Liturgy, Politics, and Salvation: The Catholic League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reform, 1540–1630 (review)

Liturgy, Politics, and Salvation: The Catholic League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reform, 1540-1630. By Ann W. Ramsey. (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 447. $99.00.)

Interest in the French Catholic League remains strong nearly forty years after social historians began to investigate the social tensions and divisions they deemed responsible for its formation. More recently the focus has been on the religious motivation of the Leaguers. Ann Ramsey has made a major contribution in demonstrating further the religious factors in the League and showing that the era of the League was a crucial phase in the transformation of Catholic piety. She has analyzed over 1,200 wills from Catholic testators from 1543-44, 1590, and 1630 to trace the changing nature of Catholic devotion. She uses 1543-44 because the testators represent a generation of Catholics still largely traditional in their religion. Over half of her wills come from 1590, when there was an extraordinarily high mortality rate in Paris because of Henry of Navarre's siege of the city; they allow the author to examine Catholic devotion at the height of Leaguer control of Paris. The year 1630 provides her with a point sufficiently far into the era of Catholic reform to provide a legitimate comparison.

What Ramsey looked for in the wills was evidence of performativity, immanence, and transcendence. By performativity she means those acts of religious ritual and symbolism such as providing for banquets, the ringing of church bells, and the presence of the poor in conjunction with funerals that confirm the presence of the spiritual within the physical world. It is very closely tied to immanence, for which the doctrine of transubstantiation is the most powerful example. Not only the Protestants but also the Council of Trent to a large extent sought to reduce the traditional Catholic sense of immanence and make the divine more transcendental, that is, removed from the physical world. Ramsey's analysis of the wills from 1543-44 in respect to the acts that the testators requested be carried out after their deaths reveals that Parisians were still traditional in their approach to religion. She finds in the 1590 wills a sharp distinction between those she has identified as Leaguers and those as Politiques, although the majority of the testators go undefined by party because of lack of evidence. She included as Leaguers not only those indicated by other sources as involved in the League but also those who have notaries and priests with known Leaguer sympathies involved in their last acts. The Leaguers almost always requested acts of traditional religious symbolism, while the Politiques rarely did. By 1630 Catholic reform had succeeded in drastically reducing performativity.

Ramsey provides persuasive evidence of the importance of maintaining traditional religion as a motivation for the Leaguers. She has expanded considerably the number of persons who can be identified as Leaguers and proposes that those whom she cannot categorize were Leaguer sympathizers as well if they reveal extensive performativity in their wills. She shows the appeal of the League to those associated with the University of Paris and in the legal profession. The author points out how the Leaguer wills often reveal a strong sense of French patriotism, refuting the Politique historians and modern secularist historians who reserve that virtue to the Politiques.

This is an important book, highly innovative in its methodology and research, but it is also a dense and difficult work, closely argued and heavily dependent on its tables and appendices, which make up about a third of it. It reaches important conclusions in its own right as well as pointing the way to further research on the Catholic League and Catholic reform.

Frederic J. Baumgartner
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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