Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France. By Karen E. Carter. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. xiv + 314 pp. $40.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Karen Carter's study of Catholics in the French countryside during the seventeenth and eighteenth century focuses on catechism instruction in the rural parishes in three dioceses (Auxerre, Châlons-sur-Marne, and Reims). She takes an apparently obvious premise--that education of children in the period of Catholic Reform succeeded in producing a more knowledgeable and more doctrinally correct generation of adults--and demonstrates the many subtleties and complexities in this premise, infusing it with new evidence and insights in what should be required reading for historians of religion, society, and education in France before the Revolution.Children's catechisms have not, as Carter observes, gotten much respect from historians; she gives them the attention they deserve. These sources provide a wealth of information on standards, education, rural religious practices, and even gender differences. To determine the effectiveness of catechism instruction, she uses parish visitations, which improved in historical usefulness in the 1650s. To offset the potential pitfalls here--anxiety, occasional manipulation of results to make the cure look better, and so forth--she adds correspondence to bishops, written both by cures and by "village notables," and questionnaires sent out by bishops to the cures. This combination of print and manuscript sources, with different intended audiences and different points of view, provides remarkable insight into Early Modern rural France.The study of confessionalization has among its consequences a significant challenge to the thesis of de-Christianization during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment: as Carter notes, "The programs of the Catholic Reformation could not be implemented with any sort of effectiveness until the eighteenth century, when schools and catechism classes became a regular part of parish life" (16). Studying childhood education brings into focus not merely the "Reformation from above" model in which catechism classes were required by a hierarchy, but the relationship between the laity and the clergy in a cooperative endeavor. Parents were instrumental in hiring schoolmasters, in seeing that their children attended schools, and in either reinforcing or undermining catechetical instruction at home, so even if clergy were the teachers, they were far from independent.Carter focuses on local catechisms, and investigates a total of 100 issued by bishops for use in their dioceses. Bishops wanted young children to memorize and recite the questions and answers while simultaneously learning discipline and good behavior. Rote was common to all forms of education at the beginning of the Catholic Reformation, but new forms of teaching, emphasizing reasoning, were introduced during the Enlightenment. What Carter correctly notes about this is that Enlightenment thinkers did not seek to impose the new method on religious educators, nor did this new method influence the rural areas much. Thus the bishops were, in fact, staying current, and their introductions show that they thought deeply about their charge: they "often included . . . material outlining [their] ideas about religious education and instructing [their] cures in catechetical pedagogy" (69), and pointed out the improvements they had made over previous versions. This raises more questions, though: what would happen to students who had memorized one version (in their own or a different diocese) and were questioned on another? …