Manuals and hagiography

Abstract

Didactic literature for bishops was hardly a new phenomenon in the seventeenth century; indeed its pedigree extends all the way back to the early church. Nor was it an exclusively French tradition. During the late sixteenth century numerous efforts were made outside France to produce texts which would be sources of both spiritual nourishment and practical administrative guidance for prelates. 1 Within France itself, however, no work of this kind was produced during that period, probably because the civil wars discouraged it in favour of straightforwardly robust polemics. To compensate, Latin and vernacular editions of non-French episcopal literature were published to serve the needs of the French episcopate, a practice continued in the following century, with French editions of Possevin's discourse on Borromeo, Giussano's history of Borromeo and an abridged life of the archbishop of Milan based on existing literature. 2 Then, as the French church recovered in the first decades of the seventeenth century, French writers began to compose works of their own, specifically designed to serve their bishops. This was a feature of a wider development within the reform movement, whereby other clerical groups, like curés, were offered detailed written advice on the nature and functions of their office. 3 The preceding chapters have used evidence from many of the treatises and other works, composed in France through the seventeenth century, which dealt with the duties and responsibilities incumbent upon bishops: works which were designed, therefore, and written by both prelates and non-episcopal clergy, to function as guidebooks for bishops. However, the abundance of texts means that they repay closer exploration on several fronts, for they teach much about the germination and dissemination of episcopal ideals. First, how did their detailed construction of episcopacy compare with those described in the previous chapters? The answer to this question is as relevant for the pastoral angle of episcopacy as it is for the jurisdictional and theological, and is directly related to the chapter's second major objective of tracking the emergence of the ideal episcopal pastorate. Here, the extensive evidence provided by published texts 6 Manuals and hagiography: mirrors of French ideals?