“My Soul to Yours Holy, My Body to Yours” Mysticism, Devotion, and Reform in the Acarie Circle (1598-1625)

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“My Soul to Yours Holy,

My Body to Yours”

Mysticism, Devotion, and Reform in the

Acarie Circle (1598-1625)

Master thesis submission Supervisor: Prof. dr. R.M. Esser Second reader: dr. B.S. Hellemans

Gooitske Nijboer, S2387824

Research Master Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 December 2018

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Introduction

Some regions and periods are thought to be saturated with spiritual, theological, or mystical genius. Such a time and place is seventeenth-century France, with memories of the devastating Wars of Religion still very much alive. François de Sales, Pierre de Bérulle, Jean-Joseph Surin, and Madame Guyon are just some of the most famous figures who wrote down their experiences concerning a mystical way of knowing God.1_{Seventeenth-century French mystics}

were positioned at a crossroads of late medieval and early modern tradition.2_{The innovations}

that took place in seventeenth-century France would have been inconceivable without the “mystic invasions”, to borrow Henri Brémond’s influential term.3_{The “invasions” entailed the}

influx of a large amount of devotional texts translated from the Spanish, Italian, German, English and Latin, starting in the second half of the sixteenth century but accelerating from the 1590s onwards. From the north, France inherited the late medieval Rhino-Flemish traditions, based among others on the writings of John Tauler, John of Ruusbroec, and Henricus

1_{Introductory studies and historical overviews of French seventeenth-century spirituality: Henri Brémond, Henri}

Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos

jours (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1933), re-published as Henri Bremond and François Trémolières, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Grenoble: Millon, 2006); Joseph Bergin, Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009); Michael J. Buckley,

"Seventeenth-Century French Spirituality: Three Figures," in Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and

Modern, eds. Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers (London: SCM Press, 1990), 28-68; Louis Cognet, "Ecclesiastical

Life in France," in History of the Church 6: The Church in the Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment, eds. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, trans. Gunther J. Holst (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 3-106; Idem., Histoire de la

spiritualité chrétienne vol. 3: la spiritualité moderne (Paris: Abier, 1966); Idem., Les origines de la spiritualité française au XVIIè Siècle (Paris: La Colombe, 1949); Raymond Deville, L’école française de spiritualité, Vol. 11

(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1987); Yves Krumenacker, L’école française de spiritualité: des mystiques, des

fondateurs, des courants et leurs interprètes (Paris: Cerf, 1999); William M. Thompson, "Introduction," in Bérulle and the French School: Selected Writings, ed. William M. Thompson (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 3-101;

Wendy M. Wright, "Seventeenth-Century French Mysticism," in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian

Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 437-451; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2007).

2_{In the sixteenth century there were evidently developments in French spirituality, such as the apocalyptic or}

eschatological popular piety, devotion to the Passion and the Eucharist, a piety which is best expressed by the many foundations of confraternities (see primarily Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps

des troubles de religion, (vers 1525 - vers 1610) Tome 1 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), Crouzet emphasises the

eschatological spiritualities during the time of the Wars of the Religion, pages 357-377 in particular on mystic developments;

3_{Henri Brémond has dedicated an entire volume of his seminal work L’Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux}

en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours to these “mystical invasions” into France.

(Volume 2: L’invasion mystique (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1916); More recently Sophie Houdard pluralised the invasion into “invasions”, and implies a more religious meaning of invasion: that of spiritual possession of the individual. She also uses “invasions” to indicate the seventeenth-century political views on the introduction of foreign mystical schools of thought as external to French culture and therefore dangerous (Sophie Houdard, Les

invasions mystiques: spiritualités, héterodoxies et censures au début de l’époque moderne (Paris: Les Belles

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Harphius.4_{From the south, Spanish treatises by Louis of Granada, Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius}

of Loyola, as well as the Italian works of Catherine of Genoa and Lorenzo Scupoli inundated the kingdom.5_{The spiritual innovations included the universalisation of cults and of commonly}

performed expressions of faith such as making confession and taking communion. Other important developments were the educational reform of the priesthood, missionary work, and the introduction and swift dissemination of post-Reformation orders, such as the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the Feuillants, the Ursulines, and the Discalced Carmelites.6_{Moreover, some of the}

spiritual reform movements propagated an individually and interiorly experienced relationship with the divine in the form of mental prayer, ideally accessible to all Catholics.7

In the past decades, scholars have emphasised that spiritual interiority plays a large role in early modern French Catholicism, and for mystical theology in particular.8_{The emphasis is}

an explicit response to a Weberian paradigm that favoured Protestant cultures as developing techniques of interiorization and individualisation, leading to the “birth of the modern subject” or the discovery of the “individualist self”, or to historians who deemed that interiority and selfhood were impossible before circa 1800.9_{Instead, notions of interior selfhood are now seen}

4_{Much of these translations were possible first by translations into Latin of the Cologne Carthusians. Especially}

the anthologies of Rhino-Flemish and English mysticism transferred Rhino-Flemish mysticism, such as the

Evangelical Pearl (1602) and the Institutiones Taulerianae - including aspects of condemned or controversial

teachings such as that of Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete. See primarily J. P. van Schoote, "Les traducteurs français des mystiques rhéno-flamands et leur contribution à l’élaboration de la langue dévote à l’aube du XVIIe siècle," Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, no. 39 (1963), 317-337.

5_{Carlos M. N. Eire, "Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation," in Cultural Translation in Early Modern}

Europe, eds. Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83-100.

6_{Joseph Bergin, Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730, 64-104, 183-207; Élisabeth}

Labrousse and Robert Sauzet, "La lente mise en place de la réforme tridentine (1598-1661)," in Histoire de la

France religieuse 2: du roi très chrétien à la laïcité républicienne, eds. Jacques Le Goff and René Rémond (Paris:

Seuil, 2001), 323-471.

7_{This movement has come to be personified in the figure of François de Sales and his work Introduction à la vie}

dévote, see for example Wendy Wright, Seventeenth-Century French Mysticism, 439-444. Cartesian dualism is

also seen as an important agent for seventeenth-century interiorization, see Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, "Rethinking Emotion: Moving Beyond Interiority. an Introduction," in Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and

Exteriority in Premodern, Modern and Contemporary Thought, eds. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (Berlin: De

Gruyter, 2014), 1-18.

