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Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution. By William Doyle. [Studies in European History.] (New York: St. Martin's Press. 2000. Pp. x, 109. $11.95 paperback.)
For the larger public Jansenism is moral rigorism; for a religious historian it is a movement that disrupted post-Tridentine Catholic renewal; for a secular historian it is what the subtitle of the work announces: resistance to authority. From whatever angle, its history is complex: many participants, many books and pamphlets, and a lot of ideological side-tracks/digressions. What was it all about? A book, of course, Augustinus by Cornelius Jansenius, and five "propositions" or excerpts, that were or were not in this book. The book was condemned; the five propositions were condemned, but the Janenists...