ABSTRACT
The conclusion of the previous chapter highlighted the contradictions present in the representation of women in religious writings from the first decades of the seventeenth century. These contradictions are magnified, one generation later, in the works of the polygraphic bishop Jean-Pierre Camus. Recent criticism has indeed painted Camus as a controversial and paradoxical figure; but the contradictions highlighted thus far have largely lain between his apologetic aims and the fictional genres he practiced.2 For example, in “Roman historié et histoire romancée:
Jean-Pierre Camus et Charles Sorel,” Christian Jouhaud states: “The paradox resides in the relation of their project (as they sometimes formulate it) and the choice of a form of writing which we identify as novelistic” [“Le paradoxe réside dans le rapport de leur projet (tel qu’il leur arrive de l’expliciter) et du choix d’une écriture que nous identifions comme romanesque,” 307]. I situate the Camusian paradox differently: rather than concentrating on the relation between goal and genre, I examine the stresses between text and presumed audience. Camus was by far the best-known and most prolific author of histoires dévotes, a genre with an almost exclusively female readership. Some of his novels were reprinted well into the nineteenth century, for a public of convent-educated girls and women. Yet at the same time, Camus’s fictional works often exhibit hostility and fear of women. I will seek an explanation for Camus’s contradictory stance in his conflicted views of the body. My analysis will mainly concentrate on the two texts most readily available in modern editions: the 1621 novel Agathonphile and a collection of short tales, Divertissement historique (1632).3