8_{Some of the most influential French writers on the interior include mystics such as François Fénelon, Madame}

Guyon, Jean-Joseph Surin, François de Sales; or Jansenists like Pierre Nicole, Antoine Arnauld, and Blaise Pascal. Literature on interiority in general: Moshe Sluhovsky, Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern

Catholicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017); Dominique Salin, L’expérience spirituelle et son langage: leçons sur la tradition mystique chrétienne (Paris: Éditions Facultés Jésuites de Paris, 2015); Jacques Le

Brun, Soeur et amante: les biographies spirituelles féminines du XVIIe siècle (Genève: Droz, 2013); J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520-1767 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Nicholas Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity

in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Mino Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme: De François de Sales à Fénelon, trans. Marc Bonneval (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon,

1994).

9_{This problem is discussed in more depth in the first paragraph of chapter 1. Moshe Sluhovsky, "Discernment of}

Difference, the Introspective Subject, and the Birth of Modernity," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006), 169-199; Edward Howells, "Early Modern Reformations," in The Cambridge Companion to

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as a common staple of human cognition and a transhistorical phenomenon, of major importance to Christian mysticism.10_{Yet how interiority is experienced and expressed is highly dependent}

on cultural contexts. In early modern Catholic Europe there is an evident intensification of the conscious use of the topos. Nicholas Paige even speaks of a cultural imperative to “be interior”.11_{Scholars have demonstrated that late medieval and early modern Catholics}

developed devotional practices of introspection and interiorization which became widespread methods to gain a relationship with God.12_{Many scholars have shown that the use of the topos}

was also common in the secular realm, often playing a part in early-modern discourses on moralism, techniques of dissection and anatomy, national identity and state, and theatre.13_The

interiority topos has been deemed an essential part of early modern mystical theologies: Edward Howells states that the tension felt between the interior and the exterior is a “useful tool for understanding mysticism in early modernity,” because the tension was so often explicitly problematised.14_{Very generally stated, in the early modern mystical paradigm,}

following neo-platonic reasoning, an “experiential” approach to spirituality was common. Exteriority, such as positivist teaching and learning, was devalued. Knowledge attained through the senses, through mediation of the body and created nature decreased in its perceived capacity of providing wisdom about or relationship to God.The “interior”, the soul, heart, or

Christian Mysticism, eds. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2012), 114-134.

10_{For interiority as transhistorical phenomenon: Julia Weber and Rüdiger Campe, “Rethinking Emotion: Moving}

beyond Interiority. An Introduction,” 1-2. Susan Schreiner emphasises the theme of interiority as present in the late Middle Ages as well: Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? the Search for Certainty in the Early Modern

Era (Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209-213. For the argument of interiority as

transhistorical in relation to early modernity and the Middle Ages, see David Aers, "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists, Or Reflection on Literary Critics Writing the History of the Subject," in Culture and History,

1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University

Press, 1992), 177-202; Ronald J. Ganze, "The Medieval Sense of Self," in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, eds. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby (New York: Routledge, 2008), 102-116.

11_{Paige, Being Interior, 1-4.}

12_{Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520-1767; Moshe Sluhovsky,}

Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism; Moshe Sluhovsky, "General Confession

and Self-Knowledge in Early Modern Catholicism," in Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies

in Honor of Michael Heyd, eds. Asaph Ben-Tov, Yaacov Deutsch and Tamar Herzig (Boston: Brill, 2013),

25-46; Moshe Sluhovsky, "Loyola's Spiritual Exercises and the Modern Self," in A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola:

Life, Writings, Spirituality, Influence, ed. Robert Aleksander Maryks (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 216-231; Jodi

Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450-1750 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), 111-117.

13_{On interiority in early modern state and Church: Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century}

France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). English theatre: Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); in French moralist

literature: Benedetta Papasogli, Le “fond du coeur”: figures de l’espace intérieur au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000); in Spanish discourses on anatomy and dissection: Enrique Fernández, Anxieties of Interiority

and Dissection in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

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mind found within the individual, was in contrast construed as an authentic source of divine revelation, based on the doctrine that man was created in God’s image.15

In much of seventeenth-century French mystical literature, the human interior was not positively acknowledged or built up, as theories of the emergence of the modern individual subject define interiorization and individualisation.16_{However, inspired by texts belonging to}

the Rhino-Flemish tradition, some early seventeenth-century writers set out to discuss the inner human being in order to annihilate its own ground of existence, and replace it with God’s foundation of existence.17_{The language of annihilation, or anéantissement, was meant to}

express the concept of abnegating and emptying the self, denouncing the own will modelled on Christ’s kenosis (Philippians 2:7). It generally meant a humiliation before God and abandonment to all that was deemed not to belong to God’s will. Dying for the self, cutting away love of the self within or amour propre, in order to reach a love begotten purely by and for God, or pur amour, was for many of these writers and their readers deemed to be the true source of a Christian life wholly focused on the devotion to and adoration of God.18

Historians in the past few decades have focused on the controversies between these “mystics”, writers of devotional treatises on interior abnegation and pure divine love, and their “critics”, theologians who opposed these forms of spirituality that were accessible to all believers, deeming them a risk for the structures of mediation between heaven and earth located in the Church.19_{These debates fully developed into a large conflict during the Quietist affair}

that played down during the last quarter of the century. It entailed a Catholic-wide debate on

15_{Also called an experiential approach to Christianity, or an extreme desire for interior experiences. For the}

theoretical basis of this “experiential science” and its development as a field of knowledge, see Michel de Certeau,

La fable mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 138; Paige, 179-225; Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? the Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, 209-260; There was a general mépris du monde, of which fear of

piety directed at outward signs was part, see Sophie Houdard, "Vanité, reliques et stigmates face au regard curieux," Études Épistémè, no. 27 (2015).

16_{This is aptly pointed out by Marc de Kesel, who contrasts Cartesianism to the mystical theology of abnegation}

in vogue in the seventeenth century: Marc de Kesel, Zelfloos: De Mystieke Afgrond Van Het Moderne Ik (Utrecht: Kok, 2017).

17_{For the theme of mystical annihilation in the Rhino-Flemish tradition, see Bernard McGinn, ""Evil-Sounding,}

Rash, and Suspect of Heresy": Tensions between Mysticism and Magisterium in the History of the Church," The

Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 2 (2004), 193-212; Juan Marin, "Annihilation and Deification in Beguine

Theology and Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls," Harvard Theological Review 103, no. 1 (2010), 89-109; Barbara Newman, "Annihilation and Authorship: Three Women Mystics of the 1290s," Speculum: A Journal

of Medieval Studies 91, no. 3 (2016), 591-630.

18_{Thompson, "Introduction," 85; Keith Beaumont, "Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629) and the Renewal of Catholic}

Spiritual Life in France," International Journey for the Study of the Christian Church 17, no. 2 (2017), 84.

