and religious houses acquired sizeable portfolios of scores of tiny rents on houses and lands in the towns and regions where they were located and many of these survived down to 1790. For example, in 1437, a foundation by Pierre Gas and Philippe Gondel in the Dominican church of Nantes was supported by a rent on a house near to the chapel of SaintYves. Although the friars had to take the mortgagees to court to obtain payment in 1513, 1584 and 1635, the rent was still being paid in 1664.156 In 1541, Jacques de Lantivy and Jeanne de Godet founded four weekly masses in the parish church of Radenac, for which they gave 20 livres of rent on a house, garden and arable in the parish of Château-Malo and in 1657, Jeanne Garo, Dame de Portereau, founded two weekly masses in the Dominican church of Nantes, for which she gave 60 livres of rent drawn from the seigneurie of Broudecholière in the parish of Gorges.157 Numerous other examples could be given. A third form of endowment was a lump sum of money, which could be invested in rentes to produce an annual cash income, from which the chaplain would be paid an annual wage. In the cities of Brittany, this was a common practice from at least the mid-fifteenth century, particularly for obits. In 1532, Guillaume Piraud, merchant, and his wife founded two weekly masses in Saint-Saturnin parish church of Nantes, for which they gave 300 livres to be sold as a rente of 15 livres per annum.158 In 1642, Michel Lucas, priest, gave 420 livres cash for a foundation to make 26 livres 5 sous annual income. The capital was made over to a consortium of three men, Anthoine Lubin, procureur fiscal des régaires of Vannes, his son Jean, avocat in the présidial of Vannes and Robert Le Metaier, procureur

154

 ADLA H 317. Dominicains de Nantes. Fondations.  ADLA G 495. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 156  ADLA H 300. Dominicains de Nantes. Fondations. 157  ADM G 1057. Radenec. Fondations; ADLA H 317. 158  ADLA G 496. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 155

166

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

in the présidial.159 In 1668, Jeanne Garo’s foundation in the Dominican church of Nantes was based on a gift of 800 livres. This was constituted into a rente of 50 livres per annum to pay for the services, tomb rent and gifts to the friars. In 1676, the capital was reimbursed by the borrower and again made into a rente.160 Sometimes the cash was intended for a capital project. In 1483, Duke François II of Brittany gave NotreDame collegiate church in Nantes 1200 livres to build a water mill, in return for a weekly mass on Saturdays at the high altar.161 In 1624, Françoise Biré, widow of a notary, gave 500 livres to Sainte-Croix of Nantes for the rebuilding of the parish presbytery, in return for a weekly mass.162 Cash financing was important in local communities and meant that the larger churches, recipients of many such donations, were able to run primitive banks, providing cash for local individuals and consortia.163 At the same time, the ‘sale’ of rentes allowed the crime and sin of usury to be avoided, at least in theory, as with loans throughout France. For example, in 1627, the Cathedral chapter of Vannes collected 1600 livres from four foundations, from which they constituted a single rente, which was ‘sold’.164 Constituted rentes were also relatively frequent as endowments. Thus in 1531, Guillaume Moulnier founded four weekly masses in SaintNicolas parish church of Nantes, transferring to the church an existing rente owed to him of 33 livres 6 sous 8 deniers per annum.165 Foundations could also be based on a mixture of endowments, although this was relatively uncommon. In 1500, Jean Avalleuc, priest, founded nine double anniversaries in Vannes Cathedral. This was a complex endowment comprising 167 livres in cash; 4 livres 15 sous rent on one house and 4 livres on a second house in Vannes; 7 livres 10 sous rent on a métairie and 4 livres and two capons on other property in Plescop parish, and a piece of meadow worth 2 sous 6 deniers rent in a suburb of Vannes.166 In 1597 in Grandchamp church, Amaury Phelipeau, priest, founded three weekly masses, to be endowed with a 6 écus rent on a house and 140 livres cash.167 The endowment of a foundation was primarily to provide intercession for the donor, but parish and church fabric funds usually profited from 159

 ADM G 821. Sainte-Croix, Vannes. Confrérie des Trépassés.  ADLA H 317. 161  ADLA G 320. Collégiale de Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 162  ADLA G 463. 163   Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (c.1320–c.1520). (Paris, 1997), p. 233. 164  ADM 55 G 3. 165  A.M.N. GG 698. 166  ADM 55 G 1. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations. 167  ADM 56 G 3. 160

The Individual Alone Before God?

167

the contracts. Thus in 1492, Jehan Gloesguan founded a weekly mass in Sainte-Croix parish church of Nantes, giving an annual rente of 9 livres for the services and 20 sous for the fabrique.168 Similarly, in 1584, Renée Burot founded a weekly mass in Saint-Saturnin church, Nantes. She gave 2,400 livres to be converted to rentes; from the yearly income (probably around 120 livres at 5 per cent), 4 livres was to be paid to the parish priest, 50 livres to the choir, 3 livres to the sacristan and the remainder to the fabrique.169 Catherine Marle argues that charitable donation to a church as a good work was often as much a motive for a foundation as the obit itself, particularly for hospitals and religious houses.170 So the local church benefitted from its management of endowments and their revenues. In terms of costs, there were no fixed prices for perpetual masses and obits. Endowments offered by individuals varied and there were different expectations by different churches and communities. Thus in the decade of the 1570s in Vannes, single obits were founded with capital endowments of 140 livres and 200 livres while a weekly mass ‘cost’ 160 livres. In the 1640s, annual rentes were given for obit foundation, on property and cash, of 1 livre 12 sous, 4 livres 10 sous, 5 livres 11 sous, 6 livres and 8 livres. In Nantes, the 1570s saw weekly masses founded with endowments of 3,000, 800 and 300 livres and single obits founded for 500 and 200 livres. The 1640s saw weekly masses founded for 400, 500 and 600 livres and single obits founded for 400, 500 and 800 livres. The acceptance of a foundation depended on personal relations, neighbourhood, the potential value of support of a patron as well as the total sum offered. Broadly speaking, the collegiate churches received the highest endowments, then the mendicant churches, with the parishes the ‘cheapest’ option. The evolution of costs was upwards over time. In Nantes, between the later sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, endowments increased by around 75 per cent. Within this overall rise, there are some notable trends. Firstly, the lavish foundations of the later wars of religion, from 1575 to 1600, stand out. Secondly, the later seventeenth century also saw rapidly increasing endowments. As for obits, again the overall trend is upwards, by around 75 per cent across time and again two periods of high costs stand out: the later religious wars of the sixteenth century and the 1630s. In Vannes, there was a slow, upwards trend in the cost of weekly masses between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, of roughly a third. Obits underwent a more dramatic evolution over time, with a rise 168

 ADLA G 462. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations.  ADLA G 496. 170   Catherine Marle, ‘Le salut par les messes: les valenciennois devant la mort à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, Revue du Nord 79 (1997): pp. 65–6. 169

Figure 5.1 Costs of foundations in Nantes 1480–1720

Figure 5.2 Costs of foundations in Vannes diocese 1480–1720

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

170

in the later sixteenth-century war years, falling back to lower levels after 1600 but then moving steeply upwards after 1650. In the diocese, the costs of weekly masses and obits were lower than in the city, but the same upward trends are seen in the seventeenth century. However, rural costs did not increase to the same extent as those in the town. Also, with a very few exceptions, Vannes city and diocese lack the distinctive, spectacularly large foundations made in Nantes. Marle and Jean de Viguerie show that in Valenciennes and Anjou respectively, costs of endowment fell in the later seventeenth century, as demand for permanent masses fell. In Nantes and Vannes, absolute costs remained elevated although inflation certainly eroded the real value of foundations.171 In Nantes, the costs of founding a weekly mass or an obit were comparable, particularly in the seventeenth century. For around the same costs, a founder could acquire a weekly low mass or a sung, high requiem for an obit. In Vannes city and diocese, the foundation of weekly masses was always costlier than that of obits. It required a very special outlay of capital and in the seventeenth century weekly masses became very expensive. The acquisition of a weekly mass was thus a symbol of great social prestige in the Vannetais. The costs of masses can in part be related to wider economic trends in France. These are much better known for Nantes than the rest of the province, but it can be assumed that they affected the whole region. The rise in foundation costs after 1570 and particularly after 1580 can be related to economic difficulties in the years of the later religious wars. There were subsistence problems, with poor harvests between 1572 and 1576, again in the wet year of 1578 and from 1580 Brittany was struck by a series of severe famines and epidemic diseases. These decades also witnessed disruptions to maritime commerce with frequent disturbances to shipping in the Bay of Biscay because of piracy out of La Rochelle. One indicator of downturn in the economy was commerce in salt, which fell dramatically after 1580. The textile trade, so important in overseas commerce, also declined. After 1585, intermittent warfare affected southern Brittany and the border with Poitou. By 1588, the countryside around Nantes was devastated and in November of that year the procureur syndic lamented that ‘enemies raid, pillage and destroy everything around the town, ransom the population, levy taxes and force the parishes to raise moneys and other means, by force, constraining those who refuse, particularly the poor peasants, by imprisonment and long captivities of their persons and their animals’.172 Recorded baptisms for Nantes fall off

171

  Marle, ‘Le salut par les messes’, p. 56–7; Viguerie, ‘Les fondations et la foi’, p. 305.   Quoted in Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 1, p. 357.

172

The Individual Alone Before God?

171

after 1580 until the end of the decade.173 The early years of the Catholic League, 1591–93 again witnessed three poor harvests. From early 1595, food shortages became serious and the spring of 1597 witnessed one of the worst subsistence crises of the century. This was accompanied by a serious outbreak of plague. Canon Jean Moreau’s account of the League wars in the west of Brittany show clearly the devastation of the countryside and damage wrought to towns in sieges.174 In all, the later sixteenth century was a period when costs rose. Inflation was a second problem in the later sixteenth century. Rising prices affected all parts of France in the 1560s and 1570s, caused by a complex combination of demographic pressure, periodically poor harvests, the financing of war and attempts at currency control.175 The mid-1570s saw an escalation of these problems because of a serious coinage crisis which became acute after 1575. It consisted of a progressive depreciation of the money of account, the livre tournois, against the metal coinage, particularly the gold écu, and a steep rise in the value of foreign currency. Nantes, where Spanish currency was in regular circulation and which housed one of the kingdom’s main mints, suffered particularly acutely.176 In 1577, the fictional livre of account was abolished and the real écu was to be used for accounting.177 The royal monetary reform succeeded and brought stabilisation and deflation. The ordonnance was rigorously observed in Brittany until 1589.178 In the decade of the League Wars, however, inflation and monetary problems returned. There was a shortage of coin for transactions, despite the minting of specie in the name of Charles X in Nantes, for these quickly depreciated in value as they were refused by many traders.179 These factors explain why the costs of foundations rose in the later sixteenth century, in monetary and real terms. This makes the lavish foundations of the 1580s in Nantes even more notable: these were political acts signifying support of Catholicism and its League by the

173  Alain Croix, Nantes et le pays nantais au XVIème siècle: étude démographique (Paris, 1974), p. 133. 174   Jean Moreau, Histoire de ce qui s’est passé en Bretagne durant les guerres de la ligue et particulièrement dans le diocese de Cornouaille (Brest, 1836). 175   See Jotham Parsons, ‘Governing Sixteenth-Century France: The Monetary Reforms of 1577’, FHS 26 (2003): pp. 1–30. 176   Figures from Henri Lapeyre, Une famille des marchands: les Ruiz (Paris, 1955), p. 451. 177   J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis. France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1976), p. 226. 178  Lapeyre, pp. 442–51. 179  Louis Grégoire, La Ligue en Bretagne (Paris and Nantes, 1856), p. 285.

172

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

wealthier residents of Nantes who went on to support the rebellion of the duke of Mercoeur against the Crown. The seventeenth century was a period of low inflation and depressed wages. It was also a period of high royal taxation, particularly in the second and the final quarters of the century. Overall, incomes stagnated. If we use the wages of masons in Nantes as a comparison (the most complete series of artisans’ wages), we can see that while working incomes changed slowly over the period 1550–1700, the costs of intercession increased much more.180 The cost of founding perpetual intercession rose in real terms over time, making it even more the preserve of the wealthy. As Eire has noted for Madrid, so in western France, mass prices kept pace with and even outstripped inflation, while the purchasing power of labourers and artisans declined. A proportionally larger percentage of estates therefore had to be spent on intercession.181 This served to reduce lower social groups’ participation in the foundation of perpetual intercession by the early seventeenth century. In Nantes, the rising cost of perpetual intercession from the late sixteenth century certainly made their foundation the preserve of elites in the seventeenth century; in the mid- century, an obit would cost around 30 livres annually. The cost of an obit had increased six-fold, whereas, for example, the wages of a mason in the city had doubled at best across the same period, from 8 to 15 sous per day.182 Costs also outstripped the original donation, over time. If an original foundation was made with land or property, foundations would endure. For example, the daily masses founded by two duchesses of Brittany in the fifteenth century became more expensive in the 1640s, as the cost of provisions rose. But as the revenues of the lands of Plouvara on which they drew their income also rose, the wages of the chaplains was able to increase and the chantries continued.183 But with cash rentes, either on property or on money, inflation ate at their real value. Also, royal taxes at the end of the seventeenth century became onerous. In 1692, the générale of the parish of Saint-Nicolas of Josselin was told that by the royal tax of droits d’amortissments et nouveaux acquêts they were to pay 238 livres 18 sous 3 deniers. They had paid 100 livres but had no more money in the parish coffers.184 The financing of perpetual intercession became problematic.

180   For wage series of building artisans in Nantes, Vannes and Rennes, see Elizabeth Musgrave, The Building Industries of Eastern Brittany (DPhil., Oxford, 1988), chapter 5. 181  Eire, Madrid, pp. 182–6. 182  Musgrave, Building Industries, chapter 5. 183  ADM 55 G 4. Chapitre de Vannes. Fondations. 184  ADM G 892. Saint-Nicolas de Josselin.

The Individual Alone Before God?

173

In the end, the cost of perpetual intercession was one of the causes of its demise as a practice. Even for the rich, the cost of endowment was very high. Other forms of intercession became more socially relevant and better value than perpetual masses for the dead. After all, social participation, witness and prayer were the functions of lavish permanent masses. Although individual souls benefitted from masses, it was the wider participation of the Church and the faithful that made those masses more valuable, on earth as in heaven. It is to alternative, community-centred strategies for intercession that contemporaries increasingly favoured that we turn in the next chapter. Conclusions The foundation of private masses was an important vehicle for the affirmation of individual and family status in Breton society. The high costs of founding perpetual intercession meant that it was always an elite luxury and a form of conspicuous consumption and one which increased in price over time. There was some ‘privatisation’ of devotion among a small number of the high elite in the purchase of family burial spaces and the creation of chapels. Some chapels were very exclusive, particularly in rural parish churches: they were located next to the chancel rather than in the side aisles, a mark of great social restrictiveness and giving greater privacy. Masses were personalised, through the choice of a special office, altar or cult and by attaching perpetual intercession to a special saint or devotion. For those who could afford it, perpetual masses were a personalised, individual form of intercession. But perpetual masses were also a form of public display, intended to draw onlookers into prayer and to engage churches in responsibility for individual souls. As Galpern has commented, ‘prayer said for family members was only the first circle in a set which expanded progressively outward until it encompassed the whole community of the faithful’.185 Nicole Lemaitre concludes for sixteenth-century Rouergue that wills show that the rise of individualism was evident, among clergy and laity, but there still continued to be a deeply-rooted ideal of solidarity, the idea that individual salvation was not achieved alone, that it was necessary to count on the works of others.186 Even in the later seventeenth century, an effort was made to cultivate reciprocal aid among Christians. John McManners argues that the idea of a corporate salvation lived on, the 185

 Galpern, p. 28.  Nicole Lemaître, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris, 1988), p. 363. 186

174

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

normative participation of everyone in church rituals, which ‘spoke of the unity of Christians in a common faith and a common hope’.187 The saints in heaven, the living and the dead comprised a mutual society, on which the individual founder depended. The founder had to give something back to the collectivity, living or saintly, in return for prayer. An increase in divine service was a good work in itself. For the more devout, contribution to the community liturgy, the funding of fabric and priests, donations of vessels and vestments, were forms of gift exchange, in return for memorialisation and intercession. There was little change over time in aspiration, even if the form and location of intercession altered as the Counter Reformation introduced more elaborate liturgies and a greater eucharistic emphasis. After 1650, however, there was a decline in giving and in mass foundations as we saw in chapter 4. Rising costs were one reason; different perceptions of salvation which laid emphasis on lifetime activities and – extremely important and linked to the latter – an increased interest in collective good works, were another cause. There was thus no simple trend towards individualisation. Evidence such as charitable works and devotion to Mary indicates elites’ continued engagement with their communities. Increasing foundations of anniversary and annual masses at the high altar rather than side altars suggests concern for ritual focused on the central point of the church, in which all the congregation could participate and offer prayers. The parish, confraternity and widely-available resources such as indulgences, dependent again upon the collective treasury of merit in the Church, were important and even grew in popularity over the period. It is to collective forms of intercession that we now turn, to compare and contrast their membership and popularity with that of individual foundations, across time.

187   John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), p. 231.

Chapter 6

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance before Eternity: Parish, Confraternity and Indulgences ‘And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried; they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God.’ [Zechariah 13:9]

In 1542 in Ménéac, Marie Tual died. The parish priest recorded in the burial register that she was a ‘poor, old, beggar woman [who] had nothing with which she could make provision’, that is, for her soul.1 That this was a matter for record shows the seriousness with which the need for intercession was taken, by all social groups. While affluent individuals and families could invest in the luxury of perpetual masses to ensure their ultimate entry into paradise, the less-well-off had to seek cheaper solutions. The majority turned therefore to mutual aid, to support each other in the quest for heaven. They relied on the services provided in their parishes, subscribed to confraternities and accessed indulgences to provide for their souls and for those of their friends and families. It would be wrong, however, to differentiate between ‘popular’ communal and elite ‘personal’ intercession. Both wealthy and poorer individuals relied on group representation for their souls. Collective forms of perpetual postmortuary prayer were the largest in scope and most widespread of all intercessory institutions for the soul and it is to these that we now turn, to reconstruct something of the beliefs and practices of the ‘ordinary’ Catholic in Brittany. Three communal institutions are examined here, the parish and its provision for the souls of the dead, confraternities and their intercessory activities and indulgences. Because parishes, confraternities and indulgences touched almost all people in early modern Brittany, they provide a window onto the beliefs and practices of ‘average’ parishioners, below the level of those wealthy enough to found permanent masses, although they also included elites. All three institutions provided mechanisms for 1

 Alain Croix (ed.), Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec (Rennes, 1993), p. 16.

176

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

disseminating ideas about the afterlife and practical means for servicing the needs of souls. As collective post-mortem practices evolved, we see reflected in them changes in attitudes to the afterlife. Like perpetual foundations, parishes, confraternities and indulgence acquisition were active in the later Middle Ages, underwent transformations during the religious wars of the later sixteenth century and emerged, strengthened and redefined, after 1600. While foundations of perpetual masses declined at the end of the seventeenth century, however, parishes, confraternities and indulgences continued to be lively. Collective forms of worship and prayer remained vital to salvation into the eighteenth century and even grew in scope as individually-based intercession declined. The Parish and Provision for the Souls of the Dead By the late fifteenth century, the principal institution of religious life for the majority of western Christians was the parish church. From baptism to burial, the events of most people’s lives were marked there. The parish also provided the primary site for intercession for the dead for the vast majority of the population. While members of the elite, particularly in towns, might prefer collegiate and convent churches as sites of burial and commemoration, this required greater wealth than was available to most people. Therefore, the community of the parish, incorporating all Christians resident within its boundaries irrespective of status, provided for the souls of most early modern Bretons. The care of ‘their’ dead was a fixed part of parish life across the early modern centuries. Two contrasting historiographical traditions describe the evolution of parish religious life in the Reformation period. From the 1970s, social and cultural historians came to argue for a separation of elite and popular culture in the early modern era, where the wealthy distanced themselves from the populace and withdrew into private spaces, physically and intellectually. At parish level, this meant the withdrawal of gentry and elites from church worship, into more personal and private spheres. The licensing of private manorial oratories with their own chaplains, the creation of family chapels and pews in parish churches, the increase in private devotions such as reading of primers and books of hours during mass, have been seen as evidence of increasing non-participation in parish religion. In contrast with this, historians of Catholic Europe of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have observed that Tridentine reformers put increasing stress on the importance of the parish as the chief

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

177

site for the religious life of the laity.2 Barbara Diefendorf argues that in France, emphasis on parish worship, to keep lay folk under the eye of their priest and confessor, was part of a larger campaign for greater public order and morality waged in tandem by the Catholic clergy and royal magistrates from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.3 Katharine JacksonLualdi’s work on the diocese of Grasse shows that during the sixteenth century Catholic authorities encouraged parish religion for the collective modelling of orthodox belief and for guiding its expression. Later in the Catholic reform process, parish religion became more than an exterior manifestation of orthodoxy, but also a means of forming the beliefs of individuals, through the sacrament of the mass and from the pulpit.4 In the Lyonnais of the seventeenth century, Philip Hoffman found that activities which took parishioners away from their parishes were more restricted, to the near locality, conclusions supported by Eric Nelson’s work on pilgrimages in the archdeaconry of Blois.5 Keith Luria thus argues that the late medieval religious landscape filled with sacred fountains, chapels and pilgrimage sites, gave way to the parish church, through which bishops and priests could control religious activity. The parish became the centre of a reformed and recharged religious life.6 While the living could choose their place of worship, the parish church remained the primary focus for the dead of the community. In Brittany as elsewhere in northern Europe, the parish church or its cemetery was the final resting place of most people and it retained burial rights across the period. Funerals were frequent as mortality was high. For example, in Ambon parish, a register of 1706 shows the high number of funerals conducted even in a small rural parish. In January, the busiest month, there were twelve ‘services’ (cycles of three masses), five interments with bells and three children’s burials; on 23rd of the month there were three funerals on one day. In June, the quietest month, there were still twelve ‘services’, one interment and three children’s funerals.7 Post-mortem intercession was most frequently associated with burial site, so for most people it was inevitably 2

  Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1730 (New Haven and London, 2009), p. 208. 3   Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 1991), p. 36. 4   Kathryn Jackson-Lualdi, ‘Obéir les commandements de Dieu et de l’Église. Culte paroissial et Contre-réforme gallicane’ RHEF 84 (1998): p. 13. 5   Philip Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789, (New Haven, 1984), pp. 85–6; Eric Nelson, ‘The Parish in its Landscape: Pilgrimage Processions in the Archdeaconry of Blois, 1500–1700’, FH 24 (2010): pp. 318–40. 6   Keith Luria, Territories of Grace. Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley CA, 1991), pp. 5–6. 7  ADM G 1198. Ambon. Comptes de fabrique 1670–1706.

178

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

concentrated in the parish church. In the east of Brittany, notables were buried inside the church while the majority of parishioners were interred in the cemetery outside. In the countryside, cemeteries usually surrounded churches; in some towns, such as Nantes, parish churches within the city walls did not have burial grounds and ordinary people were interred in suburban cemeteries such as Champ-Fleuri. In western Brittany, almost all adults were buried inside the parish church.8 In the Léon, for example, the chancel was the preserve of parish nobles and clergy; the nave and its ancillary chapels received the majority of adults and the area around the font was reserved for young children. Some individuals also chose to be buried in the porch.9 The pressure on space inside churches was such that older burials were frequently displaced. In 1617 the recteur of Malestroit noted in the parish register that to inter Jean Menaud, it was necessary to empty three graves.10 To accommodate demand, residence inside churches was limited in time, in some places to between five and seven years. The bones were then placed in an ossuary in the churchyard and after a period of time, when the ossuary became full, remains were translated into a communal grave. The movement of remains was accompanied with appropriate rituals such as the ‘general service for the translation of relics and procession of the dead’ at which most of the parish assisted in Les Iffs in 1651.11 Although as we have seen, the wealthy could select alternative burial sites, only a tiny number of people were buried in convents. Even in towns only a fraction of people opted for non-parish burial. For elites buried elsewhere, parish prayers were still requested, as we will see below. The parish church was an important site of pedagogy about the afterlife. While the frequency of sermons is unknown for the sixteenth century, increasingly across the seventeenth century homilies and preaching took place in parishes. Above all, the teaching of catechism was introduced, which contained information on the fate of the soul after death. Equally important, given low literacy rates in rural areas, was the iconography of afterlife present in most churches, on the walls and in sculpture. As discussed in chapter 3, such representations could act as visual ‘sermons’. Hell was an especially-favoured theme for church decoration, Heaven had far less coverage. It is difficult to separate depictions of Purgatory from Hell, but Hell was the place to avoid and therefore received the most attention. Croix has listed fifty iconographic depictions of Hell and/or Purgatory in 8

 Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 387.   Roger Leprohon, Vie et mort des Bretons sous Louis XIV (Brasparts, 1984), pp. 142–5. 10  Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 1100–101. 11  Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 388. 9

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

179

Brittany for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.12 The wall paintings of the Cathedral of Saint-Pol and of the chapel of Kernascléden; stained glass windows such as those at la Martyre and Plogonnec; Calvaries such as Kergrist-Moëlou of 1578 and of Pleyben of 1632–40, which show Hell as a huge, open mouth of a great fish, full of men and women bathed by flames, are merely examples among many. All depict the tearing of flesh, eternal fires and tortures by demons. Further, the folk figure of Ankou, the personification of death shown as a skeleton carrying a dart, was a popular theme for external sculpture, such as on the north side of the ossuary of Brasparts, or Lannédern church, near to the entrance in the south porch. Also, the pedagogical function of ritual activity should not be underestimated as it was through experience that many parishioners came to understand the need to intercede for the dead and the means by which it should be carried out. The pre-eminence of the parish as a site of intercession is striking. Here, parishioners and their successors ‘would have memory and remembrance of the souls … to recommend them in their good prayers to God’.13A primary function of the parish was to provide funeral services, an important ‘moment’ of intercession for the individual soul. Afterwards, the parish provided a wide range of temporary and perpetual intercessions for individuals, according to wealth and devotional preference. But it was the collective facilities provided by the parish for the community of the dead that were of most importance. Intercession was built into the daily, weekly and yearly liturgical cycle. Mondays were usually devoted to intercession for the dead. The dead were remembered liturgically on the feast of All Souls. Throughout the year, the dead were remembered with regular processions around the churchyard and sprinkling of the graves with holy water.14 Specific evidence for parish devotions is thin as few churchwarden’s accounts survive, but there are scattered hints. Two phases stand out, the later fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. In 1495, the bishop of Nantes ordered every parish to employ a crier, who would, at midnight, by means of a little bell and a loud voice, ‘alert the faithful to pray for the departed’.15 This practice was already known at Montfort-sur-Méen from 1431 established at the initiative of a parishioner ‘filled with pity and devotion towards the departed’; in Rennes from 1483 where the cathedral bells rang every day at 6pm or 7pm to alert the people

12

 Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1049.  ADLA G 461 Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Foundation document of Gillet Barbe 1451. 14  Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles. The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), p. 197. 15  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1133. 13

180

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

to say a De Profundis for the dead and at Quimperlé from 1487.16 Again in the seventeenth century, there is evidence for parish initiatives to augment collective post-mortem intercession. In Rannée, Saffré and Châteaubriant there were ‘bourse des defunts’ or collecting box for souls; these funded regular prayers for the departed, especially for those who were too poor to have their own masses said or who lacked families to pray for them.17 Five out of 14 parishes in the southern part of the diocese of Nantes visited by Archdeacon Binet in 1684–85 possessed such boxes.18 In Ambon parish, there was a warden responsible for the ‘boîte des defunts’ which was carried around the church every Sunday, during high mass. The moneys funded a monthly mass, paid for oil for a lamp and wax for lights and for the maintenance of a lantern which was carried before the viaticum for the sick.19 For the poor, with few resources, the prayers and masses of the funeral provided at least a minimum of intercession. For those with modest resources, the provision of lights for the funeral, which could afterwards be transferred for use at one of the altars, would perpetuate intercession for a little longer and in a tangible way. On a slighter grander scale, in 1549, Guillaume Simon, royal notary and procurator, left money to Sainte-Croix of Nantes, for the candle for the Corpus Christi season in the church.20 In the seventeenth century, bequests for oil for holy sacrament lamps seem to have superseded those for ‘lights’ in many parishes. In 1686 and 1689 in Plouay, Louis Le Fraisser and Louis Lemauret, both laboureurs, left rentes and gifts of rye for the lamp of the parish.21 Individuals with a small amount of ‘savings’ could give small gifts for prayers, such as Janne Le Namouguet of Aradon whose will of 1670 left two quarts of wheat to the parish church.22 Those of middling means might ask for a small number of post-mortem masses, an octave, trental or even annual of daily masses, completed with a requiem service on the first anniversary of death. In 1588, Yves Danet, priest in the community of chaplains of Saint Guédas in Auray, requested the ‘usual service for priests’ and 500 low masses at the church at Guicheux for his funeral arrangements.23 In 1670, René Le Livre of Aradon requested a ‘service’ at his funeral, for his octave and on the first anniversary of his death and asked that his children and heirs had 16

 Ibid., p. 1133.  Ibid., p. 1135. 18  ADLA G 52. Diocèse de Nantes. Visitation 1684–5. 19  ADM G 1198. 20  ADLA G 467. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 21  ADM G 953. Plouay. Fondations; G 954 Plouay. Confrérie Saint-Sacrement. 22  ADM G 1139. Arradon. Testaments et fondations. 23   ADM 6 E 2183. Notaire Kermadec. Auray 1583–1606. 17

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

181

thirty masses said for him.24 In 1684 at Biliers, Anne Le Glain, widow, requested a ‘service’ at her funeral, an octave and twenty further ‘services’ of three masses each, over a year.25 For perpetual remembrance, small gifts and annuities assured the individual a place in the annual cycle of masses and prayers of the parish church. In the later Middle Ages, in exchange for a gift, names could be entered on the bede roll of benefactors of the church, whose names were read out during Sunday parish mass and for whom prayers would be said. In 1428, Jan Mace gave a rente of eleven sous for his mother to be buried in the church of Saint-Saturnin of Nantes and to be mentioned in prayers; in 1430, six sous was given by Guillemette Olive, widow, to be buried in the church and to be on the list of benefactors or the bede roll.26 In 1511, Thomas Lebeil gave a rente of five sous as a ‘don gratuit’ on a house in Nantes, again to be listed as a benefactor.27 In her will of 1572, Marguerite Olliver, spinster of the parish of Notre-Dame of Nantes, requested to be put on the ‘billet de la semaine’ of the church, to ensure prayers for her soul.28 Later evidence for this practice is much scarcer but parishioners did leave money for specific projects which they associated with remembrance. In 1664 and 1665, in separate wills, Françoise Guilloche, Jean Le Gal and Jean Le Bot of Questembert left a boisseau and a quart of rye respectively for the lamp of the church – presumably that which burnt before the reserved sacrament – which seems to have been a new project for the parish.29 The gentry also valued parish intercession, even if their main loyalties lay elsewhere. Thus Mathurine Gatechair of the manor of Keraharon in the parish of Guilliers gave a small piece of land to the fabrique ‘to participate in the prayers which are said daily in the church’.30 Specific gifts also perpetuated public memory. In 1481, Jean Spadine the younger of Sainte-Croix parish of Nantes, where he was buried with his parents and family, willed two ells of damask and a satin robe to Saint-Pierre of Carquefou.31 In 1560, Mathurin Vivien, bourgeois, left black satin vestments to Sainte-Croix, partly for the use of the priest for his own chantry and partly for parish use.32 In 1664, Louise Guégen of Plabannec, a noble lady who was buried in the parish church, left ten 24

 ADM G 1139.  ADM 6 E 713. Notaire Salomon. Muzillac 1677–88. 26  ADLA G 493. 27  ADLA G 494. 28  ADLA G 372. 29  ADM 6 E 965. Notaire Le Mauff. Questembert 1665. 30  ADM G 901. Guilliers. Fondations. 31  ADLA G 466. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 32  ADLA G 467. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 25

182

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

livres to the church and a ‘shroud’ to cover the crucifix during Lent.33 In 1686, Julienne Kermasson of Arzal, widow, left sixty livres for a chasuble at Arzal church.34 All of these reminded the parishioners to pray for the souls of the donors and combined their memories with the rites performed in the church. The importance of the parish can also be seen in the bequests of former residents who died elsewhere or who were buried in convents and colleges. Their gifts accompanied requests for short-term prayers and services and occasionally, permanent intercession. In 1550, François Fabry, canon of Vannes, Rennes and Quimper Cathedrals, who created weekly and annual foundations in Vannes Cathedral and asked for 10,000 masses at his funeral, also left money to the rectors of Saint-Nolff and Lesbin for prayers.35 In his will of 1559, André Le Gallois, vicar choral of Notre-Dame of Nantes, left money to the parish church of Rouvier for fifty masses, for himself, his mother and father, for he was born and presumably baptised in the parish. He also requested a trental of masses in the church of Saint-Denis, in whose parish he was resident, although he was buried in Notre-Dame.36 In 1597, Guillaume Douillard, canon of Notre-Dame and rector of SaintSaturnin of Nantes, was buried in the chapel of Saint Marie-Magdelaine of that church but also asked for a trental and left a chalice to Montebert church, his birthplace.37 In 1647, Pierre Evenard, dean of the collegiate church of Rochefort-en-Terre and rector of Pluherlin, left six livres each to the chapel of the rosary in Rochefort, the parish church of Pluherlin and the convent of Bodellio.38 This practice is also seen lower down the social scale. In 1687, Lucas Moello, laboureur, acting for himself and his late wife Catherine Baillaud, founded four yearly services in Cléguer church, in their parish of residence, and three in that of Lanvaudan, where Catherine was baptised.39 The sheer volume of post-mortem intercession could be striking and the numbers of services increased over time. In Saint-Saturnin church of Nantes, for example, there were between one and five private foundations in the form of low masses per day in 1545, which had increased by 1674 to between four and six high masses, daily. Parishioners and other visitors to parish churches would have witnessed frequent memorial services, in busy city churches often several times a day.

33

 ADF 4 E 144/10.  ADM 6 E 713. 35  ADM 55 G 2. Chapitre de Saint-Pierre, Vannes. Fondations. 36  ADLA G 313. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 37  ADLA G 497. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 38  ADM G 959. Pluherlin. Fondations. 39  ADM G 878. Cléguer. Fondations. 34

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

183

Thus, remembrance was part of the sightscape and soundscape of the early modern parish. Of course, there were other sites of worship where intercession could take place. Lords had their private chapels on their estates. While these were domestic chapels they could also be sites of remembrance for families. For example, in 1663 Jeanne Louis, widow of the Seigneur of La Grande Rivière and Boschet, founded a low mass for her husband’s intention every Sunday and feast day in the chapel of their manor of Boschet in the parish of Carentoir, which also gave her household private access to the sacrament.40 In all parishes, particularly the larger territories of the west, chapels were distributed across the landscape and some of these were provided with masses through post-mortem foundations. For example, in Vannes diocese in 1633, an episcopal visitation of ninety-nine parishes recorded forty-three with outlying chapels. The numbers ranged from one chapel at Belz and Locoual to twelve at Languidic. In lower Brittany, it was customary for testators to bequeath small sums of money to large numbers of regional churches and chapels, for prayers, a custom rarely seen in Nantes or even Vannes dioceses. Thus in the diocese of Saint-Pol in 1647, the will of François Floch, canon of Léon and doctor of theology, left money to the Cathedral, hospitals and convents of Saint-Pol and Morlaix and a range of parish churches and chapels.41 This practice was shared by Hervé Billou, laboureur of Botsorel who in 1663 left money to more than thirty local churches and chapels.42 But it is clear that there was a hierarchy of allegiance which privileged the parish of residence and burial. In his will of 1668, Fiacre Le Toullec of Cléguer asked to be buried in the parish church where he founded two annual masses. He gave gifts of between one and two minots of rye to six other chapels in the parish, for prayers. The parish church, site of burial and remembrance, was foremost in significance.43 Finally, one of the clearest developments of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Brittany is the increasing concern with the separation of sacred from profane space in the parish, through the provision of an appropriately organised place for the dead. This took on an outward manifestation in the great rebuilding and redesign of parish churches from the mid-sixteenth century. Particularly distinctive in the west was the parish close, defined by high walls around the cemetery, pierced by a monumental gateway arch to solemnise entry into the churchyard and to keep out 40

 ADM 56 G 3. Chapitre de Saint-Pierre, Vannes. Fondations.  ADF 6 G 143. Chapitre de Léon. Fondations. 42   Francis Gourvil, ‘Le testament d’un paysan trégorois au XVIIe siècle’ BSAF 95 (1969): pp. 117–36. 43  ADM G 878. 41

184

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

animals; a calvary facing towards the west, to recall the Passion of Christ, and a monumental ossuary or charnel house, added either to the south side of the church or built as a free-standing chapel in the cemetery.44 That of Pleyben is one of the largest in Brittany. Here, we see a suite of monuments begun in the first half of the sixteenth century then modified and expanded in the seventeenth. The great calvary, originally constructed near to the south entrance, was erected in 1555. It takes the form of a monumental triumphal arch within which are altars for outside masses. The ossuary was built at roughly the same time; the facade, which overlooks the churchyard, has a door and six windows (unglazed at that period), as well as three stoops allowing the faithful to asperse the bones inside with holy water. In 1733, the ossuary was converted into a funerary chapel for the confraternity of the Trépassés or Faithful Departed, with a dedication to Saints Simon and Jude.45 In this way, a full ‘close’ or enclosed suite of monuments was created. In parish closes, the high walls erected around churchyards accessed through a triumphal arch provided a monumental entry to the separate domain of the sacred and the dead. There was a clear demarcation of the holy, to mark out the sacred zone at the heart of parish life, keeping it safe from animals and people, and even from everyday vision. The provision of appropriate space for the parish dead and of permanent intercession for the community of souls was a vital part of this new building programme. Ossuaries were prominent in these churchyards. They were depositories for remains displaced from their original resting place by subsequent inhumations, found in most churchyards but particularly important in regions with high rates of interior church burial. Ossuaries were frequently monumental, built onto the south side of churches or as free-standing chapels. Their windows were left unglazed, to allow the bones inside to be seen. They were decorated with symbols of mortality, skulls, Ankou holding a dart and angels of the resurrection. At Landivisau, finely-attired female caryatids are sculpted between ungazed apertures, through which the dead can be seen. A number of ossuaries have pedagogic inscriptions, for those who could read French and Latin. For example, inscribed on the ossuary of Saint-Thégonnec is ‘It is a good and holy thought to pray for the faithful departed – O sinners repent while you are living because for we dead there is no longer time – pray for us the departed because one day you

44

  Elizabeth C. Tingle. ‘The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir. The ReChristianising of the Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds) Circles of Holiness: Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 237–58. 45  Guy Leclerc, Pleyben. Son enclos et ses chapelles (Paris, J.P. Gisserot, 1996), p. 10.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

185

will be as we are – go in peace’.46 The churchyard monuments contributed to a total pedagogical experience. Entry into the church through the arch and the yard became a religious procession from the secular into the sacred world, past tombs, the ossuary (on the left) and the calvary (on the right) before entering into the south porch of the church – a symbolic journey from sin, through death to redemption symbolised by the scene of Christ’s passion, on into Mother Church. The living were thus invited to reflect on the means by which they might avoid damnation and gain grace and salvation. We see therefore in these closes, a clear definition, elevation and separation of the sacred domain at the heart of parish life and a site of remembrance, to elicit prayers for the dead. The parish was, therefore, a place where parishioners were taught about Purgatory and the afterlife of the soul, through preaching, catechism and liturgical practice. For most people, from the poorer to the wealthy, the focus of intercession was clearly parochial. Thus, in 1669 in Guidel parish, Guillemette Hutebaut willed to be buried in the parish church with three ‘services’ and 300 livres’ worth of masses for her funeral; there were to be two doles to the parish poor, at her interment and octave; she gave thirtysix livres to the church and small gifts of rye to the parish’s four outlying chapels then left a piece of land to the parish church for an anniversary.47 Her intercessory world coincided exactly with the parish. The parish was a central and evolving site of intercession for all of its dead, from the humblest to the greatest. It had a responsibility and duty to provide a basic service for souls and it also offered a site for more elaborate provision, according to tastes and above all, wealth. The parish was also a site for other forms of intercessory activity, providing a setting, staff and wider audience for different forms of collective prayer for the dead, particularly confraternities and indulgences. Confraternities and Perpetual Intercession The best-known and most widely-studied form of collective intercession, for the living and the dead, was the confraternity. Nicolas Terpstra defines the confraternity as ‘a self-governing congregation of lay Christians adapting and adjusting traditional clerical forms of group worship to their own situation and times’.48 They were relatively independent organisations, 46

 Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1102–104; Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour (Berkeley, 1989), pp.173–82. 47  ADM G 898. Guidel. Fondations. 48  Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, 1995), p. 49.

