Nicholas Hammond, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, will speak on "All the Devils: Port-Royal and Pedagogy in Seventeenth- Century France", Friday, 17 May, 12 noon, in 7 University Gardens, followed by lunch.

Port Royal was a centre of radical Catholicism termed Jansenism in seventeenth-century France. Sympathetic with protestant and Calvinist ideas on predestination, it was attacked by Louis XIV and his ministers, successive popes, the Inquisition, and the Jesuits. It nonetheless enjoyed widespread support among French aristocrats, intellectuals, and parliamentarians, and produced the brilliant rhetoric of Blaise Pascal's "Pensees". In its final years it turned increasingly towards the miraculous as evidence of its truth, spawned a strange religious movement known as the Convulsionaries, and sought eschatological signs of the end of the world. At the same time, its institutions of education for novitiates developed a curriculum for religious training that is the primary focus of Nicholas Hammond's talk. His paper will contribute to our ongoing investigation of accusations of magic and devil worship and their mirror relationship with religious orthodoxies.

ALL WELCOME

For further information please visit our website on www.gla.ac.uk/ahri, or contact Genevieve Warwick, G.Warwick@arts.gla.ac.uk , tel: 0141-330-4139; or Amy Wygant, A.Wygant@french.arts.gla.ac.uk , tel: 0141-330-4588.

Nicholas Hammond works in the field of seventeenth-century French literature, and is the author of a critical edition of "Dissertations contre Corneille: L'Abbe d'Aubignac", 1995, and of "Creative Tensions: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century French Literature", 1997.

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First published: 15 May 2002