19_{Two recent contributions to understand seventeenth-century French spirituality in its politico-religious contexts}

include Sophie Houdard, Les invasions mystiques: spiritualités, héterodoxies et censures au début de l’époque

moderne; and Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism, in particular 123-137. Both studies focus on explaining theologies that influenced and emanated

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the virtue - or lack thereof - of languages and practices of contemplation and annihilation. In France, the conflict acquired major political implications and had dramatic effect.20_The

language of annihilation and the emphasis on pur amour in earlier seventeenth-century treatises, especially the work of François de Sales, became also suspect. In 1699, the “prayer of quiet” was papally condemned, based on the belief that passive interior contemplation of God’s unknowability was favoured over the practice of virtues and the devotion to Christ. This moment in history is commonly seen as the end of mysticism as a genuine epistemological approach in the Catholic Church.21

In the light of Quietism, earlier stages of seventeenth-century French mystical theology are often analysed in order to establish when and whether (pre-)Quietist tendencies, both on the sides of the mystics and on the side of their critics, arose.22_{These approaches for the}

seventeenth century as a whole, although valuable, may lead to lopsided views on which beliefs were propagated and what was practiced in the earlier decades. In the past, the passivity of early seventeenth century spirituality and the doctrine of self-annihilation has been overemphasised, whilst the active, orthodox religious practices performed by “spirituals” at the time have remained out of scope.23_{Current scholarly research of seventeenth-century}

spirituality is often focused on the flowering and interiorization of French mysticism and the polemical developments after circa 1630.24_{Closer readings of specific cases located in the}

“roots” of seventeenth-century French interiorised spirituality and mystical theology are needed, taking historical conditions and personal agency into account. This study offers an analysis of the famous yet underexposed case of the Hôtel Acarie, or the Acarie Circle, that stood at the fountainhead of the spiritual growth in seventeenth-century France.

The Acarie Circle was one of the most influential groups composed of devotional writers on interior abnegation and pure love of God in Paris from 1600 until 1620.25_{The Acarie}

20_{Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit, 124-149.}

21_{Peter Bayley, "What was Quietism Subversive of?" Seventeenth-Century French Studies 21, no. 1 (1999),}

195-204. Certeau, La fable mystique, is occupied with the tracing of the delineation of mysticism as “other”, its death sentence this moment in 1699 when mysticism was no longer Catholic orthodox practice.

22_{This approach is also taken by Sluhovsky (Believe not Every Spirit) and Houdard (Les invasions mystiques).}

These are excellent analyses, which intend to emphasise the polemics of seventeenth-century spirituality.

23_{I will demonstrate this below in the argument against the casting of early seventeenth-century spirituality as an}

“abstract school”, that sets the crux for change in the seventeenth century well after the turn of the century. See p. 11-12.

24_{This was a trend that was perhaps set by Certeau in the Fable mystique, which mostly focused on figures like}

Jean-Joseph Surin (1600-1665) Jean de Labadie (1610-1674) due to his earlier research on them (Michel de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Julliard, 1970). Certeau also focused on Teresa of Ávila and other sixteenth-century Spanish figures. Paige, Being Interior.

25_{For short and relatively recent general overviews, see John Cruickshank, "The Acarie Circle,"}

Seventeenth-Century French Studies 16, no. 1 (1994), 49-58; Morgain, Pierre de Bérulle et les Carmélites de France: la queruelle due gouvernement 1583-1629 59-82. Agnes Cunningham, "St. Therese: The Mystic and the Renewal

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Circle has often been discussed as a cabal of pre-Quietist spirituality, but more widely known for the introduction of the Teresian Discalced Carmel.26_{Its members were profoundly occupied}

with the reform the French Catholic landscape, with the spiritual and educational reorganisation or foundation of religious institutions.27_{This thesis sets out to demonstrate the aspects of the}

Acarie Circle’s activities and practices focused on the reform of people’s “interiors” as found within themselves, their friends, and the readers of their texts. They found that the interior was inherently distinct from the body, and better attuned to God. It also insists that this interior reform was not meant to remain within: God was meant to overflow, to overtake the entire life. Therefore, practices and embodiment, the externality, were of major importance.

The informal group of profoundly Catholic individuals started gathering in 1598/9 in the Hôtel Acarie located in the Marais in Paris. The Hôtel is sometimes described as a spiritual salon, but the activities of the Acarie Circle were not confined to meetings in this place.28_At

the organisational centre of the group was Barbe Acarie (née Avrillot, 1566-1618), wife of Pierre Acarie, a member of low nobility. Pierre and Barbe had experienced the Wars of Religion intensively, Pierre having been one of the seize who ruled Paris during the years of the League.29_{When Pierre was in exile after Henri IV’s victory, Barbe, who had a profound}

interest in spirituality and the propagation of the Catholic religion, developed fruitful relations with some of the most important figures in Catholic Reformation Paris, such as the Carthusian prior Dom Richard Beaucousin (†1610), and her nephew Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629), who is known as one of the most famous reformers of the French clergy.30

of the Christian Tradition," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4, no. 3 (2001), 89-107; Keith Beaumont, "Pierre De Bérulle (1575-1629) and the Renewal of Catholic Spiritual Life in France," International

Journey for the Study of the Christian Church 17, no. 2 (2017), 73-92.

26_{As pre-Quietist spirituality: Orcibal, La rencontre du Carmel Thérésien avec les mystiques du nord (Paris:}

Presses Universitaires, 1959); Cognet, Les origines de la spiritualité française au XVIIè Siècle; Cognet, Histoire

de la spiritualité chrétienne vol. 3: la spiritualité moderne. As introducers of the French Carmel: Barbara B.

Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Stéphane-Marie Morgain, Pierre de Bérulle et les Carmélites de France: la queruelle

due gouvernement 1583-1629 (Paris: Cerf, 1995).

27_{Beaumont; Buckley, "Seventeenth-Century French Spirituality: Three Figures”; Diefendorf, From Penitence to}

Charity.

28_{Maloney refers to it as a salon of spiritual encounter and speaking: Robert P. Maloney, ""The Beautiful Acarie,"}

Vincentiana 41, no. 3 (1997), Article 7.

29_{Pierre Acarie carried the nickname “lacquey of the League”, a somewhat pejorative}_{term. Nevertheless, he and}

Barbe held close ties to the Leagueists, many of whom remained close with them after the Wars of Religion had come to an end in 1598. Robert Descimon, Qui étaient les seize? Mythes et réalités de la Ligue parisienne (Paris: Librairie Klinsieck, 1983).

30_{Bérulle is mostly credited in action for founding the Oratory, but also founding the spirituality of the “French}

School”, as it has been termed, that would remain influential throughout the seventeenth century. See Krumenacker, L’école française de spiritualité: des mystiques, des fondateurs, des courants et leurs interprètes; Thompson, “Introduction”; Beaumont.

