The Catholicisms of Coutances by Hayden J. Michael;

Author:Hayden, J. Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

7

The Catholicisms of the Catholic Laity of Coutances

Chapter 2 contained a description of the official Catholicism of Coutances in the years between the mid-fourteenth century and the end of the Council of Trent, as well as an overview of the unofficial Catholicism of those years. Chapters 3 through 6 presented the catholicisms of the clergy and religious of the diocese. In passing, the different ways in which the clergy tried to teach official Catholicism to the laity at different times were mentioned – from medieval instruction in a few basics to the sermons and catechism lessons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the catholicisms of the Roman Catholic laity of the Diocese of Coutances from the mid-sixteenth century to the French Revolution. The journals of Gilles de Gouberville provide important but partial information for the second half of the sixteenth century. The hunt for the catholicisms of the laity is much easier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the writings of rural missionaries, pastoral visit records, and the cahiers prepared for the Estates General of 1614 and 1789.

Since it took four chapters to describe the catholicisms of the members of the First Estate of the diocese, who made up no more than 1 per cent of the population, how is it possible to treat the other 99 per cent in only one chapter? It can be done because, for much of the time under consideration, the 99 per cent had what could be called a single general catholicism composed of slightly varying blends of beliefs and practices that had their roots in centuries of Catholic teaching and the supposedly no longer extant Roman and northern European varieties of paganism. The proportion of the blend of official and unofficial beliefs varied individually and collectively. It was influenced by many factors, but the elements were the same, and the overall differences were not great in 1350, 1450, or even 1550. Then, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the catholicism of the laity began to develop into the catholicisms of the laity.

A myriad of historical studies have documented the changes that came to French society from the sixteenth century onward. Particularly important in the Diocese of Coutances were the spread of literacy, the development of agrarian capitalism, and the growth of royal power. All these contributed to the decline of the seigneurial system, the rise of village ruling groups composed of farmers and rural merchants, and the growing social and political importance of royal officials.

As a result of these developments and others, especially the Renaissance and the nascent Protestant Reformation, by the mid-sixteenth century several vectors of belief were becoming evident in the diocese. With the development of different levels of general and religious education, these vectors would slowly but steadily evolve in different directions. This process became more evident by the late seventeenth century as the influence of the Catholic Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment expanded.1

Nevertheless, at the

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