Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus by Thomas Worcester (review)

468BOOK REVIEWS Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching ofBishop Camus. By Thomas Worcester. [Religion and Society, 38.] (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1997. Pp. ix, 306.) Jean-Pierre Camus became bishop of Belley, a remote diocese on the border between France and Savoy, in 1609 and retained that office until he resigned it in I629. As bishop he took seriously the Tridentine requirement that among the most important responsibilities of that office was the preaching of the gospel. Between loi 5 and 1623 approximately 400 of Camus' sermons were published in seventeen voumes. Thomas Worcester argues that these sermons provide us with a greater understanding of French culture in the seventeenth century. Conversion was a dominant theme in the sermons of the Bishop of Belley as it was in the religious culture of the seventeenth century as a whole. He urged his audiences to engage in confession and communion as often as possible in order to obtain from God a "perfect contrition," the end result of conversion. The issue of 'frequent communion' and 'contrition,' both much in evidence in the sermons,were of concern to the French Catholic community during the period . Allusions to food are much in evidence in these sermons. Bishop Camus' use of alimentary images, according to Professor Worcester, supports Caroline Bynum's contention that such images were of particular significance to women during the medieval and early modern periods. Worcester devotes several chapters to gender issues. Although Camus was not entirely free from the misogynist perception that women are weak, he frequently provided examples of female saints as models of true piety and also praised 'maternal' qualities in male saints. As was the case with other bishops of the period, Camus spent much time in Paris, where he often preached. He was also among the deputies of the clergy at the meeting of the Estates General in 1614. Not surprisingly, his sermons reflect a concern for the political and social condition of France in which he found much that was wrong btit also much that was right. He was critical of the buying and selling of offices within church and state; he deplored the scourge of heresy in France, duels within the nobility, and the disastrous effect of famine on society as a whole. At the same time he equated the France of Henry IV with the newJerusalem, and he regarded Paris as both a new Rome and as a Christian Paradise. The value of Professor Worcester's book is that it further substantiates the prevalent historiographical view that sermons and other religious writings are valuable cultural artifacts that provide a clearer understanding of early modern European history. However, the work is marred by the author's tendency to measure almost every theme contained in the sermons against a myriad of hypotheses offered by the large number of historians working in the field of cultural history today. Worcester devotes almost at least as much space to what the secondary sources have to say about gender issues and the like as to what the BOOK REVIEWS469 bishop of Belley had to say. These intrusive references to the discourse of contemporary historians obscures the discourse ofJean-Pierre Camus. Alexander Sedgwick University ofVirginia (Emeritus) The Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter's: Outfitting the Basilica, 16211666 . By Louise Rice. [Monuments of Papal Rome.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press in association with the American Academy of Rome. 1997. Pp. xvi, 478. $95.00.) St. Peter's is, without doubt, among the most intensively studied buildings in the world, the subject of countless articles and books in numerous languages. For all that has been written about its construction and decoration, however, many aspects of its history have gone largely unexplored. Who,for example, beyond the popes,was responsible for decisions concerning the construction and outfitting of the new basilica? How did the altar dedications and relics of the Constantinian basilica survive in the arrangement and tiding of the altars in New St. Peter's? To what extent do the altarpieces in the new basilica embody a unified iconographie program? And how did liturgical and aesthetic conerns impact the decoration of the new basilica? These and other related...