Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France

This book recounts the involvement of the Catholic Church in French cultural life during the Counter-Reformation. Exploring the extent of the Church's influence on all sections of society, Professor Phillips provides a wide-ranging and coherent synthesis of the period.

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France brings together the social, religious and intellectual history of the Grand Siecle and focuses on the involvement of the Church in a variety of cultural domains, including literature, art, censorship and ideas. It explores the limits as well as the extent of the Church's influence, especially in its attempt to impose orthodoxy in all areas and on all sections of society. Given that orthodoxy determines the believer's inclusion or exclusion from the Church, thus implying the notion of boundaries in a context of constraint, the study is conceived according to a number of spaces. The notion of space is sometimes interpreted literally, e.g. Port-Royal, the school and the church building, and sometimes metaphorically, e.g. orthodoxy itself, science and theology. The book also deals with religious attitudes to libertinage, atheism and deism, and with aspects of French Protestantism.