Palacios, Joy. "Antitheatrical Prejudice: From Parish Priest to Diocesan Rituals in Early Modern France." Theatre Survey, no. 2 (2023): 117-49. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557423000121.
Have you ever wondered why some priests refused sacraments to actors while others didn't?This article examines the question of how and why the idea of the actor as public sinner spread to some dioceses and not others by examining the diocesan Ritual, the liturgical handbook that gave parish priests instructions about how to conduct liturgical ceremonies and in which actors were sometimes listed as public sinners. Scholarship has tended to focus on the bishop and to figure his decision to list actors as public sinners as a top-down imposition. Based on an analysis of the Ritual's use in seminaries and parishes between 1640 and 1740, this article argues instead that antiactor action spread first among parish-level clergy as they experimented with ways to respond to new cultural figures, such as professional actors, for whom diocesan Rituals did not yet include specific instructions. This process of incremental liturgical innovation comes into view when the Ritual's status as a ceremonial object is considered and helps reconstruct antitheatrical sentiment's performance history.