186

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

raising and administering their own funds under limited supervision from clergy. They offered members training in and exercise of the communal rituals of the Catholic faith, education in doctrine through tutoring in the traditional statements of the faith and many also encouraged private devotions.49 There were different types of confraternity and individuals could be members of more than one association. The craft fraternity bound together artisans of a particular trade in a religious brotherhood dedicated to the worship and promotion of a particular saint. There may or may not have been a parallel regulatory structure for the police of the craft, but membership of the religious fraternity was often compulsory for artisans of a trade. A second form of confraternity was the parish association, for the local community. This may have been the commonest form of guild, found in both town and countryside. A third type was the association formed for a specific charitable or devotional purpose, such as the running of a hospital, maintaining a chapel or shrine, or for a special social group such as the Grande Confrérie of Notre-Dame in the church of Sainte-Marie-Madelaine in Paris. This was founded in 1168 for a restricted membership of fifty clerics, fifty bourgeois and fifty bourgeoises, where each layman was paired with a clergyman for special prayers and works of piety.50 There is a developed historiography and chronology of the history of the confraternity in which medieval vitality, Reformation decline and Counter-Reformation resurgence is shown by numerous studies. Although their origins lay in the central Middle Ages, confraternities began to appear in numbers in northern and western Europe in the later fourteenth century. In France, in the area around Avignon, numbers started to grow between 1340 and 1360, then took off in the fifteenth century. Jacques Chiffoleau found that here 10 per cent of wills mentioned confraternities in the fourteenth century but between 1420–1500, 37 per cent of testators left them money or goods.51 In Lyon, the city council summoned 30 local confraternities to a meeting in 1496, but in the sixteenth century there were at least 60.52 Historians have given different emphases to the functions of late medieval confraternities. Maureen Flynn argues that the essence of confraternity membership was the public expression of piety in order to promote the welfare of the community. She argues that two activities dominated: charity, both alms giving and practical services, and the performance of specialised ritual acts. For the membership, 49

 Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, pp. 49, 54–5.  Diefendorf, Beneath, p. 34. 51   Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (c.1320–c.1480) (Rome, 1980), pp. 267, 273. 52  Hoffman, p. 26. 50

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

187

confraternities conferred grace ex opera operantis, by reason of the good and pious sentiments of those who performed them.53 Felicity Heal argues that confraternities met voluntarist needs within the broader Church, such as provision of chapels in communities with difficult access to churches and they provided the laity with autonomy over particular aspects of their religious lives through the commission of services and hiring and firing of their own chaplains.54 The commissioning of masses, the maintenance of an altar and above all the provision of lights, was fundamental to their work. The confraternity also offered ‘artificial’ links of solidarity between neighbours, particularly important in cities where individuals were often migrants with few kin or other networks. Fraternities therefore held annual feasts to foster sociability between members; they made provisions to keep the peace and arbitrate between brethren and they might assist sick and needy members, although alms were frequently casual and informal rather than institutionalised.55 Above all, historians have stressed the role of confraternities in burial provision and perpetual intercession for dead members, that is, their function as communal chantries. Chiffoleau comments that their essential function was funerary, with devotional and charitable functions having secondary importance.56 Whereas the first chantries were founded by the rich, by the second half of the fourteenth century, middling artisans and craftsmen in towns, then rural parishioners, founded communal means of self help for souls in fraternities and guilds.57 Those who lacked the wealth to endow a personal chantry – the majority – could contribute to the costs of a fraternity chaplain to pray for all members, living and dead. But confraternities were not simply poor men’s chantries. Wealthy individuals, some of whom founded private masses, also joined confraternities and some did so in preference to individual acts. The development of confraternities from the mid-fourteenth century onwards is good evidence for the increasing penetration of a belief in Purgatory into majority culture. The statutes of medieval confraternities specify in detail the obligations which members owed to deceased brothers and sisters. Confraternities organised funeral processions and masses with mortuary sheets, charitable 53

  Maureen Flynn, ‘Baroque Piety and Spanish Confraternities’, in J.P. Donnelly and M.W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirkville MO, 1999), pp. 233–5. 54  FelicityHeal, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 91–2. 55   Caroline Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in Caroline Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (eds), The Church in Pre-Reformation Society (Woodbridge, 1985), p. 3. 56   Chiffoleau, p. 267. 57   Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities’, p. 2.

188

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

doles and other works, lights and prayers, and they organised perpetual intercessions, to enforce living members’ solidarity between themselves and with the dead. Many guilds accepted the registration of members already deceased. In sum, to use Bossy’s words, ‘the fraternity practiced the rituals of togetherness in this world and procured the salvation of its members in the next’.58 Confraternities provided an important channel for the dissemination of beliefs and practices linked to Purgatory through their ritual activities and prayers. There is a debate, however, about the role of medieval confraternities in promoting interior devotion and new forms of piety. Chiffoleau argues that fraternities were not designed to promote a richer spirituality or pedagogy of prayer, except for attendance at weekly or daily mass and the recitation of basic prayers such as the Pater and the Ave. That stated, however, Chiffoleau acknowledges that, limited as it was, the activities of late medieval confraternities did encourage participation in pious activities which surpassed the ordinary level of religious obligation.59 Nicole Lemaitre argues that in confraternities of the Rouergue, especially the Holy Cross confraternities she has studied, membership did presuppose an interior disposition towards piety. While the obligation of prayer remained medieval in form, confraternal life favoured a programme of moral reformation. The fraternity was a place of mutual service and piety, offering an education of interior prayer and intercession.60 This is supported by Terpstra’s work. He observes that confraternities offered members training in and exercise of the communal rituals of the Catholic faith, mass, confession, communion, but that encouraged by the mendicant example they also inculcated and encouraged intense spirituality of private devotions that led members towards vocational worship.61 It is clear that new devotions entered into mass observance through confraternity creation and membership, for example the rosary. Thus, it was likely that Purgatory and the needs of souls entered mainstream devotions in the towns and countryside of late medieval France through confraternities, through their collective ritual observances and prayers. In Brittany, the best surviving evidence for late medieval confraternities comes from the two largest cities, Rennes and Nantes. In the diocese of Rennes, Bruno Restif has found evidence for 29 confraternities. In the small town of Fougères, he counted 10, mostly of craft guilds. In Vitré, parish associations were more important, for there was a confraternity 58

  John Bossy, ‘Holiness and Society’, P&P 75 (1977): p. 121.   Chiffoleau, p. 286. 60  Nicole Lemaître, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris, 1988), pp. 307–308. 61  Terpstra, p. 49. 59

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

189

of the Holy Sacrament founded in Notre-Dame church in 1347 and a fraternity of Notre-Dame founded in St Martin’s church in the fifteenth century. This latter confraternity had a large membership: in 1545 there were 995 members including 279 couples, 151 men and 283 women.62 Rural confraternities seem rarer, but Restif argues that this is a result of a lack of documentary evidence. The parish association of Saint-Grégoire in the parish of the same name, near to Rennes, may have been typical. Membership cost 3 sous 4 deniers to join and the revenues were spent largely on masses for the members. About 15 members died each year and around the same number enrolled.63 In Nantes, the fifteenth century saw the emergence of a range of confraternities.64 The first associations to emerge were guilds for nobles and wealthy bourgeois, the confraternities of the Passion of 1364 and the Veronica in 1413, the latter founded by Duke Jean V in the Dominican church. Several crafts and trades founded religious associations even when they were not formal corporations, such as the joiners with their guild of St Anne. The religious orders founded city-wide confraternities at altars in their churches, of which the most important was Notre-Dame-des-Carmes in the Carmelite church. In 1532, this had 435 members.65 These comprised 229 men, of whom 15 were Carmelites and 18 secular priests, 216 women including 60 widows, 79 wives with their husbands, 69 wives without their spouses and one nun. Membership was relatively accessible; entry cost 12 sous and each confrere paid 4 deniers on the death of a member for services and lights (the daily wage of a building artisan was eight sous in this period).66 There were also parish-based confraternities and the most popular of these recruited across the city, such as Notre-Dame-de-la-Cité of Saint-Saturnin and Notre-Dame-de-Chandeleur of Saint-Nicolas. In the latter, two other late medieval confraternities are known, St Catherine and St Nicolas the parish patron.67 Finally, confraternities devoted to charitable work existed, principally Toussaints, which ran a hospital, as did Saint-Jeande-l’Hôpital. Nantes therefore had an extensive and varied network of religious confraternities, similar to other cities in France. In 1548, Nantes’ 62

  Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006), pp. 86–7. 63  Ibid., p. 88. 64  Léon Maître, Les confréries bretonnes au moyen age (Nantes, 1876). 65   Paul Bois (ed.), Histoire de Nantes (Toulouse, 1977), p. 219. 66  Yves Durand, Un couvent dans la ville. Grands Carmes de Nantes (Rome, 1997), pp. 92–3; wage data from Elizabeth Musgrave, The Building Industries of Eastern Brittany 1600–1790 (DPhil., University of Oxford, 1988), chapter 5. 67   A. Bourdeaut, ‘Le culte et les arts à Saint-Nicolas de Nantes avant le Concile de Trente’, BSAHNLI 62 (1922): p. 120.

190

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

confraternities were taxed by the Conseil des bourgeois to aid the poor of the Hôtel Dieu. Sixteen associations were listed, not including two other known groups, such as the fraternity of St Jean-Baptist in the parish of Saint-Jean, so there were at least 18 religious associations in Nantes.68 For Vannes and Quimper, less is known of the early associations. In Vannes, there is evidence for a confraternity of the Conception of NotreDame in the Franciscan church; of the Trépassés (Faithful Departed) in the parish of Saint-Pierre and of a confraternity of priests dedicated to All Saints based in the Cathedral.69 This received around 10 new members a year in the early sixteenth century, from Georges Kerfguent, deacon and chorister, to Jean Testre, canon of Vannes and dean of Péaule church.70 Other confraternities no doubt existed, but evidence does not survive. In late fifteenth-century Quimper, the Cathedral housed several confraternities. That of St Nicolas was for law officials; the shoemakers’ guild of Saints Crispin and Crispinian founded in 1431; the barber surgeons had a religious guild as did the tailors, who from 1505 met under the banner of Notre-Dame-de-Chandeleur. In addition, there were three devotional fraternities, Holy Sacrament, St Julian and St Corentin the cathedral’s patron.71 Rural confraternities certainly existed in all these dioceses, but again evidence is scarce for this period. The parish of Carentoir had a confraternity of the Nativity of Notre-Dame based in the parish church, although it is difficult to say whether this was an association of the parish’s many priests or for the laity as well: bequests were left to the association by parishioners but all the land rentals and financial transactions were undertaken by clergy in the sixteenth century.72 In the parish of Brec’h tithes were collected from six confraternities in 1587 and 1588: St Thuriau, St Michel, St Pierre, St Bridgitte, La Madelaine and one in the chapel of Locqueltas.73 This range was probably typical of the large parishes of the west. The central question here is what role these confraternities played in propagating ideas about the afterlife and in organising intercession for the souls of their members, in the period before the Reformation. Surviving evidence comes mostly from the guilds of crafts, particularly in Nantes. In this city, the shoemakers had a confraternity founded in 1480 dedicated to 68  Nicolas Travers, Histoire civile, politique et réligieuse de la ville de Nantes (c.1750) (3 vols, Nantes, 1837), vol. 2, p. 312. 69   Jean-Pierre Leguay (ed.), Histoire de Vannes et de sa région (Toulouse, 1988), p. 155. 70  ADM 57 G 2. Cathédrale. Confréries. 71   Jean Kerhervé (ed.), Histoire de Quimper (Toulouse, 1994), p. 85. 72  ADM G 1066. Carentoir. Confrérie Notre-Dame. 73  ADM 6 E 2183.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

191

Saints Crispin and Crispinian in the Franciscan convent. When a master, his wife or widow died, the body was to be carried to the funeral by the eight most recently received masters of the guild, under penalty of a three livre fine.74 The locksmiths’ guild founded in 1492 had a confraternity dedicated to St Eloi with an altar in Notre-Dame church. When masters, mistresses and children of masters died, all the masters were obliged to accompany the body to church on pain of a fine of ½ pound of wax and to attend the feast day and subsequent requiem masses for the souls of deceased members.75 The tailor’s guild founded in 1493 incorporated an earlier confraternity founded in 1471 dedicated to the Trinity, based in Sainte-Croix. Masters paid two deniers a week as fees for themselves and their wives while journeymen and servants paid one denier each week. The day after the annual feast a requiem mass was held for deceased brothers and sisters. When a master, journeymen or their wives died, the guild held ten masses, including one sung requiem mass, with four torches, four ‘pillets’ around the bier and the guild would accompany the body to the church.76 We know most about two specialist associations founded specifically to intercede for departed souls, confraternities of the Trépassés founded in Saint-Pol in 1533 and Vannes in 1543. The statutes of these confraternities show that belief in Purgatory and the importance of regular collective intercession was lively in the cathedral towns of the west by this period. The preamble of the statutes of Vannes’ confraternity clearly describes the beliefs of the founders about the fate of souls after death and the best means of managing their experiences in the afterlife: considering the universal resurrection on the terrible, dreadful great day of judgement and firmly believing that it is possible to help and assist the souls of the departed, tormented by the burning fire of Purgatory, through prayer, alms and the offering of the holy and precious body of our saviour and redeemer Jesus Christ made by the priest in the holy sacrifice of the mass

the confreres sought, to change their transitory, temporal goods into spiritual goods … to the honour and glory of God the all-powerful, of the Blessed Virgin advocate of poor humanity before God, and of the archangel St Michael, protector and defender of poor sinners while alive and also of miserable souls in the face of cruel and 74   Edouard Pied, Les anciens corps d’arts et métiers de Nantes (3 vols, Nantes, 1903), vol. 1, p. 385. 75  Ibid., vol. 3, p. 128. 76  AMN HH 168. Corporations. Tailleurs; Pied, vol. 3, p. 213.

192

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

horrible death [when] passing from this mortal life to the immortal, against the enemy and infernal dragon the Devil who searches for poor souls to ruin them completely … .77

The primary activity of the confraternity was to hold a weekly mass for departed souls every Monday, in the chapel of Saint-Michel in the suburbs of Vannes. The choice of patron was important, for the archangel weighed souls and helped them in their passage to their next destination in the afterlife. The immediate objective was to pray for those buried in the church and cemetery of Saint-Michel who no longer had living friends and relatives to intercede for them, in order to ‘relieve and diminish the pains their souls suffer in the fire of Purgatory’. The Monday mass was a sung requiem at the chapel’s high altar preceded by vespers and vigils of the dead and a procession around the cemetery saying prayers for the departed. Before the Monday service, the officers of the confraternity would pass through Vannes ringing a hand bell, to alert the members to the mass. The confraternity also undertook to maintain the churchyard of SaintMichel, including placing bones from disturbed burials into the ossuary and cleaning the chapel. Other forms of intercession were provided as well. The officers were to pass through the city at Midnight on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, ringing a hand bell at each street corner, calling upon the inhabitants to pray for the departed. The confreres also undertook to toll the large bell of Saint-Michel to mark All Souls’ Day, from Vespers on the eve to the morning following the feast, in remembrance of the dead. As for the souls of its own members, the Vannes confraternity would provide lights for their funeral services. The confreres would accompany the corpse of the deceased to the church and attend the mass. Each member would also contribute 1 denier towards a requiem service for the deceased, which all would attend, to pray for his/her soul and for the souls of all the departed.78 The statutes of the slightly earlier confraternity of the Trépassés of Saint-Pol founded in 1533 are similar to those of Vannes, with a primary concern to arrange Monday services and cemetery processions in and around Saint-Pierre church. Also, members who died would have a solemn service of vigils for the dead, a sung mass, prayers for the deceased, a De Profundis and other orations, followed by a low mass of the Name of Jesus within fifteen days of burial. The funerary and intercessory provisions for members of the associations were important and some members no doubt joined to benefit from these arrangements. Yet it would be wrong to see these confraternities solely as collective chantries. The Trépassés confraternities were also charitable and devotional. The Saint-Pol confraternity took upon itself a role as intercessor for the 77 78

 ADM 57 G 3. Confrérie des Trépassés Vannes.  ADM 57 G 3.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

193

whole city, living and dead. After the Monday mass, a procession went through the city to the church of Notre-Dame-de-Creisquer (Kreisker is Breton for ‘town centre’), about 400 meters away. Here, prayers were addressed to God, the Virgin Mary and all the saints, before the altar of Notre-Dame, to protect the city and its inhabitants from all dangers and contagions; this was repeated before the image of St Roche.79 The confraternal function was much more complex than a simple burial club. While the two confraternities of the Trépassés clearly show that a belief in Purgatory and in the efficacy of collective prayer was evident in the west, their preoccupation with charity for the dead is unusual for the province. Fewer than five such confraternities are known from Brittany in this period. Also, membership of these confraternities was relatively small. In Vannes, the founders of the confraternity in 1543 were Silvestre Guilemo, canon and archdeacon of Guello of Vannes diocese, Ollivier de Kermeno sieur of Kerano, lieutenant of the court of Vannes and Jean Ballnart, vicaire of the parish of Saint-Pierre. The first membership list comprised four further priests and 64 named laymen. In 1552, listed members comprised seven priests, six men accorded ‘sieur’ titles, twenty-three named men ‘and several others’. There was a clerical and upper-middling core to the early confraternity. The first abbé was Jean de Quinio, bourgeois and merchant of Vannes, and the chaplain was Jean Heuzel, one of the founding clerics.80 Membership costs were not particularly high however. In 1543, the Vannes statutes ruled that each confrere and consoeur should pay 20 deniers a year, 10 deniers at Easter and 10 deniers at All Souls; deceased family members could be enrolled for 20 deniers a year. Members were also expected to give alms to the confraternity at All Souls.81 In the confraternity of SaintPol, the entry fee was 100 sous for couples, 50 sous for widows, priests and other unmarried people. There was also an annual fee of 5 sous cash and 4 sous of wax, or 2 sous for single people.82 Membership lists do not survive for either confraternity but a register of new receptions exists for Saint-Pol for 1538–42 and 1549–64. In most years, there were only one or two new entrants. Across the period 1538–64, there were 34 known new members, perhaps making around 40 in total if the missing years are taken into account. Of the 34 new members, there were four couples, eight men, six widows and 16 women (wives and single women).83 Both of the Breton confraternities of the Trépassés were therefore relatively small

79

 ADF 9 G 2. Saint-Pol. Confrérie des Trépassés.  ADM 57 G 3. 81  ADM 57 G 3. 82  ADF 9 G 2. Statutes of 1543, articles 9–11. 83  ADF 9 G 4. Saint-Pol. Confrérie des Trépassés. Lettres de reception. 80

194

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and specialised in function, influenced greatly by the clerical culture of the episcopal cities. Confraternities are evidence that by the mid-sixteenth century, belief in Purgatory and in the real possibility of influencing one’s own immortal fate and that of others, was clearly an important determinant of pious behaviour in southern and western Brittany among most, if not all, social groups. Of course, individuals varied in the intensity of their beliefs. Some individuals never joined confraternities; some particularly pious people joined several, such as Gilles Jumel, choir priest of Notre-Dame of Nantes, who in 1559 was a member of the Holy Sacrament confraternity in SainteCroix and that of Saints Anthony and Sebastian in Saint-Saturnin.84 The importance of collective funerary and post-mortem intercession is clear in confraternity records, but their functions went beyond providing for the dead. In any case, for post-mortem intercession to be effective, wider good works were also vital: specific charitable work, prayer for the craft or parish community, all contributed to the wider treasury of merit of collective Christendom as well as that of the individual. To separate charity, devotion and mortuary intercession makes no sense: a fraternity’s purpose was veneration and worship, and the support of the living by charity, understood widely, and the dead through prayers.85 Terpstra comments that they activated a faith meant as much to protect the body from evil as to console and save the soul.86 The Reformation attack on saintly and collective intercession for the living and the dead led to a decline in confraternity membership in the mid-sixteenth century. In regions and cities of Europe where Protestantism was established, confraternities were abolished. But just as Reformed ideas undermined prayer for the dead even in Catholic regions, so also did they affect collective prayer associations. Alan Galpern has shown that in Champagne across the sixteenth century, membership of confraternities dwindled and at the same time became more feminised, an indicator of their decreasing social importance.87 There was royal criticism of some associations, particularly those linked with crafts. In 1539, Francis I abolished banquets for artisanal guilds, including religious associations, fearing they served as a basis for labour agitation, although they were reestablished after 1541.88 Further, there were criticisms of confraternities at the Council of Trent. Their independence was disliked by clerical elites. 84

 ADLA G 325. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondation.   Brigden, ‘Religion and Social Obligation’, p. 96. 86  Terpstra, p. 66. 87  Alan Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA, 1976), pp. 103, 188, 190. 88  Diefendorf, Beneath, p. 34. 85

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

195

In the XXIII session of the Council in 1562, canons VIII and IX ruled for episcopal control over confraternities to bring them under greater clerical supervision.89 In all, the traditional religious confraternity came under pressure on a number of fronts in this period. The sectarian and military conflicts of the French religious wars after 1560 saw a revival and reshaping of confraternities. The chief features of the new fraternities were greater emphasis on the performance of charitable work, rejection of convivial festivities, new devotional emphases on frequent confession and communion and above all, overt statements or demonstrations of Catholic faith.90 The new confraternities played an important role in the mobilisation of Catholics against heresy and in the shaping of confessional identity, especially in the early wars of the 1560s and the Catholic League conflict after 1584. Three main types of confraternities emerged at this time. Most striking in the early wars were associations formed to defend Catholic doctrine and/or communities from attacks by Protestants. The Holy Sacrament confraternity of Rouen founded in 1561 is a good example. This was a city-wide association whose chief activity was to organise a weekly mass, salutations and procession of the holy sacrament, in a different church each week. It had a large membership of 1,241 by 1562 and Philip Benedict describes its purpose as a ‘sort of urban mission, symbolically defending Catholic doctrine’.91 The confraternity of the Holy Spirit founded in Burgundy by the lieutenant-general Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes and associations uncovered in the Bordeaux region by Kevin Gould’s work are further examples.92 Later, in the 1580s, confraternities such as the Holy Name of Jesus of Paris and Orléans again justified their foundation in the preservation and defence of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion. Members had a duty to purify their souls and consciences by frequent recourse to the sacrament of penance and to fortify themselves for action by frequent reception of the eucharist, daily examination of conscience and prayers in church before the host on Fridays.93 Devotional confraternities, encouraged particularly by the mendicant orders, also expanded. Megan 89

  Christopher Black, ‘Confraternities and the Parish in the Context of the Italian Catholic Reform’, in Donnelly and Maher (eds), Confraternities, p. 8. 90   John Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism’, SCH 23 (1986): pp. 175, 177. 91   Philip Benedict, ‘The Catholic Response to Protestantism. Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen 1560–1600’, in James Obelkevitch (ed.), Religion and the People 800–1700 (Chapel Hill, 1979), p. 173. 92   Kevin Gould, Catholic Activism in South West France 1540–70 (Basingstoke, 2006). 93   Christopher W. Stocker, ‘The Confraternity of the Holy Name of Jesus. Conflict and Renewal in the Sainte Union in 1590’, in Donnelly and Maher (eds), Confraternities, pp. 157–61.

196

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Armstrong has found an efflorescence of confraternities associated with Franciscan communities, for friars were active proponents of lay pietistic practices during the religious wars. The activities of the confraternity of the Holy Sepulchre in Paris combined ‘traditional’ collective devotions such as weekly mass in the Franciscan chapel and special services on feast days throughout the year, with ‘newer’ personally-led devotions such as penitential rites, private prayers, feasting, flagellation and also ‘public’ processions and charitable work.94 A third type of confraternity which came to characterise Catholic piety in the south of France and in the larger cities of the north, was that of the Penitents, based on Italian and Spanish models.95 During the 1580s and 1590s, the Penitents held highly visible, public processions wearing distinctive hooded gowns, hair shirts, with bare feet and practising self-flagellation. Private use of the discipline was also encouraged. As with the other new confraternities, increased observation was central, both ‘old style’ prayers, feasts and masses, and ‘new-style’ frequent confession and communion, along with charitable work for the poor.96 The implication of the ‘new’ emphasis on charity, penitence and the eucharist, on interior moral transformation to meet exterior material threats, seems to have been the downgrading of the importance of intercession for souls in Purgatory among these groups. Few of the studies of wartime confraternities mention the obligations of the living towards the dead. Yet the novelty of the confraternal associations and their activities during the religious wars can be overstated. Many communities continued to support their traditional associations; missing records and the financial constraints of the period disguise continuities of practice. Stéphane Gal has found for Grenoble that testators still mentioned thirteen different confraternities in their wills of the 1580s: one of these was a Penitent fraternity but the remainder were traditional groups linked to crafts, parishes and religious orders.97 Their patronage in wills suggests a continued post-mortem intercessory function. The impact of the religious conflict on Brittany’s confraternities was mixed. The decline of old groups and rise of new ones can be seen most clearly in Nantes where the most notable development was the 94

 Armstrong, pp. 99–101.   Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations’, p. 176. 96   Andrew E. Barnes, ‘Religious anxiety and devotional change in sixteenth-century French penitential confraternities’, SCJ XIX (1988): pp. 394–6; ‘The Transition of Penitent Confraternities over the Ancien Régime’, in Donnelly and Maher (eds), Confraternities, p. 127. 97   Stéphane Gal, Grenoble au temps de la Ligue. Étude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité (vers 1562–vers 1598) (St Martin d’Hérès, 2000), pp. 239–40. 95

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

197

expansion of the Holy Sacrament confraternity. The Holy Sacrament had long been a popular devotion in Nantes with a confraternity founded in Sainte-Croix in 1462. The confraternity had two purposes: to increase divine service and to augment zeal for the eucharist. The feast day was the octave of Corpus Christi, celebrated with a procession and requiem mass for deceased members. By 1554, the confraternity had 200 members and was maintaining brethren who had fallen into poverty. In the 1560s, the confraternity expanded and its leadership attracted men of a higher social status. Previously, the master and provosts were typically priests and chaplains from parishes in and around the city; by the 1570s, Guillaume Tual, master Vicar Choral of the cathedral, was in charge. In the 1570s and 1580s there was a small trickle of bequests for obits, sufficient to show that the fraternity maintained an intercessory function, but the eucharistic devotions of the community were their main focus during these years.98 In general in Nantes, confraternity membership overall seems to have declined after 1560, although detailed sources are lacking. In 1577, the fraternity of Saint-Jean-de-l’Hôpital was suppressed, its numbers having fallen away in favour of the Holy Sacrament confraternity. It gave its sumptuous funeral pall to the municipality, to hire out for 20 sous per funeral, to the profit of the city’s poor.99 There were, however, new craft and trade groups which did adopt traditional intercessory activities. The chest and trunk makers had statutes granted in 1573 and founded a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin and St John Lateran, with a weekly mass on Sundays and a feast on 6 May.100 The weavers, incorporated in 1586, had a confraternity dedicated to St Bonaventure with an altar in the Dominican convent. Masters paid an annual fee of 5 sous and journeymen a weekly fee of 1 denier. When a master died, he would have all the lights provided by the confraternity and two masses for his soul, one requiem and one office of Our Lady; when a journeyman died, he would have a requiem mass.101 Some new confraternities were notably more austere and devotional. In 1588, the silk and woollen cloth merchants founded a confraternity to Saints James and Christopher in the Carmelite church. Many of its functions were traditional ones: dedication to saints who were protectors of travellers, a weekly mass and an annual procession on 26 July. There was also devotion to the Holy Sacrament, for on the Sunday after Corpus Christi

98

 Georges Durville, L’ancienne confrérie de Saint-Sacrement à Nantes (Nantes, 1909).  Travers, vol. 2, p. 470. 100   Pied, vol. 1, p. 341. 101  Ibid., vol. 3, p. 277. 99

198

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

the brothers held a solemn procession around the Carmelite convent.102 Deceased brethren were entitled to a funeral service and ten low masses. The yearly feast was dominated by religious services, high mass, vespers and matins; the following day saw a vigil for the dead, and requiem services.103 So intercession for souls was an integral part of the guild’s activities. Throughout the period of the wars, individuals still requested confraternal assistance at their funerals. In 1567, Mathurin de Cozre, who requested burial in Nantes Cathedral, asked for a funeral service that was customary for the brothers of the fraternity of Saints Peter and Paul based in the cathedral.104 Overall, the work of confraternities was focused foremost on the living community rather than Purgatory, but intercession for the dead still had a place. Elsewhere in the province there is limited evidence for some decline in confraternal activity in the 1560s and 1570s, but with a resurgence after 1580. Whether this decline was caused by devotional shifts or by diminishing economic resources resulting from poor climate and war is difficult to gage. The confraternity of the Trépassés at Vannes continued its activities as far as can be told, but attracted only two new foundations between 1554 and the 1590s. Numbers seem to have declined. In 1571, listed confreres comprised two abbés, eight priests, twelve named laymen and ‘others’.105 The confraternity at Saint-Pol likewise continued. Its statutes were confirmed by Bishop Rolland de Neufville in 1574 although there were only four foundations recorded in the 1570s. But interest picked up after 1580 and 13 foundations were made for it in this decade and 14 more in the 1590s.106 A picture of greater continuity emerges from the countryside. In Carentoir, the confraternity of the Nativity of NotreDame continued to administer its lands and attract some new endowments. In 1578, Yves Lebreton, priest of the hamlet of Gaseul, sold a piece of arable land and used the revenue to establish an obit in the parish church to be served by the fraternity; two further obits were founded in 1582 and 1585 while in 1584, Jean Thurel gave 5 sous annual rente ‘to participate in the prayers made by the fraternity’.107 It appears that reduced attention given to post-mortem intercession in the civil wars years was more evident in the larger towns. Here, there was some reduction in both individual and 102

 Georges Durville, Études sur le vieux Nantes (2 vols, Vannes, 1901), vol. 2, pp. 168–9. 103  Durand, Un couvent, pp. 175–6. 104  ADLA 4E2/1389. Notaire Lemoine. Nantes. 1564–93. 105  ADM 57 G 3. 106  ADF 9 G 1, 9 G 2 Saint-Pol. Confrérie des Trépassés; 6 G 145. Chapitre de Léon. Fondations. 107  ADM G 1066.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

199

collective intercession for the dead between c.1560 and the later 1580s, when it began to increase again. Thereafter, resurgent Catholicism began to refocus attention on the fate of souls. In rural areas, old practices remained, even if the resource base was eroded by inflation, war and economic distress. There is evidence that beliefs in Purgatory and concern for souls remained stronger among lower social groups and particularly in rural regions, even when it was eroded among social elites and townsfolk during the religious wars. After 1600, the confraternity once again became a prominent institution of religious life for clergy and laity alike, in town and countryside and there was a major expansion of devotional and philanthropic fraternities. Historians have identified new departures in the nature and functions of Counter-Reformation confraternities. Primarily, Tridentine reformers sought to impose greater clerical authority over these voluntary associations. Already from the later sixteenth century, French church councils stipulated that fraternities ought not to be founded without episcopal licence, that their rules, activities and funds should be subject to visitation and supervision, and that their devotional and associational life should be brought within the compass of the parish so that Catholics should not be diverted from their primary obligation of parochial observance.108 Following on from the rulings of Trent, the Bull Quacumque of Pope Clement VIII of 1604 gave powers to parish priests to curb the autonomy of confraternities, to elect or at least to veto their officials, to scrutinise their accounts and to control when they celebrated offices in order to avoid clashes with parish celebrations.109 Further, the separation of the sacred from the profane was a preoccupation of reformers. In confraternities, they stressed the sanctifying aspects of fellowship but played down sociability.110 Fraternity feasts were discouraged and not allowed to take place in guild chapels or in connection with masses. Processions with the sacrament needed permission from the bishop and any money collected above the needs of fraternity masses was to be used for pious works.111 New devotional confraternities were one of the great successes of the Catholic Reformation. Holy Sacrament confraternities were founded to promote the cult of the eucharist through more frequent administration of the sacraments of confession, penance and communion. Confraternities of the rosary encouraged Marian devotions. These originated before Trent, sponsored by the Dominicans of northern Europe and with the revival of

108

    110   111   109

Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations’, p. 183. ‘Introduction’ in Donnelly and Maher (eds), Confraternities, p. 8. R. Po-Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 202. Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations’, p. 183.

200

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Marian devotions after Trent, they mushroomed.112 The new devotions of Christ and Mary replaced older confraternities in many communities. Hoffman shows that in the Lyonnais, old parish guilds such as Holy Spirit fraternities declined, displaced by Holy Sacrament and rosary confraternities. These had not existed in 1610, but by the mid-eighteenth century there were 42 holy sacrament and 28 rosary confraternities in the 108 parishes of the north-east of the diocese. They had chapels inside the parish church; their services were subordinate to those of the parish and their spiritual director was usually the parish priest. Their hallmarks were sombre exercises of piety, with masses and sermons instead of feasts.113 Flynn observes a decline in local dedications of confraternities and states that ‘in relation to the elaborate lattice of confraternal devotions under favoured local saints in the Middle Ages, the early modern period preserved a more standardised and homogenised pattern of advocacies’.114 As with the religious war period, the innovations of the Counter Reformation can be overstated, however. Confraternities with devotional emphases existed before and certainly during the wars of religion. Also, many traditional confraternities continued to operate. Hospital guilds, city-wide groups, crafts and trades, ancient associations with their own chapels, were resuscitated and strengthened in many cases after 1600. Chaunu argues that most confraternities in Paris continued to be mutual associations to assure their members aid in death, to assist the living and provide solidarity between both worlds through intercession for the repose of departed souls. Thus, there was little difference between the roles of the confraternities of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.115 That stated, there were changes in emphasis in the spirituality of confraternities across the seventeenth century. David Gentilcore characterised this as a vocation to internal missionism, ‘manifested in a religious drive to create a liturgical and sacramental consciousness within the brotherhood coupled with an increased awareness of the plight of one’s neighbour and the need to harmonise with the activities of the clergy.’116 Not content with simply evoking the aid of a saintly protector, these associations expected their members to engage personally in repeated acts of piety or asceticism.117 By 112

 Hsia, Catholic Renewal, p. 202.  Hoffman, pp. 110–111. 114   Flynn, ‘Baroque Piety’, p. 244. 115   Pierre Chaunu, La mort a Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978), p. 215. 116   David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch. The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1999), p. 78. 117   Jean-Marie Mayeur, Charles Pietri, André Vauchez and Marc Venard, Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours. Vol. VIII Le temps des confessions 1530–1620/30 (Paris, 1992), p. 271. 113

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

201

these means, dévôt and mendicant spiritual mores were passed down the social scale to most communities in France. What was the role of these new and revived confraternities with regard to the afterlife and particularly intercession for the dead? There was certainly a mortuary function for most confraternities. It seems that among early seventeenth-century confraternities, there was a return to the late medieval concern for the souls in Purgatory and a resurgence of collective activity for the departed. Devotional, parish and craft confraternities were concerned to provide ‘decent’ funerals, prayers for the dead and continuing perpetual intercession, as they had in earlier decades. Once again, they commissioned extra services in churches, provided lights and decorations for altars and chapels. Also, specialist confraternities specifically focused on intercession for the dead increased in number, Trépassés, Agonisants of various dedications and of Bonne Mort (the Good Death). Some of these undertook to sustain the dying in their final ‘agonies’ and to aid them in the final combat with the devil, assisting their confreres through the last rites, final communion and prayers. Others, more concerned with souls, were ‘societies of mutual spiritual assistance; they assured a vast exchange of prayers of the living for the sufferings of souls which created a powerful solidarity of the mystical body and the cohabitation of the dead and the living, united by grace.’118 The surviving evidence for seventeenth-century Breton confraternities is again scattered. There is enough evidence to show that after 1600, the resurgence of Catholicism initially caused a resuscitation of old confraternities and the foundation of new ones of the ‘medieval’ or traditional type, although under closer regulation by the clergy. After c.1630, there was a new wave of foundations, mostly dedicated to the Holy Sacrament or the rosary. Some older confraternities disbanded or merged into the new groups; many, however, continued to be lively. All of these confraternities, old and new style, played an important role in intercession for the dead in the first three-quarters of the century, merging new devotions, good works and prayers for souls in a seamless observance. The role of the clergy in the creation of new associations of all kinds was important. The Dominicans supported rosary confraternities all over the province. In Rennes diocese, the Dominicans of Laval created the first three confraternities of the rosary and the first two of the Name of Jesus in 1604 and 1605, while Holy Sacrament confraternities were created by the Jesuits and the Franciscans.119 Parish priests were particularly important in inspiring and sustaining confraternities. For example, all requests to the 118

  Michel Bee, ‘La société traditionelle et la mort’, XVIIe siècle 106–107 (1975): pp.

84–5. 119

  Restif, p. 186.

