From Ritual To Meditative Piety: Devotional Change In French Penitential Confraternities From the 16th to the 18th Century
Penitential confraternities were Catholic lay secret societies popular in southern France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They were so called because initially they ritually practiced self-flagellation as an act of collective penance. However, over the centuries the devotions they pe...
| Published in: | Journal of ritual studies |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dep.
[1987]
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| In: |
Journal of ritual studies
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| Further subjects: | B
Crosses
B Society of Jesus B Catholic Reformation B Meditation B Religious rituals B Piety B Devotion B Processions |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | Penitential confraternities were Catholic lay secret societies popular in southern France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They were so called because initially they ritually practiced self-flagellation as an act of collective penance. However, over the centuries the devotions they performed underwent a transformation. In the sixteenth century all of their devotions were ritualized and tied to a specific locale, the prime example being self-flagellation which members performed a regular basis in their chapels. By the eighteenth century, in response to the new spiritual values of the Counter Reformation, these ritual devotions had given way to the practice of meditation and charitable acts. Research on altered states of consciousness suggests that the performance of rituals generates a different psychological experience from that of practice of meditation. Ritual performance generates experiences of communitas. It rewards corporate religious activity in ways that meditation does not. It can be argued that the rituals performed by confraternities early in their existence were crucial for the maintenance of group and organizational cohesion. If this is so, it is possible to see that the replacement of ritualized devotions by meditative ones was a factor in the breakdown of organizational cohesion such as developed after 1750. In this way the transformation of devotions had an indirect role in the later decline of the confraternities. |
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| ISSN: | 0890-1112 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of ritual studies
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