François Bonichon - L’Authorité episcopale - 1658

First edition. A substantial polemical treatise in defence of episcopal authority, from the height of the seventeenth-century French conflict between bishops and the exempt mendicant orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians, Capuchins). At issue was whether friars could preach and hear confessions without the bishop's approval, how far their papal privileges of exemption overrode his ordinary jurisdiction, and whether they were undermining the parish clergy.

In Angers the quarrel had a sharp edge. The bishop was Henri Arnauld (1650–92), brother of Antoine "le Grand Arnauld" and of Mère Angélique, abbess of Port-Royal, and himself one of the leading Jansenist prelates. Bonichon's book is a detailed defence of Arnauld's reforming ordinances of 1654, which required the friars to submit to episcopal examination and approval before hearing confessions. The first part argues that the regulars' privileges had been abrogated by the Council of Trent and that "les Reguliers n'ont aucune authorité sur les fideles"; the second answers the friars' objections point by point. Published in the same years as Pascal's Lettres provinciales (1656–57), it is a vivid provincial episode in a national controversy.

François Bonichon (d. 1660) was a priest of the Oratory. He had already published shorter tracts on the subject; this is his major, systematic statement.

Full calf, spine with raised bands, gilt-tooled and lettered; gilt-ruled board edges; marbled endpapers. Eighteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate of a senior ecclesiastic (motto "Virtutis amore…") to front pastedown. Small paper shelf labels to spine. Light rubbing and bumping to edges and corners. Internally a fine, clean copy, crisply printed; light waterstain to one corner of the final few leaves.

[xxviii], 776, [2] pp. 25 × 17 cm.