202

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Dominicans for the creation of a rosary confraternity were signed by the parish recteur and often by other local priests as well. The management of confraternities was under the supervision of the recteur; he or one of his priests was usually an officer of the guild and expenditure was frequently overseen by clergy. For many priests, confraternities offered an outlet for their own spirituality and they were enthusiastic members. In 1683, the founders of the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament of Plouay comprised the recteur, the curate, six priests from the parish as well as lay members. Jean Grave, priest, gave a house and garden to the confraternity ‘to begin the foundation necessary for the establishment of the confraternity’.120 Even more than in the Middle Ages, the confraternity became a complement of the parish, a means of supplementing and developing its devotional life. The new confraternities of the early Counter Reformation in Brittany were, like those of the past, dedicated to saintly intercessors and concerned with the dead. An episcopal visitation of Nantes in 1638 showed that the old, popular parish confraternities were still active, for example, in Sainte-Croix parish church there were four confraternities, the Passion, Saint-Sacrement, Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation and the tailors’ religious guild, all late medieval foundations. Within the territory of the parish, the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bons-Secours on the Loire island of La Saulzaie – another early fifteenth-century foundation – had its own confraternity as did the hospital of Toussaints on the Loire bridges.121 In the convent of the Carmelites, the confraternities of the Middle Ages also continued, particularly Notre-Dame-des-Carmes. To these were added that of the Guardian Angel and in 1636, a fraternity devoted to Saint-Sauveur. New confraternities of craft guilds continued to be highly traditional in their activities. The barber-surgeons of Nantes were incorporated before 1692, when their statutes were reissued. They had a confraternity dedicated to Saints Cosme and Damien, to which newly-received masters paid a fee of 100 sous and all masters had to accompany confreres and their wives to their funerals, on pain on thirty sous fine.122 The nail makers were incorporated around 1683 and their statutes ruled that each master had to pay an annual fee of five sous for the fraternity, for the costs of services for the souls of dead masters.123 The toolmakers’ guild formed in 1694 also had a confraternity dedicated to St Eloy and celebrated the feast day with a high mass for the saint and the day after, with a requiem for dead members.124 There were also failed confraternities. In the 1650s, a 120

 ADM G 954.  ADLA G 47. Nantes. Visitation. 1638. 122   Pied, vol. 1, p. 90. 123  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 323. 124  Ibid., vol. 3, p. 158. 121

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

203

confraternity of St Syre was founded in Notre-Dame of Nantes, to venerate the relics of the saint held there but there were difficulties of recruitment and the fraternity soon folded.125 In Vannes, the same pattern is seen. Fraternities linked to trades were welcomed by the Franciscans. In 1592, the tailors created a religious guild in the name of St John, served at the altar of St Anne in the Franciscan convent. Membership was designed to incorporate all of the trade, for it cost twelve sous a year for tailors and six sous for laundresses. In 1687, there were c.100 tailors and c.200 laundresses in the guild. In 1615, the Mercers created a confraternity under the invocation of Notre-Dame de Vrays Secours, served at the altar of St Eutrope in the convent.126 In Vannes Cathedral, efforts to augment the cult of St Vincent Ferrer led to the creation of a confraternity dedicated to the saint in 1645.127 Similarly in Quimper, the confraternity of Saint-Nicolas founded in 1436 was still functioning in 1682, when an inventory of its archive and its treasury was drawn up.128 In the smaller towns and rural parishes the same continuity of traditional saints’ confraternities also occurred. In Hennebont church, an episcopal visitation of 1633 recorded seven fraternities: St Wespre, St Sebastian, Holy Sacrament, St Eloy, St Anne, St Jullien and the Trinity.129 Guilds dedicated to the patron saint of a parish church or a chapel remained prominent: for example, that of Saint-Cado in the chapel of Saint-Cado and the Holy Trinity in the church of Sainte-Trinité en Porhouet.130 In the small town of Montfort in the seventeenth century, with three parish churches, there were at least four confraternities. The ‘Frairie Blanche’ for priests, dedicated to God and the Nativity of the Virgin, was founded in Saint-Jean in 1431; Saint-Nicolas church housed the confraternity of its patron and, from 1627, a rosary fraternity; Coulon church also had a new fraternity of 1655, to Saint-Joseph. Thus, new devotions co-existed with traditional groups.131 From the second quarter of the century the most noted phenomenon of urban and rural communities was the diffusion of devotional confraternities into parishes, above all Holy Sacrament and rosary confraternities. Historians such as Restif argue that these marked a 125

 Travers, vol. 3, p. 365.  Leguay, p. 163. 127  ADM 57 G 2. 128  ADF 2 G 120. Chapitre de Cornouaille. Cathédrale. Confrérie Saint-Nicolas. 129  ADM 41 G 1. Vannes. Visitation episcopale 1633. 130  ADM G 936. Noyal-Muzillac. Indulgences; ADM 48 G 5. Saint-Cado. Indulgences. 131   Marcel Sibold, ‘La vie religieuse d’une petite ville bretonne au XVIIe siècle’, RHEF LXIX (1983): pp. 238–41. 126

204

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

departure from the past. Rather than a concern with intercession, as in previous centuries, these were devotional fraternities where multiple exercises of collective piety were practised and individual pious behaviour was formed and encouraged.132 Trevor Johnson observes that many of the new or refounded associations were part of arch-confraternities under universal avocations, Mary and Christ, often satellites of a larger group and ‘thereby linked … to a universal project’ in the wider church.133 But this dichotomy between medieval/intercession and counter reformation/ devotional has been overplayed. The devotional confraternities were also designed to elicit intercession, although from fewer and more powerful members of the heavenly court, the Virgin and Christ himself. In Rennes diocese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catherine Jamet has located 302 confraternities, an average of 1.2 per parish. Almost 50 per cent were Marian, dominated by rosary groups; one-third were Christological, mostly Holy Sacrament and the rest were dedicated to a variety of saints.134 In Saint-Malo diocese, in 171 parishes and chapelries, Restif has counted 82 confraternities of the rosary, 46 dedicated to the Holy Sacrament and 32 parishes where other confraternities, to saints or the guardian angel, were organised. New confraternities gained on the older groups over time, often forcing them to close down. In Maixent, the priest Noël Georges recorded that the new confraternity of the Holy Sacrament ‘seemed already by the splendour of its light … to obscure the lustre of ancient devotions hitherto given to other confraternities’, notably those dedicated to Saints Maxent and John the Baptist.135 But many older confraternities simply adopted new invocations, especially Marian confraternities which changed into those of the rosary. A wide membership was a notable feature of these new groups. In Rennes diocese, the confraternities of the Holy Sacrament charged low fees, to encourage widespread participation. At Boistruden, there was no entry fee or annual charge, to encourage the participation of the poor.136 In the archdeaconry of Retz, south of Nantes, by the 1680s total membership of confraternities varied between 5 and 40 per cent of adults in many parishes. Marian confraternities – Notre Dame or rosary – were the most popular, constituting a third of all groups. Ghenassia argues that high membership fees perhaps kept numbers low in some parishes but this was uncommon. The entry fee for the All Saints confraternity at Saint-Jean de 132

  Restif, pp. 179–80.   Johnson, p. 170. 134   Catherine Jamet, ‘Les confréries de dévotion dans le diocèse de Rennes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, AB 87 (1980): p. 482–3. 135   Restif, p. 181. 136  Ibid., p. 187. 133

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

205

Montfaucon was 40 sous but that at Saint-Hilaire-du-Bois was only 2 sous and Saint-Fiacre’s confraternity charged 15 deniers, in addition to yearly ‘subscriptions’. These are not large sums when the daily wage of a mason was around 15 sous at this time.137 One of the most important functions of the new or newly-reformed confraternities was to augment the ceremonial life of the parish or community, which helped to educate the faithful in doctrine and morality. As the statutes of the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament of Coesmes made explicit, ‘the institution [of the fraternity] is a very good means of worshipping the glory of God and increasing the devotion of the people; augmenting the splendour of the Church and maintaining the faithful in sentiments of piety and charity, leading them more easily to salvation’.138 The dead were not forgotten. Restif comments that the continued success of confraternities came from the fact that the statues insisted on the solidarity between living members, and between the quick and the dead, as much as from interest in new devotions. All confraternities, even those described as ‘devotional’ continued to hold funeral services for their members and at least an annual requiem mass on the day after their principal feast. Holy Sacrament confraternities played an important role in assisting the dying. Members were asked to assist sick confreres, notably by accompanying the viaticum and by praying for the sick and the dead. The statutes of the Holy Sacrament confraternity founded in the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Lices of Vannes in 1610 stated that members would accompany the host to the house of sick members with torches and candles and that members should attend the funeral of deceased confreres and the service held by the fraternity in the chapel of Notre-Dame within 15 days of their death.139 The confraternity of the Holy Sacrament of Plouay, founded in 1683, incorporated the dead closely into the guild’s devotions. Every Thursday the sacrament would be displayed and taken in procession around the church and cemetery; a high mass would be next, followed by a benediction of the Holy Sacrament and a Libera for the souls of deceased confreres.140 Rosary confraternities also incorporated the dead. The 1661 statutes of the rosary confraternity of Arradon stated that there would be four anniversaries held a year for deceased confreres; following the death of a member, the others undertook to say a rosary or, if wealthy enough, to have a mass said for them at the rosary altar, within 40 days

137   Jacqueline Ghenassia, ‘Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: la visite d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–98)’, RHEF 57, (1971): p. 93. 138   Jamet, ‘Les confréries’, pp. 482–3. 139  ADM 57 G 1. Cathédrale de Vannes. Confréries. 140  ADM G 954.

206

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

of the death.141 There were special prayer cycles using the rosary that could be said for the dead; the Jesuit Marc de Bonnyers recommended a cycle where the large beads could be used for an Ave or a Pater Noster and the small beads, to pray ‘Pie Jesus, sweet Jesus, give them eternal rest’ or Requescant in pace, amen’ and he gave other rosary prayers for souls as well.142 In the archdeaconry of Retz, south of Nantes, all of the confraternities offered services for the dead. At Saint-Colombin the parish fraternity had regular processions around the cemetery, singing Libera me domine and the Agonisants based at La Trinité church of Machecoul had a bell rung for each confrere who was dying, so that prayers could be said for him or her.143 Jamet comments that confraternity membership was a guarantee of having a good death, with prayers and sacraments, but also a fine death with a decent and well-attended funeral.144 The collectivity also guaranteed post-mortem intercession, with its annual services and regular prayers with an assured congregation. Indeed, confraternities and religious orders continued to attract donors by offering distinctive cycles of masses. The confraternities of the Carmelites of Nantes offered a high requiem service and 10 low masses for deceased members.145 In the city of SaintPol, the Carmelite convent, the Cathedral and the confraternity of the Trépassés offered a ‘service’ of 15 masses, one sung and 14 low.146 Holy Sacrament confraternities offered intercession through votive masses and manifestations of the cult: for example, Julienne Phelipot’s anniversary of 1613 in Saint-Patern church of Vannes was an office of the Holy Sacrament and in the 1680s, in the church of Le Palais on Belle-Isle, the confraternity organised anniversaries comprising the exhibition of the sacrament, high mass, first and second vespers.147 Also, most confraternities accepted deceased members. For example, the Agonisants of Saint-Léonard of Fougères received seventeen new members 1689–91, of whom eight were already dead and one was dying.148 When she made her will in 1646, the widow Barbe Le Febvre of Saint-Saturnin parish of Nantes, was a member of the confraternities of Saints Anthony and Sebastien and Notre-Dame141

 ADM G 1143. Arradon. Fondations.   Marc de Bonnyers, L’advocat des ames de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider (Lille, 1640), p. 83. 143   Ghenassia, Les ‘chevauchées’, p. 93. 144   Jamet, ‘Les confréries’, p. 489. 145  Durand, Un couvent, p. 176. 146  ADF 9 G 1. 147  ADM 72 G 4; Chapitre de Vannes. Chapelle Notre-Dames-des-Lices; ADM G 945. Le Pallais Belle-Isle. Fondations. 148   Jamet, ‘Les confréries’, p. 490. 142

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

207

de-la-Cité in the parish church, of Jesus Maria in the Minimes convent and of Notre-Dame-de-Pitié in the Carmelites, where she was buried. She asked for the ‘usual’ services provided by each confraternity.149 Finally, there were also more specialist confraternities for the dying and the dead. The confraternity of the Trépassés in Vannes grew in strength over the first two thirds of the century. It continued its membership among the middling sort of the city; its provosts were notaries, merchants, surgeons and other master craftsmen. The period between 1600 and 1626 witnessed 12 foundations of masses for the confraternity, so that there was a sung requiem mass and procession in the confraternity’s chapel every day as well as on feast days including All Souls and St Michael.150 Revenues increased, from 400 livres in 1635 to 880 livres in 1663.151 In the 1630s, the confraternity organised between forty-five and fifty funerals a year.152 Similarly in Saint-Pol, the confraternity was also the recipient of new foundations across the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century, with a peak on the period 1630–60.153 The confraternity also received smaller donations, such as a rente of 45 sous per year on land in Ploudiry by a group of parishioners in 1626, to participate in the prayers and indulgences of the confraternity, and a rente of 16 sous per year given by François Kerdelant for himself and his late wife in 1637, on land in the same parish, for remembrance.154 By the later seventeenth century, both the Vannes and the Saint-Pol confraternities became sufficiently important in their cities to be transferred into the cathedrals. In the later seventeenth century, there was a Trépassés fraternity in Quimper Cathedral, for it was granted a 4 livre rente on a house in the city by Jean Le Bac shoemaker and his wife Marguerite, to be remembered in its masses and public prayers.155 There are altars with retables dedicated to the Trépassés in the present-day churches of Brélévenez and Plounéour-Menez, the latter of which came from the Dominican church in Morlaix, evidence for past confraternities.156 There was an ancient confraternity of the Trépassés in Épaux parish church south of Nantes, which had changed its invocation to that of All Saints by 1682.157 Agonisant confraternities developed in the second half of the century. They concerned themselves with praying for 149

 ADLA H 228. Carmes de Nantes. Fondations.  ADM 57 G 3. 151  ADM 72 G 3. Vannes. Confrérie des Trépassés. Comptes. 152  ADM 72 G 3. 153  ADF 9 G 1. 154  ADF 9 G 2. 155  ADF 2 G 121. Chapitre de Cornouaille. Confrérie des Trépassés. 156  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1049. 157  ADLA G 51. Diocèse de Nantes. Visitations 1682. 150

208

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

the dying rather than with the souls of the dead. In Rennes diocese, eight confraternities of Notre-Dame-des-Agonisants were created after 1663 and particularly after 1680.158 Their emphasis on the dying points to new views on the best time for intercession – during the lifetime of a sinner – that was to reduce investment in perpetual post-mortem intercession after this period. Indeed, collective intercession expanded at the time that individual foundations declined. Indulgences and Accessing the Treasury of Merit A third collective intercessory institution in early modern Brittany was the indulgence or pardon, blessings for the individual from the communal ‘treasury of merit’ of the Church, accumulated from the works of all Christians, from Christ down to the humblest person. Frequently attached to altars, chapels and confraternities, Robert Swanson argues that pardons were important in fostering a sense of group identity and status among confreres and parishioners and also perhaps fostered communal affirmation between the living and the dead. Thus, indulgences were important means by which groups and communities, ‘helped create a historic identity and a continuity, which was ultimately that of the whole Catholic Church under the pope’.159 Despite their importance in the causes of the Protestant Reformation, indulgences have received little historiographical attention for the early modern era.160 One reason for this is that the primary evidence base is scarce and widely scattered, making them difficult to study. But on impressionistic evidence alone, indulgences survived the Reformation and wars of religion to became again an important form of intercession for living and dead souls. So, a few observations are made here on the use of pardons, although much work remains to be done. An indulgence can be defined as a relaxation of enjoined penance, that is, the temporal penalty due for a sin which has already been pardoned through confession and absolution. A central requirement of penance was satisfaction, the performance of a physical penalty imposed by a priest

158

  Restif, p. 183.   Robert Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England. Passports to Paradise (Cambridge, 2007), p. 415. 160   There is the work by Henry Charles Lea of the late nineteenth century, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (3 vols, Philadelphia, 1896), chapter VIII is on the Counter Reformation; also for northern France, Philippe Desmettes, Les brefs d’indulgences pour les confréries des diocèses de Cambrai et Tournai aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Brussels, 2002). 159

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

209

in return for God’s forgiveness of sin.161 With the development of the concept of Purgatory, penalties could be performed in this life or in the next. Indulgences evolved across the central Middle Ages as a means of commuting such penalties. In return for assorted acts of piety or charity, the papacy and bishops would rescind small amounts of the imposed penance. The theology which underpinned indulgences rested on the doctrine of the treasury of merits. Christ, by his sacrifice on the cross, created an inexhaustible store of merit, to which is added that of the martyrs and saints. This great treasure was administered by the Church and its ministers for the benefit of sinners, by popes and bishops, through indulgences. So long as an individual was absolved of the culpa of sin before death through confession, he or she could then use indulgences acquired while alive to offset the posthumous poena, thus reducing their time in Purgatory.162 Indulgences required the recipients to be consciously engaged in their salvation, they did not work without effort. To benefit from an indulgence, it was necessary to be in a state of grace, to have undergone confession and the sacrament of penance. There was therefore an essential level of preparation. Individuals who were not in a state of grace could not benefit from the indulgences they acquired. For much of the Middle Ages, indulgences could only be acquired by the living to take effect after their own death, although pardons were frequently transferred between souls even at this date. In 1476, the use of indulgences was officially extended to the dead in Purgatory and the living were permitted to make purchases or perform acts which would benefit the souls of the deceased.163 Popes and bishops derived their authority to grant indulgences from the power over ‘binding and loosing’ granted to St Peter and his successors by Christ himself. The pope was the most important grantor of indulgences in the late Middle Ages and early modern centuries. He alone could grant indulgences for crusades, jubilees and offer pardons for the plenary remission of sins. The majority of papal pardons were granted for third parties, not the papacy itself, although the indulgence issued to support the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome in the early sixteenth century is the best known. Before the Reformation, however, most pardons were issued at diocesan and provincial levels. A ruling of 1215 restricted the pardon bishops could grant, to no more than 40 days, except during the dedication of churches, when a year’s pardon could be granted to those present. Bishops also licensed ‘pardoners’ collecting for ‘external’ 161  This discussion of the nature and uses of indulgences is heavily dependent on the recent work of Swanson, Indulgences, pp. 10–11. 162  Ibid., pp. 11, 16. 163  Ibid., p. 21.

210

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

institutions and causes, within their dioceses.164 Indulgences therefore had limits, in time and space. The extravagant pardons of the later Middle Ages, of thousands of years’ remission, are largely fabrications, usually associated with devotional activities.165 They emerged from a popular culture of pardon rather than from corrupt practice. There were two principal forms of indulgence, those acquired through purchase and those earned through devotional activity. The former are the better documented; the latter, Swanson argues, were probably the majority of pardons. The initial occasion for the issuing of indulgences was the first crusade. Plenary remission was granted to those who died in the faith or took an active part in the process. Later, the pardon was extended to those who gave money for the cause. The practice quickly spread to fund-raising for other good works. Among the most common way to acquire an indulgence was to visit a church, hospital or other site to which a pardon was attached, usually on set days in the year. Some of these churches were internationally important – Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela – others were local, such as parish churches and chapels. Contributions to public works such as roads or bridges and to fundraising campaigns for building and repairs to religious sites were common sources of indulgences. The latter might involve complex administrations over long distances and required fundraisers – quaestors or pardoners – working at distance from the home institution under licence. Indulgences were also granted as spiritual privileges for confraternity members and to encourage participation in specific devotional activities. Thus pardons could be obtained for the saying of particular votive masses such as the Name of Jesus or the Five Wounds and the saying of the rosary, where pardons might be conferred on specific beads as well as specific prayers.166 There is evidence from late medieval Brittany that the inhabitants shared fully in the culture of indulgences seen elsewhere in Europe. It seems that pardons were firmly built into religious and devotional life, an important form of intercession for the living and the dead. Evidence is scattered but illustrative. Episcopal indulgences were attached to many altars and the consecration of a new altar normally came with indulgences. Thus, in 1503, Bishop Guégen of Nantes consecrated several altars in Saint-Saturnin and granted an indulgence of a year and a day to those who visited these altars on the first anniversary of their dedication.167 Confraternities sought indulgences from popes and bishops. The fraternity 164

 Swanson, Indulgences, p. 32.  Ibid., p. 18. 166  Ibid., p. 48–75 for detailed discussion of different types of pardons. 167  Travers notes that this was in contravention of the 1216 Lateran Council which only allowed bishops to give 40 days’ remission. Travers, vol. 2, p. 256. 165

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

211

of Notre-Dame-des-Carmes in the Carmelite convent of Nantes obtained 40 days’ pardon for its members from Bishop d’Acigné, when he confirmed the guild in 1475; further indulgences were gained in 1478, 1484 and 1500 and in 1518, Queen Claude obtained a bull of indulgences from Leo X in favour of the confraternity.168 Individuals acquired indulgences when alive and after death. In 1481, Jean Spadine the younger of Nantes left 120 livres for Cathedral rebuilding and papal indulgences.169 Indulgences were being sold by questors in Brittany as elsewhere in Europe. In 1494 the statutes of Bishop Jean d’Epinay of Nantes forbade rectors and vicars to allow pardoners to preach their indulgences more than once a year and then only after having seen their licences.170 Indulgences had always had their critics so Luther’s condemnations in 1517 were not without precursors. Pardons lacked scriptural foundation; there were questions of authority – who had the right to access the treasury of merits and for whom? The buying and selling of pardons was criticised as venal. Above all, indulgences were easily misunderstood, treated by the laity as an easy form of salvation.171 But before 1517, debates focused ‘on how indulgences operated, not their fundamental validity.’172 Luther and other reformers challenged the whole doctrine of good works on which indulgences were based. Protestants also rejected papal authority and its power over the keys of heaven. Above all, justification by faith made Christ’s Passion the only source of redemption. From the 1520s, therefore, indulgences came under severe attack, which undermined confidence in the practice. Even Catholics who remained in the Church were affected. Erasmus, for example, mocked indulgences in one of his Colloquies called ‘The Exorcism or Apparition’, first published in 1518 and published in Paris by at least 1527.173 During the mid-sixteenth century and the wars of religion in France, the role of indulgences was played down. Devotional writers, even those who wrote specifically on Purgatory, tended to avoid or curtail discussion of the role of indulgences in salvation. Instead, charity and above all, the role of the sacraments, were highlighted as important for remission of sins. 168

 Durand, Un couvent, p. 92.  ADLA G 466. Sainte-Croix. Fondations. 170  Travers, vol. 2, p. 226. 171  Swanson, Indulgences, p. 280–81. 172  Ibid., p. 278. 173   Desiderius Erasmus, ‘The Exorcism or Apparition’, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. N. Bailey (2 vols, London, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 391–401. There is a 1526 imprint, without publisher, in the BNF and a 1527 edition by the Parisian printer Simon Colineum. Also see Léon E. Halkin, ‘La place des indulgences dans la pensée religieuse d’Erasme’, BSHPF 129 (1983): pp. 143–54. 169

212

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Melchior de Flavin in his work of 1563 discussed the importance of charity and almsgiving in satisfaction, along with faith, the sacraments, fasting, prayer and personal suffering. Indulgences were not mentioned.174 Noel Taillepied in 1588 again argues for the importance of baptism, the blood of Christ and charity through alms, without mention of indulgences.175 Palma Cayet’s work on Purgatory similarly discusses ‘good works’ without specific reference to pardons.176 A tract on indulgences published by René Benoist in 1566 is mostly about penance not pardons.177 This silence is reflected in some small way in Brittany. The confraternity of NotreDame-des-Carmes of Nantes obtained several indulgences before 1518; thereafter, there are no records of new pardons until 1639 and 1643, when papal briefs confirmed the guild’s privileges.178 At the Council of Trent, pardons were upheld but they were to be used with moderation.179 On 16 July 1562, the Council suppressed the office of quaestores and reserved the collection of alms to two canon members of chapters, who were to receive no remuneration for their work; it also reserved the publication of indulgences to the bishop of the diocese. In its final session on 4 December 1563, the Council ruled on indulgences, declaring them ‘most salutary for the Christian people’, but decreeing that ‘all evil gains for the obtaining of them be wholly abolished’, and instructed bishops to guard against abuses. In 1567, Pius V cancelled all grants of indulgences involving any fees or other financial transactions. After Trent, Clement VIII established a commission of Cardinals to deal with indulgences which continued its work during the pontificate of Paul V. Indulgences were reformed, reined in and brought more securely under papal control. From the later sixteenth century and certainly after 1600, indulgences once again emerged as a popular part of the economy of salvation. The revival of interest was accelerated by Gregory XIII’s liberality with indulgences. He extended access to privileged altars at which a single mass could gain a plenary indulgence, which made the pardon system more 174

  Melchior De Flavin, De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent estans du corps séparées et des purgatories qu’elles souffrent en ce monde et en l’autre après icelle separation (Toulouse, 1563); edition used here Paris 1579. 175  Noel Taillepied, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits à scavoir des âmes séparées, fantosmes, prodigies et accidents merveilleux qui precedent quelquefois la mort des grands personages ou signifient changements de la chose publique (Paris, 1588). 176   Pierre Victor Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire prouvé par la Parole de Dieu (Paris, 1600). 177   René Benoist, Brief discours touchant le fondement du Purgatoire après cette vie, des Indulgences & Pardons & Satisfaction, troisième part de Penitence (Paris, 1566). 178  Durand, Un couvent, p. 92. 179   J. Waterworth (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London, 1848), p. 277.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

213

accessible.180 The theology of the treasury of merits changed little and theorists continued to stress the importance of personal engagement in penance as they had during the Middle Ages. Emphasis on good works grew. In 1603, André Duval refuted Protestant criticism by stating that it was not true that the pope gave indulgences without joining them to some good work for those who wanted to benefit from the pardon.181 From the early seventeenth century, writings on Purgatory and the afterlife included more detailed discussions of the role of indulgences in salvation. Over time there emerged an enhanced role for the sacraments in the ‘actioning’ of indulgences by individuals. As Jean-Pierre Camus stated in Instruction Catholique des Indulgences published in Paris in 1641, an indulgence was a form of largesse and extraordinary dispensation which came from the treasury of merits of the church, accessed through the sacraments, firstly through baptism but primarily through penitence.182 But for most authors, the role of indulgences as a form of good work remained vital. In 1628, Claude de la Barre wrote ‘charity must be the first spiritual food of our souls … one day we will appear before the tribunal of Jesus Christ to receive the reward for our works, good and bad’.183 This included indulgences which could be gained by having masses said at privileged altars, by taking part in jubilees and by benefitting from pardons that came from privileged medals and rosaries.184 Also, it was possible to avoid Purgatory by dying in possession of a plenary indulgence, with the words ‘Jesus Maria’ on the lips and in the heart.185 For Andel de Lodève in 1638, indulgences were the fourth means of escaping Purgatory, after the eucharist, charity and ‘satisfactory works’ which included prayer, alms, vigils and fasts.186 Catechisms were important in teaching the meaning of indulgences. The catechism of Nantes of 1689 asked ‘What does the Church do to supplement the feebleness of our penitences?’ the response was ‘It accords us indulgences’. What is an indulgence? It is the remission of the temporal penalty due for our sins’. This was explained: ‘eternal penalty is remitted 180

  Johnson, p. 191.  André Duval, Feu d’helie pour tarir les faux de Siloe,auquel est amplement prouvé le Purgatoire contre le Ministre du Moulin & respond aux raisons & allegations contraires (Paris, 1603), p. 73. 182   Jean-Pierre Camus, Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire (Paris, 1641), pp. 7, 9. 183   Claude de la Barre, Resolution à scavoir si l’on doit apprehender et craindre ou bien aymer et souhaiter la mort (Paris, 1628), pp. 54, 60. 184   Étienne Binet, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames suffrantes en Purgatoire et des moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu (Rouen, 1635), p. 276. 185  Ibid., p.432. 186  Andel de Lodeve, Defense du purgatoire et de l’honneur des ecclésiastiques et des religieux mesprizez et calumnies sans raison par les ministres de la religion pretendue reformée (Tournon, 1638), pp. 108–109. 181

214

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

during the sacrament of penance and change into temporal penalty, which is expiated by our satisfactions or by the indulgence of the Church’.187 There was still the question of whether indulgences would make people lazy, avoiding more arduous satisfaction by acquiring pardons. For Alexis de Salo, indulgences were the fifth of five ‘suffrages’ for avoiding Purgatory. If it was impossible to fast, discipline or undertake other pious activities, indulgences offered an ‘easy’ work, although the person acquiring the indulgence had to be in a state of grace for it to operate through the sacrament of confession.188 Camus argued that the truly penitent would also undertake other forms of pious actions, prayers, fasts, alms, confession and communion, but for the lazy and rich, who avoided such efforts, indulgences were better than nothing, for at least they were good works by proxy.189 He recognised that commerce and traffic in indulgences had brought about abuses in the past, as had facility of purchase. But in his view, indulgences were a supplement to satisfactory works; they provoked good deeds from the lukewarm and they provided one of the best means of ‘re-warming cooled charity’ that the Church possessed.190 The post-1600 resurgence of interest in indulgences was seen in Brittany. Most surviving indulgences from the seventeenth century were papal pardons, evidence of shifts in authority over powers to loose and bind towards Rome. The clergy certainly encouraged the popular interest in indulgences for they contributed to the authority and prestige of the Church. Indulgences were also a militant, conscious denial of Protestant criticisms of Catholicism. As the Capuchin Charles de Génève stated, ‘the heresy of Luther originated in contempt for and opposition to holy indulgences [so] one of the most powerful means of destroying heresy is to honour and celebrate holy indulgences, either by preaching, by writing or other ways’.191 From early in the century, indulgenced altars and confraternity membership seem to have become the principal means of acquiring pardons. There is some small evidence for episcopal indulgences after 1600. They seem mostly to have been attached to altars in churches. Thus, in 1601 the bishop of Nantes consecrated an altar in the chapel of the hospital of Toussaints, on the bridges of Nantes, and attached to it an indulgence of 40 days for visitors to the chapel on its feast day.192 187

  Jean de la Noë-Mesnard, Le Catechisme du diocèse de Nantes (Nantes, 1689), pp. 323–5. 188  Alexis de Salo, Le triomphe des ames de purgatoire (Lyon, 1621), pp. 70–79. 189  Camus, Instruction Catholique, pp. 20–21. 190  Ibid., p. 24. 191   Quoted in Bernard Dompnier, ‘Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des quarantes-heures’, RHEF 67 (1981): p. 28. 192  Travers, vol. 3, p. 135.

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

215

Chantry and anniversary masses said at ‘privileged’ altars were frequently requested. These altars possessed indulgences for masses said before them which, in the words of the Jesuit Marc de Bonnyers, gave the sacrament ‘double the strength’ for souls.193 The privileged altar as a focus for bequests of perpetual masses is seen in the seventeenth century, and seems to have been a particular speciality of the religious orders and the confraternities housed in their churches. Ollive Godart’s bequest of 1639 for two weekly masses in the Carmelite church of Nantes ‘at the altar privileged for the deceased’ and Jeanne Gillot’s foundation of 1648 of an anniversary in the Minimes’ church at the ‘privileged altar’ are examples.194 In 1662, David de Cléguénec and his wife Jeanne du Mur of Cléguer founded weekly low masses in the church of the Dominicans of Quimperlé, Récollets of PortLouis and Carmelites of Hennebont at the ‘privileged altars’.195 In the seventeenth century, the privileged altars of the Carmelites of Saint-Pol and the Franciscans of Quimper also attracted numbers of foundations. Individual parish churches also sought papal indulgences, to attract visitors and their donations on feast days. These pardons were not always perpetual, they could be limited in time. Bulls of indulgence were printed and circulated in the district to advertise pardons. In 1626, Cléder parish church obtained a seven-year indulgence for its altar of St Sebastian, through the actions of one of the parish’s priests, Jean Charles, who had visited Rome in the previous year.196 In 1670, the parish church of SaintGonnéry received a plenary indulgence from Clement X for seven years ‘for the augmentation of the religion of the faithful and the salvation of souls’ for visitors to the church on their feast of the Assumption.197 In 1682 an indulgence of plenary remission was granted by Innocent XI for the parish church of Billio for its feast day of the Assumption; a copy was found in the archive of the parish of Cruguel, no doubt one of many sent out to attract custom.198 In the second half of the seventeenth century, Saint-Patern parish church in the suburbs of Vannes seems to have undertaken an indulgenceacquisition campaign in association with its confraternities. In 1676, the confraternity of the Agonisants obtained a plenary indulgence for members and for visitors to their chapel on the Annunication; the chapel of Saint Marie-Magdeleine followed in 1685 with a pardon for its feast day and in 1695 the confraternity of Saint-Barbe also gained an indulgence, again 193   Marc de Bonnyers, L’advocat des ames de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider (Lille, 1640), p. 62. 194  ADLA H 227, H 321. Carmes de Nantes. Fondations. 195  ADM G 878. 196  Croix, Jean Martin, p. 101. 197  ADM 48 G 5. 198  ADM G 1264. Cruguel. Fabrique.

216

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

for members and for its feast.199 There were also indulgenced activities. Participation in the Forty Hours’ devotion, for example, gave pardons to the participants; this was introduced into Nantes in the early 1580s and into the rest of Brittany thereafter. We see examples in Martigné-Ferchaud in 1622 and Blain in 1665.200 The greatest consumers of indulgences, however, were confraternities. Indulgences helped new fraternities to attract members and pardons could help flagging groups to attract recruits.201 Confraternities vied with each other to provide attractive portfolios of indulgences for their members.202 The vast majority of surviving indulgences in the Breton archives are papal indulgences sought by local confraternities for current and future members. The surviving indulgences are all printed, usually on broadsheet, with a standardised content. After a Latin introduction, the text is in French. Plenary indulgences were granted on condition that on the first day of their entry members would repent, confess and receive the Holy Sacrament. Plenary remission was also granted to the dying if they confessed and received the sacrament, if they were able to do so, or at least had contrition. A plenary indulgence was also granted for visiting the chapel or altar of the confraternity on its principal feast day, for praying for peace between princes, the eradication of heresy and for the exaltation of the Holy Church. In addition seven years of pardon were granted for assisting at the four annual feasts celebrated by the confraternity, if communion was also taken.203 Arch-confraternities benefitted from the general indulgences issued for the whole brotherhood. Thus, in 1600, a confraternity of the rosary was erected in Saint-Sauveur church of Locminé under sponsorship of the Dominicans. It was to receive members of both sexes ‘to participate in all the graces, privileges and indulgences which the other confreres enjoyed in the other churches of [the] order’.204 But such confraternities also sought their own, particular, pardons. Thus, Locminé’s confraternity had access to general indulgences granted to all Dominican rosary confraternities but in 1657, it obtained its own papal indulgence for saying rosaries in private and in 1666, another indulgence for visitors to its altar.205 Some rosary 199

 ADM 1053. Saint-Patern de Vannes. Indulgences.  Croix, Jean Martin, p. 91, 190. 201   Jamet, ‘Les confréries’, p. 485. 202   Johnson, p. 192. 203  ADF 9 G 2. 204  ADM 1061. Locminé. Confrérie du Rosaire. For discussion of rosary confraternities and indulgences see Marie-Hélène Froeschlé-Chopart, ‘La devotion du rosaire à travers quelques livres de piété’, Histoire Economie et Société 10 (1991): pp. 299–316. 205  ADM G 1061. 200

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

217

confraternities in Rennes diocese gave the obtaining of indulgences as the prime motive for their creation.206 Independent confraternities were also keen to acquire pardons. The confraternities housed in Vannes Cathedral gathered indulgences throughout the seventeenth century. In 1648, Innocent X granted a perpetual indulgence to the confraternity of Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian, again to be effected on the day of entry into the guild and at death, if the dying took the sacraments and spoke the name of ‘Jesus’. In 1653, a seven-year papal indulgence was granted for pilgrims visiting seven altars in the cathedral and their relics, including those of Saint Vincent Ferrer.207 Even small confraternities sought indulgences. In 1607, the confraternity of the chapel of the island of Saint-Cado obtained a plenary papal indulgence, which was republished in 1694 and 1726.208 In 1610, a bull of indulgence was granted by Paul V for the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Chapelle-des-Lices of Vannes, founded in that year.209 In 1611, an indulgence of Paul V was issued for the confraternity of the Virgin of the chapel of Brangallo in Noyal-Muzillac parish. The terms of the indulgence were of the standard form, with a plenary indulgence for people visiting the chapel on their feast of Saints Philip and James. Sixty days remission was also given for a wide range of ‘good works’, such as accompanying the viaticum or saying prayers for the dying, assisting in processions or funerals, for lodging the poor and pilgrims, making peace between enemies, strengthening the faith of individuals and teaching the commandments of God to the ignorant, all classic works of mercy.210 Indulgences for distant causes were also still in evidence in the seventeenth century. The mechanisms of collection and administration are not clear. It appears that ‘collectors’ were licensed by the bishop in each diocese, but whether these were local agents or outsiders is not known. Thus in 1678, indulgences issued for the fraternity of the Holy Scapular of Notre-Dame-de-la-Mercy for the redemption of captives, were allowed to be sold in the diocese of Vannes.211 Across the century, bishops licensed the ‘sale’ of indulgences issued for the repair and reconstruction of the Parisian hospital for the blind of Quinze-Vingt. In 1663, Hervé Billou, laboureur of Botsorel, left 20 sous for indulgences from Paris hospitals, showing that

206

  Jamet, ‘Confrairies’, p. 485.  ADM 58 G 2. Vannes. Reliques de la Cathédrale. 208  ADLA 48 G 5. 209  ADM 57 G 1. 210  ADM G 936. 211  ADM 48 G 5. 207

218

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

campaigns of indulgence were still penetrating into the Breton-speaking rural communities of the far west.212 Indulgences continued to be a popular form of post-mortem intercession, acquired mostly while alive but also by the dead, as wills’ evidence shows, because ‘they gave more effective control over the future – one’s future – by guaranteeing that Purgatory had been provided for, that the deposit account in the Treasury of Merits would, with luck and effort, secure a speedy transit to heaven’.213 Salvation could be assured without dependence on third parties, or the vagaries of fortune. The self could be saved, with foresight; although contingent on dying in a state of mind and faith to allow the pardons to be activated.214 Indulgences were the ultimate form of collective intercession, drawing on the merits of the whole Church. The widespread availability of plenary indulgences for the living and dying in the later seventeenth century may have been one factor in the decline of post-mortem chantries and obits. The indulgence had the same result, without the expensive outlay. Conclusions For the ‘ordinary’ Breton, perpetual intercession was too expensive to acquire alone. But if an individual pooled his or her resources and prayers with others, permanent intercession was affordable and achievable. There was also merit in collective devotions, which were understood to be especially pleasing to God. Thus, elites as well as the less wealthy sought to be recipients of group prayer. The chronology of activities of intercessory groups follows that of the founding of chantries and obits in early modern Brittany. This might mean that elite beliefs and behaviour strongly determined the patterns of piety lower down the social scale. It is far more likely that popular and elite groups were touched by the same events and interests, that there was no great gap between social strata. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the parish continued to be the prime site of intercession for most souls in Brittany. The parish was the main locus of burial and funerary services. Even in the seventeenth century, when elites preferred to patronise convents and collegiate churches in the towns of the region, they still frequently requested masses in parish churches, attended by as many parishioners as possible. For private foundations of perpetual masses, there was a move away from parish churches in the period after 1600, but liturgies for the collectivity 212

  Gourvil, ‘Le testament d’un paysan trégorois’, see all.  Swanson, Indulgences, p. 520. 214  Ibid., p. 520. 213

Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance

219

of souls continued and may have even expanded. Monday masses, All Souls’ commemorations, collecting boxes for general requiem masses, the reconfiguration of churchyards, all point to an ongoing concern for the souls of deceased parishioners, understood as a collective responsibility. Confraternities, self-selecting groups within parishes and towns, again provided intercession for souls across the period. Closely linked with the use of indulgences, their history with regard to the dead is more nuanced and many confraternities always maintained multiple functions anyway, as craft groupings, devotional association and charitable brotherhoods for example. As with chantries and obits, the sixteenth century and particularly the period of the religious wars saw confraternal and indulgenced activities decline, at least in the cities. New confraternities were more militant, self-consciously Roman Catholic and political. While they continued to provide funerary and intercessory services for their deceased members, such activities were not the foremost function of the groups. In rural areas, although evidence is scarce, there was more continuity however. Country confraternities continued to fulfill the traditional roles of mutuality between the living and the dead, although their resource base may have fallen. After 1600, collective intercession expanded again. Indulgence use and confraternity membership grew across the seventeenth century. In the aftermath of Tridentine reforms and in the excitement of the resurgence of French Catholicism, clergy encouraged institutional devotion; prayer for souls was a good work in a period when groups took on charitable causes with a zeal. While devotional confraternities such as the rosary and Holy Sacrament have been seen as indicators of novel forms of piety, in actuality they fulfilled many of the functions of ancient associations, binding the living and the dead in mutual association – hence their passion for indulgences. When private chantries and obits declined rapidly after 1680 confraternities and indulgences continued to be active and even to expand. By the end of the seventeenth century, collective associations overtook private foundations in the volume of intercession they offered for the dead. In the priority given historiographically to the ‘rise of the individual’, the continuing popularity of group intercession, for the living and the dead, well into the eighteenth century, has been overlooked.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 7

The Prayers of Priests: Chaplains and Intercession for the Dead In A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine, touching Purgatory of 1566, Cardinal William Allen stated that the whole world knew that the doctrine had: founded all Bishoprics, builded all Churches, raised all Oratories, instituted all Colleges, endowed all Schools, maintained all hospitals, set forward all works of charity and religion, of whatever sort soever they be.1

Although directed at English Catholics, this tract stated a long-held position that in return for gifts and donations, the Church provided intercession for the living and for the dead who had passed into Purgatory. These donations had paid for the very structure and fabric of the Church. As the mass was the central form of this intercession, the priests who performed the sacrament were the principal agents of prayers for the dead. Priests were also themselves important founders of masses, temporary and permanent, as shown in previous chapters. The key, therefore, to the whole industry of post-mortem intercession was the priest. Yet we know relatively little about the chaplains and mass priests of Brittany in the early modern period. All priests, whatever their status, were involved in post-mortem intercession in some way. All masses included prayers for the dead. Canons of collegiate churches and cathedrals were expected to participate in highstatus requiem and anniversary masses, performed by the whole chapter. Parish priests, similarly, would lead high requiems and obits founded in their churches. Canons and parish priests could also be holders of chantry benefices. But the majority of priests who serviced the post-mortem intercession ‘industry’ were lower down the clerical hierarchy. The most commonly-employed groups were the vicars choral and chaplains of collegiate churches and the choir priests and subordinate clergy of urban and rural parishes. Such lowly members of the clergy have been the most criticised and least documented of the clerical profession, from the Middle Ages onwards. Although evidence is scarce, the aim of this chapter is to 1

  Cardinal William Allen, Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine, touching Purgatory Antwerp 1566, fol. 215v; cited in Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Oxford, 2009), p. 125.