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A group of now-famous Catholic Reformation figures subsequently gathered around them, constituting a “centre of spiritual action” using the words of historian Jean Dagens.31

Those individuals included Benet of Canfield (or Benoît de Canfield, 1562-1610), an English immigrant, Capuchin preacher, and writer of mystical treatises; Pierre Coton (1564-1626), Jesuit prior and confessor of king Henri IV; André Duval (1564-1638), theologian at the Sorbonne as well as the writer of Barbe Acarie’s hagiography; François de Sales (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and one of the best-selling authors of spiritual treatises in the seventeenth century; Dom Sans de Sainte-Cathérine, father of the Parisian Feuillants; and Michel de Marillac and Vincent de Paul, other lay reformers and missionaries. Many other lay men and women, some of whom dévots whose families had been influential in the League, others from more moderately Catholic households, people of nobility, and other clergy visited the Hôtel Acarie as well, or maintained close ties with its members.32_{The group was thus composed of}

various individuals, some of whom were intimate friends to the visitors of the Hôtel, others less so, and at varying periods. It is important to keep in mind that the Acarie Circle was never an official institution, organisation, or a distinct “school” of spirituality. There was “considerable diversity within a broad overall unity”, in the words of John Cruickshank.33_A

multiplicity of spiritualities can thus be seen to emerge from the Hôtel Acarie, which nonetheless share central characteristics: spiritual interiority and charitable activity.

The late Middle Ages were a rich period for lay spirituality and the development of means to gain unmediated access to God or religion, with phenomena such as the Devotio

moderna, Beguines and Beghards, and confraternities. These developments also produced

many of the written sources which inspired the Acarie Circle for their idea of spiritual renewal.34_{The recent memory of the Wars of Religion played an important role for the}

spiritualities in the Acarie Circle, and for France in general.35_{On the one hand, the chaos the}

wars havocked were a reason why phenomena already widespread in the sixteenth century in

31_{Jean Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique (1575-1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer,}

1952), 111. An approach used by Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity.

32_{Philippe Bonnichon, Madame Acarie: une petite voie à l’aube du grand siècle (Toulouse: Éditions du Carmel,}

2002), 49-52: mentions almost all the visitors of the Hôtel.

33_{John Cruickshank, 50.}

34_{See, among others, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle}

Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2009).

35_{This has been emphasised by Barbara B. Diefendorf in Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity; See also Howard}

G. Brown, Mass Violence and the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).

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Spain, Germany, and Italy could only truly take hold in the seventeenth century in France.36

Although the wars had officially ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598, imposing religious tolerance, the chasm felt between Catholic, Protestant, and moderate or politique factions did not evaporate.37_{Brought up in an age of eschatological anxiety, the members of the Acarie}

Circle strongly felt the need to (re)convert Huguenots, to become whole again as a Catholic nation under a Catholic king.38_{After the Edict of Nantes they experienced as an emergency the}

post-Reformation concern, shared by all Catholic cultures, to bring about a spiritual renewal within each and every Christian heart, especially of those liable to become “false heretics”.39

Hence, the devotional texts produced by those who frequented the Hôtel Acarie were often not solely intended for the religious elite, but also for those positioned outside of religion: Catholics who had no choice but to live an active life or did not wish to live a contemplative one, some due to a perceived vocation in family, society, or the secular Church.40_{Some writers, such as}

Duval and De Sales, explicitly stated that they wanted to address a Protestant audience, or the “unbelieving libertines”, to instruct them in the ways of a Catholically conceived spiritual life and redirect them to the path of Catholicism.41

The Acarie Circle: abstract or concrete, interior or exterior?

The main inquiry of this thesis is what role the theme or topos of the “interior” as opposed and connected to the “exterior” occupies within the spiritualities expounded by members of the Acarie Circle. The “interior” can for now be understood as the heart, the spirit or the soul,

36_{Sluhovksy, Believe not Every Spirit, 98; Jennifer Hillman, "Testing the Spirit of the Prophets: Jean Chéron,}

Melancholy and the “Illusions” of Dévotes," Études Épistémè, no. 28 (2015).

37_._{Philip Benedict has reiterated that both cultures were more divided than previously thought. This becomes}

especially apparent in the resurge of religious violence directed against Protestants after king Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1689. Philip Benedict, "Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime," French History 22, no. 4 (2008), 381-405.

38_{Theologians like Duval, Bérulle and François de Sales were caught up in controversies with Protestants, Jesuits}

like Coton aided and participated in mission work in the kingdom (see Sluhovsky, Becoming a New Self, 113-114); Christian Renoux has suggested that the appeal of Teresa of Ávila was the fact that she had no tolerance for Protestantism (Christian Renoux, "Madame Acarie “lit” Thérèse d’Avila au lendemain de l’édit de Nantes," in

Carmes et Carmélites en France du XVIIe siècle à nos jours: Actes du colloque de Lyon (25-26 septembre 1997),

ed. Bernard Hours (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 117-154.

39_{The renewal of Christian hearts was inherently polemic: see Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Hildegard Elisabeth}

Keller, "A Battle for Hearts and Minds: The Heart in Reformation Polemic," in Mysticism and Reform,

1400-1750, eds. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 321-352.

40_{The option not to go into religion was taken seriously, and personal liberty was increasingly taken into account.}

For a pedagogical view: Christopher J. Lane, "Vocational Freedom, Parental Authority and Pastoral Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century France," The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2018), 1-17.

41_{Judith Pollman demonstrates that most Catholics confronted with Protestantism deemed their religion the}

conservative one, even if a Huguenot was a descendant of Protestants, the idea was to redirect them, reconvert them (Judith Pollmann, "Being a Catholic in Early Modern Europe," in The Ashgate Research Companion to the

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situated within the most intimate part of man, and the locus where God and man could theoretically be united or have a personal relationship.42_{The “exterior” designates knowledge}

as mediated through the senses, but also that which takes place or has its source outside of the “interior” of man, such as the state, the Church, or another institution, and the physical body. By addressing this question, it is not argued that “interiority versus exteriority” is the pivotal key to approach and understand Acarian spiritualities. It is a heuristic tool to understand facets of early modern mysticism and to argue that the members of the Acarie Circle tried to embody and disseminate a form of spirituality encompassing both active charitable virtue and mystical contemplation, including the possibility of supernatural states. Its members were striving for the ideal unification of both Mary’s and Martha’s roles, as receivers of divine wisdom and effecter of divine justice in the world.43

This portrayal of Acarian spiritualities, indebted to and building on the insights of Barbara Diefendorf, is a conscious response to a perceived misunderstanding, widespread in literature.44_{In light of pre-Quietism, the Acarie Circle is often referred to as a centre of}

individualised and completely interiorised “abstract” spirituality, in which there was little to no consideration for the orthodox, exterior or embodied aspects of a pious lifestyle. The label is largely the result of the work of historians Jean Orcibal and Louis Cognet, active between the 1940s to the 1970s, but is still uncritically adopted by contemporary historians, aided by the fact that recent thorough studies with the Acarie Circle at the centre are sparse.45_The

adjective “abstract” designates passivity: the Acarians were believed to favour contemplation of God in mental prayer, in which all faculties should be suspended, and to deem practices

42_{Meanings and metaphors of interiority in early modern Europe and seventeenth-century France are discussed}

in depth in chapter one.

