Religion et Société: Les Réguliers et la vie régionale dans les diocèses d'Auxerre, Langres et Dijon (fin XVIe-fin XVIIIe siècles) by Dominique Dinet (review)

BOOK REVIEWS635 possible private Masses, would have been almost invisible to the outside world. It was easier for the Queen than for most people to be a crypto-Catholic, since she was never expected to commune in her chapel. On the other hand, it is clear that, whatever her private sympathies, she believed that London was worth more than a Mass, no matter what the papacy thought. By comparing the Elizabethan and Jacobean Courts, McCullough throws the religious preferences and styles of the monarchs into clear relief. Elizabeth faithfully attended the very public sermons held before large crowds during Lent. She sometimes corrected the preachers, but she was there, and she was seen. She also observed morning prayer daily with her household. Her devotion was liturgically oriented, and she used sermons as public occasions to show herself to her people. Ironically,James, who loved preaching, adding extra sermons to the Court calendar and hearing them even in his hunting lodges, did not attend them with the public. In the sermon-mad Jacobean period his people did not see him as participating, even though, as Lori Anne Ferrell establishes in her Government by Polemic.James L, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetoric of Conformity (Stanford, 1998),James deliberately used sermons as an instrument of policy. McCullough is a literary scholar, but this is an historian's book. He takes pains to establish the importance of the preachers' literary production, but to do that, he had to get the history right,which no one has done. Included with this book is a floppy disk that calendars all the sermons at Court he has identified. What would have been a second volume has become a searchable companion disk, a very welcome tool. Presumably this calendar will give sermons at Court a prominence in scholarship that this excellent book proves they deserve. Norman Jones Utah State University Religion et Société: Les Réguliers et la vie régionale dans les diocèses d'Auxerre , Langres et Dijon (fin XVI'-fln XVILI' siècles). By Dominique Dinet. 2 vols. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. 1999. Pp. 435; 437-950. 280F.) A massive dissertation (doctorat d'état), this work has much to offer specialists of early modern religious history. The author examines in great detail the evolution of religious orders and congregations of three dioceses in Burgundy and Champagne, from the Edict of Nantes of 1 598, to 1789 and the French Revolution . Responding to a historiographical tradition that has often slavishly repeated the harsh, Enlightenment polemics of a Voltaire or a Montesquieu, Dinet argues for a more nuanced view of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious houses. This carefully documented study, based largely on archival sources, provides much evidence for the author's principal thesis: At least in the specific regions 636BOOK REVIEWS studied, there was not, as has often been posited, a simple scenario of rapid growth of religious communities in the l600's, followed quickly by a wellearned and steep decline in the 1700's. Against this monochromatic rise-and-fall model, Dinet establishes a much more complex picture. While some groups, such as the Franciscan friars, did lose their popularity and numbers in the eighteenth century, others grew, especially the newer congregations of uncloistered women religious, such as the Daughters of Charity. Average Catholics, the people in the parishes, rarely perceived members of religious orders and congregations as lazy, useless, wealthy gluttons, even if thephilosophes did portray them that way. Indeed, the educational and charitable work of many religious was highly valued, and missed greatly when it was suppressed by force at the century's end. More sympathetic to Jesuits than to Jansenists, Dinet suggests that where a decline in religious vocations did occur it was in places ofJansenist dominance, such as the diocese of Auxerre for much of the first half of the eighteenth century . There, under the episcopate of Mgr de Caylus, religious unsympathetic to a Jansenist agenda of moral rigorism and infrequent reception of the Eucharist were expelled or otherwise punished. The Jesuits were barred from preaching or hearing confessions in his diocese. Dinet argues that devotions associated with the Jesuits, such as that to the Sacred Heart...