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This book explores the theory and practice of authority during the later sixteenth century, in the religious culture and political institutions of the city of Nantes, where the religious wars traditionally came to an end with the great Edict of 1598. The Wars of Religion witnessed serious challenges to the authority of the last Valois kings of France. In an examination of the municipal and ecclesiastical records of Nantes, the author considers challenges to authority, and its renegotiation and reconstruction in the city, during the civil war period. After a detailed survey of the socio-economic structures of the mid-sixteenth-century city, successive chapters detail the growth of the Protestant church, assess the impact of sectarian conflict and the early counter reform movement on the Catholic Church, and evaluate the changing political relations of the city council with the urban population and with the French crown. Finally, the book focuses on the Catholic League rebellion against the king and the question of why Nantes held out against Henry IV longer than any other French city.
11 • Language and conflict in the French Wars of Religion mark greengrass Words, like looks, can kill. If that is so, we should listen to the voices, as well as observe the actions, of those who participated in and contributed to the conflicts of the French wars of religion. Yet the history of sectarian conflict in the French wars of religion has focused more on the targets of violence, animate and inanimate, than on its vocal manifestations. In 1987, Peter Burke and Roy Porter urged that it was ‘high time for a social history of language, a social history of
This book explores how conceptions of episcopacy (government of a church by bishops) shaped the identity of the bishops of France in the wake of the reforming Council of Trent (1545–63). It demonstrates how the episcopate, initially demoralised by the Wars of Religion, developed a powerful ideology of privilege, leadership and pastorate that enabled it to become a flourishing participant in the religious, political and social life of the ancien regime. The book analyses the attitudes of Tridentine bishops towards their office by considering the French episcopate as a recognisable caste, possessing a variety of theological and political principles that allowed it to dominate the French church.
The 1641 rebellion is one of the seminal events in early modern Irish and British history. The 1641 'massacres', like the battles at the Boyne (1690) and Somme (1916), played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/ British identity in Ulster, in much the same way that the subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s helped forge a new Irish Catholic national identity. This book illustrates the role that cartography and geography can play in understanding and contextualising the 1641 rising/rebellion. During the Irish wars of the 1590s, printed news on the continent about developments in Ireland emanated from the Roman press of Bernandino Beccari. Barcelona publications indicate a strong interest in Irish events at a time ironically when Irish regiments in the service of Spain were heavily involved in the attempted suppression of their revolt. The book also answers few questions with reference to the survivors of the sacks of the Dutch Revolt. The history of sectarian conflict in the French wars of religion has focused more on the targets of violence, animate and inanimate, than on its vocal manifestations. The Irish exiles in the Spanish Monarchy were extremely active in the years prior to 1641. Connecting the Hispanic dimension of events in 1641 and the birth of an Irish 'Black Legend' comparable to the classical 'Spanish Black Legend' required the reflection on the meaning of violence.
George Herbert (1593–1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. Contributors break new ground in manuscript and translation studies (French, Italian, and Latin). The literary, philosophical, and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its own investment in international Protestantism. The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics, and theology in modern universities in no way reflect the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history, and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent.
-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. The Church–Whig alliance forged during the Walpolean regime had been meant to forestall the return of religious violence; but it had also bought time for the wounds of war, if not to heal, then at least to be encased in increasingly thick scar tissue.8 The problems opened up by the Reformation had not been resolved, but the dangers attending their irresolution seemed slightly less threatening, though not wholly innocuous. Secondly, the issues with which eighteenth-century English polemical
endlessly debate whether its many wars should be called wars of religion, and what was religious and what was political in its violent uprisings and rebellions: some anachronistic dichotomies here, deriving from questions badly put. In the American and many other modern constitutions there is a formal separation of church and state. My subject is more messily enmeshed, religion and politics tightly entangled with each other. In Elizabethan England the monarch was more than a commander (which is what her prime minister, William Cecil, once called her).2 She was head of the
as closely identified as Shakespeare’s constabulary suspects, and the aesthetic emerged as a placeholder for toleration when the Wars of Religion stalled, because, in the words of Hugh Grady, ‘it began to appear that art, not any faith, would have to provide a cultural community’.5 Once Catholics and Protestants had fought to a standstill, in this account, ‘the stage was set for the Enlightenment definition of the aesthetic in a divided but relatively tolerant Europe’.6 This is the cultural or rhetorical turn Shakespeare takes in his comedy about a King of France
was injured in the fall; he was found hiding in the garden by Mazel, Séguier and Nicolas Joani and was killed, his body being stabbed fifty-two times.62 Du Chaila’s murder was a severe blow to Catholics. It marked both the end of the passive resistance and the beginning of the last French war of religion. Basville’s authority was now seriously challenged. He relied more than ever on denunciations for financial reward to catch those warrior-prophets, thanks to which he had Séguier burned alive on 12 August.63 With the harvesting season over, another 1,000 men joined
seditious preaching and its control. He suggests that a hitherto neglected part of our understanding of the French civil wars was the dilemma that the authorities faced in controlling speech-acts. There is much in his methodology that might inspire scholars of the 1641 depositions, especially given the determination of the commissioners to record the reported speech of the insurgents. In his chapter Nicholas Canny highlights the significance of these sixteenthcentury wars of religion, but argues that the appropriate context within which to investigate the 1641 rebellion