Behavioral contagion and the rise of convent education in France

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 489-521

  Jones, Marshall B ^a   Rapley, Elizabeth ^b  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0037715920     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/00221950151115061     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (New York, 1929), 112, estimates that "subsequent to the bull of Innocent VIII (1484) 300,000 witches were brought to the stake." More recent estimates, however, put the number of witches executed in Europe between 40,000 and 50,000.
2. Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbors (London, 1996), 260.
3. Torture was not legal in England; the number executed there as witches was much less than on the continent. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 450, considers Ewen's statement that "the total number of executions for witchcraft throughout the period [in England] to be something under 1,000" to be "probably an outside estimate." Furthermore, "several hundred" of the English executions were attributable to Mathew Hopkins, the "witch finder," and his associates. Such executions emanating from a single source are probably not indicative of contagion. On the continent, in contrast, the evidence for contagious spread, primarily through the use of torture, is extensive.
4. See especially H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972);
5. and H. C. Erik Midelfort, idem, "Witch Hunting and the Domino Theory" in James Obelkevich (ed.), Religion and the People (Chapel Hill, 1979).
6. Are Crashes Catching?" The Economist (August 31, 1996).
7. "Jan Goldstein, "'Moral Contagion': A Professional Ideology of Medicine and Psychiatry in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Century France," in Gerald L. Geison (ed.), Professions and the French State (Philadephia, 1984).
8. Norman T. J. Bailey, The Mathematical Theory of Injections Diseases (New York, 1975);
9. Roy M. Anderson and Robert M. May, Infections Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control (New York, 1991).
10. Jean Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique (Paris, 1952), 103, 172. In the early 1600s the lower clergy remained largely unreformed.
11. The words "religious " and "religion" are used in their old sense of pertaining to an order or a congregation under religious vows.
12. Jean-Pierre Bardet, Rouen aux XVIIe and XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1983), I, 90;
13. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal, 1990), 19-20.
14. Pierre Clément, Histoire de Colbert et de son administration (1874), 366.
15. The figure of 80,000 is given without attribution, but another author cites a work, La nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, published c. 1660. See Edmond Esmonin, Etudes sur la France des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1964), 368-69,
16. fn.1. The anonymous observer is quoted in Albert Babeau, La ville sous l'Ancien Régime (1880), 462.
17. François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire (Paris, 1977), I, 82;
18. Louis Châtalier, Le Catholicisme en France (Paris, 1995), II, 20.
19. Families certainly used convents as depositories for their surplus children, but children often entered in defiance of their families. See Barbara Diefendorf, "Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter Reformation France," The Journal of Modern History, LXVIII (1996), 265-307;
20. René. Pillorget, "Vocation religieuse et état en France aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles," in Jean de Viguerie (ed.), La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale en France, XVII-XIX siècles (Fontevraud, 1979).
21. The arrival of the Ursulines in Lille was described so, "Elles ont esté grandement importunées a ce faire de la noblesse..., du magistrat, des marchands et principaux bourgeois." Quoted in Alain Lottin, Lille, Citadelle de la Contre-Réform? (Dunkerque, 1984), 138.
22. The final quotation of the paragraph is a contemporary comment about the erection of the Ursuline monastery at Chabeuil, quoted in Chanoine Nadal, Essai sur les origines monastiques dans le diocèse de Valence (Valence, 1880), 25.
23. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (New York, 1973), 156.
24. Bernard Benjamin (ed.), Population and Disease in Early Industrial England (Farnborough, England, 1973).
25. James S. Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel, Medical Innovation (New York, 1966);
26. Marshall B. Jones and Donald R. Jones, "The Contagious Nature of Antisocial Behavior," Criminology, XXXVIII (2000), 25-46.
27. The Paris data are complete for the first forty-seven years after foundation. Hence, they are included in Figure 5, the most important in the article, on the same terms as the other nine records. Since the impact of the Colbert edict in 1666-1670 is evident in the data for the other nine convents alone (Figure 6), the Paris data do not present a problem in this connection either.
28. Diefendorf, "Give Us Back Our Children," 306-307;
29. de Viguerie, "La Vocation," 34.
30. Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789 (Chicago, 1974) I, 326, points out that social position determined which religious order a woman entered (or was sent to) in a very specific way: "In the other religious establishments for girls, created between 1600 and 1660, the Ursulines, Visitandines, Sisters of our Lady of Calvary, Carmelites, etc., recruitment of nuns and the mothers superior proceeded in descending order down the degrees of the social hierarchy: the local nobility of Anjou put their daughters in the Convent of the Visitation, while the men of the law sent theirs to the Ursulines."
31. The ordinates in figures 2 and 3 are uncorrected for population changes. Population, however, did not change much in France during the seventeenth century. Joseph J. Spengler, France Faces Depopulation (New York, 1968), 19, concludes that "the French population increased somewhat in the seventeenth century," from 20 to 21 million approximately, certainly not enough to warrant correction.
