We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Robert R. Palmer's Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France: An Overdue Tribute.
- Authors
Van Kley, Dale K.
- Abstract
Robert R. Palmer wrote his first book, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, under the influence of his mentor at Cornell University, Carl L. Becker. Whereas Becker had claimed that the "enlightened" French philosophes were more indebted to Christianity than they recognized, Palmer argued that French Catholic apologists in the eighteenth century were also more "enlightened" than they knew. The two theses are complementary sides of Becker's wider point that beneath an intellectual debate in the public sphere there lay certain shared assumptions that make discussion possible, or what Alfred Whitehead had called a common "climate of opinion." Devoted to the subsequent historiography of Palmer's subject, this article argues that although research has since vindicated aspects of Palmer's portrait of French "enlightened" Jesuits, it has also altered Palmer's picture of French Jansenists as being globally unenlightened. This development in historiography enlarges Palmer's own notion of a "climate of opinion," while challenging the coherence of recent notions of a single "Catholic Enlightenment."
- Subjects
FRANCE; PALMER, Robert R.; CATHOLICS &; Unbelievers in 18th-Century France (Book); BECKER, Carl Lotus, 1873-1945; ENLIGHTENMENT; JANSENISTS; JESUITS; MOLINISM; FRENCH Catholics; FRENCH history; FRENCH church history; EDUCATION; EIGHTEENTH century
- Publication
Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 2011, Vol 37, Issue 3, p18
- ISSN
0315-7997
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3167/hrrh.2011.370303