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Jacques Le Brun belongs to a generation of historians of Catholicism who shifted the focus from the history of the Church, or the history of doctrines, to a history of beliefs. He did so by prioritising spiritual writings, including, first and foremost, two great authors: Bossuet and Fénelon. In the topics that religious history had given itself, such as “pure love” during the quarrel of Quietism, he discovered an “impossible to think”—the discipline of history meeting anthropological questioning, and exegetical work being enriched by paying close attention to psychoanalytic inspiration.