222

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

throw some light on the priests who serviced post-mortem masses, to see how changing attitudes to Purgatory and practices of intercession affected their function and status. In the historiography of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations much has been written about changes in the parish priesthood, that is, the rectors and vicars in charge of the parish, in Brittany usually called recteur.2 Less is written about subordinate, sub-parochial, frequently unbeneficed, priests. The traditional image of the late medieval priesthood is one of a large number of poorly-educated clerics of low behavioural standards. Particularly notable are the high rates of absenteeism linked to pluralism for beneficed clergy seen in all European dioceses, whether bishops, canons or parish priests. In Grenoble the rate was 36 per cent, in Lyon 25 per cent and in the Rouergue, 66 per cent by 1500.3 In Nantes diocese, over a half of rectors did not reside in their parishes. They were substituted with one or more vicars who received letters of cure and a salary in order to provide services and sacraments for parishioners. In the countryside in particular, the parish priest has often been seen as little different from his neighbours. In the traditional view, because the curé received much of his tithe in grain and often farmed his own lands, the presbytery resembled a peasant household, requiring collective labour and a housekeeper/wife. The pre-Tridentine rural cleric therefore resembled his parishioners: he often lived with a woman, cultivated a farm, dressed like the laity outside of church services and met with them in taverns and at weddings.4 There have been some shifts in these views in recent years, however, with regard to the standards of priests. It is clear that many criticisms of late medieval priests are overstated and were not shared by their parishioners. The idea of a well-educated and professionally-trained clergy did not emerge until the Reformation period. Parish priests generally fulfilled their pastoral duties in the later Middle Ages as they did after 1600 and the transformations of the Counter Reformation have been overstated.5 Put simply, expectations of the parish priest were different before the mid-sixteenth century. He was to provide for the salvation of parishioners through provision of the sacraments. His sacramental role set him apart from his neighbours. Because of this, it seems likely that even modest peasant families saw the career of priest as being a form of

2

  See for example Nicole Lemaître, Histoire des curés (Paris, 2002).  Arthur Bissegger, Une paroisse raconte ses morts. L’obituaire de l’église Saint-Paul à Villeneuve (XIVe – XVe siècle) (Lausanne, 2003), p. 78. 4   R.P. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 118. 5   Marc Forster, The Counter Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, 1992), pp. 58–9. 3

The Prayers of Priests

223

social promotion, into a higher status, for the legal and fiscal privileges it brought and because ordination marked out clergy from ordinary men.6 There is no doubt that Catholic reformers saw shortcomings in the lives and habits of the parochial clergy. Joseph Bergin comments that one of the major developments of seventeenth-century French Catholicism was the growing emphasis on the priesthood as the highest calling.7 Trent defended holy orders and confirmed the ‘separateness’ of the priest, whose most important work was the sacraments of the mass and absolution. The ideal of the priest as a separate and special category, above the laity, was strengthened. Pierre de Bérulle argued that as the priest participated in Christ’s sacrifice, even the lowliest member of the order was in a different category to everyone else, for he mediated in a unique way between God and men. Saint-Cyran, Vincent de Paul, Olier, Eudes and other reformers insisted on a theological and spiritual gap between priests and the world in which they lived.8 The priest was to be self-disciplined, humble and detached from worldly values; he could only be a suitable instrument for the transmission of grace if he possessed it to the full himself.9 One important feature of Catholic reform in France was the promotion of the parish clergy as those most heavily responsible for the salvation of communities. The cure of souls was the fundamental objective of the Catholic Church and this took place largely at parish level. The curé’s duties were to supervise the parish, administer the sacraments, to preach and teach, particularly the catechism. Also, he was expected to be a living example of orthodox piety.10 All of these necessitated residence. In the ideal of the bon curé the moral and spiritual life of the parish were in his hands; he was to be a director of conscience and to guide each parishioner along the path to salvation, to correct, discipline and in serious cases, report, those who transgressed.11 In sum, ‘at the heart of the Counter and Catholic Reformations was the shaping of a professional clergy, better qualified to teach right doctrine, capable of guarding the holy from the

6   François Rapp, ‘La paroisse et l’encadrement religieux des fidèles du XIVe au XVIe siècles’, in L’Encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au Concile de Trente, (Paris, 1985), p. 34. 7   Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (New Haven and London, 2009), p. 62. 8  Ibid., p. 205. 9  Ibid., p. 206. 10  Forster, Speyer, pp. 205–6. 11   Philip Hoffman, Church and community in the diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984), p. 83; J.M. Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields, ‘The Clergy of SeventeenthCentury France: Self-Perception and Society’s Perception’, FHS 18 (1993): p. 151.

224

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

profane and dispensing salvation to the laity.’12 Although reality often fell short of aspirations, by 1700, the curé had changed. His behaviour was mostly moderate and moral, avoiding drunkenness and secular festivities, and he was celibate. He did not take part in commerce. He was decently dressed in tonsure and cassock. He was largely resident, so that he could guide his flock himself.13 The question that remains for this study is how these evolutions affected the sub-parochial clergy, without cure of souls and often lacking benefices. While there was no clear campaign by reformers, it is evident that chaplains and lower clergy were affected by the drive for clerical ‘improvements’ across the church. There is evidence that the sub-parochial clergy were involved in the Counter Reformation ‘project’, implicitly and overtly, until their position was eroded by wider devotional and financial trends in the early eighteenth century. In Brittany, it seems that counterreformation pressures for an ‘improved’ priesthood did not lead to the demise of this group in the early Counter Reformation, as suggested by some local studies. Rather, their fate was tied to the popularity of postmortem intercession. While masses for the dead were popular, sub-parochial clergy remained numerous; their position became more precarious after 1680 largely because ritual practices changed. The final blow to the mass priest came when the financial bottom fell out of ecclesiastical finances after 1720. Although evidence is scattered, some of these developments are traced below. Numbers and Recruitment of Lesser Clergy The term ‘chaplain’ or ordinary priest covered a wide range of functions and included men of different socio-economic status. In the greater churches, the cathedrals and colleges, from the central Middle Ages onwards, much of the liturgy was carried out not by the beneficed canons, who, as sons of wealthy families holding sinecures in these churches, were frequently absent or not ordained, but by vicars choral or choir chaplains.14 In parish churches, the elaboration and expansion of liturgy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries also led to the employment of choir priests (prêtres 12

 Hsia, Catholic Renewal, p. 116; Anne Bonzon, L’Esprit de Clocher. Prêtres et paroisses dans le diocèse de Beauvais 1535–1650 (Paris, 1999), chapters 4 and 5. 13   J.M. Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields, ‘Religion et société dans la France moderne. Les Réformations catholiques en France: le témoignage des statuts synodaux’, RHMC 48, (2001): p. 25; Hoffman, pp. 81–2; Jacques Le Goff and René Remond, Histoire de la France religieuse, vol. VII Du christianisme flamboyante à l’aube des Lumières (Paris, 1988), p. 516. 14  Bergin, Church, p. 74.

The Prayers of Priests

225

du choeur), to assist the recteur in singing services. These chaplains were sometimes the holders of chantry benefices, sometimes salaried and usually drew revenue from both sources. Their posts were effectively permanent. In the larger churches, chaplains were frequently tied into lord-servant relations with the chapter they served. Beneath the level of the permanent choir chaplains of colleges and parishes, there was a range of clergy. The growth of absenteeism of beneficed parish priests in the fifteenth century, exacerbated by pluralism, necessitated the employment of salaried clerical replacements, curates or vicaires. These were generally drawn from the ranks of local sub-parochial clergy. Other priests attached themselves to cathedrals, collegiate churches, parishes, hospitals and places of pilgrimage as chaplains, without official positions but with a recognised status of regular or permanent prêtrehabitué. In Paris, for example, the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés had 50–60 habitué priests who performed offices alongside the curé.15 In most parishes, a special place was accorded to unbeneficed priests who were natives of the community, called prêtres-filleuls or prêtres-enfants in eastern and southern France. As with prêtres-habitués and overlapping with them in the north at least, these men formed informal and formal communities and shared non-parochial duties.16 As well as ordained priests, there were also clerics in minor orders, sub-deacons and deacons. The ubiquity of the ‘ordinary’ priest meant that he was the cleric with whom Bretons came into contact most often. A primary function of chaplains was intercession for the dead. Many of these men lived by servicing chantry, obit and funerary masses, even those who were permanent choir priests. J.M. Matz’s study of Angers diocese shows the importance of chantry benefices in the careers of clergy. Matz has identified three ‘types’ of chaplain. First, the chaplain who lived in his community with his relatives, for whom the possession of a chantry benefice or two was the pinnacle of his career. This was the most humble but also the largest of the clerical ranks, priests whose limited education and patronage left them at the bottom of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. For a second group of chaplains, the chantry was the first stage in a clerical career which might end in an urban church with a parish or canonry, men who were promoted because of their education and family links. A third group was wealthy clerics such as the cathedral canons, to whom benefices were given as sweeteners, by families seeking their patronage. 15

 Ibid., p. 71–2.   For example Charles Guyot, ‘La communauté des enfants-prêtres et l’inventaire des fondations de la paroisse de Mirecourt (Lorraine)’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie de Lorraine XLII (1892): pp. 154–203; Anne Bonzon, L’Esprit de Clocher. Prêtres et paroisses dans le diocèse de Beauvais 1535–1650 (Paris, 1999). 16

226

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

These chantries were usually served by local priests salaried by the benefice holder.17 In the Middle Ages, all regional studies of France show that there were large numbers of clerics living in communities. In certain parts of France it was common to have ten to twenty priests living in a parish, although with considerable variation in their status and function.18 Access to the ranks of the clergy was relatively easy. The Church hierarchy was unable to limit numbers by imposing strict entrance criteria and there were no closely-controlled financial conditions. There was no great expectation of theological education and no examination of knowledge. It was also widely believed that the clerical estate, as instituted by Christ and defined by the Church, was a good work in itself and required only a ‘right intention’ and the minimal capacity to fulfil the necessary duties. Many men joined the clerical estate by taking only simple orders, to obtain ecclesiastical privileges. Candidates taking the tonsure outnumbered those taking full priestly orders by ten or twenty to one in an average year. Many of these clerics never become priests and returned to the laity, including marriage, at a later time.19 Another important cause of the large numbers of priests was the high rates of chantry and anniversary foundation and the increased demand for short-term funerary masses in the fifteenth century. Servicing these necessitated a multiplication of personnel.20 In Nantes, for example, the average number of priests in six parishes visited by the bishop in 1563 was just over eleven, although there were great disparities on account of size and wealth. Sainte-Croix was a large parish, comprising intra-muros and suburban territory; here there were at least 26 priests, attached to the main church and also to two chapels outside the city walls. The parish church teemed with priests, beneficed and salaried. In the fifteenth century, the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bons-Secours on the Loire island of La Saulzaie was built and endowed with foundations to employ priests explicitly to provide sacraments to the islanders when the city gates of Nantes were closed and no priests from the parish church were available. Toussaints was a suburban hospital run by a confraternity, again with resident priests providing daily and anniversary masses for the sick and poor domiciled there. In contrast, Saint-Léonard was the smallest and poorest of these parishes and the least provided with resident clergy. 17   J.M. Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains dans le diocèse d’Angers (1350–1550): éléments d’enquète’, RHEF 91 (1996): pp. 392–5. 18   Joseph Bergin, ‘Between estate and profession: the Catholic parish clergy of early modern western Europe’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500 (London, 1992), p. 75. 19  Ibid., p. 72; Hsia, Catholic Renewal, p. 115. 20   Bissegger, p. 78.

The Prayers of Priests

227

There was only the rector, a canon of the Cathedral, assisting by salaried help from poor priests residing in the parish. Table 7.1

Priests serving in six of Nantes’ parishes, 156321

Parish Saint-Nicolas

Parish priest Vicar

Saint-Saturnin

Rector and vicar

Sainte-Croix

Rector and vicar

Saint-Denis

Rector

Saint-Vincent

Rector

Saint-Leonard

Rector

Other priests 8 choir priests 2 sacristans 6 choir priests 2 sacristans 1 organist 6 choir priests 2 sacristans 12 prêtres habitués 1 curate was chaplain of the chapel Notre-Damede-Bons-Secours on the island of La Saulzaie 1 curate and 2 choir priests ministered in the chapel of Toussaints in the suburb of La Biesse 4 choir priests 3 external chaplains 4 choir priests of whom 1 was sacristan 4 prêtres habitués No choir or assistant priests 2 priests resided in the parish and assisted with chantries and parish services

It is difficult to reconstruct the social milieu of the lowliest priests of the later Middle Ages, for evidence is scarce. In towns, one route to the priesthood was through cathedral and collegiate choirs although this specialised in producing musical chaplains for the greater churches. In Lyon, choir boys came from modest social strata. Nineteen choir boys entered Saint-Nizier 1548–56, the majority from Lyon families or nearby; eight were from artisan and three from merchant families.22 In Nantes, a choir boy of the cathedral of 1563 had a baker as a father, typical of the ‘middling sort’ background of these boys.23 The majority of urban chaplains were local, from within the city or the parishes of the surrounding countryside. Yves Hamon, priest of Saint-Saturnin of Nantes, came from Nort-sur-Erdre, twenty kilometres from the city.24 Sometimes, however, talented singers could travel long distances. André Le Gallois, 21

 ADLA G 47. Nantes. Visitation 1638.  Hoffman, pp. 13–14. 23  ADLA 4 E 2/1389 Notaire Lemoine 1567. 24  ADLA G 496. 22

228

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

chaplain of Notre-Dame of Nantes, was a native of Rouvier parish, of unknown diocese but possible near to Nîmes; he had also been recteur of Montrelais, a Loire-side parish on the borders of Brittany and Anjou.25 Alain Bruneau, chorister at Quimper Cathedral in the 1590s, was a native of the Saintonge region.26 Pierre Cheminot, master chaplain of Nantes’ Cathedral choir who made a will in 1604, was a native of Picardy.27 The training of ordinary priests, in town and especially the countryside, was less formal. Mostly, they seem to have learned to read and undertook a clerical apprenticeship together with a small dose of practical theology from the clergy of their parish, often blood relatives or spiritual kin. They learnt their ‘trade’ on the job, as did other apprentices and journeymen. What is noticeable in many parishes is the presence of several priests from individual families. Just as aristocratic families produced ecclesiastical ‘dynasties’ such as the Gondi in the see of Paris, so more humble families might produce priests in each generation. In 1505 in Notre-Dame of Nantes, Jean Pionneau, master chaplain of the choir, founded an anniversary for himself and his late nephew Guillaume, who had also been master chaplain.28 In 1521, Jehan Pavaret was master chaplain of the Nantes’ Cathedral choir while his nephew Germain Pavaret was a choir priest at Saint-Saturnin parish church.29 In 1552, Jean Gordon of Notre-Dame of Nantes requested burial near to the high altar next to his uncle Jehan Rocher.30 There is less evidence for close familial links in the seventeenth century, particularly in cities, but this may be disguised by the move towards anniversary foundations rather than weekly masses, for the latter were frequently presented to clerical relatives. Some family succession continued. In 1633 in Mendon, Louis and François Le Coq were listed as priests and in Belz, the list of priests included Yves Plemeur l’aisne and Yves Plemeur le jeune.31 Also, in 1707, Jean Le Floch, priest of the parish of Bourg-Paul-Muzillac, founded a weekly mass with a benefice of a rente of 33 livres per annum, for which his nephew Jean Le Floch was to be first chaplain.32 The wars of religion after 1560 saw a reduction in the numbers presenting themselves for ordination in France, although the timing of this varied according to region. Priests were attacked in polemic and 25

 ADLA G 313. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations.  ADF 18 H 12. Cordeliers de Quimper. Fondations. 27  ADLA 4 E 2 326. Notaire Bonnet. Nantes. 28  ADLA G 327. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 29  ADLA G 495. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 30  ADLA G 330. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 31  ADM 41 G 1. Vannes. Visitation 1633. 32  ADM G 848. Bourg-Paul-Muzillac. Fondations. 26

The Prayers of Priests

229

their persons were targeted by Huguenots: two priests were killed near to the Protestant stronghold of Blain in 1562, for example. The decline in vocations also coincided with a falling away of interest in chantries, obits and indulgences and falling confidence in traditional devotional forms seen previously in this study. In Grenoble for example, boys receiving the tonsure fell from 622 in the period 1570–79 to 569 in 1580–89 and 309 in 1590–99. The figures mask an even greater fall, for ordinations of secular clergy fell while those of regular clergy held up.33 In Brittany, this is mirrored in Saint-Malo diocese, where an average of 57 priests was ordained per year in the 1550s, rising to 62 a year in the 1570s. But this dropped to 40 in the 1580s and 20 in the 1590s.34 This continued into the next century for one of the classic features of the Counter Reformation Church was a decline in the numbers of sub-parochial clergy. In Upper Normandy, for example, the numbers of secular clergy fell by 40 per cent across the seventeenth century.35 There was certainly some decline in numbers of priests between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in southern Brittany. In the deaneries of Retz and Clisson of Nantes diocese, numbers fell by almost a third, although there was a slight increase towards the end of the century:36 Table 7.2 Numbers of priests in the deaneries of Retz and Clisson, diocese of Nantes Year 1563 1564 1572 1573 1665 1682

33

Numbers of Priests 270 244 228 228 173 200

  S. Gal, Grenoble au temps de la Ligue. Étude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité (vers 1562–vers 1598) (St Martin d’Hérès, 2000), p. 213. 34   Bergin, ‘Between estate and profession’, p. 72. 35   Philippe Goujard, Un catholicisme bien tempéré. La vie religieuse dans les paroisses rurales de Normandie (Paris, 1997), p. 40. 36  Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), p. 1161; Jacqueline Ghenassia, ‘Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: la visite d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–98)’, RHEF 57 (1971): p. 87.

230

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

There were several causes. There was a great fall in the numbers taking minor orders, which had been a marked feature of the later Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, minor clerical orders were increasingly seen as a route to the priesthood, not as a status in itself.37 Heightened educational expectations, that prospective clerics should spend more time in secondary-level education whether in college or seminary, made training more expensive and therefore difficult for poorer families. Above all, the stricter enforcement and increased cost of the clerical title excluded the less well off. Since the Middle Ages, candidates for the priesthood had to demonstrate that they had the means to support themselves after ordination, to be able to live ‘decently’ and avoid ‘unworthy’ activities. Those who did not possess a benefice needed a ‘patrimonial’ title and proof of this in a notarised document before they could be ordained. This ‘title’ was a guarantee of an annual income of a sum required by the local diocesan authorities; mostly, it took the form of ‘mortgages’ or ‘rents’ on family properties. Bergin states that the high numbers of priests ordained in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suggests little or no implementation of the ‘title’ requirement, allowing sons of modest families to enter the priesthood. After 1600, this policy changed. The Council of Trent reaffirmed the importance of titles, confirmed by the French Crown and episcopate in the seventeenth century. The value of titles was increased, from 50 to 60 livres a year in the sixteenth century to 80 to 100 livres in the seventeenth, a real rise in costs. Further, their possession was enforced more rigorously and titles became an obligatory precondition for ordination, in most dioceses.38 In Brittany, by the mid-century the clerical title had increased in Vannes diocese to a yearly income of 80 livres. Support for a priest’s title came from a range of sponsors. In 1603, Jacques de Kermadec, a former advocate in the parlement of Brittany living in Auray, sponsored Jean Gouilliart, a schoolboy of the parish of Carnac, who intended to become a priest and who lacked a benefice. Kermadec made over 20 écus (60 livres) annual rente, until Gouilliart obtained a benefice, in return for prayers and the furtherance of divine service.39 More typically, in 1665, François Bego, a schoolboy of Vannes, obtained an agreement from his father for the usufruct of several pieces of land in the parish of Questembert, for life, to provide his title.40 The long-term effect was to reduce the numbers of ordinands by excluding the sons of poorer social groups, landless labourers, cottagers, humble artisans. This had the greatest impact on the 37

  Bergin, ‘Between estate and profession’, p. 79.  Bergin, Church, p. 185–7. 39   ADM 6 E 2183. Notaire Kermadec. Auray 1583–1606. 40  ADM 6 E 965. Notaire Le Mauff. Questembert 1665. 38

The Prayers of Priests

231

lowest rungs of the clergy, the prêtres habitués.41 By the later seventeenth century, the French curé or Breton recteur was increasingly bourgeois, the sons of prosperous peasants or artisans and frequently from urban families.42 Even the ‘ordinary’ choir priest and habitué were from middling peasant and artisanal backgrounds rather than the poorer sort. Although numbers of lower clergy fell in Brittany across the seventeenth century, the rate of decline can be exaggerated. Clerical densities in the province remained relatively high, if not as extensive as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In an episcopal visitation of Vannes diocese of 1633, there were 635 priests recorded in 98 parishes. The mean number actually rose slightly from 7.13 priests per parish in 1633 to 7.48 in 1667. There was, however, a wide variation in numbers, from one priest (Rohan and Croissannec parishes for example) to thirty in Sérent. In addition, in 1633 there were thirteen deacons and twenty-four subdeacons, as well as fourteen priests who held chantry benefices but who were not listed as priests of these parishes.43 In Nantes, the numbers were slightly lower – reflecting smaller territorial parishes – with 5.31 in 1640 and 6.03 in 1665. In Rennes in 1667, the density was 6.32 and in Saint-Malo, 7.14.44 In the small town of Montfort, more than thirty priests lived within three tiny parishes. Families without at least one priest were rare. The increase in chantries and requested masses in the early-mid seventeenth century may have been responsible for this increased number of priests. With the proliferation of bequests, the clergy became more numerous.45 As long as requests for masses for the dead continued to be made in large numbers by testators, these priests remained an important part of the ecclesiastical landscape.46 It was not until the decline of the number and value of funerary masses and foundations in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the decline of the sub-parochial clergy truly set in. The educational attainment of the lower clergy came into sharp relief in the late fifteenth and especially the early sixteenth centuries. There was much disdain and mockery by humanists and Protestants for humble, unlearned clerics.47 The growth of lay literacy and the evangelical movement created a more questioning and critical climate and led to greater expectations of priests. But historians have begun to revise the 41

 Bergin, Church, pp. 66–7; 185–6.  Hsia, Catholic Renewal, pp. 119–20. 43  ADM 41 G 1. 44  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1156. 45   Observed also in the Otranto region of Italy. David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch. The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1999), p. 52. 46  Bergin, Church, p. 71. 47  Le Goff and Remond, p. 35. 42

232

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

view of the ‘meanly learned cleric’ of the later Middle Ages. In towns, there is little evidence for complaints about the standards of the urban clergy. Parish priests were adequately educated while chaplains and adult choristers were trained in singing and Latin. Some of them were university graduates. Martin Badouard, chaplain of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel in Sainte-Croix parish of Nantes, listed a number of books in his will of 1466. He had an old breviary, a decretal, a dictionary, a gloss on the New Testament, a life of the saints and a book by William of Paris.48 The two choir schools (Psallettes) of Nantes, at the Cathedral and Notre-Dame collegiate church, gave instruction to their choristers in music, religion and Latin grammar. A contract with a new master of 1580 shows that the Psallette of Notre-Dame educated six boys, fed and clothed them, and that apart from the general master there was a special music teacher for the children.49 The majority of these boys became priests.50 In 1567, Jullien Bonnyer, baker, and Marguerite Du Boys his wife, founded a perpetual weekly mass in Nantes Cathedral to provide their son, a choirboy in the Psallette, with a permanent benefice of 10 livres per year, to start him off in his clerical career.51 Gilles de Brénézay, who made a will in 1666, was former master chaplain of the Cathedral and dwelt in the house belonging to the chantry of Saint-Michel – of which he was chaplain – in the suburb of Saint-Clément. He recorded that ‘since 1606 he had been continually raised, fed and maintained by the revenues of the Cathedral of Nantes, in which he was a choir boy then a chorister, master of music and of the Psallette and also master chaplain’.52 Vannes, Quimper and Saint-Pol had similar choir schools for their boy singers. In rural areas, educational demands of the lower clergy were less exacting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but should not be dismissed as ubiquitously poor. Prospective priests, even stipendiary clergy, needed to read Latin to be able to perform the sacraments correctly. Most priests at least learned to read and undertook their clerical apprenticeship together with a small dose of practical theology from the clergy of their parish, often blood relatives or spiritual kin.53 Most were too poor to pay for a prolonged stay in a town for their education but Nicole Lemaitre argues 48

 Theologian and bishop of Paris 1228–48. ADLA G 463.  ADLA 4 E 2/1684. Notaire Quenille. Nantes. 1581–1624. 50  A. Jarnoux, Les Anciennes paroisses de Nantes (2 vols, Nantes, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 53–4. 51  ADLA 4 E 2/1389. 52  ADLA G 491. Sainte-Radegonde de Nantes. Titres de la fabrique. 53   Bergin, ‘Between estate and profession’, p. 76; A. Bourdeaut, ‘Le clergé paroissial dans le diocèse de Nantes avant le Concile de Trente. Les infiltrations protestantes’, BSAHNLI XXIV (1940): p. 93. 49

The Prayers of Priests

233

that the need to be educated and literate was understood even in the rural milieu.54 Reading liturgical books was another form of clerical education, particularly the breviary, which the priest had to recite regularly, and the ritual, indispensable for the sacraments. Lemaitre argues that most priests had a short and perhaps eclectic education, but canon law required ‘sufficient knowledge’ not high levels of scholarship.55 Most people, particularly in the countryside, remained illiterate so it is unlikely that the educational standards of priests fell behind those of the laity.56 In any case, the primary function of a priest was to say mass and not to preach or teach. A central objective of the Catholic and Counter Reform was the increased education of priests. Much of the campaign to improve the quality and professionalism of the clergy was aimed at parish curés because of their direct pastoral work with parishioners. It was proposed at Session XXIII of the Council of Trent that each diocese should create a seminary to train clerics aged 12 and over, who already had writing and literacy skills, in which they would be educated in conventional subjects but also the morals and habits of future clergy.57 Here, future priests would be acculturated into lives set apart from the laity and trained to live as models of Christian virtue.58 The religious wars in France and the hostility of cathedral chapters meant that few seminaries were founded before 1610. Thereafter, the widespread foundation of colleges in towns by municipalities and religious orders meant that seminaries did not really take off until the mid-century and even after that, they trained only a minority of priests.59 The earliest seminaries in Brittany were in SaintMalo in 1645, although this never prospered, and that of Nantes of 1658. Vannes diocese began a seminary in 1663 but it did not take off until 1680 and Quimper had a seminary from 1669. Dol was the last to found one, in 1701. The influence of the movement for enhanced education of clergy also affected the lower priesthood. The lower parish clergy was not seminary educated, which was only ever the experience of even a minority of parish priests. But by the seventeenth century, all priests were educated in Latin 54  Nicole Lemaître, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris, 1988), p. 161. 55  Ibid., p. 161. 56   Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), p. 104. 57  Bergin, Church, p. 196; Gentilcore, p. 47. 58   Louise Schorn-Schütte, ‘The New Clergies’ in R.P. Hsia, The Cambridge History of Christianity vol 6, Reform and Expansion 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 453. 59  Bergin, Church, pp. 196–7.

234

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

grammar, spending some time in a college in their diocesan centre. The boys destined for priesthood in Montfort studied theology at the college of St Thomas Becket in Rennes, which was run by the Jesuits from 1608.60 In the episcopal visitation of Vannes diocese of 1633, subdeacons and deacons were almost all listed as students. Most were studying in Vannes and there was an expectation that these young men should study. Pierre Masse, of Riantec, was given permission to live at home until the harvest, then he was ordered to resume his studies. Julien Sarteron, subdeacon of Guéheno, was ordered to study.61 In 1682, Ollive Symon of Muzillac left 90 livres in her will for her son Olivier to pay the expenses of seminary education.62 While most of the formal institutions of clerical training were the preserve of the parish priest, of importance for the continuing education of all clerics were diocesan synods and their rulings. Synods were used to issue ordinances for application in the parishes and to give priests concrete suggestions on how to improve pastoral care. Through synods, clergy were supervised by bishops and their vicars general, subject to directives and reminders, introduced to changes in sacramental and liturgical practice, and made aware of episcopal priorities.63 Restif’s work on Saint-Malo, Rennes and Dol shows that synods were held here twice yearly and other dioceses are likely to be similar. Ecclesiastical conferences, where the priests of a deanery or region met monthly, to discuss and learn about pastoral duties, moral and theological questions, were another important means of clerical education.64 Carlo Borromeo in his Acts of the Church of Milan, developed the use of the vicar forain charged with organising ecclesiastical conferences in the diocese. François de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, may have used them in his diocese from 1609 and other sees followed. Conferences lasted a day and were led by a facilitator, who often preached and then led discussions. Matters of dogma, cases of conscience, discipline and a wide range of subjects necessary for the good administration of parishes, was discussed. Although Bernard Peyrous considers that conferences were the preserve of the curés and not for lower priests, at least in Bordeaux diocese, Bergin argues that these meetings were open to all priests in a community and were an important form of clerical sociability and identity building, which Philippe Goujard confirms 60

  Marcel Sibold, ‘La vie religieuse d’une petite ville bretonne au XVIIe siècle’, RHEF LXIX (1983): p. 234. 61  ADM 41 G 1. 62  ADM 6 E 713. Notaire Salomon. Muzillac 1677–88. 63  Bergin, Church, p. 173. 64   Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006), p. 173.

The Prayers of Priests

235

for Normandy.65 There is some evidence for associations in eastern Brittany although scarce for the west is scarce; this does not mean the movement was not evident here as well, although the large size of parishes may have made association more difficult in some cases. Further, after 1600 priests were encouraged to read and acquire some books. The liturgy and liturgical works were again a fundamental training ground in theology for priests. The dissemination and use of the Roman ritual after 1580 was a key part of the educational ‘upgrading’ of the lower clergy. Enforcement of the use of canonically approved liturgical texts – the Roman missal, breviary and catechism – was an important part of the work of bishops. Priests were expected to know the liturgy and its music and to train in the Roman rite as it was introduced into parishes. In 1633, the bishop’s visitor ordered priests at Bubry and Sérent to learn their ‘plain chant’ on pain of a 6 livre fine; subdeacons who did not know their ‘plain chant’ would not be ordained.66 Dioceses undertook publishing enterprises to provide priests with liturgical and catechetical material and also handbooks for their own use. Diocesan statutes were printed and distributed, to be consulted by all priests, thus in Saint-Malo in 1613, 1619 and 1620 bishop Guillaume Le Gouverneur published statutes as did the bishop of Rennes in 1682 and even the bishop of Dol in 1678.67 By 1700, the educational qualities of chaplains and stipendiary priests were therefore improved and respectable, certainly within the context of the communities in which most of them lived. These men were not scholars but they were literate and able to say masses decently, which after all, was their primary function in society. The careers of lesser clergymen are extremely difficult to reconstruct because of a paucity of evidence, for the late seventeenth as well as the late fifteenth centuries. Once ordained, a humble priest without a benefice could attach himself to his local church as a prêtre habitué, to assist with masses paid at a piece rate. Over time, he might become a stipendiary curate, a choir priest, a chaplain for a chapel or a confraternity, he might acquire a chantry benefice or two – or a combination of these positions. Only around one fifth of lesser priests rose into the ranks of parish priests. For a priest to acquire a chantry benefice as a permanent chaplain, he had to be presented by the church administrators – the chapter of a college or cathedral, the fabrique of a parish church – or by private patrons, depending with whom the advowson rested. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although more prominent in the period before 1600, 65   Bernard Peyrous, La réforme catholique à Bordeaux 1600–1719 (2 vols, Bordeaux, 1995), p. 523; Bergin, Church, p. 192; Goujard, Un catholicisme bien tempéré, p. 52. 66  ADM 41 G 1. 67   Restif, pp. 131–2.

236

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

founders preferred to retain the presentation of chaplains to their chantries for their heirs and kin. This was often part of a family strategy to maintain control over property and wealth, even at lower levels of society. Even limited rights of patronage gave a family some local distinction. In many cases where private patronage was maintained by a family, the founder stipulated that the chaplain of the chantry had to be a member of his kin. Carlos Eire observes that the practice of assigning chaplaincies to relatives made the foundation of a mass a double bequest, for it gave something to an heir in this world and to one’s soul in the afterlife. These arrangements drew on the sense of family duty for the assiduous performance of services.68 The possession of presentation rights to a benefice provided an income for future family priests, which could function as a sort of dowry for entry into clerical ranks.69 Such chaplains were attached to the dead by ties of physical and spiritual kinship. As such, their prayers for their ancestors were particularly efficacious.70 To give a few examples from Nantes, Jehan Pavaret, master chaplain of the Cathedral founded a mass in Saint-Saturnin church in 1521, for which the first chaplain was to be his nephew; Yves Hamon’s foundation in Saint-Saturnin of 1530 was to be served by his cousin Jehan Amice and a foundation of 1597 by Guillaume Douillard in Saint-Clément church was to be served by Guillaume Garnier, his nephew.71 In Vannes Cathedral, the chantry of Saint-Étienne founded in 1625 by Etienne de la Croix had his brother Jean as its first chaplain.72 More humble, rural examples are common as well, so in 1550 in SaintNolff parish church, François Fabry made his nephew Jacques Fabry first chaplain of his weekly mass and in 1677, when the practice was rarer, Jean Pivaut, recteur of Marzan, founded two weekly masses in the parish church for which the chaplain was to be a priest of the parish related to the founder.73 But there were drawbacks to the appointment of kin, for over time they might not be resident to service the chantry masses and would need to employ stipendiary priests, while still exploiting the revenue of the benefice for themselves. For example, the chantry of Guenhäel in the Cathedral of Vannes was founded by Jan La Grandeville and later augmented by Guillaume Les Meur in 1513. The first chaplain was Yves Les Meur but 68

  Carlos Eire. From Madrid to Purgatory. The art and craft of dying in sixteenthcentury Spain (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 208–9. 69  Gentilcore, p. 51. 70   Michell Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (c.1320–c.1520) (Paris, 1997), p. 527. 71  ADLA G 495, 496, 497. Saint-Saturnin de Nantes. Fondations. 72  ADM 56 G 1. Chapitre de Vannes. Chapellenies. 73  ADM 55 G 2; G 1237.

