The World of Port-Royal: The Jansenist Movement in the Catholic Church, 17th–18th Centuries
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Douglas Palmer
The seventeenth and eighteenth century Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism is best recognized by historians of the period as a primarily French phenomenon. Indeed, it was in France where the neo-Augustinism teaching of the University of Louvain theologian and Bishop of Ypres Cornelius Jansen made its most widespread and dramatic impact. Hated equally in France by supporters of absolutism, papal infallibility, and the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, Jansenism nevertheless formed a religious justification for important political challenges to the French crown, while simultaneously challenging the materialism of the French Enlightenment. Recent monographs from historians on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Dale Van Kley in the United States, and Catherine Maire in France have admirably demonstrated the impact of Jansenism upon the religious path from French absolutism to the French Revolution.
© 2002 by K.G. Saur
