From Lateran V to Trent: Reformations of the Religious Orders, Power and Society in a French Diocese: Clermont (1512-1560)

Introduction

Aspiring to deal with the full complexity of the Catholic reformation, the May 2012 workshop in Bologna placed a particular focus on the reform of religious orders in the first half of the sixteenth century. While it is true that internal reform initiatives instigated by the Church or highly placed Church officials were important and should be considered, this, in my view, is an issue that should not only be addressed from a narrow institutional perspective. For this reason, the Libellus ad Leonem X provides a good example of the reformist aspirations cutting across the Church in this particular period. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the reform impulse came solely from the Church. We should also approach the matter from a more exterior perspective, which would make the reforms a social concern, to be studied, so to speak “from the outside.” This article intends to combine those two complementary perspectives.

The diocese is the best framework for such an approach, because it provides both an essential perspective from which to observe religious change and a window opening onto many other religious and non religious issues. The diocesan territory was not only a religious area. It was, in fact, of much greater significance in defining socio-political identities than many of the existing secular teritorial entities.¹ In this article, I focus on the French diocese of Clermont, which had two major features to make it attractive for my intended approach, namely its vast geographic size – comprising nearly 800 parishes in the first half of the sixteenth century – and the full range of religious orders represented within its borders.

This case study is demarcated chronologically by the two general councils of the early sixteenth century. It starts in the 1510s, a decade that witnessed many major events, including the Fifth Lateran council (1512-1517), the Concordat of Bologna (1516), and, in the pivotal year of 1517, the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, the division of the Franciscan order and the rise of a new bishop to the episcopal see of Clermont. It ends in 1560, when Bishop Guillaume Duprat of Clermont passed away just a few years before the closing of the council of Trent and the outbreak of the French wars of religion.

Characteristics of the Movement

I shall not cite many insignificant examples regarding obscure localities from a French region that few people outside France have ever heard of. Rather, my aim here is only to dissect the reform movement at the diocesan level and identify a number of trends that occurred in this context.² It should first be pointed out that the reforms of the early sixteenth century took place within a broader movement of reform that had affected the diocese of Clermont from the first half of the fifteenth century onwards, ever since Colette of Corbie had settled some of her “Poor Clares” in the small town of Aigueperse around 1420. However the priorities of such earlier fifteenth-century reforms were not exactly the same as those pursued during the first half of the sixteenth century.

At least until the 1470s, reforms in the Clermont diocese were marked by the foundation of several new mendicant and especially Franciscan convents in small towns. During this period, reforms of existing religious communities remained the exception, and only began to intensify from the 1470s or even the 1480s onwards. In contrast, the first half of the sixteenth century more frequently saw the reform of existing communities than new foundations. Even the Franciscan Observance, which had established four new convents in the diocese during the previous century, now solely made progress through the reform of existing houses in the major towns of the region.³ Although mendicant convents and friaries did not escape reform, the main new development until the 1540s was the reform of Benedictine, Clunisian and Cistercian monasteries. Thus, several male and female Benedictine abbeys of the diocese joined the reformed congregation of Chezal-Benoît, which had been founded at the end...