Barbara B. Diefendorf

Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth-Century: The Politics of Patrimony

This book examines the character of the governing elite of sixteenth-century Paris--a group that included some of the most important jurists, administrators, and intellectuals of the early modern French state--and investigates the strategies employed by members of this group to promote and maintain their position in the city and in the monarchy.Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Widowhood and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Paris:

This article analyzes the social, economic, and legal position of Parisian widows in the second half of the sixteenth century. Three principal aspects of widowhood are discussed: the position of the widow in the break-up of the familys economic community that occurred with the death of the head of the household, the continuing role of the widow in the management of family properties, and the situation of the widow who remarried. The author argues that sixteenth-century notions of feminine frailty and the legal incapacity of married women in sixteenth- century Paris must be understood within the context of a traditional concern for the protection of the family line and property, and that there is an ironic contrast between the presumed frailty of the female sex and the important responsibilities for the management of family affairs and property with which widows were in fact entrusted.

Contradictions of the Century of Saints: Aristocratic Patronage and the Convents of Counter-Reformation Paris

This article examines the impact of lay patronage on the renewal of convent life in Paris, where at least forty-seven new religious houses for women--nearly one a year--were established during the first half of the seventeenth century. It argues that, at least from the perspective of Paris, the Catholic Reformation was less centralized and more open to individual initiative than we usually imagine as the inheritance of the Council of Trent. Just as the theory of royal absolutism veiled a monarchy whose authority was still highly dependent on informal ties of patronage and clientage, so the authoritarian facade of the Counter-Reformation church veiled an institution that depended heavily on the give and take of mutual accommodation without which no patronage system can work. Convents proliferated with more freedom than is usually thought, and the women who headed them enjoyed more formal and informal authority as a result.

Reflections on Community and Identity

How did the religious schism that grew out of the Protestant Reformation change the dynamics of community life in France? The question has been much debated by early modern historians and yet remains unresolved. One obvious problem is that the word community can be—and has been—defined in different ways. When Natalie Zemon Davis wrote in her seminal article “The Rites of Violence” that “ridding the community of dreaded pollution” was a frequent goal of religious riots, she used community in its common civil sense of people sharing mutual interests and living in a particular area or town.1 The word had a quite different meaning for John Bossy in another influential article when he associated community with communion—common union—in the Eucharist. For Bossy, the Christian community in which the sacred and secular dimensions of the body social were bound together through the shared ritual of communion was irreparably ruptured when people separated into competing churches as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation.2 Must we choose between these two meanings? Suzanne Desan suggests as much in “Crowds, Community, and Ritual” when she questions Davis’s notion that religious riots were intended to restore community. “One could say,” Desan ventures, “that violence over religious beliefs destroyed the existing community and tore it apart in a bloody struggle as each group fought to draw new religious boundaries.”3 This sounds a lot like Bossy, except that for Desan it was not separation from communion but religious violence that fractured the traditional bonds of community. Drawing on all three scholars, I have argued elsewhere that Catholics and Protestants both maintained an ideal of Christian community in which the

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion

Abstract William Cavanaughs The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europes wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.

La réforme catholique vue d’en bas: le cas des trinitaires de Provence

Les historiens qui travaillent sur la reforme catholique en France ne parlent presque plus d’une «generation de saints». Mais l’histoire de cette periode est encore ecrite comme etant surtout le produit des hommes, et parfois des femmes, dont les talents spirituels et administratifs ont menes a l’implantation de nouveaux ordres religieux et a la reforme des anciens. Le but de cette communication est d’explorer le cas des trinitaires de Provence, une congregation qui n’a pas ete reformee par des ecclesiastiques de marque mais plutot par des membres ordinaires qui ont invente leur version de reforme au fur et a mesure pendant quatre decennies et avec pas mal d’echecs sur le chemin. Les documents qui restent aux archives nous permettent d’examiner le processus de reforme catholique de bas en haut, et l’on verra que les trinitaires de Provence ont cherche a inverser un declin etendu et a refleter le nouveau climat spirituel du dix-septieme siecle. Deux questions fondamentales sont posees: en quoi consiste la ...

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

During the weeks that preceded Henri IV’s entry into Paris on 22 March 1594, Leaguer preachers rallied the populace to oppose him by denouncing him as a heretic, an atheist and a hypocrite whose pretended conversion was mere trumpery and deceit. They called him a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a demon, the son of a whore and a seducer of nuns. Denouncing his consecration at Chartres as invalid, they insisted that the Pope could not absolve him without falling into heresy himself. The same preachers spread rumours that Henri was feasting on meat in his quarters at Saint-Denis, even though it was Lent, and predicted an end to the Mass if he succeeded in defeating the Holy League.1 Although some Leaguer clerics changed their tune by early March, when Henri’s ultimate triumph began to appear inevitable, others donned armour in anticipation of a last great battle and urged their parishioners to join them in saving Paris for a truly Catholic king.2

Histoire de Sébastien le Pelletier: Prêtre liguer et Maître de grammaire des enfants de choeur de la cathédrale de Chartes pendant les guerres de la Ligue (1579–1592) (review)

resentation of this historical figure, offering a study in the construction of an image or symbol by the erasure of the resistance of history. Daniel Ménager’s essay fittingly closes the volume with an investigation of the representation of the origins of the Reformed movement. He contrasts the French version, exemplified by d’Aubigné’s depiction of the Albigensian-Vaudois connection — which Ménager finds to be more mythic and shaped by the historicalpolitical situation and an anti-royalist position — with the German version, which stresses the role of scholarship, specifically linguistic and philological, in promoting a return to religious truth found in biblical sources, a position that influenced views of the origins of the Reformed movement. ELAINE M. ANCEKEWICZ Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus

Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris.

The religious conflicts of sixteenth-century France, in particular the St Bartholomews Day massacres of 1572, continue to draw a good deal of attention from historians. What started as a limited coup against the Huguenot leadership became instead a conflagration that left two thousand or more Protestants dead in the streets and ushered in a series of bloody religious battles. Previous histories of the religious conflicts have been preoccupied with their political aspects, but have not examined the mass violence. Diefendorf focuses on popular religious fanaticism and religious hatred. She examines the roots and escalation of the conflicts, the propaganda of Catholic and Protestant preachers, popular religious beliefs and rituals, the role of the militia, and the underground activities of the Protestant community after the massacres. Using a wide array of published and unpublished sources, she provides the most comprehensive social history to date of these religious conflicts.

Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth, 1475-1600

Although very little of paris built in the 16th century survives, the author restores this fascinating chapter of architectural history through his careful synthetis of documentary and technical sources: theoretical bases; the building activities of the different social strata; municipal and royal building; 142 figures; references at the end of each chapter, and a bibliographical note.