Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal. Correspondance. Tome V: 1635-40 ed. by Marie-Patricia Burns, V.S.M. (review)

282 BOOK REVIEWS into gradual decline, faced with secularization and competition from French prints. Thanks to his initial training as an economic historian, Thijs is at his best analyzing the economic aspects of print production: the capital investment, the respective roles of illustrators, engravers, and printers, and the economics of consumption. His is less satisfactory with respect to the iconography of these prints. The success ofthe print industry is explained more in the context of the general history of the Catholic renewal rather than the intrinsic iconographie content of the prints. Nevertheless, the copious reproduction of devotional prints points to the richness of this source material; and scholars will be in his debt for his effort in pointing to the importance of these popular visual representations in the making of post-Tridentine Catholicism. R. Po-CHiA Hsia New York University Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal. Correspondance. Tome V: 1635—40. Edited by Marie-Patricia Burns, V.S.M. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, Centre d'Études Franco-Italien des Universités de Turin et de Savoie. 1993. Pp. 970. 360 FF paperback.) This is the fifth of a projected six-volume critical edition, containing about 2600 letters of Saint Jeanne-Françoise-Frémyot de Chantal (1572—1641), cofounder with Francis de Sales of the Visitation Order (1610). Edited and annotated by the present archivist of the Annecy monastery, the collection enlarges and corrects a nineteenth-century compilation (1874—1879) by the Annecy Visitandines, taken from their archival documents. When completed, the present work will include almost 600 heretofore unpublished letters that originate from a variety of sources and reveal the broad extent of this remarkable woman's socio-religious network. Overall, Burns's editing has already been hailed as a major achievement in Salesian scholarship. Her rigorous methodology and commitment to authenticity are evident throughout. Each volume contains a biographical chronology of that period of the saint's life; introductory notes for each year's correspondence in addition to careful endnotes for every letter; detailed tables related to Visitation foundations; glossaries, illustrations, and indices. Concise introductory essays for each text situate the foundress as writer and mystic within church, society, and mentalités of seventeenth-century French Catholicism . They also describe the context of women's spirituality in the classical era. The present volume is the longest in the collection thus far, covering the correspondence from 1635 to 1640. There are 494 letters, of which onefourth (122) have not been previously published. They were written in the BOOK REVIEWS 283 final period ofJeanne de Chantal's life, a period ofconsolidation and expansion for the Visitation foundations, which by 1640 numbered eighty-two. It was likewise a time of sorrow, with the deaths of her last three founding companions . Most of the letters are directed to superiors and sisters of the Visitation communities. They deal with admissions and formation of new members, community problems, relationships with authorities, and temporal affairs. There is also a subtantial correspondence with major ecclesiastical and secular figures of the period, among whom are Vincent de Paul, Princess Christine of France ("Mme. Royale"), the Jesuits Etienne Binet and JeanBaptiste St-Jure, Charles de Condren, and Marie de Combalet, sister of Cardinal Richelieu. Perhaps the most intimate correspondent of this period is "Mère Angélique" Arnauld (1591-1661) of Port-Royal, who in 1619 had been refused ecclesiastical permission to transfer to the Visitation order. The saint confides to the abbess her inner pain and prolonged spiritual desolation, because she no longer has "any creature in the world that I can trust, except you" (p. 447). The ten letters presented here bear witness to Jeanne's heroic struggle in the midst of severe temptations against the faith. She admits that while she speaks to others of God, she feels only disgust for spiritual things. Nonetheless, she chooses to pray by means ofwordless surrender and a "simple gaze of the heart." What emerges from these letters is a strong personality, an ideal yet realistic woman of God who brings her own distinctive, mature interpretation to Salesian mystical teaching. Until recently, Jeanne de Chantal has remained largely unknown to scholars, overshadowed by Francis de Sales as his...