John O’Brien and Marc Schachter (eds), Sedition. The Spread of Controversial Literature and Ideas in France and Scotland, c. 1550-1610 CHRC 102 Sedition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historein, 2001
It is by now a commonplace among historians that Protestantism was the first major movement to fully and systematically use the new medium of the printing press. 1 Following on Luther's steps, the leaders of the Reformation became actively engaged in a multilayered printing and disseminating mechanism which produced an unprecedented mass of printed material and provoked an equally massive-though somewhat belatedresponse from the Catholic side. With the emergence of Calvin as the leader of the French Reformation movement and the constant influx of French refugees, the city of Geneva was eventually transformed into a hub of a European printing network, devoted to the dissemination of the Calvinist message. 2 Besides the rejection of Catholicism on dogmatic grounds, the initial aim of Protestant propaganda was to establish the historical continuum of the "new religion" within the framework of an alternative history of Christianity, and on the other hand to underline the "obvious relation" between the ancient Christian martyrs and the persecuted reformed Christians of the sixteenth century. This would serve to identify the Catholics with the enemies of Christianity and actually reverse the grave accusation of heresy. In the 1560s, the exiled French Protestant leadership in Geneva sought to boost the moral of Protestant enclaves in France by means of a "martyrization" of the Huguenot struggle for survival. 3 Yet the Calvinists were called quite soon to answer to accusations of treason and rebellion against the king and the kingdom of France.
The Wars of Religion in France, 1559-1598: A History in Documents
2021
This book is designed as an addition to my earlier book, published in 1997, The French wars of Religion: Selected Documents. It provides contextual and explanatory material and seeks to allow students to study the Wars of Religion in greater depth. There is an introduction in the nature of the sources for the period. It was written in 2004.
Religious Persecution in Eighteenth-Century France
Leidschrift, 2023
Throughout the early modern period, Europe remained haunted by the religious tensions that had erupted from the Reformation. Despite the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the Edict of Nantes (1598) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which put an end to decades of religious wars, violence and persecution persisted well beyond. The Enlightenment and the spread of tolerationist ideas in the eighteenth century should not be regarded as the end of religious violence, but instead as a reminder that religious violence remained very much a reality in this period. Among the best-known examples of religious persecution in the eighteenth century are the Camisards, the Waldensians, the ‘Poor Palatines’, the Salzburgers, the Moravians, the Gordon and Priestley riots, to name just a few. In France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 revived religious tensions in the Protestant provinces of Languedoc and Dauphiné after nearly a century of tolerance. Beside causing the exile of some 200,000 French Protestants towards northern Europe, the Revocation opened a century-long era of clandestinity and discrimination that would last until the French Revolution. Historians generally distinguish between three phases in this period, even though the intensity of the persecution varied between provinces. The years 1685-1715 were the most violent, marked by forced conversions, brutal persecution and the Camisards’ revolt. The second phase, from 1715 to the early 1760s, corresponds to the organised revival of the French Protestant Church through clandestine assemblies and synods and the gradual decline of state persecution; and the third phase, from the early 1760s to the French Revolution, a return to a de facto religious tolerance. This paper surveys the plight of French Protestants from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to the French Revolution. It nuances the grand narrative of a steady path towards religious toleration by highlighting regional disparities and integrating foreign – mostly Dutch – sources. It argues overall that, despite the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the role of the Calas affair in changing public opinion, anti-Calvinist sentiments and discriminations remained vivid in southern France until the French Revolution.
Reason of state, religious passions, and the French Wars of Religion
2009
Review article of: Governing passions: peace and reform in the French kingdom, 1576–1585. By Mark Greengrass. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv+423. ISBN 978-0-19-921490. £65.00. Le haut cœur de Catherine de Médicis: une raison politique aux temps de la Saint-Barthémy. By Denis Crouzet. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005. Pp. 637. ISBN 2-226-15882-0. €29.00. Le Parlement de Paris ou la voix de la raison (1559–1589). By Sylvie Daubresse. Geneva: Droz, 2005. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 398. Pp. xv+558. ISBN 2-600-00988-4. €115.37. Les ducs de Nevers et l'état royal: genèse d'un compromise (ca 1550–ca 1600). By Ariane Boltanski. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 419. Pp. 580. ISBN 2-600-01022-X. €94.88. Thuanus: the making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617). By Ingrid de Smet. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 418. Pp. 344. ISBN 2-600-01071-8. €88.04. Authority and society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion, 1559–1598. By Elizabeth Tingle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Pp. x+230. ISBN 0-7190-6726-X. £55.00. Local politics in the French Wars of Religion: the towns of Champagne, the Duc de Guise and the Catholic League, 1560–1595. By Mark Konnert. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. ix+300. ISBN 0-7546-5593-8. £60.00. Histoire de Sébastien Le Pelletier (1579–1592). By Xavier Le Person. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 407. Pp. 336. ISBN 2-600-01064-5. €110.19.
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).