43_{Mary and Martha’s roles were heavily discussed in the Renaissance: Mary was not anymore seen as necessarily}

the “better” sister of the two, but rather as a vain figure, see Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious

and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128-141.

44_{“Contrary to the common understanding of France’s early seventeenth-century Catholic reformers as mired in}

a passive, “abstract” mysticism, I argue that the fusion of Franciscan affective traditions and late medieval mysticism that animated this group’s spirituality provided a powerful spur to action,” in Diefendorf, From

Penitence to Charity, 49.

45_{Jean Orcibal, La rencontre du Carmel Thérésien avec les mystiques du nord (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1959).}

Cognet, Histoire de la spiritualité chrétienne vol. 3: la spiritualité moderne; Thompson, "Introduction,” 3-101; Daniel Vidal, Critique de la Raison Mystique: Benoît de Canfield, possession et dépossession au XVIIe siècle (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990). 55-53; Benedetta Papasogli, Le “fond du coeur”: figures de l’espace intérieur

au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000). Jean-Marie Le Gall, Le mythe de Saint Dénis, entre Renaissance et Révolution (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2007). 216-217. Christian Barone, L’homme au-dessus des cieux: anthropologie et christologie en Pierre de Bérulle (Paris: Cerf, 2018). 43-49; For more nuanced views, see Jean

Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique (1575-1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), 205-210; Lancelot C. Sheppard, Barbe Acarie, Wife and Mystic: A Biography (London: Burns Oates, 1953); Houdard,

Invasions mystiques (although Houdard does accept the “abstract” label, she nuances this view to include the idea

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necessitating the body, including the Sacraments, inferior to pure contemplation infused by God. “Abstract” also indicates a Neoplatonic theocentrism, meaning the bypassing of the humanity of Christ, and neglect of the Passion.46

Cognet and Orcibal argued that the suspiciously “abstract” doctrines of the Acarie Circle were the inherent result of their adoption of the themes of Rhino-Flemish mystical theologies, who during the seventeenth century increasingly came to be labelled as “false mystics”. Of these individuals of northern origin, multiple had been condemned by the Inquisition in the past centuries: Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and the Spanish

Alumbrados, who were inspired by the same textual sources.47_{In Cognet’s line of thought, the}

practice of non-imaginative contemplation is thus implicitly opposed to official orthodoxy as declared by the Church.48_{In the same narrative the Acarians transformed into a more}

admissible and orthodox school of spirituality when the members of the Circle encountered the Spanish mystical theology of Teresa of Ávila, as well as the Ignatian teachings on meditation, resulting gradually in a christocentric, highly imaginative and sense-based devotion to God, appealing to a far greater public of Catholics. Pierre de Bérulle’s spirituality, which developed into a current of thought and practice that scholars now call the “French School of Spirituality”, is perceived as the end-product of the encounter between Rhino-Flemish mystics and Spanish mystics that took place in the Hôtel Acarie.49 _{The question is in how far the frequenters of the}

Hôtel Acarie were touched by these concerns on orthodoxy, could consciously respond to, and incorporated the meanings inherent in their labelling as “abstract school”. Whilst criticism was aired against mystical theology or rather against “false mysticism” during the lifetimes of the historical subjects of this study opposition to mystical modes of prayer became more explicit, polarised and widespread from the late 1620s onwards, when almost all members of the Acarie Circle had left the world stage.50

46_{See primarily Louis Cognet, Post-Reformation Spirituality (London: Burns Oates, 1959). 60, 111-115.} 47_{On the Alumbrados, see Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain 1500-1650 (New York:}

Crossroad, 2017). 45-61; Jessica J. Fowler, "Assembling Alumbradismo: The Evolution of a Heretical Construct," in After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 251-282. On the Rhino-Flemish mystics, in particular the Heresy of the Free Spirit, see Robert E. Lerner, The

Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

48_{Cognet, Post-Reformation Spirituality, 62.}

49_{See for example Howells, "Relationality and Difference in the Mysticism of Pierre de Bérulle," 225-243.Cognet,}

Les origines de la spiritualité française au XVIIè Siècle, 39; William M. Thompson, "Introduction," in Bérulle and the French School: Selected Writings, ed. William M. Thompson (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 3-101,

9-11.

50_{The “critics” of mystical language at the beginning of the century were people who are now known as famous}

mystics themselves, including Pierre Binet, François de Sales, and Jeronimo Gracián; see Houdard, Invasions

mystiques; Mariel Mazzocco, ""Suressentiel" Aux sources d’un langage mystique," Revue de l’histoire des religions, no. 4 (2013), 609-627.

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The primary source scholars quote in evidence of the “abstract” nature of Acarian spirituality, and of the subsequent Christological genius inspired by Teresa’s teachings, was written by a contemporary: the Spanish Carmelite Ana de Jesús. Ana was prioress of the first Discalced Carmel in Paris, founded by members of the Acarie Circle in 1604. She had been in France for less than a year, when she wrote a now-famous letter in which she aired her suspicion that all prayer by the French Carmelites was conducted in a manner of “suspension [of the senses] rather than imitation [of Christ]”. Christ’s humanity was too often forgotten by the nuns.51_{Because Barbe Acarie and Bérulle, as informal and formal spiritual directors of the}

French Carmelites, had a great influence on the spirituality practiced in the Parisian Carmel, historians concluded that Ana’s judgment applied to Acarian spirituality, even French spirituality in general of the age.52_{Barbara Diefendorf has argued against this conclusion. She}

points out that Ana barely spoke French; this was reason why Barbe Acarie and French superiors were able to have such an influence over the French Carmelites. She also believed the nation was entirely heretic.53_{Moreover, Ana’s experiences with the Inquisition’s}

condemnation of the Spanish Alumbrados and the practice of dejamiento, or the suspension of all mental faculties during prayer, made for a particular understanding of heresy.54

