We are very pleased to share with our readers this announcement of a new publication by our good friends at Canticum Salomonis, the first-ever English translation of Jean-Baptiste des Marettes’ Liturgical Travels Through France.
Gospels chanted atop rood lofts, the Blessed Sacrament reserved in hanging pyxes, processions with dragons and banners, Lenten expulsion and reconciliation of penitents, manipled choirboys, communion under two species – even, perhaps, nuns serving as acolytes! These are but some of the bygone French liturgical practices and rituals that await discovery by the reader of Liturgical Travels Through France (1718).
His guide is the learned Jean-Baptiste Le Brun des Marettes, a cleric at the turn of the eighteenth century whose abiding interest in pagan and ecclesiastical antiquity spurred him to travel his fatherland to document its diverse liturgical traditions. His account recreates a ritual world where vast cathedrals and abbeys sustained an integral and triumphal celebration of the holy mysteries accompanied by the enthusiasm of the multitudes – a world soon to be obliterated by the vicissitudes of revolution.
Translated for the first time into English by Gerhard Eger and Zachary Thomas, and published by Os Justi Press, Liturgical Travels Through France speaks directly to the concerns of our own unsettled moment as well. Early modern France enjoyed a rich and regionally varied liturgical life, shaped by centuries of faithful observance, artistic cultivation, and civic devotion, elements conspicuously absent from the flattened ceremonial landscape of today. Far from being a mere antiquarian curiosity, Le Brun des Marettes’ work offers a salutary challenge to modern preconceptions about the unicity of the Roman rite, reminding us that organic liturgical development once yielded a dazzling diversity within unity.
The book’s contemporary relevance is brought into focus by Abbé Claude Barthe, whose foreword situates the work within the context of the neo-Gallican movement as well as twentieth-century debates between rupture and continuity. An appendix by Shawn Tribe explores the art-historical aspects of Le Brun des Marettes’ account, while the French scholar François Hou offers a fascinating study of the cathedral chapters that sustained the French Church’s mighty edifice of worship.
Liturgical Travels Through France is more than a picturesque record of vanished rites (illustrated here not only in prose but in 55 plates); it is a vital source for understanding the nature and history of liturgical reform. Written at a time when the French church stood at a crossroads – torn between renewed zeal for tradition and pressures for rationalization and adaptation – it documents a moment of extraordinary tension and creativity.
The early eighteenth century, particularly in France, witnessed a flourishing of ressourcement in the fields of Scripture, patristics, and liturgy, carried out under the long shadow of the Council of Trent. As national pride swelled under Louis XIV, diocesan churches, once eager to conform to Roman norms, began asserting the legitimacy of their local customs. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes further complicated the pastoral landscape, as churchmen were forced to reconcile the needs of both lifelong Catholics and recently converted Protestants.
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| The sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Paris as it looked before its rood screen was taken down in the 18th century. |
Le Brun des Marettes’ work belongs to this milieu. His accounts do not merely chronicle local curiosities; they bear witness to a Church still deeply rooted in sacramental practice, even while grappling with the challenges of modernity.
The significance of this moment has not escaped historians of twentieth-century liturgical reform. Many have sought in the eighteenth century the remote prelude to the innovations of the Liturgical Movement, and ultimately, the creation of the rite of Paul VI. Hence, this edition of the Liturgical Travels provides a cautionary counterpoint to easy narratives of rupture or progress. It reminds us that the impulse to reform, if divorced from the lived tradition and ecclesial piety that nourishes it, risks destroying the very thing it claims to renew.
In our own day, Le Brun des Marettes’ work stands as a witness to the fruitful tension between tradition and reform. Both traditionalists and progressives may be tempted to use the past he describes to justify liturgical experiments of one kind or another. The greater value of his work lies in its ability to broaden our understanding of what the Latin liturgical tradition has been – and what it might yet become. For readers today, it offer not a blueprint, but a horizon: a vision of sacred order instantiated in a particular place and time, which can inspire our own efforts to restore the sacred.
The book is available in hardback, paperback, and ebook directly from Os Justi Press. It may likewise be purchased on Amazon US or any other Amazon outlet (UK, Canada, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan).