The Prayers of Priests

237

subsequently it seems that the benefice was held by absentee chaplains. As a result, the masses were served by stipendiaries. In 1555, the ‘farmer’ of the chantry was Jehan Kermillay, chorister, after which service passed to the chaplain Bernhard Kerrier, who received 66 livres for two years’ work and 10 livres’ rente on a house in Vannes. After 1582, the presentation was held by a family living in Léon diocese who continued to appoint nonresident benefice-holders. Thus Hierosme Kerseau allowed the Vannes chapter 18 livres 10 sous to pay a priest to celebrate the masses, from a total revenue of 42 livres 2 sous gained from the benefice.74 Similarly, the presentation rights to the chantry of Saint-Fiacre in Vannes cathedral was held by the Kerlean family of the parish of Ploerin in the diocese of Léon. In 1599 they presented Christophe de Lesven, priest of Léon, to the benefice, which would have necessitated the employment of a waged chaplain.75 This was a feature of rural parishes as well as the greater churches. In 1633, in Ploemel church, the chantry Notre-Dame-de-Locmaria was held by Abraham Bessart but served by Michel Madec, a priest of the parish.76 There was therefore a tension between the obligations of kinship and desire to preserve patrimony and the wish to ensure effective post-mortem masses. One solution was for families to keep the presentation rights but to choose a local priest. In Notre-Dame collegiate church at Nantes, in the seventeenth century, founders frequently kept the presentation for their heirs but stipulated the appointment of one of the permanent chaplains. In 1615, Jean Fourché and Marie Jouslain founded a mass; the first chaplain was Anthoine Tonnard, chorister. Thereafter, the family retained the presentation but was obliged to appoint a priest or chorister of Notre-Dame. In 1651, Guionne Bouriau founded a mass in the chapel of Saint Maurice; again her heirs were to appoint a chorister serving in the church.77 In Carentoir, the chantry of du Boscher was founded in 1663 by Jeanne Louis, widow of the Seigneur du Boscher, as a mass in the manorial chapel. The proprietors of the seigneurie retained the presentation but the first chaplain employed was Jan Prault, ‘resident of that place’.78 Thus the honour of presentation was retained and some patronage rights within the local community were exercised, but the appointment of a resident priest ensured the regular performance of the masses. Across the centuries, with increasing frequency, presentation rights to chantry benefices were given to the church where the foundation was made, whether a chapter of a 74

 ADM 56 G 2. Chapitre de Vannes. Chapellenies.  ADM 41 G 1. 76  Ibid. 77  ADLA G 323. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 78  ADM 56 G 3. Chapitre de Saint-Pierre, Vannes. Fondations. 75

238

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

college or cathedral, or a fabrique of a parish church. The transfer of rights allowed the church to use the benefice to employ priests for the benefit of the wider congregation, and it ensured prompt appointment of a chaplain, continuity of services and close supervision of the use of the chantry’s resources. In addition to direct gifts, chapters and fabriques also acquired presentation rights as heirs disappeared or defaulted. In the great majority of cases, choir or assistant priests were appointed to these benefices. Clerical pluralism was long associated with chantry benefices, even after it became uncommon at collegiate and parish level. Despite Tridentine and later French rulings against the holding of benefices in plurality, chantries seem to have been ignored in this respect. One cause of pluralism was that some families who sought patronage and influence among clerical elites might appoint them to family chantries. Also, leading churchmen might use their influence to acquire multiple benefices. These led to large-scale pluralism, a particular feature of the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. Thus, in 1598, Bertrand Guymarho, canon of Vannes Cathedral and rector of Grandchamps, was appointed to the chantry of the Saints in Grandchamp.79 Further causes were favouritism, personal contacts and even longevity in a clerical post, seen in parishes and cathedrals. In some parishes there was an uneven distribution of benefices, such that a small number of men dominated the possession of chantries. In 1633 in Plougoumelen there were four priests in the parish, including the recteur, but three out of four of the parish church’s chantries were in the possession of one man, Guillaume Levesque.80 Chaplains might combine different roles. Guyon Kergrossien of Crac’h held the benefice of SaintThuriau chantry in the parish church and was also procurator of the outlying chapel of Notre-Dame du Plascar.81 The low remuneration for chantries was a further cause of pluralism. From the second quarter of the seventeenth century, blatant benefice accumulation became less evident, particularly in chapters. Benefices were less frequently acquired by canons but instead used to support chaplains. The Maguero chantry was founded in the parish church of Le Méné by Jean de Maguero, priest, in 1533. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its benefice holders included the recteurs of Séné, Bignon, Le Méné and Marzan, but latterly it went to chaplains such as the administrator of the Psallette of Vannes and the succentor (sous-chantre).82 This may have been a result of an increased number of chaplains to support, or falling real values of benefices, although stricter interpretation of Tridentine rulings of benefices also contributed. 79

 ADM 41 G 1.  Ibid. 81  Ibid. 82  ADM 56 G 1. 80

The Prayers of Priests

239

There is insufficient evidence from Brittany to comment on the duration of chaplaincies and the careers of chaplains. In neighbouring Angers in the later Middle Ages, one in six chaplains stayed in their chantry benefice for less than a year. A half stayed between one and seven years and almost a quarter served for at least 15 years. Two thirds of chaplains left their benefices through resignation, most often to take up another chantry post (62 per cent) or sometimes, for a parish (19 per cent).83 Breton evidence is ambiguous. On the one hand, registers for the spiritual investment of priests in Vannes diocese in the 1590s suggest a high turnover rate of chantry benefices, but more systematic work needs to be done here. On the other, individual chantries could have a slow turnover. For example, a chantry founded in the domestic chapel of the manor of La Civelière in the parish of Saint-Sebastien d’Aigne in 1629 saw only eight chaplains before 1709 and six of these died in post.84 Behaviour, Morality and Discipline The disciplinary and moral shortcomings of priests and a need for reform was a long-standing criticism in the late medieval Church. The new intellectual movement of humanism of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw calls for an educated, preaching and disciplined clergy. Because of their often local origins, the lesser clergy frequently resembled lay parishioners in their lifestyles. As a result, across the sixteenth and more particularly the seventeenth centuries, at a time when the ‘separation’ of priest and laity was increasingly important to church authorities, bishops and reformers looked upon the lower clergy critically.85 Work by Hayden and Greenshields on synodal statutes of the early sixteenth century shows that many issues traditionally seen as seventeenth-century reforms were already present and under discussion a good century earlier, particularly the education, behaviour and duties of priests.86 Statutes of Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of Saint-Malo in 1501 and 1507 regulated the behaviour of priests.87 The statutes of bishop Aymar Hennequin of Rennes of 1578 ordered that all priests and chaplains, not only the recteur, should be decently dressed, should not frequent taverns, should avoid commercial activities and avoid drunkenness and women.88 In the pre-Tridentine period, it is clear that the 83

  Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, p. 390.  ADLA G 719. Saint-Sébastien d’Aigne. 85  Bergin, Church, p. 71. 86   Hayden and Greenshields, ‘Religion et société’, pp. 20–21. 87   Restif, p. 95–6. 88  Ibid., p. 106. 84

240

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

ideal of the pastor disseminated across society. There was a reduction in concubinage from the mid-fifteenth century across France, as reforming bishops and devout lay elites promoted chastity as a fundamental value for priests.89 There was increasing emphasis on the clergy’s possession, reading and use of the Manual, the ancestor of the post-1614 Ritual. Injunctions on the obligation to teach parishioners multiplied across the sixteenth century, with catechisms appearing before 1600 even if their use was relatively limited.90 The ideal of a priest was no longer based on his ‘work’ or function, but was an ideal of perfection.91 There is no doubt that among the laity, standards of accepted behaviour for clerics, especially lower secular clergy, was different in the early sixteenth century. The lifestyles of most parish clergy, whether recteur/curé, chaplains or stipendiary priests, closely resembled that of their parishioners. They wore secular dress at least some of the time and in the countryside they worked their gardens and agricultural lands. Alan Galpin argues that ‘the personal failings of the clergy were not of crucial importance to a people who expected ritual action rather than moral example or intellectual leadership from their priests’.92 Personal failings certainly existed. Visitations of the dioceses of Nantes and Saint-Pol in the sixteenth century show that the most common fault was drunkenness; one in six parishes had clergy described as drunken. Celibacy was the condition of the majority but there was a large minority of clerics with concubines: in 1554, 35.7 per cent were living with women.93 However, there is much evidence that parishioners required at least a minimum of clerical behaviour even from lesser clergy. The laity expected clergy to perform sacraments and to exhibit a high standard of behaviour; ideally, a priest should be a man of prayer, a generous giver of hospitality and a peacemaker. It was believed that learning was acquired through example. For this reason, priests had the duty to serve as models of Christian behaviour so that laymen could learn from them the means of their salvation.94 At visitations, parishioners complained most vociferously about sexual and social misconduct and about failure to perform adequate services.95 In a visitation of Nantes’ 89

 Le Goff and R. Remond, p. 32.   N. Lemaître, ‘L’education de la foi dans les paroisses du XVIe siècle’, in L’encadrement religieux des fidèles, pp. 429–30. 91  Lemaître, Rouergue, p. 280. 92  Alan Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA, 1976), p. 27. 93  Croix, La Bretagne, I, pp. 480 ff. 94   Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha. Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore, 1992), p. 70. 95   Felicity Heal, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), p. 60. 90

The Prayers of Priests

241

diocese in 1554, Jan Fournier, a priest at Chauvé, worked as a weaver but was denounced to the visitor and quickly had to abandon the sale of his cloth. Guillaume Leroy of Montbert traded at regional fairs, presumably in cereals or cloth, but again was denounced by parishioners. The bishop’s visitor threatened him with prison if he did not stop his trade.96 It is too easy to see these denunciations a result of economic competition; there may have been some of this, but it is more likely that unpriestly behaviour was unacceptable to contemporaries. There was a popular view that intercession for the living and the dead, above all performance of the mass, was only achieved by decent, honourable priests. While the Church rejected forcibly the ‘Arian’ ideal that immorality in a priest undermined the efficacy of the mass, parishioners were not always convinced. In 1558 the foundation of Jehan Compludo in Notre-Dame of Nantes stated that chaplains should be employed who were ‘prêtres de bonne vie et renommer (sic)’.97 Peter Marshall comments that people wanted virtuous and honest priests to say masses for their souls, not skilled and learned graduates. It was lasciviousness, drunkenness and idleness that irritated parishioners, not educational mediocrity.98 That most lay people were satisfied with their priests is shown in the bequests made in their wills, where gifts to chaplains and mass priests as well as the recteur, are common.99 Also, while later writers observe a closeness between lower clergy and laity based on lifestyle, it was not necessarily apparent to contemporaries. Whatever the status of an individual cleric, he was part of a separate, professional caste with a clear group culture. Even the humble priest living at home or in a hamlet was separated from the laity by his tonsure and clothing – at least when he said mass. Most did not marry and they were better educated than their family and neighbours, who were frequently illiterate. As ordained men and celebrants of the mass they held a unique position. It is too easy to see the lower clergy as little different from the wider laity; in fact, their role, privileges and functions set them apart. That priests certainly had a clear self-identity is shown in some of their associations. Apart from parish colleges of priests, discussed below, in eastern Brittany confraternities of ‘frairie blanches’ existed for clerics. Priests left gifts to these confraternities in Janzé, Mélesse, La Mézière, Pacé and Gévézé in eastern Brittany, in the sixteenth century.100 96   A. Bourdeaut, ‘Le clergé paroissial dans le diocèse de Nantes avant le Concile de Trente. Les infiltrations protestantes’, BSAHNLI XXIV (1940): p. 93. 97  ADLA G 313. 98  Marshall, Catholic Priesthood, p. 100. 99  Heal, Reformation, p. 45. 100   Restif, p. 88.

242

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

In the mid-sixteenth century, lay and ecclesiastical expectations of clerical behaviour changed more visibly.101 The heightened piety engendered by religious conflict and Protestant attacks on the sacramental priesthood were one cause. The strong emphasis at Trent on the separateness of the order was another. Reform of clerical discipline and lifestyles emerged more strongly, if unsystematically, across France during the religious wars. In a visitation to Grenoble Cathedral of 1572, the bishop called before him the prêtres habitués to outline the manner in which they had to behave. They had to respect the divine offices and obey the canons of the chapter. He reminded them of the responsibilities of their calling and the example which they had to give to the faithful. They were ‘disciples of the Lord’ and ‘not the cause of scandal or evil’. Their ordination set them apart, made them privileged intermediaries between God and the faithful, which they should show by their behaviour.102 In Lyon, canons also made efforts to reform the behaviour of lower clergy associated with the collegiate churches. In Saint-Nizier church, canons sought to ensure that all the parish clergy attended services, dressed modestly and carried themselves in a seemingly manner. While they were not completely successful, there was an attempt to augment the outward appearance of priestly dignity.103 Visitations of the dioceses of Nantes and Saint-Pol in the sixteenth century show the advance of celibacy. In 1554, 35.7 per cent of priests were living with women, in 1561–64, this had reduced to twenty per cent and by 1572–73 was down to 8.1 per cent. An example of a model priest can be seen in Nantes. The confraternity of Toussaints, which ran a hospital in the city, appointed Pierre Trotier their new almoner in 1577 stating that he was ‘un homme de bien, a good Catholic and servant of the church, 13 to 14 years in the confraternity’ he had already ‘helped the sick during their illnesses, confessed and administered the sacraments to brothers ill of contagion or other sicknesses and they have seen him perform many other good deeds, either in the confraternity or outside, [and no-one] has seen or knows anything bad about him’.104 It is with the Counter Reformation of the seventeenth century that more widespread and systematic efforts to create a ‘pure’ clergy are seen, a movement which reached down to the humblest parish cleric. Episcopal discipline over dioceses was augmented, supported by the Crown. Synods, visitations, ecclesiastical conferences and missions increased supervision of parish clergy.105 The laity became less tolerant of priests who fell short 101

 Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, p. 1168.  Gal, p. 232. 103  Hoffman, p. 35. 104  ADLA H 495. 105   Schorn-Schütte, ‘The New Clergies’, p. 456. 102

The Prayers of Priests

243

of certain kinds of behaviour, at all levels. A foundation of 1621 by Artur Hubert in Sainte-Croix of Nantes stipulated that the chaplain should be ‘vivant en bon ecclésiastique’.106 In the diocese of Nantes, drunkenness was a complaint in 23 out of 40 parishes visited in 1640. The evil was so widespread throughout Brittany that in 1651 the Jesuits of Quimper founded a Marian congregation with the sole aim of combating drunkenness in clergy.107 As a result of enhanced discipline and internalisation of new values, violent and drunken priests were rare by the 1660s. In the visitation of Vannes diocese in 1633 only one priest was sanctioned for drunkenness, Jan Guegan of Branderion, who was prohibited from entering taverns.108 In the diocese of Nantes, it was possible to have an enquiry into each case of a drunken or debauched priest.109 Appropriate dress was also required of lower clergy, at least while attending to duties. In the 1633 visitation of Vannes dioceses, three priests in different parishes were ordered to purchase a ‘bonnet carré’ immediately. At Sérent, priests were forbidden to celebrate high mass without albs and tunics and the fabrique was ordered to purchase three white albs and belts.110 Beginning in the later Middle Ages and increasingly evidenced across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were two main efforts to discipline and rein in the autonomy of lesser clergy. The first of these was the creation, regulation and supervision of communities and colleges of lower clergy. The second was the strengthening of the recteur/curé at the head of the parish.111 By the early sixteenth century, one observable feature of the lesser clergy was their increasing association into communities or colleges. Many of these dated to earlier centuries; they provided a means of collective protection for the interests of lowly priests and were also a means by which such clergy could be regulated. The most common form of association was the parish community of local sub-parochial clergy, usually natives but also outsiders who became prêtres-habitués attached to the church. This was more a community of work and income rather than a physical community. Such groups of priests might meet at a specific location, a chapel or other building, and elect a syndic each year, but individuals continued to live with their families rather than in a communal space. These communities had one principal function, that of intercession, to service masses and foundations for the dead and the living. Income came from attending funerals, saying masses and assisting the parish 106

 ADLA G 463.  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1165–6. 108  ADM 41 G 1. 109  Alain Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes, 1993), p. 471. 110  ADM 41 G 1. 111  Bergin, Church, p. 187. 107

244

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

priest. From at least the mid-fourteenth century, the communities divided the income of foundations and masses between the members.112 There were regional variations in the size and numbers of these communities. In 1518–28 in the Rouergue, Lemaître has found evidence for forty-four communities, with a total of 878 priests, a mean of 21 per community.113 In the diocese of Angers, such communities were rare, totally absent from the countryside, they were only found in the collegiate churches of the small towns and in the secular churches of Saumur.114 In Brittany such colleges existed, although they have left few traces. Restif has found evidence for two colleges of seven priests, n two of the churches of Fougères, comprised of natives of their parishes.115 As numbers of priests grew in the fifteenth century, these communities began to formalise in terms of organisation and statutes, with increasingly rigorous conditions of entry, such as parish of birth, a probationary period or entry fee. Above all, the statutes sought to define more closely the obligations of these priests to their parish or church.116 For example, in Saint-Sernin church, Toulouse, the number of priests increased greatly in the late fifteenth century, to around 40 by 1510. A reforming ordinance of 1511 reduced the number of priests to 20, chosen from ‘natives’ of the parish, who were to take two masses a week in return for a salary of 26 sous 8 deniers. In 1532, Saint-Michel of Toulouse drew up statutes for a body of 14 chaplains, who were to be chosen by the churchwardens and parishioners, subject to an examination of their competency in reading and singing. They were employed saying funerary masses and obits but were also obliged to assist at parish masses on Sundays, feast days, Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays.117 In the seventeenth century, evidence for such communities emerges for Brittany. Here, each parish had a recognised community of priests, governed by customary practice, even if it lacked written regulations. The priests did not live communally and in rural parishes they were scattered through the outlying hamlets and farms. Thus, in 1633, Jan Richard and Jan Guerho were received as priests of the community of Hennebont and as such were entitled to their share of the gifts and payments given to the church. This community had its own treasurer and it was ordered to 112

 Ibid., p. 71; Lemaître, Rouergue, p. 284; Serge Brunet, La vie, la mort, la foi. Dans les Pyrénées centrales sous l’Ancien Régime: Val d’Aran et diocèse de Commingues (Aspet, 2001), chapter 15 on the revenues of priests’ communities. 113  Ibid., p. 282. 114   Matz, ‘Chapellenies et chapelains’, p. 385. 115   Restif, p. 86. 116  Lemaître, Rouergue, p. 284. 117   Fournié, p. 284.

The Prayers of Priests

245

keep a register of attendance at parish masses. Any priest absent without legitimate excuse was to be fined 16 sous each time. The priests of the community were also given permission to administer the sacraments in the absence of the recteur.118 In 1662, a foundation of François Le Cudon stated that the services should be sung by ‘the priests of the community of Cléguer’ and another foundation of the same year was accepted by the recteur ‘in his name and those of the other priests of the community of his parish’.119 The community of Saint-Patern in the suburbs of Vannes, comprised the recteur (vicar) and six priests, who were to be named by the recteur. In 1693, this comprised Raymond Le Doux, recteur, canon of the cathedral and vicar general of the diocese of Vannes, François Le Vaivant, curé, and six others, appointed between 1670 and 1690. In the late 1690s, the priests took out a law suit against the recteur, for breach of custom. The details show how such a community functioned: … their community was established in this church since time immemorial and has its own offices distinct from those of the parish, founded in acts accepted by the community’s priests and which each of them serve in turn, without distinction between them. It was an inviolable rule that each priest said the office in his turn and on his day but Sr Guilloux (present recteur), in contempt of this custom, claims unheard-of distinctions contrary to the order of divine office, to make known his authority and power.120

In some big urban parishes such as Saint-Sulpice or Saint-Nicolas-duChardonnet in Paris, with large numbers of habitué clergy, some priests began to group together into communities of a new type and it was from these collectivities that some of the new-style seminaries for ordinands, congregations and missionaries emerged.121 There is no evidence for this in Brittany, however. A more formal clerical association was the ‘college’ with clearly defined membership, functions and regulations. The best known of these ‘colleges’ are chapters of cathedrals and collegiate churches, although lesser colleges are also in evidence across the period. Many of the larger churches of Brittany, as elsewhere in Europe, were founded as – or developed into – corporate bodies across the Middle Ages, with a specific number of canons whose livelihoods were provided by prebends, benefices of lands and properties particular to a specific ‘seat’ in a chapter. The chapter was self-governing, usually with a dean or provost at its head. The function of 118

 ADM 41 G 1.  ADM G 878. 120  ADM G 1148. Ambon. Comptes de fabrique. 121  Bergin, Church, pp. 71–2. 119

246

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

the chapter was to provide a constant round of religious offices, often in conjunction with prayers and masses for founders and benefactors. Over time, as canons withdrew from much of the day-to-day work of services and prayers and employed substitute chaplains – vicars choral – these men were also formally organised into colleges with specific regulations. The collegiate church of Notre-Dame of Nantes is a good example. By 1638, there was a chapter of a chevecier or dean, one cantor and seventeen canons; in the choir there were two master chaplains, the master of music, two half-prebendaries, sub-cantor, subdeacon, eight chorister chaplains, a sacristan and six choir boys.122 From the later Middle Ages, colleges of priests were also formed in smaller churches, specifically to sing offices and pray for the souls of their founders. In these churches, there was no hierarchy of canons and chaplains, simply the college of priests with a dean or provost at its head, who often served as the parish priest as well. For example, Guéméné church had a college founded by the seigneurs of Guéméné to sing the canonical hours every day. In 1633, the bishop’s visitor ordered a register of attendance to be kept for services; absence would be fined at 4 deniers for each service of matins, high mass and vespers and 2 deniers for the other hours.123 Carhaix, Guérande and Josselin are further examples. Similarly, up until the mid-sixteenth century within the larger churches, smaller ‘colleges’ or ‘societies’ were sometimes founded with specific numbers of chaplains to service particular chantries. For example, the society of St Gaudans of seven chaplains was founded in Vannes Cathedral in 1524 by Jean Daniello, archdeacon, to sing a daily mass.124 NotreDame collegiate church in Nantes was the home of a number of societies of priests. The society of Coué, founded by Jean Coué and his wife in the early fifteenth century, was served at the altar of Saint-Michel by six priests. The society itself attracted foundations. In 1557, Jean Gourdon founded a mass to be served by its most senior priest and in 1559, André Le Gallois, one of its chaplains, founded an anniversary mass to be sung by the society.125 The Society of St Thomas was founded in 1515 by Thomas Le Roy again for six priests, at the altar of the saint. André Le Gallois, who was also a chaplain of this society, again created a foundation for it.126 The society was still operating in 1651 when Georges Seicher was described as chorister and its dean.127 The society of St Claude was founded in 1558– 122

 ADLA G 47.  ADM 41 G 1. 124  ADM 59 G 9. Chapitre de Vannes. Calendrier de fondations. 125  ADLA G 324. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 126  ADLA G 314. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 127  ADLA G 330. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 123

The Prayers of Priests

247

59, as part of the foundation to provide masses for the private chapel of the Compludo family. A daily mass was to be said by six chaplains ‘of good living and renown, of the choir of the church, with two boys from the choir school’.128 In his will of 1598, Claude de Kerneguer created a weekly mass at the church of Saint-Pierre, Carhaix, to be served by seven priests, the vicar, curate and five other priests of the town.129 Over the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, colleges and societies played less of a role in post-obit provision. They did not find the same favour with founders as preferences shifted from weekly masses to lavish, musical obits, which required the assistance of all the choir priests of a church. A late example is that of 1639 founded in the church of Grandchamp by Jean Hernon, priest. A daily sung mass was to be provided by seven priests of the parish other than the rector and curate. The priest who officiated on Sunday was to be paid 60 livres per annum and the weekday celebrants, 30 livres.130 But more commonly, such colleges began to fail largely for financial reasons. The society of St Gaudans in Vannes Cathedral founded for seven chaplains in 1524, was reduced to three masses a week in 1642, and the chaplains were to take turns saying the mass, not to sing it together as a ‘college’.131 Rather than association, the Counter Reformation preferred to subject lesser priests more closely to the discipline of the Church hierarchy. In the seventeenth century, curés everywhere expanded their role and influence in the parish and aimed to draw religious life more closely to its church.132 The increased residence of priests, whether rectors or permanent vicars, was important in enhancing parish discipline. In Brittany by 1650 all recteurs were resident: for example, in Vannes diocese in 1633, only two parish priests were absent from 98 parishes visited.133 The most visible way in which parochial clergy were subordinated to the curé and drawn into the parish church was through assistance at services. From the mid-fifteenth century at least, community priests were required to assist with the wider liturgical life of the parish, high masses and the office on Sundays and feast days.134 In 1633, François Le Clainche assisted in the parish church of Le Moustoir and was paid 15 livres per annum for this. Nicolas Guyot assisted at Remungol and at La Magdelaine on Sundays and feasts.135 128

 ADLA G 313. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations.  ADF 38 G 24. Saint-Trémeur de Carhaix. Fondations. 130  ADM 56 G 3. Chapitre de Vannes. Chapellenies. 131  ADM 59 G 9. 132  Hoffman, p. 103. 133  Croix, La Bretagne, vol. 2, pp. 1167–8. 134   Bissegger, p. 90. 135  ADM 41 G 1. 129

248

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Chaplains’ masses were also to be subordinate to the services of the parish. In Brandeirion parish in 1633, at the request of the churchwardens, the episcopal visitor forbade priests to celebrate their chantries during the parish mass on Sunday. They were ordered to celebrate masses in their outlying chapels at 6am in summer and 7am in winter, then to travel to the parish church to assist at high mass. During the same visitation, at Cléguerec, priests were ordered to attend processions and vespers on pain of a 30 sous fine. Parish chaplains had to be present at visitations, subject to fines for absence. In the Vannes visitation of 1633 at Lanvauden, Jan Le Boulouch, absent, was fined 18 sous, at Meslan, Yves Hervé was fined 10 livres and at Plohinec, Jean Le Sezic was fined 18 livres. All priests absent without leave were suspended from their functions.136 Parish chaplains were also engaged in the ‘project’ of Catholic reform in many parishes. It was not simply a question of bringing them into disciplinary line; their roles as examples, liturgists and assistants were valued in many communities. The model of parochial organisation of a team of priests can be seen in the work of Jean-Jacques Olier in SaintSulpice of Paris. He divided his parish into eight quartiers or districts, each of which was allocated to a priest. The priest was to gather information on the material and spiritual needs of the inhabitants, to keep a list of all householders and to update it every three months. The priest was to delegate a person of particular piety on each street to gather information on disorderly households and people of ill-repute and bad lives, to find out the causes of these disorders, and to keep a record of those who did not participate in the sacraments.137 There is no evidence for this type of work in Brittany but priests were important assistants in the parish. In 1638 at Saint-Saturnin of Nantes, four of the choir priests, including the vicar, and two sacristans were ‘confesseurs’, thus able to assist the parish with sacraments.138 Baptism again was sometimes administered by parish priests of large communities and parish registers were sometimes kept by auxiliary clergy, although again under the supervision of the recteur.139 From the second quarter of the seventeenth century, some of the lower parish clergy were expected to teach children religious knowledge through the catechism. In 1633, the visitation of Vannes diocese saw a number of priests such as Michel Ruault of Plumelin and two priests of Cléguerec,

136

 Ibid.   Louis Michard and Georges Couton, ‘Les livres d’états des âmes: une source à collecter et exploiter’, RHEF 67 (1981): pp. 266–7. 138  ADLA G 47. 139   For example at Montfort. Sibold, ‘La vie religieuse’, p. 236. 137

The Prayers of Priests

249

described as teaching ‘doctrine chrestienne’ and in Baud-ès-Plouignec, the parish was ordered to name three priests to teach ‘doctrine’.140 Incomes and Levels of Wealth John Calvin considered that belief in Purgatory underpinned the financial structure of the Catholic Church, for it was bequests for masses and prayers that paid the annual rents which supported many clergy.141 The lesser clergy of collegiate churches and parishes did not make a living from pastoral work for this was the preserve of the recteur and his vicars. The chaplain’s ecclesiastical role was effectively the celebration of masses for the dead and assistance with public offices and processions at his mother church.142 Eire has observed that historians do not know how far clerical positions were funded directly or indirectly by post-mortem intercession in late medieval and early modern Europe, but it is clear that the financial bond between the living and the dead was an essential structural support to the Church.143 In short, the lesser clergy was financed largely by postmortem intercession. In the greater churches with permanent choral chaplains and musicians and constant rounds of offices, these posts were supported primarily by the holding and servicing of chantry benefices. Over several centuries, the treasuries or fabriques of colleges and cathedrals came to control the presentation of many chantry benefices. Some chantries were founded to assist with music; others came to be used as such by church administrators. For example, in Vannes Cathedral, in 1379 Jean Le Taillandier founded the chantry of St John the Baptist, whose chaplain also had to assist permanently in the cathedral choir. There was a 9 denier fine for absence from the hours and a 4 denier fine for absence from matins and vespers.144 By 1500, the choristers, musicians and lesser officers of colleges and cathedrals received ‘packages’ of small benefices, not unlike the prebends of canons but on a smaller scale. As they increased in seniority, perhaps choristers gained more or more profitable benefices in their portfolio. A survey of Nantes Cathedral’s choral benefices of 1622 allows us to see how livings were allocated to finance the vicars choral and musicians of the choir.145 140

 ADM 41 G 1.  Eire, Brief History, pp. 124–5. 142   Bourdeaut, ‘Le clergé paroissial’, p. 92. 143  Eire, Brief History, pp. 124–5. 144  ADM 56 G 2. 145  ADLA G 191. Saint-Similien de Nantes. Fondations. 141

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

250 Table 7.3

Examples of the incomes of seven choral chaplains of Nantes Cathedral, 1622

Chaplain Julien Clousel, Master Chaplain of the Right Side of the Choir

Benefice/Chantry Master chaplain – to officiate at masses at the high altar Chantry of weekly mass at altar of Three Maries

Isaac Moreau, Master Chaplain of the Left Side of the Choir

Master chaplain – Cathedral masses Chantry of a weekly mass, altar Saint-Yves Chantry of a weekly mass, altar Saint-Michel

Guillaume de Brénézay, Master of the Psallette, chorister

Chantry of Saint-Clair, a weekly mass Chantry called Bonne Mère of a weekly mass, in Saint-Saturnin church Chantry Saint-Christophe of a weekly mass Chantry in St Martin’s chapel of two weekly masses Chantry of Saints Martin and André Chantry Saint-Hervé of two weekly masses Chantry of Saint-Martin ½ of the chantries for the dead, to say low masses at the high altar Chantry of de la Barillerye Chantry of Vieux Crucifix

Julien Gentet, chorister

Jean Rayraud, former subcantor André Bouvier, organist and chorister Antoine Desson, chorister †

Property/Income † ½ dwelling, rue Saint-Guédas, shared with Moreau 14 sétiers of rye taken from dîme of Saint-Étienne de Monluc Land in the parish of SaintSimilien A piece of land near Barbin A small dwelling, rue SaintGuédas † ½ dwelling on rue SaintGuédas, shared with Clousel 14 sétiers of rye taken from dîme of Saint-Étienne de Monluc Some vine in Saint-Similien parish Rent of 23L 5s p.a. 5 journaux of meadow parish of Chevrolet Rent on a house in rue SaintLaurent ¾ of a vine row near Locquidy Rents on a house and land in Saint-Donatien parish Rent of 24L p.a. on a house in Grande rue. And 3.54L rent p.a.

A logis, 54s rent p.a., a capon, land and meadow House, rents and lands A house and certain dîmes in the parish of Courbon A dwelling and scattered properties in Nantes 7L 4s rent p.a. on a dwelling

A single house was shared by two Master Chaplains

In addition to their chantry benefices, choral chaplains were paid for their participation in anniversaries and special services of all kinds. Sung requiem foundations were administered centrally by the treasurer of the cathedral or college and each participant received a fee. In Quimper Cathedral, the musicians and choristers were paid quarterly for their assistance at obits and other foundations held in common, according to

The Prayers of Priests

251

their attendance. In the second quarter of 1684, for example, the choristers received between 43 livres 17 sous and 47 livres 14 sous according to their contributions.146 In the parish of Sainte-Croix in Vannes in 1642, priests would be paid 10 sous for presiding at a requiem mass, 3 sous for singing or assisting at the service and 3 sous for participating in vespers.147 By the later fifteenth century, the elaboration of liturgies in parish churches, whether in town or countryside, frequently led to the employment of choir priests to provide professional music in a similar way to colleges and cathedrals. To finance this, parishes replicated this two-stream source of income for their permanent choir priests. Where the presentation of a chantry benefice lay with the fabrique, choir priests could be appointed and a small source of revenue secured for them. This was again supplemented by the distribution of centrally-administered obit revenues. For example, at Sérent, the six recorded chantries were all held by priests of the parish.148 In Sainte-Croix parish of Nantes, there were six choir priests listed in the visitation of 1638. Five of them are listed as holding benefices for chantries. The more senior the choir priest, the more benefices he held. Thus, Jean Avril held five chantries and was chaplain of the parish confraternity of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation, two priests held two chantries and two more held one benefice each. In Saint-Vincent parish, the four choir priests held all listed parish chantry benefices: Jan Durand held four, Jacques Gastineau held three, Martin de Besne held two and Jean Hervy held one, probably a reflection of their seniority within the church.149 In less well-endowed parishes, some priests were privileged by possession of several benefices while others – the majority – might have none at all and have to live off the fees of obits and funerary masses. In Pontivy in 1633, the four recorded chantries were divided between the priests of the parish such that one was held by the recteur, one by Jullien Pierre and two by Jan Guillemet. As there were nine recorded priests in the parish, six lacked benefices. In Noyal Pontivy, there were 18 priests but only three listed chantries, of which one was held by the parish priest, one by a priest from outside the parish and the other was held by the recteur of neighbouring Rohan, the presentation of the latter two probably being in private hands.150 Priests who were not employed as choir chaplains – the prêtreshabitués or simple, resident priests – had less regular incomes. Some were 146

 ADF 2 G 58. Chapitre de Cornouaille. Obits.  ADM G 821. Sainte-Croix de Vannes. Confrérie des Trépassés. 148  ADM 41 G 1. 149  ADLA G 47. 150  ADM 41 G 1. 147

252

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

appointed to chantry benefices in parish or other churches, usually those presented privately. Some served chantry benefices whose chaplains were not resident, for a salary. These priests also participated in funerals and testamentary masses, for which they received fees. For example, in 1633 in Hennebont parish church, of nine parish chantries, five were held by clerics who do not appear in the list of parish priests. This included a benefice held by Deluce de la Vie but served by François Souchouart, a priest of the parish.151 In 1638 in Nantes, a prêtre habitué served the chantry of SaintMars in Saint-Saturnin church, held by Monsieur Blanchard, a canon of the cathedral; also, the priory of Saint-Martin in Sainte-Croix parish, a dependent of Marmoutiers Abbey, was served not by the named prior, François Giraud, but by Julien Postel, prêtre habitué.152 The Vaux chantry in Acquiny church was served by Ollivier Le Nol for 15 livres per year in 1633.153 The employment opportunities for choir and habitué/resident priests in the countryside increased in the seventeenth century with the expansion in the numbers of private chapels. Already a feature of the later Middle Ages, the seventeenth century saw an increase in the number of rural manorial chapels and the employment of private chaplains, mostly from the surrounding parishes. Their remuneration was based either on chantry benefices founded within the chapels or on piece-rate payment for masses. In the parish of Campénéac in 1690, for example, the value of the chaplaincy of the chapel of the château of Trécasson was six mines of cereal a year, that of the manor of Bernéant of four mines of rye a year and masses at the chapels of Glévilly and la Vallée were paid pro rata, around 10 sous per mass.154 As seigneurial demands for private masses rose in the seventeenth century, it could even leave ‘public’ provision depleted. Thus in 1647, Jean de la Coudraie founded a mass in Le Méné ‘for the utility of the public, for parishioners who are inconvenienced by a lack of masses on holy days caused by the absence of the majority of choir priests who are obliged to go to say masses and serve foundations in the chapels of noble houses on holy days’.155 The levels of income of the lesser clergy are difficult to calculate, for they varied according to function, place of residence and from year to year, as demands for post-mortem intercession rose and fell. Overall, the economic position of chaplains was lowly. The relative household size of different types of priests is one indicator of wealth and position. In a militia survey 151

 Ibid.  ADLA G 47. 153  ADM 41 G 1. 154  ADM G 876. Campénéac. Chapellenies. 155  ADM 57 G 3. 152

The Prayers of Priests

253

of Nantes in 1592, four clerics were resident in the proximal parishes of Sainte-Croix and Sainte-Radegonde. Monsieur Caron, canon, had one female servant but also had six dependents living in his household, a Monsieur Callo, his wife and four daughters. The household was provided with sufficient foodstuffs to last one year. The recteurs of Sainte-Croix and Sainte-Radegonde each had households of one manservant. The vicaire of Sainte-Croix had no servants. He lodged with François Allaire, baker, along with another family and a widow who taught girls.156 In Nantes, a taxation assessment of 1597 unusually included priests. In Saint-Laurent parish, home of many senior clerics, the dean of the Cathedral was assessed at eight écus, the archdeacon and the treasurer at 6 écus each, canons were assessed at 2 écus if they held only their prebend and 3 écus if they were also rectors of a parish; Guillaume Ravary and René Chevalleau, the two master chaplains and choristers of the cathedral were assessed at 2 écus each and other choristers and cathedral officers – organist, sacristan – were assessed at 50 to 55 sous each, almost a half of that of the master chaplains. Valentin Marchier, simply listed as ‘chaplain of Saint-Michel’ and perhaps a chantry chaplain, was assessed at 40 sous.157 As for most stipendiary clergy, it is probable that they earned little more than labourers, which means that their social status was likely to have been low.158 A detailed description of the benefices of Allaire parish in 1690 allows us to see the incomes of choir priests that were drawn from property attached to foundations.159 Table 7.4

Value of benefices in Allaire, 1690

Priest

No Benefices Held

No Masses Served

Jean Evain

3

3

156

Property/Income

1 house and garden in Allaire worth 9L p.a. 1/3 dîme of Taupon, Allaire 1 piece of meadow at Rouandaye, Allaire, worth 10L p.a. Meadow and 3 pieces of arable worth 10L p.a. = 29 livres + dîme p.a.

 AMN EE 30. Milice bourgeoise.  ADLA G 486. 158  Marshall, Catholic Priesthood, p. 196. 159  ADM G 840. Allaire. Fondations. 157

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

254 François Tual

2

3+1 1 house, stable and 2 gardens worth 9L p.a. anniversary A holding of meadow, arable and waste worth 14.5L p.a. A piece of arable and 12 denez of rye = 22.5 livres + 12 denez rye p.a

Pierre Henry

1

1

2 pieces of meadow for hay worth 15L p.a. = 15 livres p.a.

Jean Lucas

4

4

A house, garden and 2 pieces of waste in Saint-Jagu parish worth 12L p.a. 2 pieces of meadow worth 12L p.a. Rent on a house in Allaire worth 13L p.a. 2 pieces of meadow in Rieux parish worth 9L p.a. = 46 livres p.a. Also earned a yearly salary of 29L for saying masses for a chantry held by the recteur of Peillac.

Sr Pavin

1

1

2 pieces of meadow in Rieux parish worth 15 livres p.a.

We see here that incomes could vary greatly, from 15 to 46 livres per annum. Also, income came from scattered sources. A single benefice could return cash rents, mortgages on property, lands which might be farmed directly or rented out, tithes and a range of payments in kind. Such income might also have to be gathered from a wide geographical range. Thus, Guillaume de Brénézay, Master of the Cathedral choir school and chorister of Nantes in 1622 had beneficed income comprising a rente on a house in rue Saint-Laurent, usufruct of ¾ of a vine row near Locquidy and rentes on a house and land in Saint-Donatien parish.160 Jean Lucas, choir priest of Allaire in 1690, had a house, garden and two pieces of waste land in SaintJagu parish worth 12 livres per annum, two pieces of meadow worth 12 livres per annum, a rente on a house in Allaire worth 13 livres per annum and two pieces of meadow in Rieux parish worth 9 livres a year.161 The collection of such income was time consuming although the experience of chaplains was not unusual. It could, of course, lead to tensions with clerical duties and relations with the laity. But many people, even the wealthy, were dependent on a wide range of incomes. For all people, this was an economy of makeshifts and scattered resources and the modes of financing chaplains and stipendiary priests changed little over time. The system in place in 1500 was the same as that of 1700. What did change was the value of chaplains’ revenues, especially if they came in the form of fixed, cash rentes. In the later sixteenth and across the seventeenth centuries, the value of foundations yielding fixed rents fell with inflation. This eroded the economic position of chaplains, more in 160

 ADLA G 191.  ADM G 840.

161

The Prayers of Priests

255

the towns than in the countryside, but was important everywhere. Also, it made the holding of chantry benefices which required services for such small gain, unattractive. In a visitation of 1573 in the deanery north of Nantes, the high level of vacant chantries in some parishes, particularly on the Loire banks and the Atlantic coast, is striking. In Hermeland parish, three out of six chantries were vacant, in Donges, two out of six and in Escoublac, all three chantries were vacant.162 Such factors may have been significant in the fall in ordinations of this period. But the real crisis of the lower clergy came in the later seventeenth century, as new foundations fell in number and the value of existing revenues declined with rising costs and royal taxation. There was a serious fall in the financial support available for chaplains. In 1656, the six chaplains of the confraternity of the Trépassés of Saint-Pol wrote to the bishop of Léon to complain that they only earned 18 deniers for each office they served, based on the foundation document of 1533, and asked for a rise in fee. The bishop ruled that they should be paid 3 sous per service. In 1700, the confraternity officers wrote to the bishop complaining that the priests were neglecting services because their salary of 6 sous per mass – which had obviously increased since 1656 – was too modest. The bishop’s response was that the confraternity should reduce the numbers of priests attending masses to two each week and that the six chaplains should take turns officiating, to hold two masses a day during their duty week and be paid 10 sous per mass.163 It was these pressures that were the most important cause of the decline in the numbers of lesser clergy after 1700. Piety and Religious Practice Across the period under study, clerics of all types marked their separation from the laity and their participation in a special order, by public acts of piety and devotion. This was true of chaplains as of canons and parish priests. While it is difficult to reconstruct their daily practices other than their duty masses for their benefices, funerals and parish services, it becomes apparent in wills and foundation documents that even the lesser clergy were concerned with the public display of devotion. Two features of this piety stand out. Priests, even lesser priests in the countryside, were much more likely to found masses and anniversaries than their lay neighbours. In eastern Brittany, a quarter of foundations, many of them modest, were made by priests. This was not simply because clerics lacked direct heirs and could dispose of their property more freely. The need to make a 162

 ADLA G 46. Diocèse de Nantes. Visitation 1573.  ADF 9 G 5. Saint-Pol-de-Léon. Confrérie des Trépassés.

