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Fasting, Piety, and Political Anxiety among French Reformed Protestants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Raymond A. Mentzer
Raymond A. Mentzer
Affiliation:
Raymond A. Mentzer holds the Daniel J. Krumm Family Chair in Reformation Studies at the University of Iowa.
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Extract

Fasting has an ancient and revered place in the many religious traditions that human communities have fostered throughout history and across the globe. In India, to take a modern example, Hindu women commonly carry out ritual fasts or vrats. Fasting, particularly in its collective forms, is also frequent and widespread among western groups that scholars have sometimes described as Abrahamic religions. Muslims annually observe Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer, and celebration. Jews customarily fast, taking no food or drink from sunup to sundown, several days each year and, most notably, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For medieval Christians, preparation for the holy feasts of Christmas and Easter meant substantial periods of religious preparation, the well-known Advent and Lenten periods complete with fasting and abstinence from certain foods. In contemporary Christian circles, fasting may be less widely practiced, yet it retains an important place among Roman Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, to cite but two better-known cases. In short, the utilization of food for purposes of religious devotion and piety, whether through fasting or feasting, has been a long-standing custom within and without western religious culture.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 330 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2007

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45. Ibid. 259; Aymon, Jean, Tous les synodes nationaux des Églises réformées de France, 2 vols. (The Hague: Charles Delo, 1710), 1:79, 163Google Scholar; Quick, John, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata or the Acts, Decisions, Decrees, and Canons of those Famous National Councils of the Reformed Churches in France, 2 vols. (London: T. Parkhurst and J. Robinson, 1692), 1:73, 148.Google Scholar

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91. Trois sermons prononcez en deux jours de junes, et le troisieme dans une église étrangere, le lendemain d'un jusne (1681?). These three sermons, apparently published and distributed at some risk, give no author, publisher, or place and date of publication.

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98. Todd, , The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 87, n. 12, 89, 92–94, 98, 168, 170, 344–46, 348–49Google Scholar; Schmidt, , Holy Fairs, 19, 32–33.Google Scholar

99. Scots, like their French Reformed counterparts, also fasted prior to the ordination of ministers: Todd, , The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 386.Google Scholar

100. Not everyone was pleased in this regard. John Maxwell, the Caroline bishop of Ross who was ousted in 1638, was a bitter opponent of the Presbyterians. He thought that the public fasts were politically oriented and “too frequently” led to “commotion, sedition [and] rebellion”: Maxwell, John, The Burthen of lssachar: or, The Tyrannicall Power and Practises of the Presbyteriall Government in Scotland (n.p., 1646), 36.Google Scholar

101. Lamont, John, The Diary of Mr. John Lamont of Newton, 1649–1671 (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1830), 14.Google Scholar

102. Ibid., 58.

103. Todd, , The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 180–81, 250, 346–52, 357.Google Scholar

104. Ibid., 183, 222.

105. Fatio, “Le jeûne genevois,” 434.

106. Houston, Rab, “The Consistory of the Scots Church, Rotterdam: An Aspect of ‘Civic Calvinism,’ c. 1600–1800,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 87 (1996): 377.Google Scholar

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108. Cf. the Lutheran tradition of singing hymns as described by Karant-Nunn, , The Reformation of Ritual, 196.Google Scholar

109. For the establishment and spread of Corpus Christi during the Middle Ages, see Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

110. Jacques Fontaine, a Huguenot refugee to the British Isles after the Revocation, related that “my father [a pastor in France] was extremely fervent and, consequently, emotionally moving”: Dianne W. Ressinger, ed., Memoirs of the Reverend Jacques Fontaine 1658–1728 (London: The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1992), 36Google Scholar. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine that all Reformed preachers evoked similarly strong emotional responses.