Callings and Consequences: The Making of Catholic Vocational Culture in Early Modern France by Christopher J. Lane (review)

Reviewed by: Callings and Consequences: The Making of Catholic Vocational Culture in Early Modern France by Christopher J. Lane Daniel Watkins Callings and Consequences: The Making of Catholic Vocational Culture in Early Modern France. By Christopher J. Lane. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. Pp. xvii, 192. $39.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978-0-228-00855-2.) "What do you want to be when you grow up?" It is a common question for children today and, according to historian Christopher Lane, a point of significant discussion in the seventeenth-century French Catholic Church. Lane's Callings and Consequences examines the notion of "vocation" in early modern Catholic thinking through the analysis of Catholic prescriptive literature—a body of sources that includes "sermons … pious spiritual handbooks, catechisms, and guides for priestly care of the faithful" as well as biographical narratives such as chronicles and obituaries (9). Vocation in these early modern texts entailed a notion of "calling" either to the professional religious life or increasingly, as Lane contends, to life in the secular world. Lane argues that seventeenth-century reformers "developed an inherited repertoire of medieval and sixteenth-century vocational culture into more coherent, systematic forms that were meant to remake the Church and the kingdom [of France]" (4). Lane's argument rests primarily on the impact of a reforming movement that promoted what he terms "vocational rigorism." Vocational rigorism was "the belief that salvation was virtually conditional on choosing the state to which one had been called by God" (39). In Lane's telling, vocational rigorism was connected to but not synonymous with the "rigorist turn" of the seventeenth century. It was less a product of Jansenism and more an outgrowth of a general reforming attitude that emerged in the wake of the Council of Trent. In the book's first chapter, Lane connects vocational rigorism to its sixteenth-century precedents. Seventeenth-century reformers took the ideas of Ignatius Loyola and Francis de Sales, among others, and built upon them. Lane demonstrates how in the rest of the book, analyzing the concepts of urgency, inclusiveness, method, and liberty in seventeenth-century Catholic prescriptive texts. Urgency for reformers entailed the insistence that discerning one's vocational calling was fundamental for women's and men's abilities to access God's grace, resist sin, and live a happy life. Inclusiveness involved the ways that reformers understood lay life, in addition to clerical careers, as predicated on a "calling" and demanding vocational discernment. This chapter is perhaps the most historiographically significant as it pushes back on long-standing historical assumptions that Protestant reformers were solely responsible for upholding the secular life as worthy of divine "calling." In chapter 4, Lane uncovers the methods that reformers suggested for discerning one's vocation—methods that included "prayer, wise counsel, and introspective deliberation" (76). Finally, Lane ends with a chapter on "liberty," or the manner by [End Page 805] which reformers encouraged Catholic men and women to discern for themselves what God's calling was for their lives while also respecting paternal and royal authority. In all of these thematic examinations, Lane considers writings about both women and men, laypeople and clergy. Lane's ability to unpack complicated theological texts and relate them to the larger context of early modern Catholicism is impressive. His study is exceptionally well-organized and clear. The book is limited by the sources upon which he chose to focus. As a study of prescriptive literature, Callings and Consequences does not examine to a significant extent the practical application of these reforming ideas. One might imagine (and indeed hope for) a companion volume that interrogates diaries, letters, or even court records to uncover the ways that vocational discernment actually occurred in the lives of seventeenth-century French Catholics. Lane ends his book with a consideration of the "afterlife of early modern Catholic vocational reform" (112). He locates the significance of vocational rigorism in the ways that it formed a part of "Catholic modernity" (106). The conclusion nudges the book in the direction of philosophy, and it appears that one of Lane's primary objectives in studying early modern writings on vocation is to explore the place of Catholics in what he calls...

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