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This article considers the role of criminal justice in maintaining state authority and social cohesion during a period of crisis. It presents a case study of the Parlement of Paris during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), particularly in the final phase of the conflict known as the troubles of the League (1584–98). The article analyses a major body of new evidence in sample periods of appeals to the Parlement that contain a total of 2,500 appellants who brought their cases to Paris from across the court's jurisdiction. This evidence demonstrates that, despite the crisis of the civil wars, the magistrates of the Parlement ensured that some provision for criminal justice remained in place. In this light, we might reassess the resilience of criminal justice under the Old Regime and judge it not only by the ideal of absolute monarchy that its advocates misleadingly proclaimed, but rather within the limited resources and systemic constraints that existed at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes on the nexus between arms control and religious tolerance during the French Wars of Religion. As part of the peace process, royal and provincial authorities attempted to implement arms control measures on French subjects irrespective of confessional allegiance during the 1560s, before arms control mutated into a tool of confessional hegemony from the 1570s onwards. To support this observation, the Valentinois-Diois region of southeastern France serves as the geographical focus for this analysis. Although authorities in the region could never remove all illicit weapons, they carried out royal legislation on arms control with vigor to promote peace. The situation changed as repeated warfare in the region, starting in 1567, prompted many communities to abandon measures of religious tolerance, including biconfessional arms control. Henceforth, arms prohibitions reflected local religious power dynamics, whereby only those of the majority confession could legally possess arms for local defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seminal works of Jean Bodin (c.1530–96) and François Hotman (c.1524–90), the Six livres de la République, and the Francogallia, were written and re-written over the turbulent course of the French wars of religion (1562–1629). Whilst conventionally these works are understood to represent fixed, and opposing, theories of monarchy (absolutist versus constitutionalist), this article explores them as they transformed in response to the changing circumstances of French politics, and especially the succession crisis of 1584. Theories of monarchy were in flux in this period, and so the political thought of the late sixteenth century in France was in a constant state of mutation. This raises questions about the ways in which intellectual historians read ideas 'in context', even as those ideas, and those contexts, shift. What did it mean, to have a theory of monarchy in the French sixteenth century? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including sixteenth-century interactions with the classical past, relations between Christians and non-Christians, and ways that authorities attempted to create peace and maintain social cohesion during the French Wars of Religion.

