Le romanesque au secours de la Vie de saint : la Vie de la Mère de Chantal par l’abbé Marsollier (1717)

Literary criticism more often studies the hagiographic pattern used in novels, rather than the upsurge of fiction in hagiographic Life writing. We want to study this upsurge in the Life of a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, Jeanne de Chantal, written by Father Marsollier in 1717. It seems to be the sign of hagiographic changes, but also of changes within the Literary field. One episode of the Life resorts to an exceptionally elaborate writing, using fictional tools. We will then be able to interrogate the aesthetical and pastoral issues of such a rewriting in a limited corpus of Jeanne de Chantal’s Lives in the Early Modern period