163

256

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

statement as a priest and to participate in the continuing devotions of their clerical colleagues at least in memory, seems paramount. Further, in their foundations and pious bequests, chaplains were loyal to the churches in which they served, again preserving their status among a defined clerical group, even after death. We lack systematic evidence to trace change over time, but it appears that in all periods some chaplains at least led notably religious lives. In the later Middle Ages, chaplains associated with the greater churches were careful to provide for elaborate funerary intercession and post-mortem provision and were particularly keen to promote their ‘home’ cults. In 1521, Jehan Pavaret, master chaplain of the Cathedral choir of Nantes, made a will with an elaborate salutation to the saints associated with his church, Peter, Paul, Donatien and Rogatien, as well as his patron John the Baptist. Although he elected to be buried in Saint-Saturnin parish church with his nephew, also a priest, he founded an annual obit in the Cathedral, to which he gave a gift of 60 sous’ rente per year.164 The loyalty to the mother church continued to be a feature of clerical culture throughout the period. In 1651, Georges Seicher chorister of Notre-Dame of Nantes and dean of the society of St Thomas, founded a weekly mass, two anniversaries and two weekly anthems. The anniversaries and the anthems were to be celebrated by the chaplains of the society of St Thomas. In addition, Seicher bequested a gift of 50 livres to Notre-Dame.165 A study of the chaplains of the collegiate church of Notre-Dame of Nantes of the 1550s shows that they led a vigorous spiritual life. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Notre-Dame had attracted a number of chantry foundations which required several chaplains to provide elaborate liturgical music from which the Societies of Coué, St Thomas and St Claude discussed above, were formed. In the decade of the 1550s, these societies attracted new patronage. In 1552, a weekly mass founded by the Caron brothers was to be serviced by the society of St Thomas.166 A foundation of twelve annual masses by Jehan Pageaud and his wife in 1556 requested that they be performed by the society of Coué. The popularity of the societies of Notre-Dame coincided with a notable piety among their members, which was traditional and ritualistic in expression but nonetheless sincere. Gilles Jumel, doctor of theology, was a chaplain of St Thomas and St Claude in this decade. He was a member of two confraternities, Holy Sacrament in Sainte-Croix parish, and Saints Anthony and Sebastian at Saint-Saturnin church. His will of 1561 was careful with regard to funerary provision. His body was to be 164

 ADLA G 495.  ADLA G 330. 166  ADLA G 314, G 322. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 165

The Prayers of Priests

257

accompanied by the poor of the city and buried with 100 masses, followed by 100 a week later. He donated vestments and liturgical books to the church of Guénroc; the rest of his money he gave to the sisters of SainteClaire, the Hôtel-Dieu of Nantes and the poor present at his burial. Even his books were to be sold to profit the poor.167 André Le Gallois, chorister of Notre-Dame, was the master of the society of St Thomas by 1550 and a chaplain of St Claude. In 1558 and 1559, he set up three foundations, an anniversary for the day of his death, one annual and 12 monthly masses per year. Le Gallois’s foundations were to be served by his brethren, the societies of Saints Thomas, Claude and Coué.168 Later, in 1561, his executors founded a joint mass for Le Gallois and the priest Jean Le Breton, for whom Le Gallois had acted as executor. A high mass with Gloria was to be sung at the altar of St Thomas by its the society of chaplains.169 Le Gallois’s will is also highly detailed. He dedicated his soul to a great number of patrons, the Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saints Michael, Gabriel, John, Andrew, Peter and Paul, and his guardian angel. One hundred masses were to accompany his burial; there were to be 100 more the following week in Notre-Dame and 50 in the church at Rouvier, his baptismal church. A trental was to be celebrated for him at Saint-Denis in Nantes and he left money for the poor here and at Rouvier.170 The wills and foundations of four other chaplains survive for this decade. At a time when lay foundations were beginning to decline in Nantes, these priests made elaborate provision for post-obit intercession and donations to the poor. They took particular care in their choice of devotions. François Le Roy’s annual mass founded in 1558 was to take place on the day after Corpus Christi, in front of the great crucifix of Notre-Dame.171 André Le Gallois requested potations of the Holy Sepulchre and Gilles Jumel’s annual was to fall on St Giles’s day.172 The ongoing concern with spiritual matters throughout a priest’s lifetime is shown in a few examples by a series of foundations built up over time. Alain Bruneau, chorister of Quimper Cathedral originally from the Saintonge region, founded three weekly masses, one at a time, over a period of four years between 1594 and 1597. Perhaps because he was a recent incomer, he preferred to patronise the Franciscan convent with his foundations. Bruneau was precise in his requests for special masses. The first, for Wednesdays, was a sung office of the Name of Jesus. The 167

 ADLA G 325. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations.  ADLA G 324, G 313. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 169  ADLA G 313. 170   Will 1558–9. ADLA G 313. 171  ADLA G 326. Notre-Dame de Nantes. Fondations. 172  ADLA G 313. 168

258

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

second, for Tuesdays, was for a mass of the Holy Spirit and the third, for Mondays, was to be a requiem.173 Similarly in the later seventeenth century, Louis Ledres, priest of Persguen parish church, founded eight annual obits in 1683 for the eight days following Easter, then in 1691 another eight annual masses, to be held during the first two weeks of Lent.174 While the chaplains of the greater churches lived close to and were influenced by clerical elites, the piety of lesser, rural, chaplains is also notable. For these men, with careers in the Church from childhood, piety was their profession and interest. Such men were conscious of public expectations that they should be devout. One indication of this is that choir priests and other chaplains spent a relatively large part of their material possession on post-obit provision, throughout the period. Typically, they gave part of their inheritances or cash savings to found either a weekly mass – particularly in the earlier sixteenth century – or an anniversary. For example, in 1598, François Groller founded an anniversary in SaintPierre church of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, to be serviced by the confraternity of the Trépassés, with a foundation of a rente of 3 écus 9 sous drawn from land in the parish of Saint-Pierre.175 In 1641, François Madec of Ploudiry parish founded an anniversary in Notre-Dame-de-Creisquer in Saint-Pol, for 30 sous per annum from his inheritance lands.176 In Carentoir parish in the late sixteenth century, there were usually 12 to 15 priests resident. Between 1576 and 1607, there are foundation records for six of these men, who died and requested anniversaries, quite a high percentage of the total corps of priests.177 Priests might have lodged with their families and have been closely involved with the social and economic lives of their communities, but there was still a sense of a special calling and status, shown in ordination but also by provision for the soul and burial place, which was usually inside the parish church. The relative size of bequests compared to total wealth is also striking, for all chaplains. In 1550, Charles and Jean Le Bloyez, both priests of the parish of Allaire, founded two weekly masses in the parish church. For this, they gave pieces of arable and waste land in the hamlet of Saint-Gorgon of Allaire. This represented a considerable part of their joint inheritance, put to use for their souls and also for future relatives who might be priests of the parish, a double good work.178 This continued throughout the period. Thus in 1699, Eustache Lancelot, a priest and former curate of Le Palais 173

 ADF 18 H 12.  ADM G 939. Persguen. 175  ADF 9 G 1. Saint-Pol. Confrérie des Trépassés. 176  ADF 9 G 8. Saint-Pol. Confrérie des Trépassés. Fondations. 177  ADM 1066. Carentoir. Confrérie Notre-Dame. 178  ADM G 840. 174

The Prayers of Priests

259

on Belle-Isle, founded two obits, one for the anniversary of his death and the second for St Eustace’s day, his patron. Lancelot had built a house in the bourg of Le Palais, which he gave to the church for his foundation.179 Whether public piety by priests increased in the seventeenth century, part of the wider changes in expectations of clergy behaviour, is difficult to say. There are examples of model clerics, but it is likely that such men existed in all ages. The example of Jean Avril, choir priest of SainteCroix of Nantes, shows the regard in which lesser priests could be held, on account of their probity and piety. By 1631, Avril was chaplain of a foundation made by Jehanne Maumarche in 1526. In 1634 he was one of the executors of Catherine Brusle, who made a foundation in the parish church.180 By 1638, he held five chantry benefices and was chaplain to the confraternity of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation based in the parish church.181 In 1643, when he made his will, he was the oldest – or at least the most senior – of the choir priests. He founded a solemn obit in the parish church and gave money for the rebuilding of the south aisle.182 High percentages of priests left anniversary foundations. In Saint-Patern church in the suburbs of Vannes, there are records of eight chaplains’ foundations between 1637 and 1703, all anniversary services except one monthly mass. This was in a church which traditionally employed six choir priests at any one time.183 Priests also played an important part in encouraging and patronising new devotions in their parishes. In 1647, the creation of a confraternity of the rosary in the parish church of Bourg-Paul-Muzillac was achieved in the presence of the recteur and six priests of the parish.184 At Plouay in 1683 the parish founded a confraternity of the Holy Sacrament. The recteur, curé and six priests were present at its inauguration and one of the priests, Jean Grave, donated a house and garden to serve as part of the founding endowment.185 Such men could be held up as examples to their parishioners. In 1672, Jerome Lestour, recteur of Caudan, described Jean Janno, who died aged 33 after returning from a mission to Belle-Isle, as ‘zealous, fervent in his preaching, indefatigable, regulated in his morals and liberal to the poor’ and his death was ‘a cause of regrets, tears and cries of all the parishioners’.186 The piety of the lesser clergy was therefore 179

 ADM G 945. Le Pallais Belle-Isle. Fondations.  ADLA G 468. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 181  ADLA G 47. 182  ADLA G 464. Sainte-Croix de Nantes. Fondations. 183  ADM G 1042. 184  ADM G 849. 185  ADM G 954. Plouay. Confrérie Saint-Sacrement. 186  Croix, L’âge d’or, p. 478. 180

260

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

an important part of the experience of religious life of the laity and should not be understated. Conclusions Although evidence is scarce from Brittany, the history of perpetual mortuary intercession and that of the chaplain or ordinary priest are inextricably linked. Abundant in the later Middle Ages, a fall in numbers amongst the unbeneficed and unsalaried priest set in during the religious wars of the later sixteenth century. One of the ‘classic’ features of the Tridentine priesthood in France, its fall in numbers, has to be nuanced for seventeenth-century Brittany, however. There were fewer priests in urban and rural parishes after 1600. But there will still large numbers of clerics and even a slight rise in the mid-century. It was falling numbers of new chantries and obits, the decline in value and revenue of existing foundations and reduced funerary and temporary masses, which eroded the numbers of priests after 1680. Yet economic supply and demand do not account for the fall in numbers by themselves. The practice of the Counter Reformation Church to emphasise education and appropriate levels of income for priests made a clerical career less available to the lower sort. Even the lesser clergy such as chaplains and mass priests began to change from a privileged order into a professional class, as many studies have shown it did among parish priests. The role of the lesser clergy in mediating between the living and the dead was vital; these men were the largest providers of prayers and masses for souls. Throughout the period under study, this was their principal function. As well as the more obvious funerary and post-funerary masses, chantries and obits, such priests had other intercessory functions which involved care of departed souls. They were choral chaplains, confraternity and hospital priests, the holding of prayers and masses was central to their functions. As the seventeenth century progressed, ordinary priests became catechists, assisted in missions such as those of Julien Maunoir in the west, helped to found new confraternities and devotions. They too, were part of the Counter Reformation ‘project’, as agents and also audience, for religious revival and reform. While the ordinary priest was often poor and in rural areas, although he might live with his family, till the land and participate in popular pursuits, he was still marked out from the laity by his special status. He had privileged rights in law, he could robe and say the mass, he interceded between the living and the dead. Even in the fifteenth century, the humble priest’s literacy levels were higher than those of his neighbours; in the seventeenth century, this was certainly so. Many priests were consciously,

The Prayers of Priests

261

professionally pious, something we glimpse in confraternity membership and in wills and foundation documents. Conscious of being part of a special order and wishing to demarcate themselves in local communities, even lower clergy founded obits in larger numbers and at a higher rate than the lay population. In this way, they perpetuated intercession and the means of prayer for the dead, by supporting future generations of chaplains, in perpetuity.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 8

Conclusions In 1721, Mathieu Gaultron de la Bâle, Vicar General of the diocese of Nantes, received a petition from the recteur and priests of the city parish of Saint-Nicolas. They requested that the number of perpetual mortuary foundations maintained by their church be reduced. They were responsible for foundations of 649 high and 646 low masses annually, along with further daily matins, salutations of the Holy Sacrament, vespers of the dead and other prayers. All of these services had to be performed by just ten priests; the funds were worth only 1,321 livres per year, which scarcely made ten livings. Instead, the parish offered to celebrate seven of the larger chantries annually rather than weekly and to keep sixteen solemn anniversaries throughout the year, for the other founders. After some negotiation, this greatly reduced intercessory obligation was approved.1 1721 thus marked the end of a long tradition of the foundation of perpetual masses in Nantes, for Saint-Nicolas was one of several of the city’s twelve parish churches to restructure its provision of mortuary intercession at this time. The immediate cause of the rationalisation in post-mortem intercession across Brittany in 1721–22 was a crisis in church finances caused by the failure of Law’s System in France. Churches in Vannes and Quimper also reduced the numbers of their services for chantries and obits. Like other public and private institutions, ecclesiastical revenues were ruined by the financial crash and churches had to consolidate benefices and services ‘to take account of the losses that have been suffered because of the bank notes.’2 Strategies for the afterlife and particularly for souls in Purgatory were forced to adapt to a new austerity in the temporal world. There was little recorded protest about the reduction in intercession of the early 1720s. Such commutations of individual masses to fewer, collective services had happened before; they occurred from time to time in many churches throughout the period, as the value of ancient foundations fell or family resources disappeared. There were always new foundations made to fill the gap. But 1722 marked a new departure. The practice of founding perpetual masses had diminished greatly by this date and it was never to become common again. By the 1720s, changes in attitudes towards intercession had changed. Perpetual, individual commemoration had been replaced by individual works and collective activities such as confraternity membership and indulgence acquisition. So the concentration 1 2

 ADLA G 487. Saint-Nicolas. Fondations.  ADLA G 504. Saint-Saturnin. Fabrique.

264

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

of intercessory activities necessitated by the financial crisis did not cause great uproar. Of particular significance in the decline of individual post-mortem foundations was a shift in the perceived relationship between the body and the soul after death. For much of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the site of burial, the physical resting place of the body until the day of judgement, was the preferred site of intercession for the soul. Even when the soul had departed for Purgatory, the presence of the body provided a link, both mnemonic and material, with the departed. Bodies as well as souls were holy and demanded special treatment. Individuals were therefore anxious to be buried in holy ground, as near to a holy object as possible, altar or crucifix; holy water was aspersed over burial sites and cemeteries during processions and commemorations; funeral rites were repeated in obit services with the church hearse over the burial site of the founder. There was a tangible, corporeal link with the soul, whose interests were best served close to its mortal being. But from the later seventeenth century onwards this link was slowly severed. Church burial declined. New ideas of hygiene and fears of the dangers of the vapours of decay led to prohibitions on church inhumations. John McManners argues that the growth of Romantic sentimentalism, its rejection of the Baroque images of the horrors of death and the increasing focus of families on their private lives, altered attitudes to burial.3 After a serious epidemic of scarlet fever in Rennes in 1719, the Parlement forbade church burial. Compliance was slow and a second edict followed in 1749. But hygiene concerns increased, along with the professionalisation of medicine and by the mid-century, external cemetery use rather than intramuros burial had expanded greatly. The history of Purgatory and its relative importance in soteriology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tells us much about wider spiritual and ecclesiastical movements in Brittany. Theological and clerical interest in Purgatory shifted over time. This was a nuanced evolution rather than seismic movements, for across the period the afterlife in the Catholic world remained that of Heaven, Hell and the place of purgation, determined by penance and satisfaction. Polemical writings, handbooks on dying and wider salvific themes, catechisms and sermons, show that a belief in Purgatory was implicitly held to underpin mortuary culture and visions of the afterlife in the later Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century. Purgatory became a lively subject of defence and debate during the religious conflicts of c.1555 to c.1610 and was thereafter an important 3

  John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), pp. 233, 306, 445.

Conclusions

265

subject of description and pedagogy until c.1670 to c.1680. From this point, its popularity as a topic for authors declined, as writers preferred to promote the model Christian life on earth and the awfulness of Hell for those who sinned, without the complicating safety net of Purgatory. Purgatory was still a topic for some authors, its existence was taught in catechism, but by the turn of the eighteenth century it had lost its earlier prominence. The response of elite and popular groups to the prospect of purgation in the afterlife was clear. The creation and patronage of a range of intercessory institutions to provide ongoing, preferably perpetual, intercession for souls in the ‘third place’ is evidence of widespread belief in Purgatory in Brittany. The wealthy and middling groups founded individual masses in the form of chantries and obits of varying sorts. Popular and wealthy groups created mutual support in parish devotions, confraternities and indulgence acquisition, as well as other activities such as patronage of the poor in hospitals and their chapels, donations to religious orders – all of which ensured the provision of masses, prayers and memorialisation by a collective group, for souls. The role of individuality in salvation and the question of the separation of elites from popular practice is complex. Private masses, grave plots, family chapels of the rich, memorialisation, all these focused on the individual or at least the family of the wealthy. These practices affirmed social status as forms of conspicuous consumption. But they were also for public display and necessarily drew in the prayers of others. Many personal foundations also augmented church liturgies and incomes, or were made for confraternities, to boost their services and thus membership. All social groups joined confraternities, did good works, acquired indulgences, venerated Mary and the Holy Sacrament for souls in Purgatory and for their own salvation. It is difficult to unpick individual and collective behaviour, for there was much interdependence. The homogeneity of beliefs across social groups can be seen in the parallel and inter-related evolution of individual and collective post-mortem intercession over time. Perpetual masses, confraternity membership and indulgences were common in the period 1480 to 1560; their popularity declined during the religious wars of the mid- to later sixteenth century and underwent a resurgence in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, at the end of the seventeenth century, there was some differentiation. Chantries and obits – individual intercessory forms – declined while confraternity membership and indulgence acquisition continued to be popular and even expanded after 1680. Some of this shift was caused by deteriorating personal and group finances caused by the wars and fiscal difficulties of the later reign of Louis XIV. But there seems also to have been changes in views about the most efficacious means of obtaining salvation.

266

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

The evolution of perpetual intercession, for individuals and groups, was influenced by the the relative prominence of the eucharist and good works in the economy of salvation. It is clear from all studies of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Catholicism that Christological devotions grew in significance over time, particularly in the form of veneration of the Holy Sacrament of the eucharist. It is notable that when devotion to the sacrament was at its most enthusiastic – during the religious wars; increasingly over the seventeenth century as evidenced by the growth of confraternities in the second half of the period – then the relative profile of Purgatory and the intercessory needs of souls declined in prominence. When salvation through good works was privileged – in the early sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century – then the fate of souls received greater attention in literature and in post-mortem foundations. The dichotomy between these devotions should not be over stated for the mass contained prayers for souls and the eucharist was a vital good work. But the ‘way of the cross’ and the ‘ladder of perfection’ continued to offer alternative conceptions of routes to salvation and the function of Purgatory across the early modern period. The relationship between the teachings and writings of Purgatory – the voice of the clerical intelligentsia – and the popularity of participatory perpetual intercession, was not always a direct one. In the later Middle Ages, handbooks on dying, books of hours, prayers and saints’ lives, largely authored by clergy, was predicated upon a widespread understanding of Purgatory, even if it was not always explicit in the literature. Reformers’ attacks on Purgatory from c.1520 certainly seem to have undermined confidence in this and other beliefs. Yet the resurrection of interest in Purgatory through polemical debates with Protestantism and in the definition of Catholic doctrine in the mid-sixteenth century did not find an immediate response in Brittany. The priorities of the laity lay elsewhere during the religious troubles, in defending the faith against heresy, cleansing society and the polity of sin and bad governance, maintaining the community of the living in times of hardship and adversity. After 1600, the liveliness of perpetual intercessory forms and the volume of writings on Purgatory and the afterlife went hand in hand. Cause and effect is difficult to unravel but interest in Purgatory was stimulated by – and in turn fostered – works of description and advice. Towards the end of the century, both literature and devotions changed. Tracts on the afterlife moved away from discussions of Purgatory; individual interest in founding masses declined. The works of the living, of individual, confraternity and Church, gained ground and determined the fate of the soul. Pierre Chaunu sees this as the triumph of particular over final judgement and a result of uniformity of

Conclusions

267

belief about the afterlife fostered by the Counter-Reformation Church.4 But it was perhaps simply different means to the same end of salvation. There were some differences across Brittany. It appears that Alain Croix’s hypothesis of the limited penetration of beliefs about Purgatory into the west of Brittany, needs some revision.5 What is striking is not variation between eastern Brittany and the Celtic west, but that between town and countryside. The ‘history’ of Purgatory and intercession is best known for Nantes, the largest city, for which documentary records survive in greater numbers than elsewhere in the province. But the other cathedral cities of Vannes, Quimper and Saint-Pol, the smaller towns dominated by collegiate churches and mendicant convents such as Guérande, Carhaix and Morlaix, followed closely the same developments. By the sixteenth century, all towns had wide networks of contacts, clergy, legal and financial officers, resident nobles, soldiers, merchants and pilgrims. Bretons from all urban communities moved throughout the region, the kingdom and also overseas, for Brittany is a maritime province. Although printing was under-developed, bookselling, at least in the episcopal cities, was growing and ideas circulated quickly. The countryside was also open to new ideas, for its priests and people were far from static, as seafarers, market traders, temporary workers in towns and pilgrims. Bruno Restif’s study of Rennes diocese shows how quickly new ritual practices could be introduced, for example Bishop Aymar Hennquin’s new Missal based on Roman usage spread in the rural parishes after its publication in 1588, although its rapid acquisition was checked by the Catholic League Wars.6 But rural areas also saw the conservation of practices for longer than in the cities. Purgatory continued to attraction foundations and confraternity membership in the countryside during the religious wars when the cities had other priorities; similarly, individual foundations continued for longer in the villages, until the 1690s, when they had already collapsed in urban churches. There were some differences between dioceses as well. In the west, there was a tradition of giving small gifts to large numbers of rural chapels and churches in wills that was not seen in the east; large-scale intra-muros church burial was a western custom and not nearly as widespread in the east. But these are nuances not profound differences in attitudes, and can be seen between most regions and dioceses of early modern France. Presiding over the institutions of intercession was the priesthood, above all the lower clergy and stipendiary chaplains of college and parish. 4

  Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978), p. 365.  Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (2 vols, Paris, 1981), vol. 2, p. 1183. 6   Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes, 2006), p. 78. 5

268

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Their incomes, status and numbers were determined above all by demands for intercession for departed souls, at funerals and in post-mortem masses, chantries, obits and confraternity services. Numbers of mass priests remained high while souls in Purgatory needed prayers; despite some decline in the seventeenth century, clerical density was still marked throughout Brittany. Wider influences began to alter the position of the lesser clergy after 1600, however. Educational demands and the economics of livings began to depress numbers of candidates for the priesthood, although these trends also allowed the lower clergy a wider role in their parishes, as catechists, assistants to the recteur, missioners and leaders of new devotions. But the collapse of church finances together with changing intercessory practices after 1700 saw their numbers and functions decline. Purgatory did not disappear after 1700. Permanent masses continued to be founded, although in small numbers; confraternities and indulgences remained lively. But the culture of death and attitudes to the afterlife shifted. Images of the macabre in churches slowly disappeared with new building projects and changing tastes in religious art. In the end, increased emphasis on the love of God, Christ and Mary, on lifetime works and actions, reduced the place of Purgatory and the need for permanent, postmortem intercession. An homogenisation of Roman practice continued to iron out particularisms in the countryside as well as in cities and towns in Brittany. But concern for souls did not die. It remained in parishes and fraternities to emerge strongly again when the Church restored its authority in the west after the upheavals of the French Revolution. Death, judgement, cold hell. When man dreams of this he must tremble It is foolish and improvident to hope [to live] Seeing that we must die. [Inscription on the parish ossuary of La Martyre (1619)]7

7   W.J. Jones, ‘L’inscription bretonne de l’ossuaire de la Martyre’, BSAF 26 (1899): pp. 467–9.

Bibliography of Cited Works Printed Primary Sources Aepinus, Johannes, Liber de Purgatorio, Satisfactionibus, Remissione culpae et poenae etc (London, 1549). Allen, William, Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine, touching Purgatory (Antwerp, 1566). Andel de Lodève, Defense du purgatoire et de l’honneur des ecclésiastiques et des religieux mesprizez et calumnies sans raison par les ministres de la religion pretendue reformée (Tournon, 1638). Anon, L’enfer, le purgatoire et le paradis temporal de la France (Paris, 1649). Anon, Purgatoire des catholiques contre le debordenments des eaux du lac de Genève (1605). Auger, Edmond, Catechisme et sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne avec un formulaire de dievers prières catholiques (Lyon, 1563). Bellarmine, Robert, Petit catéchisme universel. Catéchisme et ample déclaration de la doctrine chrétienne, trans. Robert Crampoz (Lyon, 1604). —, De Arte Bene Moriendi (Rome, 1620). —, L’art de bien vivre pour heureusement mourir (Paris, 1620). Benoist, René, Brief discours touchant le fondement du Purgatoire après cette vie, des Indulgences et Pardons et Satisfaction, troisième part de Penitence (Paris, 1566). Bertou, P. de (ed.), ‘Analyse sommaire des statuts synodaux de l’église de Saint-Brieuc’, RBVO, XXXI (1904): pp. 430–50. Binet, Étienne, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames suffrantes en Purgatoire et des moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu (Rouen, 1635). Biré, Pierre, Alliances Généalogicques de la Maison de Lorraine illustrées des faites et gestes des princes d’icelles (Nantes, 1593). Bonfans, Jean, Le purgatoire de Sainct Patrice (Paris, 1547). Bonnyers, Marc de, L’advocat des ames de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider (Lille, 1640). Boschet, Antoine, Le Parfait Missionaire ou la vie du Reverend Père Julien Maunoir (Paris, 1697). Boüillon, François, Histoire de la vie et du purgatoire de S. Patrice (Paris, 1643).

270

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Brachet de la Milletière, Théophile, Response du sieur de la Milletière à la letter d’un de ses amis sur son ‘Traité de la nécessité de la puissance du pape en l’église ou la doctrine du Purgatoire suivant le concile de Trente (Paris, 1640). Brun, J., Le Purgatoire des chrestiens, par un nourrisson de l’Eglise (1608). Burlat, Hugues, Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare Par lesquels est verifiée l’intercession des saints, la confession auriculaire et le Purgatoire (Paris, 1603). Cajetan, Thomas, De indulgentia plenaria concessa defunctis, quibus et quomodo prosit (1519). Camus, Jean-Pierre, Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire (Paris, 1641). Canisius, Peter, Summa doctrinae Christianae (Vienna, 1555); Catéchisme ou Sommaire de la doctrine, nouvellement compose par demande et par réponses (Antwerp, 1557). Catherine de Gênes, La Vie et les oeuvres spirituelles (Lyon, 1610). Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory and The Spiritual Dialogue, trans. Serge Hughes (London: S.P.C.K., 1979). Caze, J., Discours de la vie et de la mort (Nîmes, 1593). Châteaubourg, Comte de, ‘Testament de feu J. Bouan seigneur de Lorgisière (1603)’, BMSAIV LXIV (1939): pp. 101–25. Clichtove, Josse, De Doctrina moriendi opusculum necessaria ad mortem foeliciter oppetendam preparamenta declarans (Paris, 1538). Coret, Jacques, L’Ange conducteur de la devotion chrétienne (Liège, 1746). Crasset, Jean, La Douce et sainte mort (Paris, 1681). Croix, Alain (ed.), Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec (Rennes: OuestFrance, 1993). Dante, The Divine Comedy. II. Purgatory, trans. D.L. Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). De la Barre, Claude, Resolution à scavoir si l’on doit apprehender et craindre ou bien aymer et souhaiter la mort (Paris, 1628). Denis Le Chartreux, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Brehant-Lodéac, 1484). ‘Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la cathédrale de Nantes’, BSAHNLI 27 (1888): pp. 1–364. Donovan, J. (ed.), The Catechism of the Council of Trent (London, 1854). Drexel, Jeremias, L’avant-coureur de l’éternité (Paris, 1684). Du Bec, Philippe, Exhortation sus le Reglement et Police faictz à Nantes pour l’entretien des paouvres: aux Clergé, Nobles et Bourgeois, habitans de ladicte ville (Paris, 1570). Durand, Charles, Le purgatoire des fidelles deffuncts (Poitiers, 1605). Duval, André, Feu d’helie pour tarir les faux de Siloe, auquel est amplement prouvé le Purgatoire contre le Ministre du Moulin et respond aux raisons et allegations contraires (Paris, 1603).

Bibliography of Cited Works

271

Erasmus, Desiderius, Préparation à la mort, nouvellement composé et publié par le discret docteur Érasme avecques aulcunes prières et pseaulmes de la saincte Escripture, moult prouffictables à tous christiens (1543). —, ‘The Exorcism or Apparition’, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. N. Bailey (2 vols, London, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 391–401. Flavin, Melchior de, De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent estans du corps séparées et des purgatories qu’elles souffrent en ce monde et en l’autre après icelle separation (Toulouse, 1563; Paris, 1579). —, De la preparation à la mort en trois traitez (Paris, 1566; Paris 1578). Gourvil, Francis, ‘Le testament d’un paysan trégorois au XVIIème siècle’, BSAF 95 (1969): pp. 117–136. Granges de Surgères, Anatole, ‘Fondations pieuses à Nantes 1549–1691’, BSAHNLI 24 (1885): pp. 29–69. Honorius of Autun, Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called the Lucydarye (London, 1507). Isbled, Bruno (ed.), Moi, Claude Bordeaux. Journal d’un bourgeois de Rennes au XVIIe siècle (Rennes: Editions Apogée, 1992). Le Menn, Gwenolé, ‘Dialogue avec la mort. Poème en moyen-breton’, Études celtiques XV (1978): pp. 633–645. Le Noir, Philippe, Histoire ecclésiastique de Bretagne depuis la reformation jusqu’à l’édit de Nantes, (ed.) B. Varigaud (Paris and Nantes, 1851). Lobineau, Guy-Alexis, Les vies des saints de Bretagne, (ed.) Abbé Tresvaux (Paris, 1837). Loyola, Ignatius, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Personal Writings, trans. J.A. Munitiz (London: Penguin, 1996). Maunoir, Julien, La Vie du Vénérable Dom Michel Le Nobletz, (ed.) H. Pérennès (Saint-Brieuc: Armand Prud’homme, 1934). Mellinet, Charles, La commune et la milice de Nantes (3 vols, Nantes: Mellinet, 1841). Meung, Jehan de, Les loys des trespasses, avecques le pélerinaige de maistre Jehan de Mung (Brehant-Lodéac, 1484). Moreau, Jean, Histoire de ce qui s’est passé en Bretagne durant les guerres de la ligue et particulièrement dans le diocese de Cornouaille (Brest, 1836). Morice, Pierre-Hyacinthe, Mémoires pour servir des preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne (3 vols, Paris, 1742–46). Morice, Pierre-Hyacinthe and Taillandier, Charles, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne (3 vols, Paris, 1756). Moulin, Pierre du, Eaulx de Siloé pour esteindre le feu de purgatoire et noyer les traditions, les limbes, les satisfactions humaines et les indulgences papales, contre les raisons et allégations d’un cordelier portugais défendues par trois escrits dont l’un est du mesme cordelier, intitulé : ‘le Torrent de feu’, etc. (La Rochelle, 1608).

272

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Nicollière-Teijeiro, Stéphane de la, ‘Les titres de la chapelle Notre-Damede-Bon-Secours à Nantes’, RBV XXI (1867): pp. 460–65. Noë-Mesnard, Jean de la, Catéchisme du diocèse de Nantes (Nantes, 1689). Ochino, Bernadino De purgatorio (Tiguri, 1555). —, Dialogue de M. Bernadin Ochino, Senois, touchant le purgatoire (1559). Palma Cayet, Pierre Victor, Le purgatoire prouvé par la Parole de Dieu (Paris, 1600). —, La fournaise ardente et le four de reverbere, pour évaporer les prétendues eaux de Siloé et pour corroborer le Purgatoire, contre les heresies,erreurs, calomnies, faussetez et cavillations ineptes du pretend minister du Moulin (Saint-Germain lez Paris, 1603). Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, Barthélemy, ‘Les Statuts synodaux d’Alain de la Rue évêque de Saint-Brieuc (1421), BMSAIV 47 (1920): pp. 1–142. Raymond of Capua, Here begynneth the lyf of saint katherin of senis the blessid virgin (Westminster, 1492). St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, (ed.) Halcyon Blackhouse (London: Hodder, 2009). Sainte-Marthe, Claude de, De la piété des chrestiens envers les morts (Paris, 1665). Salo, Alexis de, Le triomphe des ames de purgatoire (Lyon, 1621). Siena, Bernadino da, The chirche of the euyll men and women wherof Lulyfer [sic] is the heed, and the membres is all the players dyssolute and synners reproued (Paris, 1511). Suarès, Jacques, Torrent de feu sortant de la face de Dieu pour desseicher les Eaux de Mara, encloses dans la chaussée du Moulin d’Ablon (Paris, 1603). Taillepied, Noël, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits à scavoir des âmes séparées, fantosmes, prodigies et accidents merveilleux qui precedent quelquefois la mort des grands personages ou signifient changements de la chose publique (Paris, 1588). Tavernius, Joannes, De Pugatorio Animarum post hand vitam expiandarum (Paris, 1551). Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Teresa of Ávila by herself, trans. J.H. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1958). Travers, Nicolas, Histoire civile, politique et réligieuse de la ville de Nantes (written c.1750) (3 vols, Nantes: Forest, 1836–41). Vigor, Simon, Sermons Catholiques pour tous les jours de caresme at feries de Pasques, faits en l’eglise Saint Estienne du Mont a Paris, (ed.) Jean Christi (Paris, 1588). Voragine, Jacques de, La Légende dorée en françois (Lyon, 1497). Waterworth, J. (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London, 1848).

Bibliography of Cited Works

273

Secondary Sources Allmand, Christopher, (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989). Alsop, J.D., ‘Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae’, JEH XL (1989): pp. 19–27. Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death (London: Allen Lane, 1983). Armstrong, Megan, The Politics of Piety. Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). —, ‘Adjusting to Peace: the Observant Franciscans of Paris and the reign of Henri IV’, in A. Forrestal and E. Nelson (eds), Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 42–64. Badone, Ellen, The Appointed Hour (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Barnes, Andrew, ‘Religious Anxiety and Devotional Change in SixteenthCentury French Penitential Confraternities’, SCJ XIX (1988): pp. 389– 405. —, ‘The Transition of Penitent Confraternities over the Ancien Régime’, in John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirkville MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1999), pp. 123–35. Barron, Caroline, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in C. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (eds), The Church in Pre-Reformation Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985), pp. 13–37. Bee, M., ‘La société traditionelle et la mort’, XVIIe siècle, 106–107 (1975): pp. 81–111. Benedict, Philip, ‘The Catholic Response to Protestantism. Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen 1560–1600’, in James Obelkevich (ed.), Religion and the People 800–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 168–90. —, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Bergin, Joseph, ‘Between Estate and Profession: The Catholic Parish Clergy of Early Modern Western Europe’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500 (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 66–85. —, The Making of the French Episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). —, Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1730 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1996).

274

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Bissegger, Arthur, Une paroisse raconte ses morts. L’obituaire de l’église Saint-Paul à Villeneuve (XIVe – XVe siècle) (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 2003). Black, Christopher, ‘Confraternities and the Parish in the Context of the Italian Catholic Reform’, in John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirkville MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1999), pp. 1–26. Bois, Paul (ed.), Histoire de Nantes (Toulouse: Privat, 1977). Bonzon, Anne, L’Esprit de Clocher. Prêtres et paroisses dans le diocèse de Beauvais 1535–1650 (Paris: Cerf, 1999). Booton, Diane E., Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Bossy, John, ‘Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’, SCH 10 (1973): pp. 129–43. —, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, TRHS Fifth Series, 25 (1975): pp. 21–38. —, ‘Holiness and Society’, P&P 75 (1977): pp. 119–37. —, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, P&P 100 (1983): pp. 29–61. —, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). —, ‘Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism’, SCH 23 (1986): pp. 171–89. Bossy, John, ‘Practices of Satisfaction 1215–1700’, SCH 40 (2004): pp. 106–18. Bourdeaut, A., ‘Le culte et les arts à Saint-Nicolas de Nantes avant le concile de Trente’, BSAHNLI, 62 (1922): pp. 101–43. —, ‘Le clergé paroissial dans le diocèse de Nantes avant le concile de Trente. Les infiltrations protestantes’, BSAHNLI XXIV (1940): pp. 90– 99. Brault, Ferdinand, ‘Le couvent des Cordeliers de Nantes, étude historique (1250–1791)’, BSAHNLI, 65 (1925): pp. 165–92. Brigden, Susan, ‘Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-Century London’, P&P 103 (1984): pp. 67–112. Brine, Douglas M., Piety and Purgatory. Wall-mounted Memorials from the Southern Netherlands c.1380–1520 (PhD Thesis, University of London, 2006). Broomhall, Susan, Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Brunet, Serge, La vie, la mort, la foi. Dans les Pyrénées centrales sous l’Ancien Régime: Val d’Aran et diocèse de Commingues (Aspet: Pyrégraph, 2001).

Bibliography of Cited Works

275

Burgess, Clive, ‘By Quick and By Dead. Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, English Historical Review, CII (1987): pp. 837–58. —, ‘An Afterlife in Memory’, SCH 45 (2009): pp. 196–214. Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978). Camporesi, Piero, The Fear of Hell. Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). Carroll, Stuart, ‘The Compromise of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine’, JEH, 54 (2003): pp. 469–83. Casey, John, Afterlives. A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Oxford University Press, 2009). Cassan, Michel, ‘Laics, Ligue et réforme catholique à Limoges’, Histoire Économie et Société 10 (1991): pp. 159–75. Castel, Yves-Pascal, Lampaul-Guimilau (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1979). Catta, Étienne, ‘Les évêques de Nantes des débuts du XVIème siècle aux lendemains du concile de Trente et aux origins de la “Renaissance catholique”’, RHEF 51 (1965): pp. 23–70. Charles, Olivier, Chanoines de Bretagne: carriers et cultures d’une élite cléricale au siècle des Lumières (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004). Chartier, Roger, ‘Les Arts de Mourir 1450–1600’, AESC 31 (1976): pp. 51–76. Châtellier, Louis, The Religion of the Poor. Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism c.1500 – c.1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Chaunu, Pierre, ‘Mourir à Paris (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles), AESC 31 (1976): pp. 29–50. —, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978). Chédozeau, Bernard, Choeur clos, choeur ouvert: de l’église medievale à l’église tridentine: France XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1998). Chevalier, Bernard, Les Bonnes Villes de France du XIVème au XVIème siècle (Paris: Aubier-Montagne, 1982). Chiffoleau, Jacques, La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (c.1320–c.1480) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980). Christian Jnr, William A., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Cohn, Samuel K., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800. Strategies for the afterlife (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1988). Coster, Will and Spicer, Andrew (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

276

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Courouau, Jean-François, ‘L’imprimé religieux en langue bretonne’, ABPO 115 (2008): pp. 57–79. Croix, Alain, Nantes et le pays nantais au XVIème siècle: étude démographique (Paris: SEVPEN, 1974). —, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: la vie, la mort, la foi (2 vols, Paris: Maloine, 1981). —, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675 (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1993). Croix, Alain and Fanch, Roudaut, Les Bretons, la mort et Dieu de 1600 à nos jours (Paris: Messidor, 1984). Crouzet, Denis, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (c.1525–c.1610) (2 vols, Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990). Davis, Natalie Z., ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 65–96. Delumeau, Jean, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1977). —, Une Histoire du paradis (Paris: Fayard, 1992) revised as Á la recherche du paradis (Paris: Fayard, 2010). Desmette, Philippe, Les brefs d’indulgences pour les confréries des diocèses de Cambrai et de Tournai aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: A.S.V. Sec. Brev. Indulg. Perpetuae, 2–9 (Brussels: Institut historique Belge de Rome, 2002). Devailly, Guy (ed.), Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne (Chambray-lèsTours: CLD, 1980). Diefendorf, Barbara, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). —, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Counter Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Dolan, Claire, Entre tours et clochers: les gens d’église à Aix-en-Provence au XVIème siècle (Sherbrooke: Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 1981). Dompnier, Bernard, ‘Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des quarante-heures’, RHEF lxvii (1981): pp. 5–31. Duffy, Eamon, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Dugast-Matifeux, Charles, Nantes ancien et le pays nantais (Nantes: A.-L. Morel, 1879). Durand, Yves (ed.), Le diocèse de Nantes (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985). —, Un couvent dans la ville. Grands Carmes de Nantes (Rome: Edizioni carmelitane, 1997). Durville, Georges, Études sur le vieux Nantes, d’après les documents originaux (2 vols, Nantes: A Dugas, 1904).