32. For the rise and fall of French serial history, see Pierre Chaunu, "Une histoire religieuse sérielle," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 1965, 5-7, 34;
33. Daniel Milo, "La rencontre, insolite mais édifiante, du quantitatif et du culturel," Histoire & Mesure, II (1987), 7-37.
34. The mathematical model most often used to describe this sort of process is the Poisson model, in which average arrival time (average age at entrance) decreases with increasing arrival rate (numbers entering per unit time). In contagious conditions, however, arrival rate is primarily a function of prevalence. The independence requirements of a Poisson model are almost certainly not met by age at entrance into Ursuline convents. However, since the relationship on which the present analysis relies - average age at entrance decreases with increasing prevalence of a contagious condition - is general, it can safely be assumed to hold for the Ursuline case, if entrance into the convents was indeed contagious.
35. The drop from the first to the second year is significant at the .02 level by a t test for uncorrelated means (t = 2.46 with 92 degrees of freedom). The downward course from the second to the twenty-fifth year was analyzed for linear trend. The linear component of trend over time yielded an F ratio of 16.0 with 1 and 480 degrees of freedom, significant at the .0001 level.
36. Average age at entrance and prevalence are detailed below for the fifth to the ninth half-decades after foundation. The rise in age at entrance occurs mainly between twenty-one to twenty-five and thirty-one to thirty-five years after foundation and is significant at the .02 level (analyzing for linear trend, F = 6.0 with 1 and 288 degrees of freedom). Thereafter, neither average age at entrance nor prevalence changes much. Years after Foundation Mean Age at Entrance Prevalence 21-25 17.1 139 26-30 17.7 118 31-35 18.7 92 36-40 18.5 86 41-45 18.3 81
37. The number affected in biological contagion is constrained in a similar, though not identical, way. Number affected increases while prevalence is increasing until it reaches a maximum. Then it starts decreasing while prevalence is still high, because the number of susceptible persons who have not already been affected is shrinking. The constraint in biological contagion is the number of susceptible persons prior to onset of the epidemic. In the present analysis, the constraint is the size and resources of the houses. These constraints have different effects but they are alike in making number entering and number affected equivocal indicators of prevalence or "contagious pressure."
38. Jacques Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population française (Paris, 1988), 184.
39. Mean age at entrance for 1666 to 1670 was 21.9 and for the preceding twenty-five years 18.0. The difference is significant beyond the .0001 level (t = 4.2 with 327 degrees of freedom). For the next thirty years (1671 to 1700), mean age at entrance was 18.3. This difference was also highly significant (t = 4.6 with 326 degrees of freedom, p < .00001).
40. Quoted in Esmonin, Etudes sur la France, 370.
41. Colbert, quoted in Etudes sur la France, ibid., 369;
42. Clément, Histoire de Colbert, 367, 371.
43. Marie-Chantal Gueudré, Histoire de l'ordre des Ursulines en France (Paris, 1953), II, 134; Archives municipales de Chatellerault XXIX. Religieuses de Notre Dame, Annales (I), 12.
44. Pillorget, "Vocation religieuse et état," 16;
45. de Viguerie, "La Vocation," 34.
46. Coleman, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (London, 1964).
47. Rapley, "Women and the Religious Vocation in Seventeenth-Century France," French Historical Studies, XVIII (1994), 613-631.
48. "'Noble homme' which was a title of nobility in the first half of the sixteenth century, had ceased to be this by the beginning of the seventeenth. It was then a title for bourgeois, one with which 'the worthiest of the townsfolk' adorned themselves." Mousnier, Institutions of France, I, 122.
49. The difference between the two classes over all years (2.1 years) is significant at the .001 level (t = 3.39 with 544 degrees of freedom).
50. Ronald S. Burt, "Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural Equivalence," American Journal of Sociology, XCII (1987), 1287-1335.
51. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France an XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1980).
52. The standard summary of this literature, both theoretical and empirical, is Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York, 1983; 3d ed.). The range of innovations is enormous: technological ideas (the steel ax, the horse, boiling water), agricultural ideas (weed sprays, hybrid seed, fertilizers), teaching/learning innovations (kindergartens, modern math, programmed instruction), public health (drugs, vaccinations, CAT scanners), new products (snowmobiles, the touch-tone telephone, clothing fashions), and much more.
53. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations Ibid., 18.
54. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations Ibid., 27.
55. Early examples of this model were thought to be the role of the Hearst newspapers in arousing public support for the Spanish-American War, the power of Goebel's propaganda machine during Wold War II, and the influence of Madison Avenue advertising on consumer and voting behavior.
56. The OEO experiments are well summarized in Gilbert Y. Steiner, The Futility of Family Policy (Washington, D.C., 1981), 104-107.
57. Gabriel Tarde, Penal Philosophy (Boston,1912). Timing in social movements also involves the historical environment in which they occur. The contagiousness of the Ursuline or any other social movement is highly specific. It is not determined by abstract forces or general ideas except as components of a complex mix that also includes organizational details, current events, and personalities. It is difficult to imagine any movement occurring or being as contagious as it was outside its moment in history.