This is a relatively specialised collection, containing sixteen essays that, in the course of discussing their particular topics, aim to describe the relevant historiography, to outline current and future directions of research and to suggest further reading. Although not every entry in this collection fully achieves these aims, there are many which aim to play a role as guides to researchers and students. Jérémie Foa's chapter on peace-making at the beginning of the French Wars of Religion, and the chapter on the organisation of the French Reformed Churches by Phillipe Chareyre and Raymond Mentzer are carefully schematic in presenting the field, important concepts and debates and even key archival sources for the subject.
As with some other recent collections on the Huguenots, this volume is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the Huguenots in France before 1685 (and the desert), while the second deals with the diaspora, up to the present day. This can develop a focus on longer- term cultural and religious phenomena, and relatively less on the narrative history of the early persecutions of the Huguenots, or the Wars of Religion. Instead, many of the early chapters deal with the formation of Huguenot institutions and identities. Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard's chapter on doctrine and liturgy, Hughes Daussy's chapter on the development of their political thought and activities, Karin Maag on the development of a Huguenot clerical class, and Amanda Eurich on the role of women within the Reformed community all work on outlining the distinctive origins and practices of the Huguenots.
The first section, discussing the Huguenots within France includes Andrew Spicer's illustrated section on the role of Huguenot artists in the seventeenth century, when they appear to have made up a significant proportion of the Academy's numbers. Despite an idea that landscape and still-life works were particularly appropriate for Calvinist artists, Huguenots participated in the production of Catholic art, and even altarpieces. Didier Boisson's chapter on the Huguenots of the Desert, the Camisards and the eighteenth century's attempts at coexistence concludes the first section, bringing the story up to official toleration in 1787. Boisson divides the period of ‘the desert’ into phases of improvised, disciplined and tolerated life for the Church. He also stresses the capacity for regional difference: the stronger concentration of Huguenots in the South allowed for a qualitatively different experience from that in the North.
The second half of the book, engaged with the post-Revocation diaspora, is as interested as the first in social and cultural histories, many of which have a transnational or comparative element to them. The late Myriam Yardeni (to whom this book is dedicated) discusses the perennially-important question of integration and assimilation across England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Switzerland and the colonial settlements in the last years of the seventeenth century. One of her findings is that the diaspora became more ‘French’ in the second generation, where their parents had often maintained a stronger regional identity.
Yardeni's approach is closely complemented by that of Manuela Böhm, whose chapter on sociolinguistics amongst refugees in German-speaking lands, allows for a detailed discussion of the different factors affecting integration and assimilation in different settings. Böhm discusses the emergence of an exile patois, as groups from across France's linguistic regions mingled, read the same Bible and sang from the same psalter. This subject is also addressed by Susanne Lachenicht's chapter on diasporic networks, which discusses the post-1685 generations of Huguenots as developing a distinct diaspora in a manner that the ‘first refuge’ may not have achieved. The diaspora often benefited from its association with French culture and language, even as its relationship with that culture became more strained and distant.
The Revocation also acted as a spur for the development of more individual areas of expression. Carolyn Chappell Lougee argues that through much of the seventeenth century Huguenots had been less active in the field of memoirs and other Life-writing than their English counterparts, or even many French Catholics. She suggests that common features can indeed be found amongst the more than fifty surviving examples from this period, with a less overt religious structure to these works, but a clear interest in family and ordinary life. Many of these works crossed into the province of martyrology, or memorialisation, the subject of David van der Linden's chapter. Drawing on the tradition, form and methodology of earlier martyrologists such as Crespin and Goulart, he demonstrates how seventeenth-century authors like Jurieu and Benoist developed their own approaches to the question of Huguenot suffering and French injustice.
In addition to the colonies and settlements in Germany and other places of refuge, there is a strong interest in the diaspora in the New World. Owen Stanwood places the Huguenots in the context of European expansion and imperialism, describing a string of prospective colonies which the Huguenots would be able to settle, and offer unique commercial possibilities for the English and Dutch empires. Plans for Huguenots to settle Reunion, to grow vines and silk in Virginia, and to populate the plantations in Ireland all reached different levels of fruition.
Paula Wheeler Carlo examines the Huguenot congregations in Massachusetts and New York, drawing on much recent work to suggest that Huguenot conformity to the Anglican Church in these areas (where the Church was not established) was rarer than previously thought, and that it continued to contain a number of Calvinist impulses and forms. These colonies, especially in North America, are the subject of Bertrand Van Ruymbeke's chapter on the memory of the Refuge. By the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of Huguenot societies in England, France and the USA became entwined with nationalist narratives: in America, ‘ownership’ of the Walloon Church became contested between Dutch and French Reformed Churches, and the Huguenots became regarded as ‘good Latins’ at a time when racial categories were central to American immigration debates.
This is a valuable collection for advanced or specialised students working on the Huguenots or related subjects, and will be particularly useful on account of the deliberate way in which it aims not only to contribute to the field, but to explain and contextualise it as well.
