Mélancolie et apostasie aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles

• Main Author: Mathilde Bernard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2015-12-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Subjects: Conversion; apostasy; declaration; confession; Labadie; Véron
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/748

In France, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witness the appearance of the Reformation and the establishment of the Counter-Reformation, designed to renovate Catholic practices and thus to fight against the “poison” of Protestantism. During heresy trials, wars, or controversies, Catholics and Protestants oppose in order to try and win more souls/consciousness’s over to their cause or at least not to lose too many. Conversion becomes a large-scale political stake and a whole strategy is therefore developed to check abjurations on the one hand and prompt conversion on the other. This war of consciousness’s tends to increase the phenomenon of religious melancholy in its diverse expressions, from anxiety to panic, from confusion to despair. Melancholy then becomes an object of controversy, as it is analysed by the detractors of the convert to question the honesty/legitimacy of the conversion.