When Ignorance Is a Virtue: Misreadings in the Unigenitus Controversies

ABSTRACT: While scholars have long appreciated the political, religious, social impacts and of the controversies surrounding the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus in France, they have paid less attention to their place in the history of reading. The controversies surrounding Pasquier Quesnel's popular seventeenth- century French-language Bible commentary and the papal bull Unigenitus , which condemned it, were fundamentally disputes over reading, in which the accusations of misreading were central to both sides. This article examines how Jansenist polemicists—who opposed Unigenitus —and their antagonists, especially bishops and Jesuits, described and prescribed different ways of reading and characterized different sorts of readers. It shows how previously unstudied readers read, and how they understood their own acts of reading. Above all, it documents how Jansenist polemicists and their readers framed ignorance as a desirable trait that protected readers from error while accusing their powerful, educated interlocutors of willfully misreading texts for their own worldly interests. In raising this challenge to authorities and authoritative readings, these polemicists, their model readers, and their actual readers, especially laymen and women, contributed to the formulation of public opinion and, significantly, the formation of an actual critical, judging reading public in early eighteenth-century France.