Riti proibiti

The Director of the Genoese diocesan archive, Don Paolo Fontana, has previously published many books and articles concerning notable religious women, acceptable mystics or doubted ‘holy women’, such as Princess Violante Lomellini Doria, St Caterina Fieschi Adorno, Domitilla Galuzzi (an inquisition target in 1658 as a follower of the Pelagini), and lesser figures across Europe from the Annunziata Celestine order. In English, we have, intriguingly, his ‘Devotion and Healing: The Sick, Miraculously Cured, Examined Body of Sister Maria Vittoria Centurione in Eighteenth-Century Genoa’ (Eighteenth-Century Archives of the Body, ed. Elena Taddia, from a Cambridge 2011 conference; see http://www.epistemocritique.org). His latest book deals less enticingly with the struggle between Rome and Paris over moves in the 1730s by Archbishop Charles Gaspard Guillaume de Vintimille du Luc in Paris, and other French bishops, to reform Breviaries and Missals, and liturgical performances. A large part of the book will only really appeal to scholars immersed in studies of Latin breviaries, missals and the Vulgate, and recondite commentaries on them, and who appreciate spotting nuances in Latin phraseology. This reviewer candidly admits deficiencies over some of this. However, the book’s wider importance is for those concerned with the ongoing Jansenist controversies in the reign of Louis XV, and diplomatic relations between France and the papacy, and those (like the reviewer) interested in the out-reach of the Holy Office, and censorship beyond its immediate territory. After a century of adapting French liturgical works to the Roman Tridentine texts and rites, Vintimille and other bishops changed direction—to Rome’s alarm (though admitting the French episcopacy’s right to produce their own versions). The main texts concerned were the 1736 Breviarium Parisiense, and the 1736 Missale Trecensis, reformed by the bishop of Troyes, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (the younger). Critics in Paris saw them as influenced by the long controverted ideas of Jansenius and Pasquier Quesnel and their followers. Many printed Lettres, for and against, aired the controversies. Rome soon showed concern. Paolo Fontana draws on the rich Stanza Storica epistolary resources in the Holy Office archive (ACDF), and the Francia records in the Vatican Archive, showing fraught attempts to secure copies of the breviaries, missals, episcopal instructions and commenting Lettres; then to curb publication of these texts, to persuade Vintimille to modify the changes for revised editions, to bring back the older, acceptable breviaries and missals. The vice-legate of Avignon, Nicolò Lercari, joined Nunzio Raniero D’Elci in fighting the Roman cause in Paris, and reporting to the Holy Office. The king and Cardinal Fleury were directly approached to moderate. The Jansenist reformers largely won the day, though Bossuet was more accommodating than Vintimille over some withdrawals

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