scholarly journals Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events, inevitably they depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and the collection of Pierre de L’Estoile (1546–1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this book is the first life of L’Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called ‘the storehouse of my curiosities’. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this book challenges historians’ assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L’Estoile’s prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilize rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L’Estoile’s curiosity, this book rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

scholarly journals A SODOMY SCANDAL ON THE EVE OF THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
TOM HAMILTON
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Public Execution ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article uncovers a sodomy scandal that took place in the Benedictine abbey of Morigny, on the eve of the French Wars of Religion, in order to tackle an apparently simple yet persistent question in the history of early modern criminal justice. Why, despite all of the formal and informal obstacles in their way, did plaintiffs bring charges before a criminal court in this period? The article investigates the sodomy scandal that led to the conviction and public execution of the abbey's porter Pierre Logerie, known as ‘the gendarme of Morigny’, and situates it in the wider patterns of criminal justice as well as the developing spiritual crisis of the civil wars during the mid-sixteenth century. Overall, this article demonstrates how criminal justice in this period could prove useful to plaintiffs in resolving their disputes, even in crimes as scandalous and difficult to articulate as sodomy, but only when the interests of local elites strongly aligned with those of the criminal courts where the plaintiffs sought justice.

Montaigne and the Wars of Religion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Greengrass
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Relationship

Using examples of moments in the Essays where Montaigne says that he has “seen” something this article problematizes the relationship between the events of the Wars of Religion, those in Montaigne’s life, and his reflections in the Essays. The questions Montaigne chooses to reflect on, and how he does so, is more important than the abstraction of the references in the text, which can be construed as referring to incidents or phenomena during the period of the wars. The plasticity of his allusions (“civil wars,” “troubles,” etc.) furnishes the context for demonstrating why Montaigne’s view of religion meant that he could not regard the period as, in any simple way, “wars of religion.” His attitudes to attempts to bring about a pacification of the troubles through royal edict are analyzed. The article concludes with a brief examination of Montaigne’s public engagements as mayor of Bordeaux and in the wars of the Catholic League.

The Abbatial Election at Citeaux in 1625

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Louis J. Lekai
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Other ◽  
Total Destruction ◽  
General Decline ◽  
History Of

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.

Recent Sources of Information on the Anabaptists in the Netherlands

1917 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Henry Elias Dosker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Northeastern Germany

The subject is not of my own choosing. It was assigned to me by our Secretary, when he invited me last summer to write a paper for this meeting of the Society. The raeson for this request lies in the fact that, for the last dozen years, much of my spare time has been spent in special work on this engrossing subject, which is shrouded in much mystery. But we all know something about the great Anabaptist movement, which paralleled the history of the Reformation. We have all touched these Anabaptists in their life and labors, in the sixteenth century, in all Europe, but especially in Switzerland, upper Germany, and Holland. Crushed and practically wiped out everywhere else, they rooted themselves deeply in the soil of northeastern Germany and above all in the Low Countries. And thence, whenever persecution overwhelmed them, they crossed the channel and moved to England, where their history is closely interwoven with that of the Nonconformists in general and especially with the nascent history of the English Baptists.

FINANCE, RELIGION, AND THE FRENCH STATE

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 565-570
Author(s):  
ROBIN BRIGGS
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fair Degree

L'argent du roi: les finances sous François Ier. By Philippe Hamon. Paris: Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière, Ministère de l'Economie, 1994. Pp. xliii+609. ISBN 2-11-087648-4. 249F.The king's army: warfare, soldiers, and society during the wars of religion in France, 1562–1576. By James B. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+349. ISBN 0-521-55003-3. £45.00.One king, one faith: the parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+543. ISBN 0-520-08626-0. £50.00.A city in conflict: Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+228. ISBN 0-7190-4694-7. £40.00.The birth of absolutism: a history of France, 1598–1661. By Yves-Marie Bercé, translated by Richard Rex. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Pp. viii+262. ISBN 0-333-62757-1. £15.50.The French sixteenth century has always posed serious difficulties for historians. It was a time of rapid change and, in its later decades, of massive disorder, so that there are many large and complex issues to unravel. The need for close analysis as an antidote to over-hasty generalizations is obvious, yet on many issues the archives are frustratingly scanty or even non-existent. A group of recent books tackles these problems with considerable ingenuity and a fair degree of success, even if some of the gaps in the evidence inevitably defy the authors' best efforts.

