Boute, Bruno, “Those Who Join the Confraternities of the Scapular or the
Rosary Go to the Demons”. Carmelites and Catholic Puritanism in the Low
Countries (1674-1682), in: Religious Orders and the "World" (Cultures of Christianity 5) edited by Giuanna Beeli, Lukas Camenzind, Nicolas Rogger and Christian Windler, Cologne: Böhlau 2025, pp. 117-146.

In his Natural History of Religion of 1757, the Presbyterian-raised philosopher David Hume took a dim view of the Catholic use of the scapular. On the axis contrasting “primitive” religion and polytheism with monotheism and reason as a superior foundation for religious belief, he squarely mapped similar techniques of self-improvement and related enchanted matters as perversions of true and evolved religion. In The Thing About Religion, David Morgan argues that Hume’s philosophical and Protestant emphasis on religion as belief, rather than a dynamic web of ritual and other practices, objects, and human and non-human agencies, testifies to the spiritual and cognitive bias informing religious studies. Understandings of Christianity as an “orthodoxic religion,” in which cognition grounds religious practice and the sacralization of matter, are a case in point. However, a series of cultural turns has allowed historians to take a salutary distance from similar asymmetric, Whiggish, and Eurocentric understandings of Christianities, including the Protestant Reformations themselves. In the wake of new paths in Science Studies and knowledge history illuminating cognition from its materiality, historians of religion are rediscovering the non-human agencies—objects, animals, landscapes, demons, angels, etcetera—that have shaped and extended religious experiences and communities but that had previously been marginalized in scholarship as mere products of human faith-driven agency or imagination. This chapter seeks to materialize the history of Jansenism (or Catholic Puritanism). The assessment quoted in the title, that those who joined confraternities of the Rosary and the Scapular would “go to the demons,” did not spring from Calvinist or enlightened pens doused in vitriol against all things Catholic. It stems from Carmelites seeking to mobilize Roman correspondents against the Hydra of Jansenism, and was attributed to fellow Catholics in the Spanish Netherlands who deemed similar material practices sacrilegious. Yet, clamorous polemics over devotions of religious confraternities intersected with a plethora of other conflicts that exposed deep uncertainties about the narrow path to salvation: conflicts on the European scene that intersected with iconic intra-Catholic clashes overseas. Ines Županov has situated the Malabar and Chinese Rites controversies in an epistemic and cultural shift towards rigoristic universalism that mounted an increasingly sustained assault on Jesuit particularist practices of accommodation as a missionary strategy. The case I wish to present here reveals that these connected controversies, including the epistemic, rigoristic-universalist turn in late-seventeenth-century Catholicism, were deeply grounded in local and material religious ecologies. The 1674 “procession edict” of the archbishop of Mechelen Alphons van Bergen (*1624, in office 1669–1689) sparked endless polemics with echoes in the courts of Brussels, Madrid, and Rome that only subsided with his death in 1689, when the fiercely anti-Jansenist Humbert-Guillaume de Precipiano (*1627, in office 1690–1711) took over the only remaining metropolitan seat of the Habsburg state in the Low Countries. The procession edict was widely considered by its opponents as a Jansenist attack on the (profoundly material) devotions propagated by the Mendicants in the towns and cities of a densely urbanized area. A closer analysis of this case, zooming in on the Carmelites, will reveal that this was not a clash between material and immaterial models of religion, however. This chapter will seek to symmetrically materialize Catholic Puritanism as well. It illustrates how scholarship has overemphasized the epistemic-ideological and “Jesuit” dimensions of intraconfessional controversies that shaped connected Catholicisms in the four corners of the early modern world. In other words, these epistemic-ideological shifts were also moved by (local, corporal) matter, adding substance to the notion that “materiality is agency.” After an anatomy of a conflict situated in the sacramental offensive launched by Catholics in the era of the Reformations, I will reconnect the affair with stakes and concerns that shed light on how belief systems materialize (or fail to do so). Following new directions in Science Studies, these prove to be embedded in diverging and sometimes conflicting cycles of credibility that blurthe lines between matter and belief.