Bibliography of Cited Works

277

—, Le Chapitre de l’Église de Nantes. Aperçu sur son histoire du VIIème siècle au Concordat (Nantes: A. Dugas, 1907). —, L’ancienne confrérie de Saint-Sacrement à Nantes (Nantes: Biroché et Dautais, 1909). Eire, Carlos, From Madrid to Purgatory. The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). —, ‘The Good Side of Hell: Infernal Meditations in Early Modern Spain’, Historical Reflections, 26 (2000): pp. 285–310. —, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Elwood, Christopher, The Body Broken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). L’Encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au concile de Trente (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1985). Fenn, Richard K., The Persistence of Purgatory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Flynn, Maureen, ‘Baroque Piety and Spanish Confraternities’, in John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirkville MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1999): pp. 233–45. Foot, Sarah, ‘Anglo-Saxon Purgatory’, SCH 45 (2009): pp. 87–96. Forster, Marc, The Counter Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Fournié, Michelle, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (c.1320–c.1520) (Paris: Cerf, 1997). Froeschlé-Chopard, Marie-Hélène, ‘La devotion du rosaire à travers quelques livres de piété’, Histoire Economie et Société, 10 (1991): pp. 299–316. Gal, Stéphane, Grenoble au temps de la Ligue. Étude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité (vers 1562–vers 1598) (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2000). Galpern, A.N., The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Gautier, Étienne and Henry, Louis, La population de Crulai, paroisse normande. Étude historique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). Geisey, Ralph, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: E. Droz, 1960). Gentilcore, David, From Bishop to Witch. The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

278

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Ghenassia, Jacqueline, ‘Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: la visite d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–1698)’, RHEF 57 (1971): 83–95. Giles, Kate, ‘Seeing and Believing. Visuality and Space in Pre-Modern England’, World Archaeology 39 (2007): pp. 105–121. Giquello, Pierre, ‘La confrérie de la Véronique de Nantes’, RBV 33 (1889): pp. 245–63. Giraud-Mangin, Marcel, ‘La bibliothèque de l’archidiacre Le Gallo au XVIème siècle’, BSAHNLI lxxvi (1937): pp. 105–20. Gordon, Bruce and Marshall, Peter (eds), The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Goubert, Pierre, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730. Contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1960). Goujard, Philippe, Un catholicisme bien tempéré. La vie religieuse dans les paroisses rurales de Normandie (Paris: Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1997). Gould, Kevin, Catholic Activism in South West France 1540–1570 (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2006). Grégoire, Louis, La Ligue en Bretagne (Paris: J.-B. Dumoulin, 1856). Griffith, Paul J., ‘Purgatory’ in Jerry L. Walls (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008,): pp. 427–40. Grosse-Duperon, Albert, Les chapellenies de Mayenne avant la Revolution (1420–1789) (Mayenne: Poirier Frères, 1904). Guillouet, Jean-Marie, ‘Un témoin des dévotions nantais a la fin du Moyen Age’, BSAHN 133 (1998): pp. 83–95. Guyot, Charles, ‘La communauté des enfants-prêtres et l’inventaire des fondations de la paroisse de Mirecourt (Lorraine)’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie de Lorraine, XLII (1892): pp. 154–203. Halkin, Léon E., ‘La place des indulgences dans la pensée religieuse d’Erasme’, BSHPF 129 (1983): pp. 143–54. Harding, Robert, ‘Revolution and Reform in the Holy League: Angers, Rennes and Nantes’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981): pp. 379– 416. Harding, Vanessa, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500– 1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hayden, J., Michael and Greenshields, Malcolm, R., ‘The Clergy of Seventeenth-Century France: Self-Perception and Society’s Perception’, FHS 18 (1993): pp. 145–72. —, ‘Religion et société dans la France moderne. Les Réformations catholiques en France: le témoignage des statuts synodaux’, RHMC 48, (2001): pp. 5–29.

Bibliography of Cited Works

279

Heal, Felicity, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Higman, Francis, ‘Theology in French. Religious Pamphlets from the Counter-Reformation’, in Andrew Pettergree (ed.), The Reformation. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies IV. The Counter Reformation (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 69–75. Hoffman, Philip T., Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500– 1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Hsia, R.P., ‘Civic Wills as Sources for the Study of Piety in Münster, 1530– 1618’, SCJ, XIV (1983): pp. 321–48. —, The World of Catholic Renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). — (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity vol 6, Reform and Expansion 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jackson-Lualdi, Katharine,‘Obéir aux commandements de Dieu et de l’Église: culte paroissiale et contre-réforme gallicane’, RHEF LXXXIV (1998): pp. 5–20. Jamet, Catherine, ‘Les confréries de dévotion dans le diocèse de Rennes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, AB 87 (1980): pp. 481–91. Jarnoux, A., Le diocèse de Nantes au XVIème siècle 1500–1600. Étude historique (Quimper: Imprimerie cornouaillaise, 1976). —, Les Anciennes paroisses de Nantes (2 vols, Nantes: A. Jarnoux, 1981). Jeulin, Paul, ‘Aperçus sur la Contractaction de Nantes 1530 environ – 1733’, AB 40 (1932–33): pp. 284–331, 457–505. Johnson, Trevor, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: the Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Jones, W.J., ‘L’inscription bretonne de l’ossuaire de la Martyre’, BSAF 26 (1899): pp. 467–9. Kerhervé, Jean (ed.), Histoire de Quimper (Toulouse: Privat, 1994). Koslofsky, Craig, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Krieder, Alan, English Chantries. The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Kümin, Beat, The Shaping of a Community. The Rise and Reform of the English Parish 1400–1650 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Lapeyre, Henri, Une famille des marchands: les Ruiz (Paris: Bordeaux, 1955). Laven, Mary, ‘Encountering the Counter Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): pp. 706–20. Lea, Henry Charles, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (3 vols, Philadelphia: Lea Bros, 1896). Le Braz, Anatole, La légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Paris: H. Champion, 1893).

280

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Lebrun, François, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques (Paris: Mouton, 1971). Leclerc, Guy, Pleyben. Son enclos et ses chapelles, (Paris: J.P. Gisserot, 1996). Le Goff, Jacques, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Le Goff, Jacques and Remond, René, Histoire de la France religieuse, vol II, Du christianisme flamboyante à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Seuil, 1988). Le Goffic, Michel, Provost, Georges and Thérin, Henri, Trois enclos de l’Arrée: Sizun, Commana, Locmélar (Quimper et Léon: Association diocésaine de Quimper et Léon, 2005). Leguay, Jean-Pierre (ed.), Histoire de Vannes et de sa région (Toulouse: Privat, 1988). Lemaître, Nicole, ‘L’éducation de la foi dans les paroisses du XVIeme siècle’, in L’Encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au concile de Trente (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1985), pp. 429–40. —, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–1563 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1988). —, Histoire des curés (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Le Mené, J.-M., Histoire archéologique, féodale et religieuse des paroisses du diocèse de Vannes (2 vols, Vannes: Galles, 1891). Leprohon, Roger, Vie et mort des Bretons sous Louis XIV (Brasparts: Bibliophiles de Bretagne, 1984). Loach, Judi, ‘The consecration of the Civic Realm’, in Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (eds), Defining the Holy. Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 277–300. Luria, Keith, Territories of Grace. Cultural Change in the SeventeenthCentury Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). McGrath, Alister, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). McManners, John, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). Maitre, Léon, Les confréries bretonnes au moyen age (Nantes: Forest & Grimaud, 1876). Marle, Catherine, ‘Le salut par les messes: les valenciennois devant la mort à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, Revue du Nord, 79 (1997): pp. 45–67. Marshall, Peter, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). —, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Matz, J.M., ‘Chapellenies et chapelains dans le diocèse d’Angers (1350– 1550): éléments d’enquète’, RHEF, 91 (1996): pp. 371–97.

Bibliography of Cited Works

281

Mayeur, Jean-Marie, Pietri, Charles, Vauchez, André and Venard, Marc, Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours (Paris: Declée/ Fayard, 1990). Merdrignac, Bernard, ‘L’apport des sources hagiographiques à l’histoire de la Bretagne médiévale’, in Noël-Yves Tonnerre (ed.), Chroniqueurs et historiens de la Bretagne du Moyen Age au milieu du XXe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001), pp. 21–34. Mérimée, Prosper, Notes d’un voyage dans l’Ouest de la France (Paris: Fournier, 1836). Michard, Louis and Couton, Georges, ‘Les livres d’états des âmes: une source à collecter et exploiter’, RHEF 67 (1981): pp. 261–77. Minois, Georges, La Bretagne des prêtres: le Trégor d’Ancien Régime (Brasparts: Beltan, 1987). —, Les religieux de Bretagne sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes: OuestFrance, 1989). —, Histoire de l’enfer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). Mitchell, Allan, ‘Philippe Ariès and the French Way of Death’, FHS 10 (1978): pp. 684–95. Mousnier, Roland, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy 1598–1789 (2 vols, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Musgrave, Elizabeth, The Building Industries of Eastern Brittany (DPhil., University of Oxford, 1988). Nalle, Sara T., God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). Nelson, Eric, ‘The Parish in its Landscape: Pilgrimage Processions in the Archdeaconry of Blois, 1500–1700’, FH 24 (2010): pp. 318–40. Nicholls, David, ‘The Nature of Popular Heresy in France’, Historical Journal 26 (1983): pp. 261–75. —, ‘Looking for the Origins of the French Reformation’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989): pp. 131–44. Parsons, Jotham, ‘Governing Sixteenth-Century France: The Monetary Reforms of 1577’, FHS 26 (2003): pp. 1–30. Pettegree, Andrew, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book Project’, in Andrew Pettegree, Andrew, Nelles, Paul and Connor, Philip (eds), The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 1–17. — (ed.), The Reformation. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies IV. The Counter Reformation (London: Routledge, 2004). —, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Pettegree, Andrew, Nelles, Paul and Connor, Philip (eds), The SixteenthCentury Religious Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

282

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Pettegree, Andrew, Walsby, Malcolm and Wilkinson, Alexander (eds), French Vernacular Books. Books published in the French Language before 1601 (2 vols, Leiden: Brill, 2007). Peyrous, Bernard, La réforme catholique à Bordeaux 1600–1719 (2 vols, Bordeaux: Fédération historique du Sud-Ouest, 1995). Pfister, Ulrich, ‘Croyance et éspace dans le contexte alpin: les Grisons, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, RHMC 52 (2005): pp. 49–63. Pied, Edouard, Les anciens corps d’arts et métiers de Nantes (3 vols, Nantes: 1903). Pocquet de la Haut Jussé, Barthélemy, Histoire de Bretagne, tome V (1515– 1715) (Rennes: J. Plion and L. Hommay, 1913; reprinted Mayenne: Joseph Floch, 1975). —, ‘Les évêques de Bretagne dans la renaissance religieuse du 17e siècle’, AB 54(1947): pp. 30–59. Racaut, Luc, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). —, ‘Education of the Laity and Advocacy of Violence in Print during the French Wars of Religion’, History 95 (2010): pp. 159–76. Rapp, Francis, ‘La paroisse et l’encadrement religieux des fidèles du XIVe au XVIe siècles’, in L’Encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au Concile de Trente (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1985), pp. 27–43. —, ‘Les campagnes d’indulgences dans le diocese de Strasbourg a la fin du moyen age’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 83 (2003): pp. 71–88. Reinburg, Virginia, ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France’, SCJ, 23 (1992): pp. 526–47. —, ‘Books of Hours’, in Andrew Pettegree, Paul Nelles and Philip Connor (eds), The Sixteenth-Century Religious Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 68–82. Reinis, Austra, Reforming the Art of Dying. The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Restif, Bruno, La Révolution des paroisses: culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006). Roche, Daniel, ‘La mémoire de la mort. Recherche sur la place des arts de mourir dans la librairie et la lecture en France aux 17e et 18e siècles’, AESC, 31 (1976): pp. 76–119. Roffy, Simon, ‘Deconstructing a Symbolic World: The Reformation and the English Medieval Chantry’, in Gaimster, David and Gilchrist, Roberta (eds), The Archaeology of Reformation (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 341–55.

Bibliography of Cited Works

283

—, Chantry Chapels and Medieval Strategies for the Afterlife (Stroud: Tempus, 2008). Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Salmon, J.H.M., Society in Crisis. France in the Sixteenth Century (London: Benn, 1975). Saupin, Guy, Nantes au temps de l’Édit (La Crèche: Geste, 1998). Schorn-Schütte, Louise ‘The New Clergies’ in R.P. Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity vol 6, Reform and Expansion 1500– 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 444–64. Sherlock, Peter, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) Sibold, Marcel, ‘La vie religieuse d’une petite ville bretonne au XVIIe siècle’, RHEF LXIX (1983): pp. 233–57. Stegman, André, ‘Transformations administratives et opinion publique en France (1560–1580)’, Francia, 9 (1980): pp. 594–612. Stocker, Christopher W., ‘The Confraternity of the Holy Name of Jesus. Conflict and Renewal in the Sainte Union in 1590’, in John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirkville MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1999), pp. 155–61. Strocchia, Sharon T., Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). Swanson, Robert (ed.), Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits. Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2006). —, Indulgences in Late Medieval England. Passports to Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). —, ‘Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages’, SCH 45 (2009): pp. 143–73. Tapié, Victor, Retables baroques de Bretagne et spiritualité du XVIIe siècle. Étude sémiographique et religieuse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). Taylor, Larissa, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). —, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris: François Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Terpstra, Nicholas, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Tingle, Elizabeth, ‘The Catholic Reformation and the Parish: The Church of Saint-Thégonnec (Finistère) 1580–1680’, in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (eds), The Archaeology of Reformation (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 44–57.

284

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

—, ‘The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir. The ReChristianising of the Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 237–58. —, Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion, 1558–1598 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Vailhen, Jacques, Le Conseil des bourgeois de Nantes (Thèse du Doctorat, University of Rennes, 1965). Venard, Marc, Le catholicism à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIème siècle (Paris: Le Cerf, 2000). Viaux, Dominique, ‘L’Economie du salut dans les textes des fondations de messes aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Essai théologique’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Religions 72 (1992): pp. 151–63. Viguerie, Jean de, ‘Les fondations et la foi du peuple chrétien. Les fondations des messes en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, RH 520 (1976): pp. 289–320. Vovelle, Michel, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses de testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973). —, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). —, Les âmes du purgatoire ou le travail du deuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Walls, Jerry L. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Walsham, Alexandra, “‘Domme Preachers?” Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, P&P 168 (2000): pp. 72–123.

Index abbeys 22 absenteeism 19, 20, 36, 37, 222, 225, 237, 245, 248, 249 Acarie, Barbe 121 actions 43, 64, 70, 71, 85, 200, 214, 216, 240 public 116, 117 see also activism; good works activism 24, 30, 31, 44, 46, 115, 127 administration 15, 17, 18, 234, 249 Aepinus, J. 61 afterlife 49, 51, 52, 55, 65, 69, 123, 213 attitudes to 2, 93ff., 83–4, 176, 190, 201, 264ff. studies of 3, 6–7 Western Breton 87–8 descriptions of 68 and foundation documents 132–3 historiography 49–51 literature on 54–7 pedagogy of 178–9 Agonisants 201, 206, 207–8, 215 Aix-en-Provence 92, 110, 115–16 All Saints 148 All Souls 56, 148, 179, 193 Allaire 164, 253, 258 Allen, Cardinal William 221 almsgiving 30, 34, 55, 58, 67, 78, 82, 86, 117, 124, 212, 214 confraternities 186 monastic 139 Alsop, J.D. 132 altars 29, 71, 155, 156, 162, 174, 180, 187, 207 chapels 153, 163 and indulgences 210, 213, 214ff. specific masses 148–9 Ambon 139, 177, 180 Amfrye, Guillaume 84 Anaon 5, 87 Angers 94, 106, 110, 113, 114, 115n., 225, 239, 244

Anjou 2, 91, 97, 125, 170 Ankou 5, 179 Annales school 2, 49 Anne, St 147, 148, 149, 150, 203 anniversary masses 84, 94, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 120, 147, 148, 164, 165, 166, 205, 206, 215, 226, 250, 255, 256, 258, 259, 263 annual masses 90, 91, 106, 143, 144, 147, 148, 152 anthems 256 Anthony, St 26, 27, 31, 148, 194, 206, 256 anti-clericalism 20, 36–7, 38 Aquinas 57 arch-confraternities 204, 216 arches 32, 184, 185 archdeacons 17, 20 Argoat 10 Argol 32 Ariès, Philippe 3, 53 aristocracy 17, 25, 34, 156–7, 163, 228 chapels 156 see also elites; nobility Armor 10 Armstrong, Megan 112, 121, 195–6 Arradon 205 Ars Moriendi 54–5, 56, 57, 62, 69, 70, 113, 123 artisans 32, 34, 96, 97, 101, 231 confraternities 185, 189, 190, 194, 202, 203 Arzal 182 asceticism 124, 200 associations 115, 130, 186, 188, 189ff., 194, 199, 200, 219, 235, 242, 241–7 see also parish associations atonement 63, 72 Audierne 23 Auger, Edmond 66

286

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

augmentation 138ff., 146, 163, 174, 180 Augustine, St 22, 52, 102 Auray 148 Aurélien, St Paul 11, 148, 151 austerity 83, 115, 116, 263 authority 6, 41, 46, 122, 199, 209, 214 Autun 56 auxiliary clergy 248 Avignon 7 Avril, Jean 251, 259 Badone, Ellen 5, 13 baptisms 16, 31, 67, 212, 248 Barbe, Gillet 133 barber-surgeons 202 Barbe-Torte, duke Alain 25 Barbier, Hamon 95, 145 Barbier family 95 Barnes, A.E. 41, 117 baroque 3, 8 Barre, Claude de la 79, 213 Bayle, Pierre 84 Beauvais 2, 45 Bégard 22 behaviour 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 43, 54, 58, 86, 239ff. of lesser clergy 222, 239–49, 259 beliefs 3, 4, 6, 9, 35, 49, 86, 92, 93ff., 113–14, 188, 199 changes 265–7 popular 177, 265 social groups 265 bell-ringing 179, 192, 206 Bellarmine, Robert 18, 67, 77 Belle-Isle 144, 206, 259 Belz 183 Benedictines 21–2, 23 benefices 126, 222, 226, 230, 236ff., 245 choral 249, 250 finances 249, 252, 253 Benoist, René 63, 64, 212 bequests 181–2, 215, 231, 236 and clerical behaviour 241 by lesser clergy 258–9 see also foundations; gifts

Bergin, Joseph 223, 234 Bible 52, 60, 61, 62, 72, 73 Bignon 238 Billio 215 Binet, archdeacon Antoine 21, 95, 180 Binet, Étienne 76–7, 79, 80, 81, 82 Binski, Paul 4, 153 Bintin, Pierre 37 bishops 13, 15–16, 17, 18, 24, 31, 122, 234, 235 and indulgences 209, 210, 214, 217 reform of 37 Bissinger, Arthur 89 Blain 216 Blandin, Ollive 1 blessed bread 28, 34 Bodellio 182 body 3, 6, 53, 72, 75, 92, 125, 194 changing attitudes to 264 Bois, Paul 123 Boissieu, Frélat de 18 Boltanski, A. 163 Bonfans, Jean 57 Bonnyers, Marc de 78, 81, 82, 206, 215 books 21, 40, 42, 51, 54, 56, 57, 74, 212, 213, 232, 233, 235 see also literature booksellers 42, 45, 56, 267 Bordeaux 234 Borromeo, Carlo 143, 148, 234 Boschet 183 Boschet, Antoine 11, 43 Bossuet, J.-B. 83 Bossy, John 2–3, 115, 121, 129, 137, 188 Bouan, Jehan 157 Bouffay 121, 163 Bouillon, François 58, 82 Bourg-Paul-Muzillac 259 Bourg La Chapelle 164 bourgeois 23, 35, 37, 39, 97, 100, 101, 181, 186, 189, 190, 231 Brachet de la Milletière, T. 83 Brasparts 46, 179 Brélevenez 207 Breton foundation documents 132–3 Breton language 10, 44

Index

Breton parlement 42 breviary 233, 235 Briçonnet, bishop Denis 16 Briçonnet, bishop Guillaume 16, 26, 36, 239 Bridieu, Roger de (1687–96) 45 Brittany change in 2ff., 35–46, 263ff. Church 17 colleges 244, 245–7 confraternities 188–9ff., 196–7, 201ff., 216–17 continuities 267 economic crisis 170–71, 263 eucharist 117–18 foundations 94–5ff., 105, 132–3ff. decline of 113ff. purpose of 146 historiography 2–3, 5–6, 7–8, 10 indulgences 210–12, 214ff. and lesser clergy 224, 229–30ff. communities of 244–5 new devotions 142–4 and outside influences 8–9, 15 parishes 177–8 particularity of 6, 9, 46–7 pluralism in 238–9 private chapels 154–7ff., 183 regional differences 10, 47, 87–8, 105, 267 religious culture 11–15, 24–34, 39 saints’ cults 146–7, 148, 152 Celtic 151 Bruneau, Alain 257–8 Brunet, S. 7 Burgess, Clive 86, 95 burials 4, 5, 46, 64, 155, 158–60 changing attitudes to 264 parish 177–8 place of 125 and sacred space 184 see also funerary rituals Burlat, Hughes 73, 74, 75 Cajetan, cardinal 59 Callier, Jean 134 Calvariennes 24

287

calvaries 32, 57, 179, 184, 185 Calvin, Jean 60, 66, 249 Camporesi, Pietro 6, 70, 84 Camus, Jean-Pierre 77, 78, 213, 214 candles 180 Canisius, Peter 66 canons 15, 19, 221, 224, 225, 235, 242, 245, 246 canticles 44, 140, 141 Capuchins 23, 24, 44, 45, 112, 122 careers, clerical 222, 225, 232, 235, 239, 258, 260 Carentoir 183, 190, 198, 237, 258 Carhaix 10, 15, 103, 105, 119, 136, 159, 246, 247, 267 Carmelites 22, 23, 24, 32, 43, 75, 96, 112, 113, 122, 126, 133, 149, 215 Carnac 94, 230 Carthusians 25 Casey, John 6, 50n. cash 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 172, 193, 254, 258 Cassan, Michel 121 catechisms 42, 44, 66, 70, 78, 178, 223, 235, 240, 248 and indulgences 213 and Purgatory 50, 65, 66, 78 Breton 79 cathedrals 15, 20, 110, 221, 224, 225, 227, 249 colleges of priests 245 Catherine of Genoa 56, 74, 82 Catherine of Siena 27, 56, 147, 148 Catholic Church 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11–12, 24, 45, 47, 71, 85, 119, 120, 188, 214, 247 and confraternities 19–5, 199 fiscal crisis 10, 126, 263 and Purgatory 7, 49, 52, 53, 61, 64, 69, 7–6, 87 see also Catholic reform Catholic League 41, 6–7, 118ff., 136, 140, 154, 171, 195 Catholic reform 5, 8, 1–15, 1–18, 24, 28, 29, 3–31, 36, 39ff., 92, 121, 164

288

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and chapels 154 and clergy 222, 223, 239, 240, 24–3ff. and confraternities 33, 19–5, 199 and eucharist 29, 150 and good works 3–31 lay demand for 37, 4–41 and parish life 17–7, 248 and Purgatory 5–60ff., 66, 8–3, 266 and religious wars 3–40, 41, 115 and spiritual values 42 see also Tridentine reforms Cayet, Pierre V.C. 7–3, 74, 75, 76, 212 celibacy 240, 242 Celtic culture 5, 6, 11, 21, 22, 2–7, 46, 151 cemeteries 5, 16, 178, 183, 264 cemetery walls 32, 183 centre-periphery relations 6 ceremonies 43, 205 Champagne 130, 194 Champeaux 158 chancels 26, 28, 29, 32, 46, 155, 156, 159, 173, 178 change 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 3–46, 47, 8–4, 127, 129, 174, 176, 219, 256, 26–4, 267, 268 in clerical behaviour 242ff. and confraternities 200 and foundations 100, 103ff., 11–16, 123 chantries 31, 9–6, 101, 120, 121, 152, 163, 226, 231, 235, 249 benefices 225, 23–8, 251, 255 costs of 164 decline of 229, 263 temporary 91 see also chaplains; private chapels chapels 19, 25, 36, 152, 153ff., 186, 187, 248 cage 153 see also chaplains; private chapels chaplains 19, 101, 172, 221, 22–5ff., 231, 246, 267 appointment of 23–8 careers 225 choral 250

colleges of 246 incomes of 238, 249ff., 25–5 and multiple benefices 25–2 and parish discipline 248 piety of 25–8 and pluralism 23–9 types of 225 chapters, cathedral 95, 105, 112, 141, 156, 159, 166, 212, 245, 246 Charette, Jean 156, 160 Charette family 160, 161 charity 16, 30, 32, 37, 42, 64, 70, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 174, 211, 214 and confraternities 185, 187, 189, 19–3ff., 205 and decline of intercession 11–17 founders and 145 see also almsgiving; good works Chartier, Roger 50, 55, 69 Châteaubriant 23, 122, 158, 180 Chaunu, Pierre 3–4, 8, 49, 52, 53, 58, 69, 70, 90, 9–2, 124, 132, 200, 266 Chevalier, Bernard 35 Chiffoleau, Jacques 7, 52, 89, 97, 186, 187, 188 children 16, 18, 31, 51, 70, 78, 248 choir boys 22–8, 232, 246 choir priests 19, 20, 221, 224, 227, 231, 248, 251, 252 income of 25–4 piety of 258, 259 choir schools 232 choristers 20, 91, 134, 156, 190, 232, 246, 249ff., 253 Christ 1, 14, 28, 37, 51, 53, 58, 60, 62, 64, 67, 72, 73, 78, 80, 137, 138, 209 confraternities of 204 cults of 147, 149 and dying 54 imitation of 30, 124 Christi, Jean 20, 40 Christian, William 36, 131 churches 5, 7, 8, 15, 18, 46, 53, 57, 95, 246

Index

and confraternities 33 financial problems 10, 263 gifts to 14–5 see also cathedrals; collegiate churches; parish churches churchwardens 20, 33, 244, 248 churchyards 87, 178, 179, 183, 184, 185, 192, 219 Cicstercians 22 cities 34 see also towns Claude, St 256, 257 Cléder 215 Cléguenec. David de 11–13 Cléguer 112, 113, 132, 138, 182, 183, 215, 245 Cléguerec 95, 248 clergy 1–24, 18, 41, 45, 52, 57, 79, 85, 122, 267 and confraternities 195, 199, 20–2 education of 14, 20, 21, 51, 23–5, 239 elites see clerical elites and foundations 97, 110 immorality of 13, 16, 21, 239, 240ff. local 225, 226 numbers of 19, 21, 229, 231, 255, 268 parish 177 professional 223, 233 and Purgatory 64, 65, 69 reform of 239, 240, 24–3 regular 2–4, 225, 229, 242, 243, 245, 251 renewal of 14, 21, 37, 40, 46 residence of 1–20, 37, 223 secular 1–21, 33, 110, 229, 240 see also bishops; canons; chaplains; choir priests; deacons; lesser clergy; parish priests; recteurs; sacristans; vicars general clerical elites 60, 86, 194, 238, 258 clerical titles 230 clericalism 41, 122, 127 Clichtove, Josse 5–9, 70 Clisson 19, 21, 95, 229 closes, parish 32, 18–4

289

coats of arms 157, 15–9, 162 Coesmes 205 Cohn, Samuel 4 Colin, Louis 102 collecting boxes 180, 219 collective intercession see intercession collective piety 3, 4, 31, 32, 35, 177, 204 collective prayer 92, 185, 193 collective rituals 46, 71, 116, 127, 188 colleges 42, 43, 224, 233, 244, 24–7, 249 collegiate churches 15, 34, 110, 112, 221, 227 altar masses 149 endowments 167 priests 224, 225 colleges of 244, 245 communities of 244 private chapels in 155, 163 commemoration 4, 5, 7, 162ff. commerce 115, 170, 214, 224 communion 214 cults 149, 150 communities of priests 24–5 community 24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 41, 116, 117, 145, 173, 174, 187, 205, 225, 26 and change 12–30 and chaplains 238 and elites 130, 131, 175 and perpetual masses 13–7, 138, 146 and private chapels 153, 16–3 concubinage 240 confession 31, 42, 150, 209, 214, 248 confessionalisation 47 confessionals 32, 46, 46 conflict 5, 8, 28, 34 see also religious wars confraternities 8, 23, 28, 3–4, 45, 155, 17–6, 18–208, 219, 263, 265, 268 artisans’ 185, 189, 190, 194, 202, 203 and charity 185, 187, 189, 19–3, 194ff., 205

290

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

and clergy 195, 199 costs 187, 193, 208ff. and the dead 20–7 decline of 34, 130, 194 definition of 185 devotional 33, 186, 188, 190, 195ff., 19–200, 204, 205 and the dying 20–8 failed 20–3 fees 191, 20–5 functions 18–8, 197, 201, 205ff. and indulgences 21–11, 21–17, 219 intercessionary18–8, 19–4, 198, 200, 201, 206 of lesser clergy 241ff. membership 186, 193, 197, 202, 204, 219 and parishes 186, 199, 20–2ff. and Purgatory 187, 188, 191ff. and reform 33, 41 renewal of 195ff., 199, 200, 266 and women donors 97 Confraternities of the Departed (Trépassés) 113, 145, 184, 190, 191, 19–3, 198, 201, 20–8, 255, 258 Confraternity of Notre-Dame-desCarmes 32, 189, 202, 211, 212 congregation 28, 155, 161, 174, 185, 206, 238, 243 Congregation of St Maur 23 conscience 42, 45, 74, 123, 150, 195, 223, 234 consumption, conspicuous 135, 173, 265 contemplation 14, 23, 43, 150 continuities 9, 2–34, 3–6, 46, 47, 208, 219, 267, 268 contracts 88, 132, 157, 159, 167, 232 convents 22, 23, 24, 25, 97, 112 burials 178 and foundations 108, 122 private chapels in 155, 156 Cordeliers’ church, Nantes 135n., 152, 161n. Corentin, St 11, 152, 190 Coret, J. 71

Cornouaille 10, 19, 44 see also Quimper-Cornouaille Cornwall 11 corporal discipline 81 Corpus Christi feast 47, 180 processions 38, 118, 141 costs 112, 144, 145, 16–73, 180, 218, 255 and confraternities 187, 193, 20–5 of priesthood 230 see also finances; incomes Coue, societies of 256, 257 Coulon 203 Council of Trent 17, 20, 41, 117, 194, 223, 230, 233 and indulgences 212 and Purgatory 50, 61, 65, 67 Counter Reformation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 24, 40, 66, 69ff., 87, 121, 129, 148, 154, 260 and dialectic 10 and new confraternities 19–200 and priests 222, 224, 229, 233, 24–3, 247 revisionist view of 14 courts 95 Crac’h 238 crafts 101, 186, 187, 188, 189, 194, 196, 197, 200ff., 207, 219 Crasset, P. 71 Crispin, St 32, 190, 191 Crispinian, St 190, 191 Croix, Alain 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 26, 86, 87, 90, 92, 112, 122, 125, 160, 178, 267 Croix, A. and Roudaut, F. 5–6 Croix, Etienne de la 236 Croix, Jacques de la 119, 134, 138 crosses 25, 44 Crouzet, Denis 14, 66 Cruguel 215 Cuenca 130 cults 141, 14–7ff., 256 Christological 147, 19 eucharistic 14–50 Marial 150 saints’ 146, 14–8, 15–2

Index

culture 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 27, 39, 132, 241, 268 differences 10 curates 225, 227, 231, 233, 234, 247 curé see curates; parish priests currency crisis 171 d’Acigné, Louis (153–42) 17 damnation 7, 54 dancing 16, 21, 43 d’Andelot, François 38 Dante’s Purgatorio 55, 57 d’Argouges, François 45 Daughters of Charity 23 Davies, Natalie 34 De Profundis 80, 81, 143, 145, 180, 192 deacons 225, 231, 234 dead, the 9, 6–6, 180, 209 attitudes to 1–2ff., 4, 5, 52 collectivity of 5 and confraternities 20–7 cult of 5 prayers for 52, 54, 60 relationship to 52, 58 suffrages for 73 death 51, 83, 213 attitudes to 3, 5, 52, 55, 83, 201, 264 handbooks on 54 historiography 2–6 rituals 4 individualisation of 53 debt 51, 73 ‘de-Christianisation’ 45, 84 decoration 162, 17–9 funerary 184 Delumeau, Jean 6, 13 demography 2, 3, 5 demons 58, 77 denunciations 241 Denys, René 135, 144 despair 61, 68, 83 d’Espinose family 161 d’Este, Hypolyte 17 destitution 125 Devailly, Guy 13, 44

291

devils 57 dévôt movements 43, 121, 154 devotional works 21, 44, 5–5ff., 60, 70, 83, 210 devotions 8, 28, 29, 46, 57, 120, 255ff. and confraternities 33, 188, 196, 197, 19–200, 204, 205 decline of 11–16 new 139ff., 14–50, 156, 200, 203, 259 Diefendorf, Barbara 14, 41, 116, 121, 124, 177 Dinan 22 diocesan statutes 235, 239 discipline 30, 37, 196, 214, 223, 234, 242, 243, 247 interior 121, 129 divine service, increase of 138ff., 146ff., 163, 174 documents 96, 105, 132, 230 see also foundation documents doctrine 13, 40, 42, 5–2, 57, 62, 6–6, 67, 195, 249, 266 Dol 10, 15, 21, 158, 234 Dolan, Claire 92 Dominicans 22, 85, 110, 118, 120, 136, 149, 199, 201, 202, 215, 216 donations 20, 25, 26, 31, 54, 161, 221 reasons for 13–4ff. see also foundations donors 9–8, 121, 181 motives of 113, 129, 131, 13–7 see also founders Doualas 22 Dourdain 157 dress 196, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243 Drexel, J. 71 drunkenness 21, 239, 240, 243 du Bec, bishop Philippe 17, 29, 40, 117 du Pré, Jacques 20, 40 du Moulin, Pierre 71, 72, 73 Duffy, Eamon 7, 52n., 57, 130, 131n., 132, 137, 137 Duhard, Charles 45

292

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

dukes 15, 16, 17, 22, 34, 120, 136 see also aristocracy; nobility Durand, Charles 73, 74 Duval, André 73, 75 dying, the 54ff., 201, 205, 206, 207, 208, 217 early modern period 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 26, 28, 46, 100, 132, 175, 176, 200, 208, 218, 221, 249, 266 Easter 25 ecclesiastical conferences 234, 242 economic factors 36, 115, 117, 118, 124, 126, 17–71, 25–5, 263 see also financial crisis education 17, 20, 21, 23, 37, 40, 42, 46, 239, 268 of lesser clergy 22–8, 230, 23–5 eighteenth century 9–10, 21, 24, 4–6, 126, 265 Eire, Carlos 6, 7, 69, 92, 93, 137, 172, 236, 249 elites 4, 8, 9, 10, 17, 21, 32, 35, 36, 41, 43, 60, 120, 121, 218, 265 and community 130, 131, 175 and costs 172, 173 founders 101, 110 and Marian cults 150 and perpetual masses 96ff. and private chapels 155ff., 183 and Protestantism 39 and Purgatory 52, 55, 86 and saints 152 tombs 158, 160 Eloy, St 202, 203 Elwood, Christopher 61, 117 endowments 22, 36, 106, 129, 131, 133, 139, 145, 153, 155, 164ff., 173, 198, 259 see also gifts; foundations employment 20, 224, 225, 237, 251, 252 endurance 64, 73 England 6, 9, 91, 153, 162 Enlightenment 45, 49, 84 Épaux 207 Erasmus 59, 60, 70, 211

eschatology 2, 6, 66, 69, 70 estates 172, 183 eucharist 8, 14, 2–9, 46, 61, 62, 64, 65, 80, 11–18 and change 266 and confraternities 195, 196, 197 cults of 14–50, 199 Eudes, Jean 44 Europe 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 15, 69, 150 beliefs in Purgatory 52, 114 public/private piety 130 Euzenno, René 10–3 evangelism 44 experience, management of 55, 60, 76 fabric, church 137, 157, 162, 166, 174, 221 fabriques 238, 239, 243, 249ff. Fabry, François 91, 182, 236 faith 13, 14, 24, 26, 28, 37, 38, 40, 42, 49, 52, 60, 64, 67, 74, 75, 80, 86, 115, 118, 121, 130, 132, 186, 188, 210, 212, 217 families 3, 54, 101, 130, 13–6, 153ff., 265 aristocratic 156, 183 and clerical patronage 225, 228, 231, 23–8 famines 170 fasting 78, 81, 212, 214 Faouët 19 feasts 31, 43, 46, 94, 102, 118, 163, 187, 199, 216 Marial 147 saints’ 14–41, 14–8 fees 62, 101, 112, 191, 204, 25–2 Ferrer, St Vincent 11, 141, 148, 203, 217 festivals 28, 141 festivities 16, 43, 195, 224 finances 33, 161, 210, 224, 247, 249ff., 263 financial crisis 10, 126, 171, 255, 26–4, 268 fines 235, 246, 248, 249 Finistère 87 fire 64, 74, 77

Index

fiscal crisis see financial crisis flagellation 196 Flavin, Melchior de 6–3, 64, 212 flesh 58 see also body Flynn, Maureen 186, 200 food shortages 170, 171 forgiveness 59, 209 Forty Hours 28, 216, 216 Fougères 188, 206 foundation documents 119, 120, 179, 255 and family endowments 134ff. Preamble 132, 151 and Purgatory 132 foundations 20, 31, 43, 158, 163, 182, 226, 231, 236, 241, 244, 245, 250, 255, 256, 25–8 beneficiaries 13–5 changes in 100, 10–8, 113ff. costs 16–73 decline of 11–16, 123, 176, 255, 26–4 institutional 136 legal status 95 location of 108, 10–13 medieval 113 and new devotions 13–45, 201 numbers of 94, 103, 105, 106, 138 political 136 revival of 11–22 and social status 113, 122, 163 specific offices 14–8ff. taxation 12–6 types of 10–3, 106 see also foundation documents; founders founders 9–101, 122, 15–2, 174, 182, 257, 258 changes in 110 and clergy 236, 237 female 97ff., 122, 152 and gifts 14–5 motives of 113, 129, 131, 13–7ff. naming of 151 fountains 1, 25, 27, 177 Fournié, Michelle 7, 51, 53, 153, 236n.