Diefendorf has reiterated the practically-minded apostolicism and christocentrism of Acarian spiritualities, and has understandably relegated the more passive mystical elements, the signs of demonic and divine possessions that were also promoted by frequenters of the Hôtel Acarie, to the background to counter the “abstract” label, and emphasised the more “disenchanted” aspects of Acarie’s life.55_{Yet, in the life of Barbe Acarie as most}

seventeenth-century Catholics knew it, her own extraordinary mystical graces were not lacking, but gave her great spiritual authority. The argument of this thesis is that mystical contemplation as well as the experience of spiritual possession on one hand, and practical devotion and action on the other hand, were both important aspects of Acarian spiritualities as they were practiced, but perhaps even more importantly: as they were textually and performatively disseminated. In

51_{The letter is printed in original Spanish in Ana de Jesús, "Ana de Jesús cronista de la fundación del primer}

Carmen Descalzo de París," Bulletin Hispanique 95, no. 2 (1993), 647-672;

52_{Orcibal, Rencontre, 9-15.} 53_{Diefendorf, Penitence, 158-164.}

54_{Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit, 106; Alastair Hamilton, "The Alumbrados: Dejamiento and its}

Practitioners," in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf, Vol. 19 (2010: Brill, 2010), 103-124.

55_{Diefendorf, Penitence, 158-166; Already in Sheppard, Barbe Acarie, Wife and Mystic: A Biography; Barbara}

B. Diefendorf, "Barbe Acarie and Her Spiritual Daughters: Women's Spiritual Authority in Seventeenth-Century France," in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Aldershot, Hampshire / Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 155-172.

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order to understand the Acarie Circle both as a centre of apostolic action and as a centre of mystical contemplation, this thesis offers the interior-exterior approach, that takes the possibility of the unification of the two aspects in account.

This approach also serves to implement the Acarie Circle more firmly within the history on spiritual interiorization and selfhood in seventeenth-century France. Nicholas Paige, Mino Bergamo, and Benedetta Papasogli have offered excellent insights into the linguistic topoi of interiority and mystical theology in French seventeenth-century culture. Yet they neglect to make mention of the Acarie Circle, or go into its history and effect in any depth.56_{Paige argues}

that interiorised ways of practicing and speaking about oneself only became widespread around 1650.57_{Nevertheless, this opens up questions of roots, translations, and origins. Sluhovsky and}

Molina have taken a trans-Catholic approach on interiority and selfhood, and demonstrated that early modern practices of introspection were built on late medieval insights.58_{Moreover, the}

Acarie Circle’s indirect influence in the form of printed works and institutionalisation of their beliefs, was effectuated firstly between the 1610s-1630s. Many of the works they had written and the institutions they had founded remained influential throughout the seventeenth century.59_{Next to André Duval’s best-selling hagiography, three other Lives on Barbe Acarie}

were written over the seventeenth century.60_{The long-term influence of the Acarie Circle on}

French seventeenth-century culture remains out of scope of this study, but arguably, the later seventeenth-century popular maxim to “be interior” has benefitted from the discursive practices undertaken by the members of the Acarie Circle, although it did not take on the same shape.

Spirituality, interiority, and practice: the soul-body continuum

This study approaches the spiritualities that emanated from the Hôtel Acarie primarily from the field of history, focusing on the interpretation and contextualisation of textual sources. Moreover, it applies theories from the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and borrows heavily from the academic study of spirituality in its historical form. In the past decades, the field of

56_{Paige focuses on a period after 1650; Bergamo focuses on François de Sales, but on the text instead of the}

context; Papasogli, Le “fond du coeur”: figures de l’espace intérieur au XVIIe siècle, defines Acarian spiritualities as “abstract”.

57_{Paige, 72 in particular.}

58_{Molina, To Overcome Oneself; Sluhovsky, Becoming a New Self.}

59_{And celebrated and commemorated their founders, their writings, their spiritualities, this was the case for the}

Carmel, the Oratory, the Daughters of the Charity, and the Ursulines in particular.

60_{Étienne Cavel, Pourtraicts raccourcis de Saint Charles Borromée, Sainte Thérèse, Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation}

et du Bienheureux François de Sales (Lyon: La Botière, 1632); Dom Maurice Marin, La Vie de la Servante de Dieu Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation, religieuse converse et fondatrice de l’Ordre de Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel en France (Paris: Gaspar Meturas, 1666); Daniel Hervé, La vie chrétienne de la vénérable Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation, fondatrice des Carmélites en France (Paris: Gaspar Meturas, 1666).

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spirituality has gained more explicit frameworks and aims, specifically by the hand of historian Philip Sheldrake.61_{He defines spirituality as “the way our fundamental values, lifestyles, and}

spiritual practices reflect particular understandings of God, human identity, and the material world as the context for human transformation”.62_{Influenced by this definition, this study}

contends that the history of spirituality should be at least twofold: it includes the study of certain theologies and social and embodied practices. The hybridity between interiority and exteriority is of major methodological importance in studying spirituality.

Edward Howells emphasises how the increasingly common practice of introspection and a progressive awareness of the interior in early modernity would paradoxically lead to active practices that affirm rather than negate the exterior world, for example in the cases of Teresa of Ávila or Pierre de Bérulle.63_{He thereby recognises an issue that is also at the centre}

of this study: whilst mystical thought and spirituality might seem to be about belief and orthodoxy in the first place, because of their focus on the interior, they are always inherently tied to a form of practice, or orthopraxy, about the dissemination and expression of beliefs in material forms, be it by embodiment or by texts. Moreover, as Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber argue, the concept of interiority itself is always construed in relation to exteriority. In language of interiority, the exterior is always supposed, often as inferior to that which is interior. The practices that lead to “interiorization”, a consciousness and focus on what supposedly passes within, are always structured by that which takes place on the outside.64_{Following Michel de}

Certeau’s theory on mystical theology, this study contends that mystics discursively “institute a ‘style’ that articulates itself into practices defining a modus loquendi and / or a modus

agendi”.65

61_{Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality: Questions of Interpretation and Method (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998); Philip}

Sheldrake, A Brief History of Spirituality (Malden, Massachussets: Blackwell, 2007); Philip Sheldrake,

Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology, and Social Practice (New York: Paulist Press, 2010). Philip

Sheldrake, The Spiritual City: Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2014). But see also Mary Frohlich, "Critical Interiority," Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 7, no. 1 (2007), 77-81, Bernard McGinn, "Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal," Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8, no. 1 (2008), 44-63.

62_{Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality: A Brief History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 7.}

63_{Howells, "Early Modern Reformations," 114-134; Howells, "From Late Medieval to Early Modern: Assessing}

the Mystical Theology of Pierre De Bérulle," 169-183.

