Unigenitus at 300: Selections from the Miscellanea Relativa alla Bolla Unigenitus.

Promulgated in September 1713, Pope Clement XI’s apostolic constitution Unigenitus became the subject of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, prints, broadsides and even card games. Debates over its acceptance by the French church and state spawned innumerable sub-controversies and lawsuits, on papal infallibility, the liturgy, government’s role in the Church, the refusal of sacraments, the rights of clergy and laity, miraculous cures, and popular religious movements operating well beyond the reach of academic theology.

Members of Clement’s own family, most likely his cardinal nephews Alessandro and Annibale, assiduously collected titles that documented the Unigenitus war on all its ideological fronts. Volumes of the Albani Miscellanea include clandestine Jansenist publications, possession of which would have landed the average Parisian in the Bastille. These are bound in disorderly counterpoint with works of anti-Jansenist polemic, most of them publications which the exasperated French king, Louis XV, would have been happy to suppress. 

300 of these pamphlets (dating from 1709 to 1738) have recently been cataloged, with some 1000 or more soon to be added to WorldCat. Presented below is a small sample, in chronological order, of works encountered in the course of this project. From these few titles the reader may glimpse the diversity of the pamphlets' content and the complexity of the age which produced them. Together with matters directly relating to the Constitution, one finds the Church's social and pastoral concerns, evidence for natural disasters, legal issues, censorship and printing history, and occasionally, even humor.

MRBU 5:12

Le Grand Hiver.
Mandement de Monseigneur l'archeveque d'Arles... (1709)

The record for the coldest temperature in 

Europe still stands with that set by the “Great 

Frost” of 1708-09 when rivers froze and even

the Venetian lagoon iced over. In Paris alone,

24,000 people perished from cold when January

temperatures lingered near -14º F.  Snow and 

ice brought commerce to a standstill and food 

could not be transported to the cities. Spring 

brought no relief; with the ground still frozen, 

crops failed in the country, and reports circulated of desperate people eating grass like animals, an image which would endure, nurturing the pent-up bitterness of the ancien régime. In this letter of 2 June 1709, François de Mailly, Archbishop of Arles, requests prayers for the time of famine, which he attributes to God's displeasure ("l'Auteur de la Nature soit bien irrité contre nous..." ) a formulaic statement perhaps from a man who could not have mentioned the truth, that the endless wars of Louis XIV made everything so much worse. But the writer's main object here is to propose, together with prayer, practical relief efforts for the poor – the sale of church silver to buy them bread.

MRBU 6:12

Banned in Paris.
Ordonnance de son Eminence Monseigneur...

In this edict of 1716 Archbishop Noailles put the Society of Jesus under interdict within the Archdiocese of Paris. With this act (occasioned by an anti-Jansenist sermon preached a few days earlier by a member of the Society) the Jesuits were forbidden to preach or hear confessions, effectively curtailing their Parisian ministry until after Noailles’s death in 1729. This pamphlet, concerned with one episode in the decades-long skirmishing between Jansenists and Jesuits, is an early omen of the 1764 suppression of the Society in France.

MRBU 6:13

Indecency?

Mandement de son Eminence Monseigneur le cardinal de Noailles....(1717) 

Another of Noailles’ archiepiscopal pronouncements, this one forbids the use of “indecent” tapestries and decorations in churches and wayside altars during Corpus Christi celebrations. The occasion for this decree is no longer evident to the modern reader, but was likely  provoked by some incident which only time and research will reveal. 

MRBU 1:34

The Great Plague of Marseilles.

Lettre pastorale de Monseigneur l'eveque de Sisteron... (1720) 

The last major European outbreak of the bubonic plague began when a ship carrying the infection docked at Marseilles in 1720. Within 2 years, more than half that city’s population had been wiped out. The disease, commonly called the Black Death, crept north, approaching the Diocese of Sisteron by December 1720, when bishop Pierre-François Lafitau issued this letter urging his clergy to stay and aid the victims. Printed on splendid Italian paper, with engravings of the bishop’s coat of arms, this elegant production seems out of place given the gravity of the situation, and Lafitau evidently wrote it from the safety of Rome. Nevertheless, in Marseilles and other areas of Provence, numerous clergy who did not hesitate to remain in harm's way succumbed to the plague in the course of their ministry to its other victims.

