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16 FATHERS, PASTORS AND KINGS
It is certain, however, that for many of the peasantry, their bishop was a remote
figure, seen only if and when he made his visitation of their parish. Instead, their
parish priest, resident among them, was the peasantry’s principal point of
contact with the clergy of their church. Very little evidence still exists, if it ever
did, to enable the historian to trace the laity’s ‘ideal’ bishop, or his impact on
prelates, and what remains is so scattered that it would require a complete project
to construct a coherent overview. However, an enhanced appreciation of the
episcopate’s own ideals and world view is surely a prerequisite for this.
What is offered here, then, is a broad presentation and analysis of views
within the French church that, above all, enables us to understand what bishops
thought about their office, why they did so and how it affected their
behaviour. By drawing on the wide range of published and private material, the
chapters that follow provide a composite and comprehensive image of the ideal
bishop, as it was perceived by French bishops themselves and by their contemporaries,
and as it shaped the Tridentine church. What follows, therefore, is
not primarily a study of events, but one of mentalities and ideas and of the many
ways in which they interplayed with events. Its purpose is to expand significantly
our understanding of an extremely influential seventeenth-century elite
and of the culture of the Catholic church during this formative period.
Notes
1 Joseph Bergin, ‘The Counter-Reformation Church and its Bishops’, Past and Present, 165
(1999), 30–73, at 30.
2 Nor to Protestant churches in which bishops remained as the heads of dioceses. For the
attempts by Anglican bishops to adjust to the Reformation by references to Pauline and apostolic
imagery, see Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor. The Episcopate of James I (Oxford 1990).
3 André Deroo, Saint Charles Borromée (Paris 1963); Ruth Kleinman, Saint Francis de Sales and
the Protestants (Geneva 1962).
4 Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, 2 vols (London 1957–61).
5 Hubert Jedin, L’Evêque dans la tradition pastorale du xvi e siècle, ed. Paul Broutin (Brussels
1953).
6 Henry Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge 1968).
7 For example: Michael Carroll, Veiled Threats. The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore
and London 1996); Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional. A Sacrament Profaned
(New York and Oxford 1986); David Sabean, Power in the Blood. Popular Culture and Village
Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge 1984).
8 Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear. The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries,
trans. Eric Nicholson (New York 1990); Gabriel Le Bras, Etudes de sociologie religieuse, 2 vols
(Paris 1955); Gabriel Le Bras, L’Eglise et le village (Paris 1976).
9 Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture. France 1570–1715
(Berkeley and Oxford 1993); Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France.
Voices from the Wilderness (Charlottesville, Virginia 1977).
10 Keith Luria, Territories of Grace. Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble
(Berkeley and Oxford 1991); Bernard Peyrous, La Réforme catholique à Bordeaux (1600–
1719), 2 vols (Bordeaux 1995); Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en bas-
Languedoc. Le diocèse de Nîmes au xvii e siècle (Louvain and Paris 1979).
11 Luria, Territories, pp. 44–5.