64_{By analysing an interior-exterior hybrid, this study concurs with Campe and Weber that the favourisation of}

interiority over exteriority, the idea of mind-over-matter in western culture, like the methodological emphasis on abstract contemplation in the history of mystical theology, should not be taken at face value, and is in need of reassertion. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, "Rethinking Emotion: Moving Beyond Interiority. an Introduction," in Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern and Contemporary Thought, eds. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 1-18.

65_{Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable Vol. 1, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,}

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Concurrently, Pierre Hadot has demonstrated that premodern philosophies or theologies, ways of speaking of an apprehension of a reality as it is understood in thought, were often meant to be practical guidelines, or “spiritual exercises”. These were written down to guide the reader in living a full and “healthy” life, exercises that utilised the entire psychism of the individual, involving the ratio, imagination, affection, and volition.66_{The spiritualities}

practiced and expressed by the Acarie Circle can also be understood through this lens. They intended to follow not a set of dogmas, but rather a holistic approach to living and dying that seeks relationship to a higher power. The goal of the writers and readers of these texts was all-pervasive: to follow the example held before them and become interiorly possessed by God through enacting his will only.

The aim of practicing spirituality, and forms of mystical theology in particular, was to form a deep relationship with God, an incorporeal being. Perhaps for this reason, historians of mystical theology have often ignored the role of bodily practice.67_{As Jessica Boon argues,}

historians of Christian thought implicitly maintain the method of abstraction as the “pinnacle of Christian religious expression”.68_{She finds that in this manner, meditative practices}

requiring embodiment, whether imaginative embodiment or real, have unwarrantedly been left out of scope in accounts of Christian mystical theology.69_{According to medieval and}

renaissance aristotelian-thomistic and galenian medical epistemologies, knowledge and abstract thinking first entered the soul through the ventricles of the body. Bernardino de Laredo (1482-1540) was medically trained, and physiology was instrumental in his conception of mystical contemplation. Boon thus argues for a continuum instead of a hierarchy between body and soul.70_{The definition of Acarian spirituality as “abstract” is another instant in which}

embodied practices as well as a form of “lived mysticism” have been left out of scope. Acarie and her associates supposedly wrote about the mystical journey of progressive abstraction in order to gain an apophatic knowledge of God. However, my thesis is that the Acarians believed that the final stage formed the return of the soul-renewed-in-God to the active life, in which one could act with spiritual nourishment and put the whole body and soul in service to God’s

66_{Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).} 67_{Seminal for an approach to mystical theology that focuses on the somatical is Caroline Walker Bynum, Caroline}

Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

68_{Jessica A. Boon, The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino De Laredo's Recollection}

Method (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 9.

69_{Ibid., 10-11.} 70_{Ibid., 1-25.}

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will. This thesis follows the concept of the body-soul continuum, after Boon, but inverts it to describe a soul-body continuum, more fitting for the Acarie Circle.71

This theme of complete devotion to God is central to any understanding of spiritualities in the Acarie Circle. Authentic belief in God was one of the greatest perceived stimulators for individual action for Barbe Acarie and her associates. In the past few decades, following anthropological and sociological models advanced by Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad and Pierre Bourdieu, many historians have argued for theories in which practices internalised as habitus, ritualised behaviour, and social imitation form beliefs.72_{These are apt historical models: the}

material result of these practices is the only source left. But following Certea, doxis and praxis should not be separated. Theologically, faith in God’s grace was indispensable for being a Christian. Yet one did not only passively accept the gift of faith, but should also do good works, express faith publicly, and lead a faithful lifestyle in order to keep on receiving the faith. All these practices required cultural knowledge of how the gift of faith should be experienced and expressed. Intentionality plays a large role for somatic embodiment. At least for those Catholics who practiced spirituality, it was not a question of “practice first, belief second”, or the other way around, but rather an ongoing dynamic relation between the two, between interior and exterior life.73

Two case studies offer apt analyses of seventeenth-century mystical practices in interplay with a discourse on interiority, and have been inspirational for this thesis’ methodology. Edward Howells gives us an idea of what a study into the exterior practice of interior life might look like in the case of Pierre de Bérulle. Howells demonstrates that Bérulle equated the states of Christ’s Incarnation to specific states in the lives composed of charitable works by dévots.74_{Michel de Certeau has focused on Pierre Coton’s polemical letter to the}

Company of Jesus. Coton emphasised the importance of interiority, because his aim is to reform the religious practices of prayer and apostolic work among the Jesuit Order in order to restore them to what he perceived as Ignatius of Loyola’s original intent.75_{Through Howells’,}

71_{Although it would be most accurate to describe Acarian contemplation and action as a body-soul-soul/body}

continuum, but this term would be unworkable.

72_{Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Clifford}

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Talal Asad, Genealogies

of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Islam and Christianity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University

Press, 1993).

73_{This argument is offered by Moshe Sluhovsky as well, Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early}

Modern Catholicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1-23.

74_{Edward Howells, "From Late Medieval to Early Modern: Assessing the Mystical Theology of Pierre De}

Bérulle," in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France, eds. Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi (London / New York: Routledge, 2016), 169-183.

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Certeau’s and Sluhovsky’s analyses it becomes clear that individual beliefs in mystical theology and spirituality influenced the way in which seventeenth-century subjects approached their social, religious and political environments, and vice versa. A similar approach which points out the dynamics between Acarian spiritualities and the intended effects of these spiritualities on social practices is fruitful for a deeper understanding of the soul-body continuum.

Operationalisation: case-studies of the Acarie Circle

For this reason, this thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is occupied with theoretical, methodological and historiographical questions, in which we will go deeper into some problems touched on before. How can seventeenth-century interiority in France be approached, and how is it linked to concepts of selfhood and mysticism? Subsequently, the focus shifts to three case-studies of the Acarie Circle. The first chapter forms a short synthesis of devotional texts written by members of the Circle, analysed according to the interior-exterior hybrid. The second chapter delves into texts that deal with questions of demonic and divine possession of the body and the soul. The third and final chapter relates collective practices of belief in the form of convent ceremonies. This sequence of chapters may be seen as schematically reflecting the soul-body continuum: a life fully devoted to God involved complete dependence on God, developed through prayer. Yet, self-emptying requires the constant scrutiny of one’s thoughts and behaviours to check whether they are congruent to divine will. Virtuous social practice is a sure mark of divine will that has taken residence in the soul. This practice serves to share with others in the spiritual joy and inspire them to undertake the same circular journey.