Between 1491 and 1589, three abbesses from the House of Bourbon-Vendôme reformed Fontevraud's extensive monastic network and made the order a Gallican bastion during the French Wars of Religion. The reform effectively centralized Fontevraud's administration, significantly expanded abbatial power, and established the Bourbon-Vendômes as the sole patrons of the vast network. During the Wars of Religion, the Fontevrist network became a geopolitical asset, as many of the order's houses were located in regions where the new faith was strong. This article shows how Fontevraud's Bourbon-Vendôme abbesses used the order's reform to lead both the monastic network and their own family to unprecedented political power and discusses their pivotal role in maintaining Gallican agency in Protestant regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic churches throughout southern France suffered the ravages of religious violence during the French Wars of Religion (1559-1629). Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the provinces of southern France became the focus of Catholic renewal within France, and one of the most important areas of Catholic Reformation in all of Europe. The Catholic revival in southern France involved a broad transnational movement, led to a great extent by noblemen and noblewomen who provided the means to rebuild the church. This article explores the networks of Italian and French Catholic noblewomen and noblemen who promoted the Counter-Reformation movement in southern France. Tuscan-French connections in noble culture, religiosity, and religious patronage seem particularly intriguing during the dynamic expansion of the Catholic reform in southern France during latter stages of the French Wars of Religion, from around 1588 to 1629. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sovereign power is often defined as transcending legal and religious norms, the work of historians like Prodi and Agamben has drawn our attention to the ways in which modern accounts of sovereignty depend fundamentally upon the fusion and transformation of these norms. In Latin Christendom, this process was enabled by the juridical quality of ecclesiastical authority, its expression through laws similar in form and structure to those of civil power. There was, however, an important strand of Catholic thinking from the late-sixteenth century which emphasised the centrality of sacrifice, rather than law or jurisdiction, in creating communities. For Catholic polemicists like Rossaeus (William Reynolds) sacrifice came before law and the juridical organisation of human society was secondary to the ritual and ceremonial. This article will examine the roots of this claim in post-Tridentine discussions of the Mass as a sacrifice and will go on to show how it was used to defend the primacy of the Catholic Church, particularly in 1590s France. It will consider the impact of this argument and suggest its importance in provoking new and more powerful articulations of both royal sovereignty and papal power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt, German audiences were continually targeted with appeals for support. Due to the empire's fragmented confessional landscape, the warring parties in France and the Netherlands faced the difficult challenge of presenting justifications with cross-confessional appeal. Central to their strategy was the sharp differentiation between religious and political motives. By explaining the actions of their adversaries as the product of hypocrisy and personal ambition, the aristocratic leadership of the warring parties deconfessionalised the two conflicts. These efforts were partly undone by pamphleteers who interpreted the conflicts as manifestations of a larger religious or even eschatological struggle. These two narratives were essentially irreconcilable and therefore caused confusion among German audiences. This article explores the nature and impact of these contradictory explanations. Sensitive to the inconsistencies, the German aristocracy advocated solutions that carefully addressed both the religious and the political dimension of the conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the long-term memory of record destructions committed during the French Wars of Religion. Although the 1598 Edict of Nantes ordered Protestants and Catholics to forget about the wars, in Montpellier the memory of archival loss continued to fuel tensions between the two communities and undermine religious coexistence throughout the seventeenth century. In the aftermath of the wars, Montpellier's priests and friars initiated multiple court cases against the Huguenot community to claim reparations and seek retribution for the loss of their records. Yet the archival destructions also functioned as a catalyst for new record-keeping practices, as both Huguenots and Catholics appointed specialists to retrieve acts, inventory records, and use archival documents as legal evidence against the other community. As such, this essay highlights the importance of record destruction and the emergence of contested memories for prolonging religious conflict in the early modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines a peculiar reworking of the ‘moving artwork' motif in early modern French culture. It mentions moving pictures of the French Wars of Religion and devisants of Guillaume Bouchet's fictional dinner club gather to discuss paintings that are so ‘parfaite' that they must be restrained with ‘chainons et liens' lest they wander away. It also mentions devisants' affective and social responses to these paintings and interrogates tense and mood, feeling and attachment.

