Introduction

This chapter considers the challenges of finding the voices of ordinary women who lived in the mid-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. It describes the sources used in the study: the registers of the Reformed churches of Languedoc, and why they are an important new source for the study of women and gender. Surveying the historiography on women in early modern France, it identifies that despite the impression given by synthetic literature there is actually little material examining the patterns of behaviour, motivations, beliefs, and scope for action of women of lower to middling sorts in France in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: most work focuses on social structures and elite women. This is followed by an overview of the historiography on the consistories, and a discussion of models and methods used in the book.