1. Objectifs

Intentions :
« This essay has attempted to demonstrate the usefulness of an approach that centres upon ritual as performance. By examining social practice through a grille provided by texts and representations which privileges neither the views of clerical elites nor those of popular culture, it has sought to offer a multi-layered understanding of ritual events. » (p. 63)

Questions/Hypothèses :
« This article proceeds from a more nuanced assumption that ritual always possesses a plurality of meanings. In the micro-societies examined here - namely, the rural French-speaking Catholic parishes that were establish between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, in a temporal context sufficiently long after the enactment of the Council of Trent’s reforms to lend credence to Bossy’s contentions - I see little evidence to support the hypothesis of an ’individualist’ ritual culture. » (p. 38)

2. Méthode

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

« The evidence presented in this paper suggests that this was not the dominant function of Catholic ritual in colonial Quebec. Many other social practices were at work in the parish ritual, especially a game of positioning, the elaboration of hierarchy, and the search for status both within the family and outside it. Seen in this light, Bossy’s view that a radical individualization occured in ritual practice as the immediate consequence of Councils of Trent is difficult to accept. Although in the practices decreed by and the representations diffused by the council, there certainly were an intent to interiorize belief, it must be recognized that these practices, either through ritual or teaching, always relied upon the family as the primary medium.
[...] [I]n rural Quebec the full force of this change in ritual practice appeared very late, only in the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus became one of the central pillars of a privatized society that increasingly sealed the nuclear family off from the public gaze and ensured that, within its precincts, the rules of morality could be violated through public ignorance and the complicity of church and state. » (p. 64)