Gender, Rumor, and Religious Polemic in Louis XIV's France
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8940916 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sue Heath (0000-0002-0500-5594, corresponding author), Sean Heath (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 611-638 |
| Publication date | 2024-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French Historical Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00161071-11284403 |
| OpenAlex | W4404790821 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
The Chinese Rites Controversy was one of the most contentious issues in the French church at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nourished with rumors from China, it was predominantly a debate among men, with the exception of an extraordinary intervention by a woman, Paule Payen de Lionne, in 1701. In a public letter to the Jesuits, she used a dispute concerning her missionary son Artus de Lionne to launch a fierce critique of what she saw as the Society of Jesus's toleration of Chinese idolatry. Conscious that many would see it as inappropriate for a woman to discuss a matter of ecclesiastical controversy, Payen nonetheless filled the letter with references to her sex. This article proposes that she strategically invoked tropes of feminine weakness and intellectual inadequacy as rhetorical tools to contrast the simple purity (and thus truth) of her perspective with the verbose artifice of the Jesuits. At the same time, the register of aggression in her letter forces historians to reconsider the view that women engaging in querelles were obliged to adopt a less confrontational tone than men. This episode shows how women could use femininity to carve out a unique voice in an otherwise male-dominated public sphere
Political science · Rumor · Early Modern Women Writers · European Political History Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |