Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720

Elizabeth C. Tingle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317073116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

The concept of Purgatory was a central tenet of late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism, and proved a key dividing line between Catholics and Protestants. However, as this book makes clear, ideas about purgatory were often ill-defined and fluid, and altered over time in response to particular needs or pressures. Drawing upon printed pamphlets, tracts, advice manuals, diocesan statutes and other literary material, the study traces the evolution of writing and teaching about Purgatory and the fate of the soul between 1480 and 1720. By examining the subject across this extended period it is argued that belief in Purgatory continued to be important, although its role in the scheme of salvation changed over time, and was not a simply a story of inevitable decline. Grounded in a case study of the southern and western regions of the ancien régime province of Brittany, the book charts the nature and evolution of 'private' intercessory institutions, chantries, obits and private chapel foundation, and 'public' forms, parish provision, confraternities, indulgences and veneration of saints. In so doing it underlines how the huge popularity of post-mortem intercession underwent a serious and rapid decline between the 1550s and late 1580s, only to witness a tremendous resurgence in popularity after 1600, with traditional practices far outstripping the levels of usage of the early sixteenth century. Offering a fascinating insight into popular devotional practices, the book opens new vistas onto the impact of Catholic revival and Counter Reform on beliefs about the fate of the soul after death.

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 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 Etienne 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 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 Aries. Using a wide range of sources, literature, memoirs, religious and administrative records, monuments and pictures, Aries 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 Aries 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 Aries. 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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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 Setting the Scene: The Catholic Church and Religious Life in Early Modern Brittany
• 3 Purgatory and the Counter Reformation in France 1480–1720
• 4 Strategies for Eternity: Perpetual Foundations for Intercession and their Evolution Over Time 1480–1720
• 5 The Individual Alone Before God? Motives of Donors and the Functions of Perpetual Masses
• 6 Collective Intercession and Mutual Assistance before Eternity: Parish, Confraternity and Indulgences
• 7 The Prayers of Priests: Chaplains and Intercession for the Dead
• 8 Conclusions
• Bibliography of Cited Works
• Index