Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Joseph Bergin
View Inside
Format: ClothPrice: $55.00
The definitive account of the nature of French religious life across the ‘long seventeenth century’
This readable and engaging book by an acclaimed historian is the only wide-ranging synthesis devoted to the French experience of religious change during the period after the wars of religion up to the early Enlightenment. Joseph Bergin provides a clear, up-to-date, and thorough account of the religious history of France in the context of social, institutional, and cultural developments during the so-called long seventeenth century.
Bergin argues that the French version of the Catholic Reformation showed a dynamism unrivaled elsewhere in Europe. The traumatic experiences of the wars of religion, the continuing search within France for heresy, and the challenge of Augustinian thought successively energized its attempts at religious change. Bergin highlights the continuing interaction of church and society and shows that while the French experience was clearly allied to its European context, its path was a distinctive one.
Joseph Bergin is professor of history at the University of Manchester, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Cardinal Richelieu, The Making of the French Episcopate and Crown, Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV, all published by Yale.
"Benefiting from a lifetime's study, Joseph Bergin brilliantly succeeds in showing us how the French Catholic church was the product of a society that it, in turn, did so much to shape. The result is a remarkable recreation of a diverse religious society to which generations of individuals, clerics and laymen, found themselves committed by shared duty and devotion." —Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield
"Joseph Bergin's outstanding synoptic study combines breadth of coverage and depth of understanding to brilliant effect. He brings out the astonishing scale of the Catholic reform movement in France, while offering an incisive analysis of its inner workings and ambiguities. This now becomes the indispensable book for everyone interested in seventeenth-century French Catholicism, and will also be invaluable to all serious students of early modern French and European history."—Robin Briggs
“Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand seventeenth-century France . . . a masterpiece.”—Michael Hayden, Canadian Journal of History
Publication Date: August 25, 2009
