Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu (review)

When Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet approached Bruno Neveu in 2003 with an idea to assemble a volume of essays in his honor, they had no idea how timely their tribute would be. Neveu died the following year while on a research trip. The volume, which Neveu helped to assemble before his death, contains eighteen essays divided equally into three sections reflecting the major themes permeating his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, England, and Italy: (1) the culture, exchanges, and production of knowledge among religious scholars; (2) diplomatic relations and practices of negotiation; and (3) the instruments, representations, and power of Rome and the papacy. Two introductory essays by Quantin and Waquet and a complete bibliography of Neveu’s printed works precede the core essays. Quantin’s “De l’Histoire de l’érudition ecclésiastique à l’histoire de l’orthodoxie religieuse: Bruno Neveu et le catholicisme” is a bio-bibliographic essay that traces Neveu’s interests as they swung from French Jansenism and Gallican politics at Port Royal, to the study of theology—particularly problems of orthodoxy and papal infallibility—at the court of Rome. Neveu’s most current and unfinished book settled on the topic of English recusant history. For Neveu, the ecclesiology of English Catholics represented a possible synthesis, or “third way,” between the two extremes of French conciliarism and papal infallibility that he had examined in earlier works. Waquet’s essay, “Bruno Neveu: Historien des relations diplomatiques,” emphasizes Neveu’s defense of positivist historical methods in the 1960s and 1970s when French intellectuals were rejecting the importance of individual agency and authorial intent as historical frameworks. For Neveu, the diplomatic dispatches he studied provided tangible evidence of texts in which human intent and authenticity were integral to their meaning and production.

The eighteen invited essays represent original research by scholars whose works intersect with Neveu’s interests in various ways. In part 1, Sylvio Hermann de Francheschi’s article “Gallicanisme, antirichérisme et reconnaissance de la romanité ecclésiale: La dispute entre le cardinal Bellarmin et le théologien parisien André Duval (1614)” explores resistance in France to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Whereas Neveu focused on the diehard resistance of those associated with Port Royal, Francheschi examines the case of André Duval, who had sought a compromise between the extremes of Gallican conciliarism and papal infallibility in the early-seventeenth century by supporting papal authority but with some concessions to the French clergy. Duval’s correspondence with Bellarmine reveals how authorities in Rome tried to manage their supporters abroad and undermined them by preventing them from straddling the gap between national and international Catholic interests. In part 2, Robert Anthony Beddard’s essay, “Queen Henrietta Maria’s Mission and the Reopening of the Catholic Chapel Royal in Restoration England,” reveals the potential of Neveu’s interests and methods to enrich other fields—in this case, women’s history. By placing Henrietta Maria at the center of his analysis, Beddard highlights the role played by dynastic marriage and female conversion in international diplomacy and negotiations in seventeenth-century Europe. Pietro Stella’s article in part 3, “Quesnel autore spirituale nell’Italia dei secoli XVIII e XIX,” considers the Italian editions of texts by Pasquier Quesnel, the French Oratorian and Jansenist whose reflections on the New Testament were famously condemned by the bull Unigenitus in 1713. The timing of Italian editions of his works and several of the adjustments made to his original texts reveal how editors tailored these translations to fit specific controversies surrounding Italian bishops. Thus, although the ideas of French Jansenists permeated Italy, their ideas passed through linguistic and political filters that made them distinctly Italian by the time they circulated...