Planting the Cross

Deifendorf's stunning ability to reconstruct the lives and events of her subjects within the meticulous religious, political, and social history of early modern France sparkles through each chapter. * Allison Kach, Boston University, MA, Religious Studies Review *
The trials that Marie d'Icard and Blanche de Castillon underwent in order to restore the convents of Sainte-Catherine and Saint Guilhem in Montpellier, capture the mean atmosphere that prevailed. It nuances the triumphalism that often characterizes accounts of the lives of the religious during the Catholic Reformation. Diefendorf's attentiveness to details makes all the difference: our hearts reach out to them. * Orest Ranum, Journal of Jesuit Studies *
This is the fourth monograph produced by Barbara Diefendorf in a long and influential career. Like its predecessors, Planting the Cross shares the hallmarks of meticulous research, appealing prose and a provocative engagement with important lines of debate of interest to early modern historians. Another characteristic is the close attention she pays to the subtle interactions between the forces of continuity and change involved in shaping the distinctive religious and political culture emerging in early modern France by the end of the Wars of Religion ... As Planting the Cross makes quite clear, the Wars of Religion were themselves a powerful catalyst of religious change, one that intersected with monastic reform, reshaping in the process the French Catholic tradition from the ground up. * Megan C. Armstrong, H-France Forum *
Using examples from both Paris and the provinces, this book 'decentralizes' Catholic reform and in so doing raises new questions about how historians should define it ... As the case studies in this book so brilliantly illustrate, Catholic reform had numerous 'centers' throughout France. The Catholic revival of the early seventeenth century was a grassroots affair that grew out of local initiatives. * Linda Lierheimer, H-France Forum *
Diefendorf has written another thought-provoking study of early modern French Catholicism ... Diefendorf's profound archival knowledge also demonstrates that reform was very much a local and haphazard affair, rooted in the painful experience of civil war, rather than a uniformly imposed model of 'Catholic Reformation' drawn up in Trent. As such, the importance of Planting the Cross for our understanding of religious culture and coexistence in postwar France can hardly be overstated. * David van der Linden, H-France Forum *
Diefendorf presents the reader with a thoughtful and incisive chronicle of the challenges which Catholic religious faced when rebuilding or expanding in the wake of the Wars of Religion...The book offers an engaging and well-executed series of microhistories, which challenge scholars to take seriously the rich vitality of archival sources from Catholic religious orders. * Archie R. MacGregor, Marquette University *
impressive and engaging ... many will undoubtedly find inspiration in Diefendorf's local study approach, which offers intriguing possibilities for integrating the Jesuits into the nuanced and compelling story that she has sketched of the emergence of a "diverse, experimental, and experiential" Catholic renewal in France from the final decades of the sixteenth century. * Eric Nelson, Journal of Jesuit Studies *
Through a series of subtle and elegant local studies Barbara Diefendorf illuminates many key aspects of the great drive for reform among the French regular clergy that occurred from the late sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. More than any previous account I know, her outstanding book brings out the devastating impact of the religious wars on the old monastic orders and the reasons why new congregations were the ultimate beneficiaries. Her penetrating analyses also demonstrate how the passionate commitment to an ascetic religiosity brought so many divisions and quarrels, which became entangled in the complex structures of church and state."-Robin Briggs, All Souls College, Oxford
Barbara Diefendorf brings her immense talents to the story of how Catholic religious orders in Paris and Languedoc renewed themselves from their own decay and from Protestant attack. Searching archives never yet used, she has left us a riveting account of spiritually engaged men and women who never lost hope."-Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
Barbara Diefendorf's major new book redefines Catholic renewal in early modern France as a product of both Counter-Reformation and Catholic Reformation, coming as it did in the wake of the civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century. With a careful examination of the reform of religious orders in France, she shows clearly that Catholic reform took root in diverse and unpredictable ways. Above all, it was never directed exclusively from the top down, but was often the product of ordinary religious members initiating reform from the bottom up, sometimes despite the opposition of their superiors."-Mack P. Holt, George Mason University
In this meticulously researched and attractively written account, based on a series of attempts at the reform of France's religious orders, Barbara Diefendorf provides an impressive analysis of the enormous challenges facing those orders during and after the wars of religion. She reveals the complexity of interests involved at each stage and portrays the problem of reform in its indispensable social, familial, and institutional dimensions. Taking the problems of religious change out of their ghetto, Planting the Cross will be an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to reach beyond the established and often facile generalizations about France's Catholic Reformation." - Joseph Bergin, University of Manchester