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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

How to make exemplarity with secret virtues: funeral sermon and its challenges in early modern France

Résumé

Funeral sermons were immensely popular throughout seventeenth-century Europe. In France, such public speeches (oraisons funèbres) constituted major cultural, religious, and often political events. The sermons were sustained by a complex institutional organisation and, at least in the case of the most prestigious of them, embedded in a multimodal semiotic framework. As such, they do not seem to have much to do with privacy. They belong to a time when death was not viewed as a private event, especially when a public figure was concerned. In those cases, funeral ceremonies often entailed a spectacular decoration of the church as well as public advertising and public reports in newspapers. As to their content, by their very nature, funeral sermons are situated at the intersection of biography and history, of individuals and communities, of particular actions and public deeds. However, they target communal memory and therefore mobilise shared memories and mostly deal with public or semi-public biographical episodes. As official or semi-official epideictic speeches, they primarily address the community rather than individuals, which explains why they seem to exclude privacy. Furthermore, they do not describe the specific aspect of each person, but rather his or her sense of community. By collectively re-enacting the personal experience of loss and death, they are meant, in a typically epideictic dynamics, to sustain the unity of the living as a group that shares the same values and representations. They constitute collective experiences that reinforce the unity of the group and intentionally transcend private emotions of grief, sadness, and fear, aiming towards the regeneration of the community.

Dates et versions

hal-03946221 , version 1 (19-01-2023)

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Citer

Anne Régent-Susini. How to make exemplarity with secret virtues: funeral sermon and its challenges in early modern France. Green Michael; Nørgaard Lars Cyril; Bruun Mette Birkedal. Early Modern Privacy, Brill, pp.179-193, 2021, ⟨10.1163/9789004153073_009⟩. ⟨hal-03946221⟩

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UNIV-PARIS3 FIRL
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