Six Hundred Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190-1789 (review)

Hayden and Greenshields investigate bishop-initiated reform within the French church using synodal statutes and pastoral visitation records from the late twelfth century to the French Revolution. They bring new rigor to the exploitation of these well-known sources and propose a new chronology and a new geography of reform in France.

The authors quantified the catalogue of synodal statutes compiled by André Artonne and Odette Pontal (Répertoire des statuts synodaux). This creates our first aggregated serial database revealing the frequency of promulgations covering the entire period 1190-1789. The study finds that "changes in content [in synodal statutes] appeared exactly where the analysis of volume of promulgation predicted (p. 13)." This information on the long-term evolution of promulgations is then combined with a qualitative analysis of changes in visitation questionnaires. On this basis, the authors present their view of 600 years of continuity in church reform punctuated by periods of disruption and slowdown.

They argue for two 300-year cycles (1190-1489 and 1490-1789), characterized by enough consistency of aim (purification and universalization of doctrine and practice) to constitute "a continuous reality in the history of Christianity" (p. 7). Within these cycles, they emphasize a "First Catholic Reformation," at its height from the 1490's to 1560, and a "Second Catholic Reformation," at its height from the 1640's through the 1690's, with two distinct phases: 1590-1689 and 1690-1789. The interpretation of their data is shaped at least in part by their critique of the vogue of "discontinuity" as a world-view and more importantly by their desire to lay to rest the Protestant monopoly of the term Reformation.

This work is most useful in remedying critical problems of method, chronology, and geography in the existing standard treatments of visitation records provided in the CNRS Répertoire des visites pastorales and the Atlas de la réforme pastorale en France de 1550 à 1790 by the Froeschlé-Chopards. They revise the ecclesiastical geography of the CNRS studies, creating two consistent geographic areas for comparison: an "ecclesiastical France" of sixteen dioceses where the French king had the right to make episcopal appointments and a "border lands." This clarifies the role of French kings in appointing "reform-minded" bishops in distinct periods and shows the role of limiting factors such as the Thirty Years' War in border areas. The authors also usefully identify "cohorts of reforming bishops" for whom collective biographies and prosopgraphical studies are needed (p. 110).

Problems arise, however, if one wishes to use the authors' sources to discuss broader questions of reform within the French Church and within the larger society. The reform they document is in part an administrative procedure perilously akin, at times, to modernization theory in the cadre of the developing nation-state. Complex factors shaping reception and the desire and ability to "purify" and "systematize" religious practice do not really enter into consideration. Why, for example, should systematization constitute "reform" in an earlier period but become mere "bureaucratization" and "routinization" in the later period ?

The bulk of this work is given over to appendices which present their data and to a methodological essay, intended to be read either on its own or following the text. This material explains the difficulties in applying the CNRS data to the problem of the long-term evolution of reform within the French church. This is essential reading for historians who plan to work with these particular sources and for researchers who wish to develop methodological strategies for coping with asymmetrical and missing data. Specialists in the history of pre-modern Catholicism will not be surprised by the chronology presented here, but they might become more attentive to the daunting problem of developing probative global indicators of reform.