In 1576, during the French Wars of Religion, the advocate Jean David died under mysterious circumstances while returning from Rome to Paris. Among his effects was allegedly an account of a meeting with the pope that outlined a plot to overthrow Henri III, king of France, and to replace him with the Duke of Guise in order to ensure France’s Catholic allegiance. Two versions of David’s Mémoire were published soon after, and both attack the Guises in order to discredit them but on slightly different fronts: one focused on their internal threat and the other, the threat posed by foreign powers looking to intervene in France’s civil and religious disputes. In either case, David’s papers and the texts published with them demonstrate through their rhetorical and editorial strategies the emerging and enduring power of the short printed text in the politics of this contentious era of French history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Renaissance & Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme is the property of Iter Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Renaissance & Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme is the property of Iter Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It has been said that the publication of Jean Boucher's Vie et faits notables de Henry de Valois (1589) helped inspire the assassination of Henri III. Boucher was a leader of the extremist Catholic League; five years later, the League would be irreparably harmed after the publication of another polemical pamphlet, the anonymous Satyre Menippee (1594). During the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), religious and political opponents sharpened their attacks, employing sardonic invective that changed the rules about what one could make fun of in both religious and political matters. Contemporary theories about hostile humour (Erasmus), as well as Freud's notion of tendentious humour, elucidate how these two pamphlets used a destructive form of humour to dehumanize adversaries and trivialize pieties. In their own ways, as this article demonstrates, both pamphlets seek to mock the sacred, setting in motion a shift in attitudes in France that continues to have consequences today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern 'neo-Roman' or 'republican' concept of freedom as liberty from the arbitrary will of another is the starting point for a discussion of three French Renaissance magistrates for whom freedom is paramount political question: La Boétie, L'Hospital, and Montaigne. The first of these sees freedom in ontological terms, the foundation of being as well as of any political system in the form of freedom of expression and amitié. The article shows that that these values are severely tested by the French Wars of Religion. L'Hospital claims that personal and collective liberty is compatible with monarchical rule and submission to the will of another. This attempt to reconcile domination and non-domination is then greatly refined by Montaigne who re-frames the premises of this debate in terms which develop the role of historical figures such as Socrates and Lucan in the defence of individual and civic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses political homelessness in French literature during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), using Montaigne's 'De la vanité' ('Of Vanity') as a case study. In that chapter, in which Montaigne discusses travel extensively, he aligns writers and vagabonds, later describing his writing style and way of thinking as vagabondage. There is no direct equivalent of the term 'homelessness' in early modern French, but 'vagabond' is frequently used to describe those of no fixed abode. Montaigne's brief appropriations of the vagabond figure enable a reassessment of his relation to home and to politics, understood in the broader context of mass displacement and renewed philosophical reflection on home in this period. Firstly, the alignment between writers and vagabonds is read as a reference to Montaigne's experience of papal censorship in Rome and an anticipation of his claim to be a citizen of the world. Montaigne's creative vagabondage has affinities with Rosi Braidotti's theory of 'nomadic subjectivity' (another kind of world-citizenship), which is both an aesthetic principle and a way of interrogating – and affirming – political agency. The article then goes on to analyse the extent to which Montaigne is 'politically homeless', in the sense that he is alienated by politics and refuses factionalism. Lastly, we consider Montaigne's relation to homelessness in the context of contemporary print culture: the existence of clandestine 'homeless texts' reveals the limits of Montaigne's strategic vagabondage. The conclusion then returns to the stakes of Montaigne's claim that his style of writing is a 'vagabond' movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of letter writing in the political practice of the French royal family. By focusing on the use of letters exchanged by Henri III, François d'Anjou, and Catherine de' Medici between 1574 and 1584, it analyzes how both kinship relations and notions of royal authority were negotiated and intertwined by letter. In a dynamic communication process, the correspondents discussed and framed familial relationships and political concepts. The letters were read, seen, and heard by a broader audience at court, thus transcending modern categories such as public and private, formal and informal, or intimate and official. The article argues that the correspondence produced specific, sometimes oppoing pictures of the royal family that were supposed to be visible. This use of letters shaped social relations and political processes during the Wars of Religion in early modern France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article rethinks the important question of why, despite the remarkable success of the French Protestant movement in the late 1550s and early 1560s, France did not turn Protestant. It does so by focusing on a hitherto neglected group: the French princely houses. Recent research has forced reconsideration of the motives and confessional identity of some of the best-known princes, such as those belonging to the houses of Guise and Bourbon. This essay identifies a group of largely neglected Protestant loyalists who shared much in common with the other moderate Catholic princes. It argues that they wished to steer a middle course between the confessions, to "nager entre deux eaux." It explains their motivations and the consequences their actions had in shaping the course of French history on the eve of the Wars of Religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how eighteen rural communities in the Touraine, Blésois, and Sologne navigated the treacherous waters of religious civil war. Drawing on over a hundred parish account books, it explores how communities engaged with the threats of war by gathering information, protecting the possessions of the parish church, and dealing with the demands of troops and the royal government. In many ways their experiences were similar to those of other communities across France--both urban and rural--as they relied on their own resources and relationships to mitigate the threats of armed confessional conflict. While these communities offer evidence of resilience and agency in the face of war, comparison with other rural communities that endured more sustained and intense warfare reminds us of the fragility of their resilience, which depended on factors outside their control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L'Antigone de Jean-Antoine de Baïf est la première pièce de Sophocle traduite en français et l'unique tragédie que le poète ait publiée. Souvent considérée comme une simple traduction, cette pièce a longtemps été ignorée du répertoire des Antigones françaises. Toutefois, Baïf procède à une réécriture en adaptant le texte au contexte de la fin du XVIe siècle qui fait écho aux guerres de Religion et à la Saint-Barthélemy. C'est en questionnant le rôle de la dikè ou de la Justice dans le texte de Sophocle et dans l'Antigone de Baïf, en comparant le texte grec à la traduction que se saisissent la pensée politique de l'auteur-traducteur et son rôle de courtisan sous Charles IX, époque où se marient les arts et le pouvoir dans le but d'harmoniser comme de pacifier les relations civiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Marguerite de Valois's "Mémoires" constitute one of the first autobiographical projects undertaken by a woman in France. It mentions participant in the Wars of Religion, the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined throughout her life and death of her brother François led to a succession crisis and launched a new religious war. It also mentions prospective anxiety about the uncertainty of the future and nature of free will and self-determined action.

