The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560-1600 (review)

Megan Armstrong's book is the second volume in an ambitious new series showcasing innovative research on Europe during the transformation from the medieval to the modern world. Armstrong admirably lives up to these goals in her investigation of how and why the Observant Franciscans, the largest branch of the Franciscan order in late sixteenth-century France, became a potent political force during the Wars of Religion. The chronology of her study is essential to her argument that the Franciscans' alliance with the Catholic League after its emergence in 1585 was in step with their longstanding battle against heresy and spiritual corruption. Furthermore, it was precisely because the Franciscans had already successfully established themselves as a public voice of spiritual truth that so many people embraced their pro-League message. Consequently, Armstrong asserts, the Franciscans helped to tip the balance towards the inherently Catholic nature of the early modern French state.

In linking religious values to political action, Armstrong embraces the recent historiographical trend to, in Mack Holt's words, put religion back into the Wars of Religion. Certainly, conventional political studies have their place, but Armstrong illustrates the ways in which the Franciscans, drawing on their deeply embedded traditions of spirituality and itinerant preaching, held special appeal in this tumultuous period. As chapter 1 outlines, many French Catholics likened Calvinism to a disease that threatened France's spiritual and political health. Neither the king nor episcopate offered an effective remedy for this threat, thereby creating a void in leadership that the Franciscans eagerly filled.

The subsequent four chapters examine the ideological roots of the Franciscans' political activism and spiritual zealotry during the Wars of Religion (chapter 2), and their strategies and bases of support for selling their ministry to the French public. These included ecclesiastical support (chapter 3), notably for their talents as preachers, and an extensive web of lay patronage (chapter 4). The accompany-ing eighteen-page appendix detailing the names, dates, and foundations of patrons of the Paris friary from 1560 to 1611 highlights Armstrong's formidable archival skills. As she argues, the social diversity of the benefactors and their forms of patronage — for example, bequests supporting the pastoral ministry of thefriars — attest to the vitality of the Franciscan spiritual tradition. At the core of this tradition was Saint Francis's call to put one's duty to God before that to any other authority. This duty included the pursuit of individual holiness, which, Franciscan preachers insisted, opened a path for every Catholic to both personal and societal salvation. Because Calvinism blocked this path, it had to be destroyed, even if this meant disobeying the crown.

Armstrong's decision to focus her lens on the Paris community was not haphazard. Home to the University of Paris and a prestigious Franciscan school of theology, Paris was the premier site of intellectual formation and political advancement for Franciscans (chapter 5). Equally significant, it was where they first came into contact with, and ultimately embraced, League radicalism.

Armstrong's discussion culminates in chapter 6, which uses sermons and polemics to explore the increasing politicization and radicalization of the Franciscans in the late 1580s and early 1590s, when the Protestant prince, Henry of Navarre, emerged as heir presumptive to the French throne. Steeped in the medieval idea of the Christian nature of the body politic, for the Franciscans the French monarchy was by definition a Catholic institution. Since any compromise on this front spelled spiritual and political disaster, they vigorously opposed Navarre, and in the process cast themselves as the true Christian leaders in society. Their alliance with the League thus stemmed from more than a mutual fear of a Protestant king: it was also based on a fundamental principle of Franciscan corporate identity.

As compelling as her argument is in this chapter, it also points to the one significant weakness...