Recent historical analyses of Catholic conceptions of interiority in the early modern age have challenged the narratives that construe early modernity in a state of permanent alterity from modernity. Many historians and philosophers have debated what defines modernity, and the concept of then “birth of the modern subject” often emerges within these narratives. The first part of this study focuses on this historiography of this “modern subject”, and elaborates on the choice to approach earlier forms of selfhood and interiority within a less teleological narrative. The goal is to propose an understanding of selfhood and self-exploration that is less dependent on our definition of modernity, and to consider the horizons of early modern epistemes. One aspect of the recent appreciation of the late medieval and early modern subject and selfhood in historical studies is the central role that historians reserve for the theme of mysticism. What specifically ties the tradition of mystical theology and seventeenth-century

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concepts of selfhood and interiority together? These theoretical and historiographical reflections provide a footing on which to base further assertions on Acarian spiritualities.

The mystical-theological content of Acarian spiritualities is the subject of the second chapter. There, the Acarie Circle is primarily understood as a gathering of fervently Catholic individuals, who utilised late medieval and other European traditions and put these traditions in a post-Edict of Nantes and post-Tridentine context, with the goal to reform the souls of all Christians. Following Hadot, specific attention will be paid to how these forms of interiorised spiritual exercises were bound up with a way of life, and to the manners in which these exercises led to an expression of abnegating and annihilating the self. How was such a seemingly paradoxical practice - self exploration for self-abnegation - theorised and experienced?

To adequately answer this question, we need to delve deeper into the idea of the self as a vehicle for God, but also for the Devil. Barbe Acarie, as the central figure of the Acarie Circle, was offered to the world as a master in the ways of the spiritual life. She, after all, had received the divine charism and mystical gift of discerning spirits. The discernment of spirits is an interesting theological concept with regards to interiority and exteriority, for it involves a gift of “seeing” what is hidden within another individual. This problem is central to this study’s understanding of the discernment of spirits as it was theologised in Acarie’s Life by André Duval, as well as in the documents of the witness accounts given for Acarie’s beatification process.

Whilst the Acarie Circle may seem to be focused on the exploration of God’s will by turning into their selves (although these selves were denied the right of existence), one of the most important events of their lives, the introduction of Spanish Carmelite nuns into Paris, went accompanied with multiple public ceremonious processions. These processions and vesture ceremonies, as well as the entering of a cloister, also constituted a spiritual practice, albeit in a thoroughly different way than the dissemination of devotional texts, or the activity of discerning spirits and guiding souls. This chapter provides fewer insights into prescriptive and descriptive texts relating on spiritual interiority. But it provides a possible answer to the question how the Acarie Circle expressed and communicated their spiritual beliefs to their contemporaries, and how they gave these beliefs tangible form in a world where there was increasing liberty to choose to have a personal and intimate yet public relationship with God, whether one wanted to go into religion or stay in the world.

This thesis has been inspired by, and hopes to contribute to, the ongoing discussions on how personal belief and relationships with God in early modern Catholicism were experienced

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and expressed, internalised and refined. By focusing on the Acarie Circle, it hopes to demonstrate that they were an active and important group of people who are generally known, but deserve to be analysed on their own terms. By no means is this study intended to offer a holistic overview of Acarian spiritualities and their historical contexts or of mystical theology and spirituality in the early decades of seventeenth-century France. Yet, it set outs to garner an understanding of Acarian spiritualities as not necessarily what later critics of their mystical theology made them out to be. Their active bodies were not seen as obstacles to perfection, but meant to be applied to be fully devoted to God. Instead of private and ineffable, the Acarians intended to go public and made themselves understood by everyone, to fulfil what they believed God had sent them for. As such, this study intends to gain a different understanding of early seventeenth-century Acarian interiority: not as passive, unmediated contemplation of God, not as the not-yet of later developments, but as action-inspiring interiority that was intrinsically wound-up with conceptualisations on exteriority.

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1

Interiority and Mysticism in Early Modern France

A Historiographical Analysis

“The past is a foreign country.”76_{In this country the rules and frames for thinking are not the}

same as those of the present. The alterity of the past and of the historical subject is something to be carefully mapped. To understand the frameworks for the possibilities of thinking and ideas in the past, we also need to understand those of the present. Michel de Certeau, who has inspired the query after interiority and exteriority in early modern French mysticism in general, understood the past as inherently other, and inherently lost to the historian.77_{In that sense many}

have argued, among whom most often historicists, that a sense of interiority, subjectivity, the differentiation between self and other or self-exploration was impossible before some characteristics of what twentieth- and twenty-first century historians read as signs of “modern cultures” had arisen. A reading of classical, medieval or early modern texts that speak of a concept of interiority and selfhood before “modernity” can be accused of explaining the past through a modern lens, and the suspicion of anachronism arises.78_{The reason for this doubt is}

that the individually thinking, feeling and acting subject has often been construed as that which sets modernity apart from the earlier ages.79_{As a result, the question when “we” - western}

Europeans and their diasporas - have started to become “interior” is often analysed by turning to the eighteenth century, or the seventeenth century at the earliest.80

76_{The first lines from the book by British novelist L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Hamish Hamilton, 1953),}

although these lines are uttered by the main character to relate the not-so distant past within an individual’s life.

77_{Certeau’s theorisation about the writing of history is also key to his understanding of mysticism: like the}

historian has to deal with the “otherness” of the past and it being inherently lost and not present anymore to us, in the same vein the mystic had to deal with the loss of God and his inherent “otherness”, on which more will follow below. Éric Maigret, "Les trois héritages de Michel de Certeau: un project éclaté d’analyse de la modernité,"

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55, no. 3 (2000), 511-549; Marian Füssel, “Writing the Otherness: The

Historiography of Michel de Certeau S.J.” in Spiritual Spaces: History and Mysticism in Michel de Certeau, ed. Inigo Bocken (Louvain: Peeters, 2013), 25-52.

78_{Anachronism in reading interiority based on the “otherness” of the past, applied to the reading of selfhood and}

interiority in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was the argument offered byCatherine Belsey and Francis Barker, amongst others. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984). For an overview of new historicists commenting primarily on the issue or impossibility of interiority and selfhood in renaissance theatre, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-34.

79_{This argument is well developed by Moshe Sluhovsky, "Discernment of Difference, the Introspective Subject,}

and the Birth of Modernity," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006), 169-199; and Moshe Sluhovsky, Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

80_{This depends mostly on what the definition of “selfhood” or “interiority” entails according to the historian, and}

on whether he or she assesses this modern development as discursive or as an existential reality for human beings. Boundaries shift approximately between 1300 and 1800, depending on whether religious forms of “interiority” are included or excluded.

“My Soul to Yours Holy, My Body to Yours” Mysticism, Devotion, and Reform in the Acarie Circle (1598-1625)