Recent studies of women and power in France during the sixteenth century have demonstrated that noblewomen wielded considerable political influence through patron-client relationships and through the management of their households, especially during the Wars of Religion. This article will examine the extent of noblewomens influence and power during the religious wars by focusing on the activities of widows connected to the Selve family of Limousin. It will look at their estate management activities, arrangement of marriages, purchase of offices, and pursuit of legal claims on behalf of the family, based on documents contained in the Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds français. These noblewomen exercised their autority in such a way that the financial well-being of the family was preserved and enhanced, and they should be recognized and acknowledged for their contributions during this chaotic period of French history as they worked not only to raise their families, but to advance the economic interests and social prestige of those families as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study investigates the choices made by a newly ennobled French Protestant and his family. During the French Wars of Religion, Marc-Antoine Marreau de Boisguérin advanced his social ambitions and acquired noble title through military service to the crown. As the crown became more Catholic, Boisguérin experienced greater difficulty remaining Protestant. After a period of defying the royal will, Boisguérin acquiesced and crossed confessional lines, but he never became a Catholic militant. He also shaped the professional and confessional configuration of his family. His progeny were able to retain a degree of flexibility, producing a confessionally heterogeneous family compact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the work titled "L'entente catholique ou la redéfinition de l'ennemi à la fin des Guerres de Religion" by Lorenzo Comensoli Antonini, published in the 2023 issue of the periodical Revue Seizième Siècle.

The article reviews the work titled "Les usages mémoriels de la Guerre de Cent Ans au temps des Guerres de Religion" by Antoine Lauer, published in the 2023 issue of the periodical Revue Seizième Siècle.

Discusses the history of the Abbaye des Conards, which organized the yearly carnival in Rouen, France in the sixteenth century. Examination of a festive society in France; Ways in which the Wars of Religion forced the abbey into a formal relationship with Rouen's Parliament; Abbey's disappearance in the early part of the seventeenth century; Evidence that the Conards' membership and activities were urban in nature.

Songs played a significant role in the French Wars of Religion by spreading political and religious ideas, and by involving Protestants and Catholics in the conflict. Performed in the streets, churches, workshops and houses, songs participated in the construction of urban soundscapes during the troubles. This article examines six songs composed after the execution of the duc and the cardinal de Guise on the order of Henri III (23 and 24 December, 1588) and printed in Paris by Nicolas Bonfons. This event sparked the armed revolt of the Catholic League against the king and his heir, the Protestant Henri de Navarre. The article analyses the rhetorical features of the songs and compares their arguments with those of contemporary visual images and printed libels. In particular, it shows how songs served as a link between print and oral culture. Songs allowed Leaguers — whatever their age, sex, or status — not only to assimilate the main points of the justification of the revolt and to incorporate representations of a just monarchy, but also to appropriate them intimately by singing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the commemorative meaning of sound in early modern Montpellier, focusing on the use of processional music and church bells to remember the French Wars of Religion. Scholarship has demonstrated that music in post-Reformation Europe often served to consolidate confessional identities, but this article argues that in religiously mixed communities like Montpellier, sound also served as a memory vector. In the wake of the French religious wars, Protestants and Catholics developed competing soundscapes that revived painful memories about the wars and sustained religious tension throughout the seventeenth century. Catholics relied on frequent processions to recall the destruction of their churches and monasteries at the hands of the Protestants, and chose specific songs to underline their triumph in re-establishing Catholic worship. The memory of losing their church bells also prompted them to fight Protestant attempts at installing their own bells after the wars. On the basis of untapped archival sources, this article also reconstructs the musical culture of Catholics in seventeenth-century Montpellier, paying particular attention to the cathedral chapel and the confraternity of White Penitents.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française is the property of Librairie Armand Colin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the policies that state and urban authorities within the Habsburg Netherlands adopted towards emigration during the Dutch Revolt. The Spanish Crown's repression after the Iconoclastic Fury in 1566–7 intensified the exodus during the first decade of the Revolt, as local or exceptional courts often sanctioned these retreats through judicial banishment and confiscation of property. Beginning in 1579–81, however, there was a change in policy towards refugees, as local authorities in Habsburg territories abandoned their initial attempts at repression in favour of reconciliation and reintegration. While the new governor-general and city magistrates in reconciled cities encouraged Protestants to leave, they also welcomed those seeking to permanently return, albeit if they both pledged loyalty to the Spanish Crown and reconciled with the Catholic Church. This policy, as shown in pardon letters, petitions, and inquiries concerning returnees, met with some success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes how the French Wars of Religion were remembered in the early seventeenth century through the mechanism of criminal lawsuits heard before the parliament in Paris, France. Edict of Nantes; Paris Chambre De L'Edit.

