"Gender, rumor, and religious polemic in Louis XIV's France : Paule Payen de Lionne's intervention in the Chinese rites controversy" / Heath, Sean

This article belongs to French Historical Studies 47 (2024)

Available online at https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-11284403

Abstract: 

The Chinese Rites Controversy was one of the most contentious issues in the French church at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nourished with rumors from China, it was predominantly a debate among men, with the exception of an extraordinary intervention by a woman, Paule Payen de Lionne, in 1701. In a public letter to the Jesuits, she used a dispute concerning her missionary son Artus de Lionne to launch a fierce critique of what she saw as the Society of Jesus's toleration of Chinese idolatry. Conscious that many would see it as inappropriate for a woman to discuss a matter of ecclesiastical controversy, Payen nonetheless filled the letter with references to her sex. This article proposes that she strategically invoked tropes of feminine weakness and intellectual inadequacy as rhetorical tools to contrast the simple purity (and thus truth) of her perspective with the verbose artifice of the Jesuits. At the same time, the register of aggression in her letter forces historians to reconsider the view that women engaging in querelles were obliged to adopt a less confrontational tone than men. This episode shows how women could use femininity to carve out a unique voice in an otherwise male‐dominated public sphere.