Abstract
This chapter examines how women contributed to shaping understandings of the supernatural during the sixteenth century by their interpretations of who could have access to it: either by suggesting that they themselves were touched by the divine, or that they knew how to recognise it in others. The evidence drawn on in this chapter was produced by both women and men, and includes canonisation records, testimonies about what people understood to be miraculous, holy and diabolical female behaviour, as well as constructions of martyrdom by female martyrs and their male contemporaries. In many ways, the recognition of the supernatural could be as important in creating ideas about divinity as being the holy person oneself.
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Notes
The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt: The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis XI and Longchamp, (ed.) S. L. Field, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, p. 11.
J. Trochu, Françoise d’Amboise: Duchesse et Carmélite, 1427–1485, Nantes, Lanoë, 1984, p. 123.
Ibid., p. 130. Christophe Leroy, Les saintes ardeurs de Mere Françoise d’Amboise, Paris, 1621.
Some biographical notes about Jeanne were compiled by Guyard’s uncle, Blessed Gabriel-Maria, see J.-F. Bonnefoy, ‘Bibliographie de l’Annonciade’, Collectanea Franciscana, 13, 1943, 122.
Guyard’s account was transcribed into the seventeenth-century text of Paulin du Gast, then into Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, Paris, Louis Vivès, 1856, pp. 210–20.
Peter Burke’s analysis of Counter-Reformation saints suggests that the ideal candidate was male, Italian or Spanish, noble and clerical. P. Burke, ‘How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, (ed.) K. von Greyerz, London, Allen and Unwin, 1984, p. 49.
R. M. Bell, Holy Anorexia, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 175. On Counter-Reformation constructions of female sanctity, see also G. Zarri, ‘From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650’, (trans.) Keith Botsford, and S. F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Models of Female Sanctity in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy’, both in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, (eds) L. Scaraffia and G. Zarri, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 83–112 and 159–75.
On Counter-Reformation constructions of female sanctity, see also G. Zarri, ‘From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650’, (trans.) Keith Botsford, and S. F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Models of Female Sanctity in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy’, both in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, (eds) L. Scaraffia and G. Zarri, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 83–112 and 159–75.
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Cited in H. de la Ferrière-Percy, Marguerite d’Angoulême, son livre de dépenses (1540–1549), Paris, Auguste Aubry, 1862, p. 197.
AD d’Indre et Loire, 1 J 1165 Les déclarations faites à la chapelle de Sainte Catherine de Fierbois, près de Sainte-Maure en Touraine, de 245 miracles arrivés de 1375 à 1536. The Bibliothèque Nationale copy (BN ms fr 1045), is an earlier version of the text, including 237 miracles from 1375 until 1470, and has been published as Livre des miracles de Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, (ed.) Y. Chauvin, Poitiers, Société des Archives historiques de Poitou, 1976.
For discussion of concepts of late medieval sainthood and community dynamics, see A. M. Kleinberg, Prophets in their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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And P. Delooz, ‘Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church’, Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, (ed.) Stephen Wilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 189–216.
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See article by A. M. Walker and E. H. Dickerman, ‘ “A Woman under the Influence”: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, 3, 1991, 534–54.
D. Charles Blendecq, Cinq histoires admirables, esquelles est montré comme miraculeusement par la vertu & puissance du S. Sacrement de l’Autel, a esté chassé Beelzebub, Paris, Guillaume Chaudière, 1582, histoire 4, 65.
M. Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, 4, 1996, 1044.
Marshman, ‘Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom’, The Journal of Religious History, 23, 3, 1999, 265–81.
AD du Rhône, 27 H 22 discusses reforms to the abbey. The elite status of the abbey is attested by the preuves de noblesse provided by nuns at the turn of the century, 27 H 48. See also A. Coville, ‘Une Visite de Saint Pierre de Lyon en 1503’, Revue d’histoire de Lyon, 1912, 243–72.
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Jean Boulaese, L’Abbregée histoire du grand miracle par nostre Sauveur & Seigneur Jesus-Christ en la saincte Hostie du sacrement de I’Autel, faict à Laon 1566, Paris, Thomas Belot, 1573, fol. 4 r.
Michel Marescot, Discours veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, pretendue demoniaque, Paris, Mamert Patisson, 1599, p. 39.
Kevin C. Robbins argues that the French Calvinist Churches agreed in theory about the diabolical alignment between magical practices and women, yet spent little time pursuing cases in consistories. Robbins, ‘Magical Emasculation, Popular Anticlericalism, and the Limits of the Reformation in Western France circa 1590’, Journal of Social History, 31, 1, 1997, 61–83. Mentzer provides examples of the consistory admonishing women for healing practices in ‘La Place et le role des femmes dans les églises réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 46, 113, 2001, 125. See also B. Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modem Europe, (eds) Gordon and P. Marshall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 109; Sluhovsky, ‘Calvinist Miracles and the Concept of the Miraculous in Sixteenth-century Huguenot Thought’, Renaissance and Reformation 19, 2, 1995, 5–25.
On Crespin, see L. Racaut, ‘Religious Polemic and Huguenot Self-perception and Identity, 1554–1619’, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) Mentzer and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 29–43.
Catharine Randall Coats, ‘Reconstituting the Textual Body in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des martyrs (1564)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44, 1, 1991, 62–85.
Jean Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), vol. 1, Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, 1885, p. 576.
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© 2006 Susan Broomhall
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Broomhall, S. (2006). Understanding the Divine. In: Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501508_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501508_3
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