Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘A Rejoinder’ to Janine Estèbe, ‘Debate. The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’,” Past and Present 67 (May 1975): 131-135 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Riot and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France
Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World
He is the co-editor of the New Approaches to European History series published by Cambridge University Press. He is especially interested in aspects of the social and institutional history of sixteenthand seventeenth-centuries France, and one of his recent works is A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (2009).
Some forty years ago Natalie Zemon Davis published an article in Past & Present that opened up a new approach to the religious wars that tore France apart during the second half of the sixteenth century. Infl uenced by socio-cultural approaches and perspectives, as well as her own personal experience, 'The Rites of Violence' provided a fresh interpretation of the causes, enactment and perception of confessional violence during this confl ict. Professor Davis demonstrated that, faced with the threat of heresy or the assurance of the Reformed faith, rival confessional communities sought to establish their hegemony over each other and that violence was encouraged by religious leaders and vigorously pursued by their adherents. This infl uential essay has helped to shape our understanding of religious violence not only in the late sixteenth century but also in other periods. This volume provides a new assessment of religious violence by leading historians of early modern France. Building upon a generation of research, they explore new questions and dimensions of the religious strife of the late sixteenth century. Contributors consider not only the circumstances in which religious confl ict and violence developed, but also why it did not emerge in other places. They assess diff erent aspects of the internecine confl ict in France, including their judicial and sexual dimensions. Further themes include the emergence of religious coexistence as a real alternative to religious violence: confl ict resolution and appeasement; the diff usion of communal tensions; and initiatives for social reconstruction. Providing an important reappraisal of violence and religious confl ict in early modern France, this volume also suggests new avenues of research and points of comparison for those interested in these issues in other contexts, cultures, and arenas.
Massacres During the French Wars of Religion
2012
This article examines who committed major massacres, when they were committed, and where. This led to three discoveries: (1) men in organized military units, not crowds, perpetrated most of the massacres; (2) most violence occurred in the early phases of the Wars; and (3) massacres tended to occur in regions where one side was trying to solidify its control, frequently in the context of local coups or seizures of power. These facts suggest that in general, military and political leaders ordered massacres based on rational — usually political — calculations.
in: Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo 5 (2008) , 9-28, 2008
In the European tradition, religious violence has manifested itself principally in the guise of three phenomena, martyrdom, holy war, and terror. While this labeling is unproblematic for holy war (inclusive of crusades and confessional wars of religion), that martyrs perpetrate a form of violence and that there inheres a religious component in terror may seem self-evident only to recent observers of very recent history. Without denying the importance of conjuncture and (perhaps) pathology in the occurrences of these phenomena, it is legitimate to try to recover how they made deep sense over the very longue durée of Western history, even across the classic divide separating premodern and «religious» from modern and «secular», across the temporal plane within which theologies morphed into godless ideologies. More precisely, how did these phenomena make deep sense given a theology that has often been labeled pacifist? 2 «Given» has often been translated «despite», the presumption being that an essentially pacifist early Christian ethos was perverted by outside forces -to round up the usual suspects, Constantine's conversion; the warlike barbarian invaders; feudalism; state-building 3 . Obviously it would be a difficult proposition to brush away these factors in a longue-durée history of violence in the Christian world. But «given» can
Reason of state, religious passions, and the French Wars of Religion
2009
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