 

"Mes chers enfans"
Lettre du Reverend Pere General... (1726)
       

MRBU 9:17

The polemical nature of most of the pamphlets in the Miscellanea is evidenced by heated rhetoric between Jansenist sympathizers and their opponents, between the “acceptants” or “constitutionnaires” who welcomed the bull Unigenitus and its “opposants” and  “appellants” who sought to bring the matter before a General Council. Amidst the mutual recriminations and excommunications, it is rare to find a document as charming as this one, a letter from the general of the Carthusian order urging the return of his runaway monks,  appellants, who had fled to Holland to make their stand against Unigenitus. In terms of affection, yet with a reminder of their vows of stability, Fr. Antoine pleads with his "enfants prodigues" to return to their community.

To err is human ... to cover up keep a woodcut handy.
Instruction pastorale de Monseigneur l'eveque duc de Laon ... (1731)

Étienne La Fare, the rabidly anti-Jansenist bishop of Laon, published relentlessly against his opponents, even after his printing privileges were revoked by the king. When theological issues were at stake, correctness of the text mattered, but in the publication shown below, there must have been significant errors or infelicities that were not meant to see the light of day. How did the printer cope? Reprinting the sheet would have been far too expensive. Instead, a few old woodcut borders were printed on thin paper, and the result used to cover up some large expanses of printed text at the top and bottom of the page. Slip cancels are common in eighteenth-century continental printing, but it is rare, in our experience, to find pre-printed decorations being pasted over offending letterpress passages.

MRBU 7:16 (Title)

MRBU 17:16 (page 7)

"De par le Roi..."
Ordonnance du roy ... (27 Jan. 1732)

When he died in 1728 the pious (anti-Constitutionnaire) deacon, François de Pâris had a devoted following from his years spent in prayer, extreme asceticism, and knitting socks for the poor. Esteeming him a saint, visitors flocked to his tomb in the cemetery of St. Medard church in Paris, soon claiming miraculous cures wrought by the deacon’s intercession. Church authorities were more skeptical, although some miracles were verified by investigations conducted by Archbishop Noailles. However the cemetery soon took on a carnival aspect attracting large crowds, criminal activity and threatening public order. In 1732  Louis XV put a stop to this early “occupy” movement by ordering the cemetery closed. Shown below are two versions of his order, bibliographically distinct editions each with completely different settings of type. The Albani collection is believed to be the only venue in the U.S. to hold both editions of this edict, which soon after publication elicited the famed response from an anonymous wit who left it at the cemetery’s gate: "De par le Roi, défense à Dieu de fair miracles en ce lieu.”

MRBU 10:65

MRBU 10:63

Slashed, burned and banned in Paris.
Arrest de la cour de Parlement... (9 Feb. 1732)

MRBU 10: 40

Approximately 20 percent of the pamphlets cataloged thus far involve governmental or ecclesiastical acts suppressing printed books, most often works that are pro-Jansenist, but sometimes propaganda on the other side. This arrêt prescribes the usual penalties for an illicit publication: to be shredded and burned by the public executioner at the foot of the grand staircase of the Palace. The object of this treatment is perhaps the most successful underground printing production of the 18th century, the long-running (1728-1803) Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, a weekly news sheet of anti-Constitutionnaire propaganda which eluded the authorities for decades. This Arrêt was not the first attempt to quash the journal which persisted by means of brilliant security measures, a network of independent and anonymous editors, printers, and distributors, unknown to each other and unable to give away the names of colleagues if arrested. Despite the best efforts of the police and the imprisonment of numerous booksellers and printers, the editors were never apprehended.

 MRBU 10: 77 page 1

 A refusal of sacraments case.

Consultation de Messieurs les avocats 

du Parlement de Bretagne... (1735)

The reign of Louis XV was a litigious age and  lawyers occupied the highest places in the Jansenist movement. The Unigenitus controversy provided them with plenty of clients, one of them the husband of a woman who had been refused the last sacraments because of her inability (or refusal) to state publicly her acceptance of all papal constitutions including Unigenitus. This is the text of his 1735 lawsuit brought in the Parlement of Brittany. In an age which took the sacraments seriously, it was not uncommon to refuse them to a person living in sin. (The Jesuit confessors of Louis XV refused him absolution until he sent his mistress away). But holding the sacraments hostage to a person’s acceptance (or not) of Unigenitus, was loudly condemned, and, as might be expected, the subject of litigation.  