Adjudicating the Troubles: Violence, Memory, and Criminal Justice at the End of the Wars of Religion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Post War ◽  
Formed Part

Abstract This article provides a new perspective on the themes of violence, memory and criminal justice at the end of the Wars of Religion by focusing on a particularly well-documented criminal case tried by the Parlement de Paris. Previous studies of the end of the troubles have often focused on the politics and personality of Henri IV or studied the memory culture of elites. This article instead examines how the witnesses who confronted the royalist military captain Mathurin de La Cange made use of a broad social memory of the civil wars and shows how their use of the courts formed part of a larger pattern of post-war conflict resolution. This was a time when people in France endured decades of warfare and confessional division, but nevertheless emerged determined to put an end to the violence by committing to resolve their disputes through the law.

scholarly journals DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 599-605
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
American Thought ◽  
Number Of Authors

After a generation of grand stories about the rise of modern republican thought (the so-called “republican-synthesis” school epitomized by the works of Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock), James Kloppenberg's new book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, offers a history of democratic thought: what Kloppenberg calls “the idea of self-government.” In the course of nearly a thousand pages of text and notes, Kloppenberg traces democracy's emergence “as a widely shared, albeit still controversial, model of government” over the last four centuries in the North Atlantic world (1). The book is deeply learned and intellectually capacious, covering thinkers from the ancient Greeks, through the sixteenth-century wars of religion, through the American and French Revolutions, ending abruptly at the Civil War. Few intellectual historians writing today could have managed a book of such sweep. The number of authors, texts, and themes discussed is vast—so much so that at times it seems that the book could double as a history of thought in the West.

scholarly journals The Biblical Image of the Providential Ruler in the Protestant Propaganda on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Andrei Constantin Sălăvăstru
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The People ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

French Protestantism has remained famous in the history of political thought mostly for its theories regarding popular sovereignty and the right of the people to resist and replace a tyrannical ruler. However, before the civil wars pushed them on this revolutionary path, French Protestants stressed the duty of obedience even in the face of manifest tyranny. The reasons for this were ideological, due to the significance placed on St. Paul’s assertion that all political power was divinely ordained, but also pragmatic, as Calvin and his followers were acutely aware of the danger of antagonizing the secular authorities. More importantly, they were fervently hoping for the conversion of France to the Reformation and, in their mind, the surest way such a process could take place was through the conversion of the king and the royal family. Therefore, Protestant propaganda of that time constantly urged the most important French royals to convert to the Reformation, and, for this purpose, they deployed a language full of references to the pious Biblical rulers who led their people towards the true faith—whom the addressees of these propaganda texts were advised to emulate, lest they incur God’s wrath. This paper aims to analyze the occurrences and the role of these references in the Protestants’ dialogue with the French monarchy.

The Social World of the Palais de Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Social World ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter follows L’Estoile’s life and collecting at the outset of the Wars of Religion. It evaluates how he attempted to write non-confessional histories of his family life and the civil wars that conformed to his traditional, Gallican beliefs. Yet, however disinterested L’Estoile tried to appear in his family book, he struggled to come to terms with tragic events such as the death of his wife, Anne de Baillon, and took comfort in her salvation by faith alone. And however impartial L’Estoile aspired to be in presenting his poetry miscellany concerning the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, his life writing and personal prejudices continued to shape his narrative and selection of sources, especially in his sympathy for Protestant perspectives.

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