Parental Authority and Freedom in Vocational Choices

What is it about?

Could freedom to choose marriage or a religious vocation be reconciled with parental involvement in that choice? In seventeenth-century France, clerical advice to young adults on choosing a state of life navigated the tension between a theological commitment to liberty and societal norms of parental authority.

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Why is it important?

This study shows that pastoral advice on parents' involvement in their children's vocational choices developed within concrete social, legal, and cultural conditions. Increasingly, the law in seventeenth-century France favored parental authority, and so this advice literature turned toward pastoral persuasion of both young adults and their parents. These texts were an important piece of a long and conflicted attempt to build a new "culture of vocation" in early modern Catholicism.