MRBU 5:9

Birth of the “Old Catholics”

Rescriptum alterum ... (1736)

This rescript of the Archbishop of Mechlin responds to the publication of the Defensionem of the schismatic bishop Van der Croon who was at the time ruling in a see which the Vatican still regarded as vacant since the election of Cornelius Steenhoven by the Jansenist-dominated and government-supported chapters of Utrecht and Haarlem. The secession of  the Old Catholics as they came to be known, was another piece of fall-out occasioned by the bull Unigenitus, the crux of the disagreement being the bull’s expression of papal infallibility, which would not be formally defined until the First Vatican Council.

Au revoir...  
Les miracles futurs...

 

The undated work excerpted below has yet to be cataloged, but is one of a genre that we hope to discover more of in cataloging future volumes. Jansenists are seldom remembered for their sense of humor but they certainly evoked hilarity from their opponents. Here the author (probably G.-H. Bougeant) has penned a satirical litany in honor of "Saint" François de Pâris. The author prays (among other things) that François, who can make mute women speak, might reverse the process, and suggests that the great saint who cared nothing for the Pope, should yet make us duly obedient - to lawyers. 

MRBU 11:40

Researchers curious about other pamphlets in this collection may find them in the CUA Libraries' catalog. All items can be retrieved for browsing by a left-anchored title search using the phrase Miscellanea relativa.

As always, we welcome readers' comments and corrections.

    

                                                               

Unigenitus 101

"The fear of an unjust excommunication should never hinder us from fulfilling our duty...."             
                                      Proposition 91 condemned by Pope Clement XI in Unigenitus

On September 8, 1713 Pope Clement XI issued the dogmatic constitution Unigenitus, a document condemning 101 propositions purportedly found in the writings of the French Oratorian priest, Pasquier Quesnel. Issued at the behest of Louis XIV, Unigenitus followed years of contention between the papacy, the French crown, and various ecclesiastical entities tainted by or merely suspected of adherence to questionable theological precepts attributed to Cornelius Jansen, former bishop of Ypres. 

Pasquier Quesnel. (Frontispiece, Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques, 1713)

Quesnel himself belonged to the new generation of Jansenists.  His Réflexions morales, written in French, had more public impact than Jansen’s abstruse Latin theology. For years Quesnel’s nonconformist, not to say heretical positions, were seen as a threat to Louis XIV’s absolutist government, and when the seizure of Quesnel’s private papers in 1703 revealed his alarming network of Jansenist supporters all over Europe, the king had had enough. In 1705 Louis XIV persuaded the Pope to issue his first anti-Jansenist bull Vineam Domini. This bull was met with defiance in some quarters, and Louis embarked on a policy of repression, but the government’s brutality only sparked further unrest. By 1711 renewed anxiety drove Louis to seek help again from Pope Clement, and Unigenitus was promulgated. The ensuing ecclesio-political crisis shows that once again, both Louis XIV and Pope Clement had miscalculated.
    

Some sample volumes of the Miscellanea.

 
Many of the primary sources for this tumultuous period are represented here in the Clementine Collection of CUA's Rare Books department. Housed in several dozen volumes,  are more than 1,000 pamphlets, manuscripts and broadsides, including papal decrees and royal mandates written in response to Unigenitus and documenting the intense controversy it aroused. The pamphlets were produced by zealots on all sides and in great numbers; according to historian B. Robert Kreiser, over 200 pamphlets were issued on Unigenitus in the year 1714 alone. These works testify to the turbulent decades following the bull’s publication, and to divers factions and competing agenda: the Pope reiterating orthodox teaching; the monarch intent on keeping order; his Jesuit allies determined to crush Jansenism; the theologians of the Sorbonne resisting both papal and regal power; the ambivalent bishops and upper clergy; the increasingly restive lower clergy, (usually impecunious parish priests); the Parlements or magistrates, hostile to papal control of the Gallican church and objecting vehemently to the condemnation of proposition 91 (see above). A majority of prelates (the constitutionnaires) accepted the Bull, but others like Cardinal Noailles, (Archbishop of Paris, and leader of the anti-constitutionnaires) sought modifications from Clement before they would sign. And long after the deaths of Quesnel, Louis, Clement and Noailles, others had taken their places, continuing the pamphlet war with anonymous works, fictitious imprints, and fulminations on complex issues which challenge modern interpretation and hamper cataloging efforts. Despite such challenges and a seriously under-staffed department,  these pamphlets and associated manuscripts are RBSC’s current cataloging priority. The books have been here since 1928, but have received only sporadic attention. In the 1960s several volumes were the subject of library students' master's theses, and they received scholarly treatment from Rev. Prof. Jacques Gres-Gayer, an expert in 18th-century French Catholicism. But outside CUA, these works remain a well-kept secret, chiefly owing to their absence from any online catalog. We hope to remedy this by ensuring that these works are cataloged and available in WorldCat before September 2013, the tri-centennial of the promulgation of Unigenitus.  To meet this deadline may require curtailment of other departmental activities and users are reminded to contact us in advance for an appointment.

