" Joseph is well married ! " : Saint Joseph as a model husband in ^17th-century French Baroque piety

The "Salutations à saint Joseph" by Jean Eudes (1601-1680) is one of the many prayers the oratorian composed for the hundred or so missions he preached between 1632 and 1676, and one of the most widely used. Based on a commentary on this text, whose incipit is "Je vous salue Joseph", and on hymns including Eustache du Caurroy's famous noël "Joseph est bien marié! "my talk will compare the image of Saint Joseph as a model of the Christian husband in Baroque piety - as Michel Vovelle puts it - as portrayed in the missionary catechisms of the French Counter-Reformation, with texts by theologians of the French school of spirituality on the terrestrial trinity - a notion that emerged with Jean Gerson, but took on its full scope in the^16th and^17th centuries, these include Saint François de Sales, author of a prayer to Saint Joseph, and Bérulle, the teacher of Saint Jean Eudes.