The Reform of Port Royal

The monastery of Port-Royal has been a favorite subject of scholarly research mainly because of its involvement with the founder of Jansenism in France, St-Cyran, and its family connections with Antoine Arnauld who was the theologian of the movement. Less studied, but also significant, was the role played by the reform of port-Royal by Mère Angélique Arnauld, and its continuance by her niece, Soeur Angélique de St-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly, in the Cistercian reforms of the Seventeenth Century. F. Ellen Weaver, who completed her doctorate at Princeton University and is now teaching Church History at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, has traced the evolution of this important reform from its Cistercian beginnings to its emergence as a model of Jansenist ideal and practice, pointing toward its final enduring influence in French Catholicism as a mythic symbol of heroic resistance of a community to oppressive authority in the name of freedom of conscience. She has done a careful textual analysis of the development of the Constitutions de Port-Royal during the period in which the controversies were raging (1948-1684) to illustrate this evolution fromCistercian to Jansenist character of the reform, and to point out continuities which have semetimes been overlooked in the polemic against the Jansenists. This work represents a significant contribution to studies in the religious history of modern France in general, and to monastic and counter-reformation studies in particular. Une étude neuve, unique en son genre, sur la place tenue par Mère Angélique Arnauld à Port-Royal et sur le rôle joué par sa nièce dans les réformes cisterciennes du dix-septième siècle. L'examen approfondi des Constitutions de Port-Royal révèle l'idéal janséniste et fournit une contribution non négligeable aux recherches sue l'histoire religieuse de la France moderne.