Ecclesiologie e spiritualità a confronto nella poesia religiosa manierista e barocca : ancora sulla collocazione confessionale di Chassignet

Recent studies have attempted to provide evidence of a declared pro-Protestantism in Jean-Baptiste Chassignet's early works, the OEuvres sacrez and the Mepris. This essay, through the analysis of some key texts, reveals his unquestionable anti-Protestant choice, which manifests itself especially through an apologetic discourse based on the condemnation of the opinion's rise in the reformed churches. In spite of the absence of doctrinal statements on the controversial points of the opposing theologies, the Mespris' passage which condemns the Protestant opinion, an element already pointed out in Ronsard's Discours as the source of all heresies, becomes a declaration of orthodoxy and an unquestionable position.

The research expands by sketching a picture of the Church of France as an extremely variegated historical-spiritual reality, which is precisely that of post-Tridentine Catholicism, characterised by a theological debate, whose components overlap and oppose each other according to filières that will last throughout the seventeenth century, which often makes it extremely complex, in the interaction between poetic and theological fact, to determine the affiliation of ideological area. [Publisher's text]