Illustrates the importance of local elites in France's national politics and their increased freedom of action during the tumult of the Wars of Religion. Different components of the governor's regime; Focus on the question of the relationship between clientage networks and religious parties.

Examines the religious belief of Michel de L'Hopital, chancellor of France from 1560 to 1568 during the Wars of Religion, particularly his policy of granting limited freedom to Protestants. Charges of being a Huguenot; Lack of proof from his Catholic opponents or from the Protestants; Toleration of Protestantism as the alternative to civil conflict.

The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) were the scene of the greatest doctrinal challenge the French monarchy had to face before the 1789 Revolution. While the medieval political theory had always accepted the idea of a royal power restrained by specific limitations, as the feudal character of the monarchy presupposed the existence of mutually-binding obligations between king and vassals and it involved the idea of consent by the ruled, the civil wars which devastated France during the second half of the sixteenth century brought with them the development, first by the Huguenots, then by the radical Catholics, of theories of popular sovereignty, which argued for a right of lawful resistance, for deposition of tyrannical kings and, in some cases, even for tyrannicide. But, in face of this challenge, the monarchy and the partisans of a strong royal power did not remain passive, but instead reacted with vigour, with political treatises and pamphlets of their own, which exalted the role of the king and bitterly attacked the arguments of their opponents. One of the most celebrated such treatises was Jean Bodin's Les Six livres de la République (1576), which represented a seminal work in the development of early modern absolutism. Bodin's book brought many significant contributions to the early modern understanding of the state and kingship, chief among them being the shift in the king's main role, from that of supreme source of justice to that of legislator, and the definition of sovereignty as unique and indivisible - which turned the model of the "mixed constitution", previously so much admired, into a corrupt form of state. But Bodin's most direct answer to the dramatic circumstances of the 1570s and to the theories of popular sovereignty was to propose the so-called "royale" monarchy as the ideal form of the state - a monarchy where the absolute power of the king could coexist, without contradictions, with some limited constraints on royal authority derived from the respect for natural justice and the king's own moral fortitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Psalter from the third quarter of the fifteenth century is preserved in the collections of St Patrick's College now housed in the Russell Library at Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. The psalter was evidently made in a Benedictine monastery in south-west France, probably Poitou. One particular saint occurs in both the calendar and the litany. St Rigomer, though little known elsewhere, was specially venerated at Maillezais in the marshes of bas-Poitou, where the abbey, founded c.1000, was provided with incoming funds from pilgrims by the transfer there of the saint's relics c.1020, and they were given a place of special importance in the chapel to the south of the main altar. The monks at Maillezais had a good library of which there is a catalogue from the end of the twelfth century. Of the small number of these books that still survive one is identified as a Maillezais book because it includes a mention of St Rigomer. It is extremely likely that the psalter now at Maynooth came from Maillezais. This journey cannot have been direct. Maillezais suffered heavily in the Hundred Years War and the French Wars of Religion and the books from the monks' library were probably dispersed in the 1560s. What happened to the psalter between this time and when it arrived in Maynooth probably in the first half of the eighteenth century is moot, but we can now be reasonably certain of its place of origin as well as knowing where it is housed now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the publication of pamphlets in Paris, France, within the context of the French Wars of Religion and the reign of Henri III, King of France. Particular emphasis is given to the pamphlets' discourse on the recent past in an effort to demobilize the French Catholic League, an organization which aimed to drive all Protestants out of France, including the assassination of Henry, Duc de Guise, on December 23, 1588.