Binding of Miscellanea, Vol.1

Aside from the looming anniversary, other factors make these materials an obvious cataloging priority. Most of the printed works, collected in some 40 volumes known collectively as Miscellanea relativa alla bolla Unigenitus, are unique, with no examples reported even in European libraries. Additionally, the provenance of our volumes adds to their scholarly value, for the Miscellanea are pamphlets and manuscripts collected by the family of Pope Clement XI, and the volumes were assembled in and for the Albani library. As such, they offer a unique window into the mind of Clement and his circle, and testify to his family’s organizational methods. They are veritable filing cabinets in book form (often with 40 or more titles bound together), still in their original bindings of vellum and block-printed paper. Many pamphlets bear the pen marks of careful reading, while others show folds, perhaps from being carelessly shoved into the pocket of an eighteenth-century cassock. A number are presentation copies, dedicated to Pope Clement or to members of his family. All the containing volumes were bound to order, with letterpress spine labels and manuscript title pages. As the books are cataloged, more information will be made available on the contents, the bibliographic features, and the organizational principles inherent in these volumes.

The first of more than 1,000 18th-century works related to Unigenitus, this pamphlet contains the text of Clement's Pastoralis officii, a condemnation of the French bishops who appealed against Unigenitus to a general council.

This water-color drawing of Clement XI's

coat of arms serves as the cover to a special presentation copy for the pope of a 1717 doctoral thesis by a theological student of Coimbra, Portugal.









 

 

The French government's 1722 condemnation of the bishops' appeal against Unigenitus, printed by the famed Imprimerie Royale.

               One of numerous broadsides, folded into a volume of the Miscellanea,

               this Lisbon imprint of 1717 contains a condemnation by the Roman    

               Inquisition of various French books hostile to Unigenitus.

AND NOW, A WORD FROM SAINT PATRICK

Irish literature (and Irish tourism) would probably be better off without the encumbrance of a script which, though most decorative on postage stamps, raises an additional bar to its understanding...

                                                    S.H. Steinberg. Five Hundred Years of Printing

"Short Directions for Reading Irish" - from The Life of Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland. Dublin: H. Fitzpatrick, 1810.

The three pages of instruction reproduced here appeared in several editions of this life of St. Patrick. Similar abbreviated Irish language tutorials may be found in other religious works, Bibles, etc. from the early 19th century. They are interesting for the use of Irish type, which, as Steinberg observed, was an exception amidst the predominating Roman typefaces of western Europe.

A good overview of the history of Irish typefaces may be found in Mathew Staunton's work Trojan Horses and Friendly Faces: Irish Gaelic Typography as Propaganda in which the earliest Irish type is revealed to be the work of Queen Elizabeth I. The Irish themselves wasted no time in appropriating the idea, and a number of native Irish typefaces were developed which were far less Roman in appearance and more related to medieval letter forms.

By the 1830s the rise of Irish nationalism and interest in Irish history spurred the development of Irish types such as the semi-uncial produced by George Petrie for use in the first bilingual edition of one of Ireland's key historical sources, known as the Annals of the Four Masters.

Opening words of the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland. Dublin: Hodges, Smith, 1856 

Petrie later designed a typeface modeled on early Irish minuscule hands. Known as Newman, this font was created for use by the Catholic University of Ireland, being named after that University's first rector, John Henry Newman. Despite the Irish government's adoption in the 1960s of Roman letter forms for printing Irish language texts, Irish typefaces are still being produced and their beauty is appreciated by practitioners of fine printing in Ireland and elsewhere.