293

‘frairie blanches’ 203, 241 France 2, 7, 10, 11, 17, 34, 3–6, 43, 45, 50, 51ff., 115, 150, 153, 170, 171 confraternities 18–7ff., 195 differences in 5–6 foundations 11–12, 113 historiography 3–4, 5ff. Parishes 177 priests 225, 226, 240 social change 130 temporary masses 8–90 views on Purgatory in 61, 62, 66, 78, 85 France, Olivier de 20 Francis I, King 17, 34, 194 Francis, St 152 Franciscans 22, 33, 34, 85, 110, 112, 118, 119, 122, 135, 149, 160, 191 confraternities 196, 201 François II, duke of Brittany 15–8, 166 French-language works 77 friends 134 friars 23, 51, 112, 125, 165 fund-raising 210 funds 135, 137, 145, 166, 186, 199, 263 funerals 31, 32, 64, 89, 95, 112, 243 and confraternities 192, 201, 205, 207 parish 177, 179 and social change 264 funerary rituals 4, 5, 89, 264 furnishings 162 Gal, S. 61, 196 Galpern, Alan 35, 114, 130, 173, 194, 240 Garnier, Guillaume 118 Gautier, Étienne 2 Gentilcore, David 200, 236n. Germany 4, 55, 69 Gerson, Jean 54, 70 Gestigné 38 gestures 43, 55 Ghenassia, J. 204

294

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

ghosts 68, 69 Giesey, Ralph 4 gifts 134, 14–5, 161, 162, 163, 16–7, 174, 202, 221, 238 to parish churches 18–82 and priests 241 Gildas de Rhuys, St 22 Giles, Kate 57 Giles, St 103 girls 42 God 1, 51, 53, 70, 72, 75, 77, 137, 209 good death 4, 55, 123, 124, 201, 206 good life 55, 56, 123, 124 good works 14, 30, 37, 58, 67, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 121, 167, 194 and decline of foundations 11–17, 266 and indulgences 210, 212, 213, 214, 217 and masses 138 Goubert, Pierre 2 Goujard, Philippe 7, 123, 234 Gould, Kevin 195 Goulven, St 148 grace 26, 59, 63, 187, 209, 214 Grâces, the 57 Grand, Gilles de 19 Grandchamp 166, 238, 247 Grangier, Balthasar 18 Grasse 116, 177 gratitude 134 Grenoble 61, 196, 222, 229, 242 Griffiths, Paul 52 groups 5, 11, 30, 32, 34, 35, 38, 44, 46, 55, 196, 208, 216, 218, 219, 241, 243, 256 see also social groups Guéhenno 57 Guéméné 246 Guérande 10, 15, 246, 267 Gueznou, St 148 Guichrist 102, 103 Guidel 135, 144, 185 guilds 32, 33, 186ff., 190ff., 198ff., 205, 211, 217

elite 189 parish 200 see also artisans; crafts Guillaume of Saint-Brieuc, St 147, 148, 151, 152 Guilliers 181 guilt 51 Guingamp 22, 118 Guyondaie 135 hagiography see saints’ lives Hamon, André 17 Hamon, François 16 Hamon, Gilles 37 Hamon, Yves 227, 236 handbooks 50, 54ff., 76, 77, 78, 82, 8–5, 266 Harding, Vanessa 4, 92, 153, 161 Haton, Claude 118 Hayden, J.M. and Greenshields, M.R. 239 Heal, Felicity 187 healing miracles 1 Heaven 1, 6, 51, 52, 57, 61, 68, 76, 264 heirs 79 Hell 1, 3, 5, 6, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 5–60, 61, 62 changing view of 8–4, 26–5 depiction of 17–9 in Counter Reformation 70 description of 68, 74 fear of 59 Hennebont 113, 203, 215, 244, 252 Hennequin, bishop Aymar 1–18, 267 Henry, Louis 2 heresy 38, 39, 51, 61, 120, 214 Hermeland 255 historiography 2–8, 14, 3–6, 46, 47, 4–51ff., 70, 208, 219, 231 confraternities 18–7, 20–4 model 88 and parishes 17–7 and perpetual masses 94 and private chapels 153 revisionist 130, 131, 231 Hoffman, P. 36, 114, 177, 200

Index

Holy Family cults 147, 150 Holy Name of Jesus confraternity 195 Holy Sacrament confraternities 28, 33, 43, 103, 112, 118, 190, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203ff., 205, 217, 256, 259 Holy Sacrament cults 141, 142ff., 147, 197 Holy Sacrament foundations 142, 144, 266 Holy Spirit 77 confraternities 195, 200 office of 147 homilies 178 Honorius of Autun 5–6 hope 57, 77, 83 hospitals 23, 26, 3–31, 110, 124, 145, 167, 189, 217 priests 225 guilds 200 host 29, 138 see also eucharist household 100, 252, 253 houses 164, 165, 250, 254 Huard, Jean 25 Hubert, St 26 Huby, Vincent 122 Huguenots 115, 229 humanism 37, 58, 114, 231 humility 41 Hundred Years’ War 113 hygiene 125, 264 iconography 150, 17–9 ideas 2, 5, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 85, 88, 121, 176, 190, 194, 264, 267 identity 11, 25, 100, 208, 234, 241 Ille-et-Villaine 8, 22 illegitimacy 16 illiteracy 54, 233 images 26, 29, 57, 268 incomes 236, 238, 24–55, 268 individuality 129, 131, 162, 173, 174, 265 individuals 3, 4, 25, 41, 102, 119, 121, 152, 194, 204, 219 and change 129, 263, 265

295

and community 146 and death 53, 55 and indulgences 209, 211 judgement 94 masses for 81, 137 and memorials 162 prayers for 80 in Purgatory 58 indulgences 8, 23, 33, 41, 54, 59, 63, 76, 78, 82, 83, 17–6, 20–18, 219, 229, 263, 265, 268 and charity 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217 and confraternities 21–11, 21–7, 219 critics of 211, 213, 214 definition of 20–9 for distant causes 21–18 granting of 20–10 historiography 208 and post-mortem intercession 218 reform of 212 revival of 21–13 types of 210 inflation 171, 172, 254 inhumation 125, 184, 264 inscriptions 184, 268 institutions 8, 9, 15, 31, 35, 112, 121, 122, 265 motivations 136 intercession 1, 7, 8, 9, 28, 61, 173, 260 collective 175, 17–83, 185, 187, 191, 194, 198, 20–9ff., 218, 219 costs of 16–73 demand for 69, 90ff., 112 institutional 136 long-term 9–113 motives for 103 and priests 221, 224, 225, 231 moral 241 and Purgatory 58, 60 of saints 26, 81, 14–8, 15–2 strategies 9–4, 102 temporary 8–93 see also foundations; indulgences; perpetual masses; post-mortem intercession

296

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

intercessors 14–8 saintly 151 interior piety 56, 121, 129, 130, 132 Isabeau de Navarre 39 Italy, 4, 6, 69 Jackson-Lualdi, K. 116, 177 James of Chusa 68 James family 158 Jamet, Catherine 204, 206, 217n. Jansenism 45, 83, 123 Jaoua, St 148 Jeanne du Mûr 112, 132, 215 Jesuits 23, 42, 43, 121, 123, 201, 243 Jeulin, Paul 34 John, St 33, 147, 148, 151 John of the Cross, St 68 John the Baptist 204, 217, 256 Johnson, Trevor 8, 204 Joseph, St 27, 147, 150 Josselin 22, 172, 246 Jouault, Pierre 23 jubilees 76, 82, 213 judgement 3, 4, 5, 6, 62, 70, 266 collective 3, 4, 53 final 94 particular 3, 4, 53, 57, 69, 92, 94, 125, 266 Julian, St 102, 141, 190 Jumel, Gilles 25–7 justification 60, 65 by faith 114, 129, 211 Kernascléden 57 Keruel 113 Kesven 95 kinship groups 135, 23–7 Koslofski, Craig 3n., 4 Kümin, Beat 33 La Magdelaine 247 La Roche-Bernard 14, 39 La Saulzaie 202, 226, 227 laity 16, 17, 20, 24, 31, 33, 82, 131, 226, 231, 239, 260 and bequests for prayers 53 and clergy 240, 241, 24–3

and confraternities 18–6, 187 as founders 97, 100, 110 and reform 18, 37, 4–41 Lampaul-Guimilau 29 lamps 180 Lancelot, Eustache 25–9 land 164, 165, 181, 245, 250, 254, 258 Landévennec 2–2, 27 Landivisiau 44, 184 landowners 100, 101 landscape 2–6, 35 Langelier, Nicolas 17 Langonnet 19 languages 10, 52, 54, 56, 60, 85 Languidic 132, 183 Lanvaudan 182, 248 Last Judgement 49, 52, 53, 60 lateral group 130 Latin 56, 61, 77 Laval 201 Laven, Mary 10 Law’s system 10, 126, 263 laziness 214 Le Bossu, Jacques 40 Le Croisic 23, 115 Le Gallois, André 22–8, 257 Le Goff, Jacques 7, 49, 52 Le Grand, Albert 27 Le Méné 136, 238, 252 Le Nobletz, Michel 13, 14, 44 Le Ray, Jan 134 Le Roy, François 152, 257 Le Roy, Thomas 151, 160, 246 learning 42, 232, 233, 240 Lebrun, François 2, 70, 125 lectures 20, 40 legal privilege 23, 36 Lemaitre, Nicole 113, 173, 188, 232, 244 Léon 11, 13, 43, 44, 89, 106, 108, 110, 111, 149, 151, 237, 255 burials 178 see also Saint-Pol-de Léon lesser clergy 22–61, 26–8 appointment of 23–8 associations 24–7

Index

behaviour of 222, 23–43, 259 careers 22–3, 225, 227, 230, 235 confraternities 241 decline of 231 education of 22–8, 230, 23–5 incomes 225ff., 230, 236, 244, 247, 24–55 numbers of 22–7, 22–30, 231, 244, 255, 268 decline in 268 and parishes 222ff., 233, 24–4, 24–8 piety of 242, 25–60, 261 and reform 222, 223, 24–3ff. role of 222, 223, 22–5, 233, 260 social status 22–3, 227, 228, 23–31, 241, 268 see also chaplains; choir priests; parish priests life 5, 58, 71, 123 lights 180, 187, 188, 192, 197 lineage 135, 154, 159, 162, 163 litanies 141, 14–3 literacy 42, 49, 85, 231, 233, 235, 260 literature 21, 27, 40, 42, 49, 5–51, 5–7ff., 6–3, 7–71, 74, 76, 79, 83, 8–5, 122, 123, 127 and changing beliefs 266 and indulgences 21–12, 213, 218 and perpetual foundations 9–6ff. Liturgy 131, 13–9, 144, 164, 179 living, and the dead 1–2ff., 52, 58, 64, 6–6, 76, 113ff., 130, 146, 174 and confraternities 201, 205 and indulgences 209 see also foundations; perpetual masses Loach, Judy 33 loans 166 Lobineau, Guy-Alexis 27 local saints 148, 152, 200 Locminé 216 Locronon 25 Lodève, Andel de 77, 213 London 4, 153 Loriot 100 Loriot family 160

297

Lorraine, Jean de (154–50) 17 Louis, St 147, 148 Louytre, Etienne 43 love, divine 51, 72 Loyala, Ignatius 27, 59, 60 Lucas, Jean 28, 254 Luria, Keith 177 Luther, Martin 59, 60, 61, 211, 214 Lyon 33, 35, 36, 40, 74, 120, 222, 227, 242 confraternities 186 decline of foundations 116, 117 Lyonnais 113, 120, 124, 177, 200 macabre, the 5, 87, 268 McGrath, Alistair 6 Machecoul 206 McManners, John 83, 84, 173, 264 Madrid 7, 93, 153, 172 Maixent 204 males 94, 97ff., 101 Malestroit 135, 178 Mamert, St 26, 139 Margaret, St 151 Marial cults 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 200, 204 maritime areas 10, 170, 267 Marle, Catherine 90, 93, 167, 170 marriages 16, 31 Marshall, Peter 6, 9, 66, 162, 241 Martial, St 56 Martigues, Madame de 120, 155 Martin, Yvonne 103 Martin of Tours 152 Mary Magdelaine, St 103, 140, 148, 149, 151, 182 Marzan 236, 238 masses 14, 20, 2–9, 31, 32, 53, 61, 64, 65, 73, 74, 79, 8–2, 117, 119, 13–41, 162, 180, 187, 192, 219, 221, 252, 256, 257ff., 268 altar 14–9, 215 bequests 182 costs of 164, 167, 170, 180 cycles 8–90, 92, 134, 14–6, 206 for the departed 207 for the dying 55, 205

298

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

functions of 137 general 8–2 income from 126 for individuals 81, 102, 137 low 93, 94, 101, 121, 138 and motivation 137ff. multiple 89, 138ff. and priests 221, 224, 226, 243, 244 patronage of 236 selection of 102ff. and short-term intercession 89ff. numbers of 91, 92 social context 131 specific 147ff. see also perpetual masses material culture 6, 131, 134, 135 Matz, J.M. 94, 113, 114, 225 Maudet, St 148 Maunoir, Julien 11, 14, 18, 42, 44, 79, 260 mausolea 25 Mayheuc, Yves 16 meaning 5, 150, 213 meditation 14, 35, 56, 59, 64, 85, 129, 150 Melaine, St 22 memorialisation 4, 133, 156, 16–4, 174, 265 memorials 2, 158, 162 Menard, Sieur 78 mendicant orders 8, 2–3, 32, 34, 52, 115, 195 and foundations 110, 112, 122 and private chapels 163 mentalitiés 3, 5, 7, 49 merchants 34, 97, 100, 160, 161, 197 Mercoeur, duke of 41, 120, 136, 155, 172 mercy 76, 84, 137 Meriadec 26 merits, treasury of 194, 208, 209, 211, 213, 218 Meung, Jean de 113 Michael, St 103, 191, 207 Middle Ages 1, 2, 3, 4, 6–7, 113, 129, 157, 181, 20–10, 222, 256, 264, 266

clergy 224ff., 245 education of 232 confraternities 186, 18–9 ideas of Purgatory in 49, 5–60, 74, 87, 126 private masses 137 social solidarity in 13–31 Midi 3 Minimes 24, 149, 207, 215 Minois, Georges 6, 10, 22, 24, 84 miracles 1, 27, 46, 56 missionaries 1–12, 85, 242, 245 monasteries 2–2, 23, 27, 110 masses, motives for 139 money 38, 54, 66, 81, 92, 117, 120, 131, 133, 135, 139, 151ff., 161, 165, 171, 172, 180ff., 210, 257, 258, 259 endowments 164ff. for indulgences 210 monks 22 monstrances 29 Montfort 203, 231, 234, 248n. Montfort, Grignion de 86 monthly masses 106, 165, 180, 257 monuments 25, 31, 32, 57, 135, 157, 158, 162, 184 moral transformation 70 morality 12, 16, 21, 37, 43, 44, 116, 233, 23–43 Moreau, Canon Jean 38, 171 Morin, Jean 122, 141 Morlaix 15, 2–4, 159, 183, 207, 267 booksellers 56 mortality attitudes to 4 studies 3, 4 see also death mortgages 230, 254 mortuary foundations 120 see also foundations; perpetual masses mortuary practice 7, 89 see also funerary rituals; intercession; perpetual masses motivation 113, 131, 13–7 and families 13–6

Index

and institutions 136 and liturgy 13–9 and mass 137ff. and Purgatory 13–3 and salvation 133 Mûr 15 music 42, 44, 46, 141, 144, 22–8, 232, 246, 249, 251, 256 mutual aid 4, 32, 124, 17–4, 175, 188, 200ff., 265 mysticism 24, 41, 4–4, 121, 129 Nalle, Sara 4, 66, 92n., 93, 130 Name of Jesus confraternities 32, 142ff., 147, 156, 192, 195, 201, 210, 257 names 133, 134, 151, 162, 181 Nantes 8, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 34, 36, 38, 45, 78, 119, 160, 213 absenteeism 222 burials 178 change in 36, 39, 41, 103ff., 267 chantries 95 charity 117, 125 Christological cults 149 churches 25, 31, 34, 14–4 confraternities 28, 32, 43, 18–90, 19–7, 202 guild 19–91 economic crisis 17–71, 172 endowment costs 164, 167, 172 eucharist devotions 28, 29, 11–18 foundations 94, 95, 101, 103ff., 121, 257 decline of 114 institutional 136 locations 108, 109 taxation 12–6 founders 97, 98, 100, 113, 136, 25–7 funerals 112 heresy in 3–9 holy sites 25 hospitals 31, 133 indulgences 21–11, 216 and Jansenism 45, 123

299

Marial cults 150 masses 94ff. altar 148, 149 short-term 91 specific 147ff. weekly 108 new devotions 14–4 parish criers 179 priests 19, 20, 37, 22–7, 231, 253 behaviour 240, 241, 242, 243 education of 233 piety of 256 printed books 40, 56 private chapels 15–6, 157, 160, 161, 16–3 reform in 39, 40, 41 saints 27, 151, 152 feasts 147, 148 schools 20 sectarian conflicts 115 see also Nantes Cathedral; Notre-Dame parish, Nantes; Sainte-Croix parish, Nantes; Saint-Saturnin parish, Nantes; Saint-Vincent, Nantes Nantes, Carmelite church of 133, 134, 148, 155, 158, 189, 202, 211, 215 Nantes, Dominican church of 136, 149 endowments 165, 166 Nantes, Franciscan church of 135, 155, 158, 160, 161 Nantes Cathedral 20, 25, 108, 112, 134, 138,151 choir boys 22–8, 232 choral benefices 24–50 Nelson, Eric 177 Netherlands 54, 77 Nicholls, David 36 Nicole, Pierre 83 Nicollazo (Nicolas), Sebastien 112, 134 nobility 8, 23, 24, 36, 38, 39, 44, 157, 159, 163 and foundations 97, 100 and private chapels 131, 155, 15–8, 183, 252

300

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

tombs 15–60 see also aristocracy Normandy 2, 7, 123, 229, 235 Notre-Dame, mass of 147 Notre-Dame parish, Nantes 20, 25, 27, 108, 136, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 160, 162, 163, 228, 241 chaplains 237, 246, 25–7 college of 246 Notre-Dame-de-Bons-Secours 202, 226, 227 Notre-Dame-de-la-Cité church, SaintSaturnin 148, 189 Notre-Dame-de-la- Consolation, Nantes 148, 155, 163, 202, 251, 259 Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth 1, 27 Notre-Dame-du-Méné 135, 156 obits 8, 31, 53, 95, 96, 121, 145, 221, 247 costs of 167 decline of 229 services 145 social origins 97 see also foundations; post-obit provision Observant Franciscans 2–3 occupations 100 Ochino, B. 62 officers 97, 100 oil 180 oral transmission 85 oratoire 29, 149 Oratorians 43, 123 ordination 45, 223, 225, 229, 230, 242, 255, 258 Orozco, Alonso de 139 orphans 31 ossuaries 5, 32, 86, 87, 159, 178, 179, 184, 185 outward behavour 37, 38, 4–3, 119, 242 pain 64 paintings 26, 50, 53

pamphlets 61, 62, 63, 67 pardoners 20–10, 211 pardons 25, 208ff.; see also indulgences parents 137, 146 Paris 3, 4, 40, 55, 69, 70, 74, 90, 9–2, 94, 112, 121, 124, 132, 153, 217, 228, 248 communities of priests 245 confraternities 186, 195, 196, 200 private chapels 15–4, 161 parish associations 186, 18–9 parish chaplains 248 see also chaplains parish churches 8, 19, 26, 29, 176, 210 altar masses 14–9 burials 178 and communal life 31 foundations in108, 110, 138, 139 and new devotions 14–3 gifts to 18–83 iconography 17–9 and indulgences 215 internal alterations 2–30, 32, 46 private chapels in 15–5, 162 rebuilding of 3–2, 183 revenues 145 and sacred space 25, 32, 43, 162, 164, 18–5 parish closes 18–4 parish priests 13, 31, 46, 177, 221 and church discipline 248 and confraternities 199, 20–2 education of 20, 21, 37, 234 in eighteenth century 45 incomes 25–5 medieval 225 reform of manners 21, 24–3 status of 22–3 see also lesser clergy parish registers 16, 31, 248 parishes 1–20, 22, 25, 31, 33, 116, 175, 17–85, 218 administration of 234 and collective intercession 17–83 criers 179 historiography 17–7

Index

and lesser clergy 222ff., 233, 24–4, 24–8 social conflicts 34 see also parish churches; parish priests parishioners 16, 19ff., 26, 28, 37, 113, 133, 139, 175, 181, 187, 207, 218, 222, 233, 239, 240, 241 Parlement of Brittany 125 particular judgement 3, 4, 6, 53, 57, 69, 92, 94, 125, 266 Patrick, St 52, 56, 57 patronage 8, 17, 22, 23, 34, 127, 146, 163, 256 conflicts 237 and priests 225, 228, 231, 23–8 reasons for 135 Paul, St 52, 64, 73, 82, 139, 257 peasants 43, 97, 170, 222, 231 pedagogy 178, 179, 184, 185, 265 penalties 51, 21–14 penances 44, 58, 64, 75, 20–9, 214 see also indulgences 208 penitence 51, 54, 63, 196 penitential piety 8, 15, 41, 67, 11–20 Penitents confraternity 196 perpetual masses 88, 9–113, 121 changes in 100, 113ff., 11–8, 266 and community 13–7, 161ff. costs of 164, 167, 170, 218 decline in 11–16, 176, 26–4 and foundation types 10–3, 106 at high altar 14–9 historiography 94 purpose of 93, 94, 133ff., 13–46 see also foundations; private chapels personalisation 164 personnel 7, 9, 35, 226 Peter, St 64, 82, 209, 257 Pettegree, Andrew 36, 40, 62 piety 41, 4–4, 55 changes in 8, 35, 115, 200, 204 collective 31, 162, 163 in eighteenth century 46 and eucharist 2–9 individual 35, 162

301

of lesser clergy 242, 25–60, 261 political aspects 120 private 163 revival of 11–20 pilgrimage 14, 18, 26, 31, 41, 81, 116, 177 Plabennec 90, 181 place 4, 5, 25, 26, 39, 43, 74, 264 of burial 125, 162 of chapels 154 Plancoët 1, 27 Plascar 238 plenary remission 210, 212, 213, 216, 217, 218 Pleyben 179, 184 Ploemel 237 Ploemur 95 Ploerin 237 Plouay 180, 202, 205, 259 Plounéour-Menez 207 Plouvara 172 Pluherlin 144, 151, 182 Pluneret 27 pluralism 17, 36, 222, 225, 23–9 poems 50, 56, 85, 86 Point-Croix 15 polemical works 50, 61ff., 76, 84, 212, 213 politics 120, 121, 136, 171 Pont-Château 156 Pontivy 251 Poor Clares 22 poor, the 23, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36, 42, 43, 81, 82, 116, 117, 122, 124, 145, 217, 230, 257 parish aid for 175, 176, 180 poor relief 15, 16, 30, 35, 124, 125 see also almsgiving; charity Popes/Papacy 17, 18, 17, 52 and indulgences 209, 211, 212, 215, 216 popular religion 9, 27, 35, 36, 42, 52, 85, 86, 87, 95, 115, 117, 176, 177, 265 Port-Louis 113 post-mortem intercession 60, 8–90, 92, 121, 221, 257, 260

302

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

augmentation 180 changes in 114ff., 265 collective 3, 35, 116, 175ff., 194, 208, 219, 263, 265 confraternities 206 decline in 114ff., 123, 196, 198, 218, 26–4 individual 3, 116, 129ff., 17–4, 265 and parishes 17–83 and patronage 237 and priests 241 incomes 249 and social groups 9–7, 113, 175, 265 see also perpetual masses post-obit provision 8, 95, 247, 257, 258 see also perpetual masses poverty 19, 44, 160, 197 power 64, 69, 136, 146, 157, 164, 209, 211 practice 3, 9, 41, 50, 65, 86, 95, 188, 255 prayers 26, 30, 32, 42, 56, 78, 81, 83, 86, 122, 124, 137, 150, 162, 212, 214 collective 92, 185, 193, 194 for the dead 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 66, 80, 89ff., 180, 201, 206, 221 methods 82 for souls in Purgatory 58 preachers 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 70, 119 and indulgences 54 prebends 19, 20, 245, 249, 253 presentation rights 237, 238 priests 15, 19, 20, 21, 35, 45, 52, 57, 22–61, 263, 26–8 criticism of 3–7 as founders 97 ideal of 240, 242, 259 lifestyles 23–40 and masses 81, 92, 180 role of 69 separate status of 22–3, 239, 241, 242, 255, 258, 259 stipendiary 235, 237, 253

training 228 see also chaplains; choir priests; lesser clergy; parish priests; vicars general print culture 4, 36, 88, 42, 51, 85 printed books 27, 40, 42, 49, 5–7, 85, 113 printers 40 priories 21, 22 private chapels 152, 15–8, 176, 252, 265 and community 153, 16–3 costs of 164ff. and elites 155ff., 183 function of 153, 161, 162 location of 154 motivation of 15–8 of nobility 15–8 spatial geography 162, 164 private masses 137 see also private chapels; private rituals private rituals 130 privatisation 4, 35, 131, 157, 163, 164, 173 privileges 23, 156, 212, 223, 226, 241 spiritual 210, 212, 213 processions 25, 29, 31, 38, 41, 44, 116, 140, 14–2, 144, 192, 193, 196, 199 and the dead 206 nocturnal 120 parish 179 property 95, 145, 16–5, 236, 254 alienation of 164, 165 Protestants 1–2, 6, 8, 14, 35, 36, 3–9, 49, 72, 117, 149, 194, 195, 231 and indulgences 211, 213, 214 and Purgatory 50, 60ff., 71, 77, 78, 127, 266 decline of 114ff. Provins 118 public devotions 28, 41, 42, 116, 117, 118, 163, 255 decline of 120, 130 and private chapels 16–2 public display 116, 117, 163, 255, 265 public memory 181

Index

Pucci family 17 pulpits 32, 46, 65, 117, 177 punishment 51, 65, 77, 123 purgation 56, 64, 68, 78, 121 Purgatory 1, 2, 38, 120, 153, 209, 211, 221 belief in 6–7, 50, 86, 113, 199, 249 Catholic defences 6–3, 7–4, 7–81 changes in 9–10, 26–71 and confraternities 187, 188, 191ff. continuities 9, 267 decline of 8–4, 114, 12–4, 263ff. origins of 52 description of 5–6, 5–8, 6–8, 74, 76 and devotional works 5–5ff. Doctrine 5–2, 62, 6–6, 67, 8–8 handbooks 50, 54, 8–5 historiography 3, 7, 10, 4–51ff., 7–71ff. iconography 17–9 and intercession 58 medieval views 5–60 motivations 13–3 polemical works 50, 61ff., 67, 76, 84, 212, 213 Protestant views of 60ff. and role of church 69, 7–6 sermons 5–4, 55, 61 and suffrages 212, 213, 214 Questembert 135, 181, 230 Quimper 10, 18, 20, 22, 30, 31, 33, 42, 43, 44, 122, 232, 263 books 45, 56 changing beliefs 267 colleges 233 confraternities 190, 203 foundations 87, 105 founders 100 hospitals 124 priests 243 Quimper Cathedral 102, 103, 105, 110, 159, 190, 207, 250

303

Quimper-Cornouaille 10, 11, 15, 38, 96, 138 Quimperlé 113, 180, 215 Quintin, Père 44 Racaut, Luc 40, 85 Radenec 165 Rannée 122, 180 Raymond of Capua 56 readership 83, 85 Récollets 23, 24, 43, 113, 215 recteurs 16, 19, 21, 31, 37, 46, 222, 225, 231, 238, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253 redemption 7 Redon 22 Reformation 7, 35, 60ff., 85, 11–15, 130, 194, 208, 221, 266 see also Catholic reform regulation 16, 17, 41, 122, 239 Reinburg, Virginia 131 relics 29, 37, 178 religiosity 35 religious experience 3 religious instruction 14, 16, 17, 20, 42, 54, 57, 188, 248 religious orders 8, 13, 2–4, 43, 45, 47, 51, 122 confraternities 33, 189, 19–6 female 97 foundations, purpose of 139 funerals 112 saints 148 see also mendicant orders religious wars 8, 17, 24, 28, 29, 22–9, 233 and confraternities 195, 196, 200 and eucharist 117 and intercession 88, 92, 103, 115 and Purgatory 50, 60, 6–7, 126 and reform 3–40, 41, 242 remembrance 133, 17–83 see also memorialisation Remungol 247 Renaissance 126, 127 René, St 103, 141, 152 Rennes 10, 14, 15, 16, 30, 39, 264

304

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

confraternities 23, 33, 18–9, 201, 204, 208, 217 funerals 112 monasteries 22 parish criers 17–80 priests 231 education of 234 printed books 40, 56 ritual changes 267 sectarian conflict 115 short-term masses 90, 91 rents 135, 145, 164, 165, 166, 172, 180, 181, 230, 249, 250, 254, 256 repentance 51, 54 requiem mass 80, 89, 96, 101, 102, 147, 163, 170, 180, 219 Restif, Bruno 7, 10, 91, 188, 189, 20–5, 234, 235n., 239n., 244, 267 resurrection 53, 60 retables 29, 150, 207 Retz 19, 95, 204, 206, 229 revenues 126, 145, 164ff., 207, 255, 265 rich people 75, 82, 187, 214, 265 see also elites Richet, Denis 121 Rieux 23, 135, 254 Rieux family 15–6 Rigoleuc, Jean 43 rites of passage 5 rituals 4, 5, 26, 30, 31, 36, 41, 79, 102, 132, 178, 186 changes 127, 13–31, 224, 264, 267 communal 131 decline of 35 and dying 55 and pedagogy 179 and Purgatory 57 short-term masses 89 Roche, Daniel 50, 7–71, 83, 123 Rochefort 182 Roffy, Simon 153, 164 Rohan 39 Roman rite 18, 47, 89, 93, 102, 235, 267

rosary 23, 27, 41, 120, 142, 150, 155, 188, 210 altar 149, 205 confraternities 33, 34, 120, 150, 199, 200ff., 204ff., 21–17, 219, 259 prayers 80, 206 Roscoff 23 Rosmadec, Sebastien 122, 141 Roudault, Jullien 141 Roudaut, F. 5 Rouen 195 Rouergue 27n., 114, 173, 188, 222, 240n., 244 Rouvier 182 royal officers 85, 100, 160 Ruiz, André 40, 155 Ruiz family 34, 160 chapel 157, 161 rural areas 10, 13, 21, 51, 88, 164 chapels 252 and changing beliefs 267 chaplains 258 confraternities 33, 189, 190, 198, 199, 203, 219 foundations 94 local priests 222, 23–3 mystical movements 44 new devotions 144 private chapels 15–7 and Protestantism 38, 39 sacred spaces 25 sacraments 13, 20, 2–9, 33, 38, 42, 64, 73, 77, 78, 118, 199, 212, 213, 232, 233 changes in 137 and lesser clergy 248 see also eucharist Sacred Heart devotions 46 sacred space 5, 25, 32, 43, 162, 164, 18–5, 199 and change 125 sacristans 167, 227, 246, 248, 253 Saffré 180 ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’ 52, 57, 77, 82 Saint-Anne-d’Auray 1, 26, 46

Index

Saint-Brieuc 11, 15, 17, 147 Saint-Cado, chapel of 203, 217 Saint-Denis, Nantes 91, 182, 227, 257 Saint-Donatien, Nantes 25 Sainte-Croix parish, Nantes 20, 28, 32, 101, 118, 133, 138, 143, 148, 150, 154, 163, 167, 180, 181, 194, 197, 202, 226, 227, 243, 251, 253 Sainte-Croix, Vannes 145, 251 Sainte-Radegonde, Nantes 134, 253 Saint-Goustan 133 Saint-Grégoire 189 Saint-Jagu 164 Saint-Lauren, Nantes 253 Saint-Léonard , Nantes 22–7 Sainte-Marthe, Claude de la 82 Saint-Malo 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 22, 30, 33, 235 confraternities 204 seminaries 233 priests 229, 231 Saint-Méen 22 St Patern, Vannes 142, 143, 245, 259 Saint-Michel, Vannes 102, 139, 182 Saint-Nicolas, Nantes 19, 26, 28, 32, 33, 37, 101, 119, 155, 189, 227 and financial crisis 263 Saint-Nicolas, Vannes 145 Saint-Pierre, Saint-Pol 102, 192 Saint-Pierre, Vannes 91, 112, 182n., 190, 237n. Saint-Pol-de-Léon 10, 15, 20, 96, 100, 102, 183, 242, 258 altar masses 148, 149 Cathedral 133, 145, 149, 179, 232 confraternities 191ff., 197, 206, 207 feast days 147, 148 foundations 105, 110 decline of 114 specific offices 147 weekly masses 108 saints 1, 25, 2–8, 37, 38, 61, 152, 256, 257 Celtic 2–7, 151

305

cults 14–8, 15–2 feasts 14–41 female 151 images of 26 and indulgences 209 intercession by 26, 81, 8–3, 146ff. local 148, 152 new 148, 152 and purgatory 56, 69 saints’ lives 27, 5–6 Saint-Saturnin parish, Nantes 25, 26, 31, 94, 119, 144, 148, 165, 167, 181, 182, 194, 206, 210, 227, 228, 236, 248, 252, 256 Saint-Sebastien 26, 112 Saint-Sebastien d’Aigne 239 Saint-Similien 19, 25, 250 Saint-Thégonnec 32, 46, 184 Saint-Trémur church, Carhaix 103 Saint-Vincent, Nantes 120, 136, 155, 227, 251 salaries 222, 225, 226, 227, 244, 252, 254, 255 Sales, François de 74 Salo, Alexis de 76, 80, 81, 82, 214 salvation 3, 30, 41, 55, 61, 69, 84, 119 and change 130, 265 corporate 3, 131, 17–4 motivation 133 role of priests 223 social 119 Sarzeau 23 satisfaction 51, 54, 60, 63, 67, 73, 75, 208, 212 Saturnin, St 25, 28, 94 Saumur 244 Sauveur, St 202 schools 20 screening 162 sculpture 53, 178, 184 Sébastien de Rosmadec 141 sectarian conflict 115, 195 see also religious wars secularism 13, 46, 112, 139, 185, 224, 240 seigneurial families 156, 157, 163 seminaries 21, 37, 233

306

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Séne 238 Sérent 139, 140, 231, 235, 243, 251 sermons 40, 51, 5–4, 55, 61, 82, 85, 123 Seron, Jean 101 servants 97, 122 services 101, 145, 146, 147ff. Seurin, Père 43 seventeenth century 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 21, 23, 24, 2–44, 89, 91ff., 106, 110, 114, 121ff., 145ff., 156, 160, 170ff., 200ff., 215, 217, 218, 223, 228, 230ff. ideas of Purgatory in 49, 50, 69ff. sexual morality 16, 240, 241 Sherlock, Peter 162 shoemakers 32, 190, 207 short-term intercession 8–93 shrines 25 sickness 23, 26, 30, 64, 79, 125, 187, 205 sin 44, 51, 56, 57, 64, 72, 73, 83, 119, 208, 209, 211 polemical works on 76 singing 42, 44, 246, 250, 251 sixteenth century 8, 14, 15, 17, 19, 23ff., 30, 32, 36, 40, 49ff., 100ff., 116, 130, 137, 147ff. 153, 158ff., 170ff., 184, 190, 194, 209ff., 219, 222, 230, 238, 240ff., 258, 260, 266 ideas of Purgatory in 50, 54, 60ff. Sizun 29 skepticism 60, 93 sociability 234 social change 12–31, 264; see also change social differences 34, 153 social groups 14, 9–7ff., 47, 53, 110, 112, 113, 122, 129, 134, 150, 175, 199, 208, 218 and change 130, 265 and confraternities 27, 32, 186, 187 and costs 172 and priests 22–3, 227, 228, 23–31 and private chapels 153, 155, 158, 160, 163

societies see colleges society 119, 121, 130, 131, 174 Society of St Gaudans 246, 247 Society of St Thomas 246, 256, 257 solidarity 130, 131, 160, 173, 187, 200, 205 songs 50, 85, 86 soteriology 6, 49, 53, 59 souls 1, 2, 3, 9, 30, 58, 64, 68, 77, 80, 125, 178, 187, 201, 223 changing attitudes to 264 particular judgement of 53, 69 prayers for 54 sources 6, 49, 9–6, 132 Spadine, Jean 154, 181, 211 Spadine family 154 Spain 4, 7, 26, 40, 60, 69, 92, 93, 115, 130, 131 Spanish community 34, 160, 161 specific offices 137, 143, 147ff. spirits 68, 81 spirituality 5, 8, 13, 24, 41, 42, 43, 44, 58, 115, 150, 200, 202, 256, 25–8 literature of 83 stained glass 57, 179 State 6, 95, 147 statistical series 88 statues 34 statutes 235, 239, 244 status 4, 100, 101, 113, 153, 157, 158, 159, 16–61, 163, 197, 208, 223, 258, 268 stories 27, 55, 56, 60, 68 Strocchia, Sharon 4 Suarez, Jacques 67, 68, 71, 73 sub-deacons 225, 231, 234, 246 sub-parochial clergy see lesser clergy suffering 61, 70, 212 suffrages 56, 64, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 86, 125, 214 nature of 80 superstition 13, 43, 83, 125 Swanson, Robert 58, 68, 208 Sylvester, St 148 symbols 45, 130, 156, 162, 185 synods 16, 18, 234, 242

Index

tabernacles 2–30 Taillepied, Noel de 67, 68, 69, 212 tailors 32, 33, 190, 191, 202, 203 Tavernius, Johannes 62 taxation 12–6, 172, 190, 253, 255 Taylor, Larissa 14, 54 teaching 123, 178, 213, 223, 24–9 temporal goods 13–4 temptation 64 Teresa of Avila, St 27, 59, 75, 147, 148 Terpstra, Nicolas 185, 188, 194 testators 89ff., 120 and good works 117, 124 motives of 132ff. and perpetual masses 94ff. and saints 152 thanksgiving 133 Thebaud, André 25 Theix 163 theologians 123 theology 9, 14, 20, 50, 53, 61, 86, 211, 212, 234 ‘third place’ 88, 113, 265 Thirty Years’ War 124 time 89, 90, 91, 100, 103ff., 113ff., 208, 210, 256, 257 tithes 254 tombs 145, 156, 157, 15–60, 185 torment 57, 58, 68, 76, 77 Toulouse 5, 62 Toussaints, hospital of 189, 202, 214, 226, 267, 242 Touzelin, Michel 121 towns 10, 11, 15, 23, 42, 88, 164, 227 changing beliefs in 267 burials 178 chaplains 255 clerical education 232, 233 confraternities in 32, 33, 187 foundations 94, 100 reform in 37 tracts 61, 67, 74, 76 training 228, 233, 234, 235 transubstantiation 28, 29, 138 Tréguier 15, 16, 17, 21, 25, 44 Trégor 10, 22, 44 trentals 8–90ff., 180, 257

307

Trépassés see Confraternities of the Departed (Trépassés) Tridentine reforms 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 24, 29, 41, 65, 71, 219, 238 and charity 3–31 and confraternities 199 and mass numbers 9–3 and parishes 17–7 Trinitarians 2–3 Tual, Guillaume 118, 197 Tual, Marie 175 University of Nantes 20, 34 Ursulines 23, 24, 42, 43, 122 Valenciennes 90, 94, 170 values 4, 42, 43, 243 Vannes 10, 15, 17, 18, 21, 42, 43, 124, 145, 215, 238, 263 book trade 40, 42, 56 changing beliefs in 267 chantries 94, 238, 239 confraternities 3–3, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198, 203, 206, 207 foundations 97, 99, 102, 105, 113 costs 164, 167, 170 location of 110, 112 types 106, 107 founders 100, 101 hospitals 30 and Jansenism 45 mystics 43, 44 priests 230, 231, 23–7, 247 morality of 243 education of 233, 234 and reform 41 schools 20 Vannes Cathedral 105, 112, 136, 138, 203, 207 chaplains 23–7, 249 choir school 232 colleges 246 endowments 166 gifts to 182 indulgences 217 mass cycles 145 new devotions 13–40

308

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

private chapels 161, 164 saints’ cults 151, 152 saints’ feasts 14–41 Venard, Marc 14 vernacular works 36, 40, 52, 85, 86 vertical group 130 vespers 31, 89, 101, 102, 142ff., 192, 198, 206, 246, 248ff. vestments 181 vicars choral 221, 224, 246, 249 see also choir priests vicars general 17, 19, 234 Vigor, Simon 20, 40 Viguerie, Jean de 91, 95n., 146n., 170 Vincent, St 141, 148 Vincent de Paul, St 30 Virgin Mary 1, 26, 27, 28, 56, 193 cult of 147, 150, 152 virtue 58, 77, 233 Visitandines 23 visitations 18, 19, 95, 240, 242 visual art 7, 26, 34, 44, 50, 57, 150, 153, 178 Vitré 14, 39, 115, 188 voluntarism 187 von Eck, Johann 61 Voragine, Jacob de 56

votive objects 46, 137 Vovelle, Michel 3, 5, 8, 49, 60, 69, 70, 123, 150, 153 wages 172, 205 wall paintings 26, 53, 57, 179 walls 32, 183, 184 wealth 88, 91, 100, 131, 135, 161, 175, 176, 189, 236, 252, 254, 258 weavers 197 weekly masses 94, 106, 108, 11–13, 118, 138, 164, 247, 256, 257 payment for 165 on Sundays 163 wells 25 wills 30, 36, 61, 8–9ff., 95, 96, 132, 186, 196, 255ff. and charity 11–17, 124 and saints 152 women 16, 22, 23, 30, 34, 42, 45, 9–100, 122, 124, 127, 152, 239, 240, 242 saints 151 woodcuts 57 Yves, St 25, 30, 81, 143, 151