The French Wars of Religion are commonly seen as one of the more brutal clashes in European Reformation history, with much scholarly attention focusing on the many massacres which took place in towns and cities across France, the apogée being the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572. But non-battlefield violence could take many different forms: one of the main challenges that the Edict of Nantes of 1598 had to deal with was how to manage the legacies of such events. The edict’s first article famously established ‘oubliance’ as a core principle, commanding people to forget what had happened in order to move on. But buried deep within the provisions was another article, article 86, which allowed for the prosecution of ‘execrable crimes’, including particular acts of violence which could not be considered part of the ordinary course of warfare. Tom Hamilton’s book uses one particular case to examine how violence was experienced in the wars, and how individuals and communities used the emerging legal frameworks of the time to seek redress and build something approaching a consensus in the wake of decades of brutal civil war which had touched all levels of society. In the winter of 1590-1, when the Protestant Henri de Navarre was battling hard to secure his succession, the village of Chaumot near Sens came under the control of one of Henri’s captains, a man called Mathurin Delacanche. In the months he spent in the village, he and his men launched a wave of terror, going beyond demands for provisions and money and frequently ending up initiating physical and sexual violence. Many families in the village were affected by these events, both physically and emotionally. Delacanche was eventually moved on from the village by his superiors, and established himself in the urban hierarchy of nearby Sens. He might have expected his actions to stay in the past, part of the usual disruption of civil war, but that was reckoning without the actual sieur of Chaumot, an extraordinary woman, and the widow of the title, Renée Chevalier. Chevalier had already had to fight for her own inheritance, in the process gaining an excellent understanding both of the practicalities of the French legal system, and insights as to how to exploit networks and gendered assumptions so as to best navigate the various courts. Chevalier brought a case against Delacanche, one where the villagers acted as witnesses, which saw a soldier’s expectations about what was admissible in the prosecution of a war come up against a village’s experiences of trauma and their understanding of what was fair punishment. The case heard in the Paris parlement in 1599 to 1600 saw the lawyers work both to establish what had happened nearly a decade before, and work out how this case fitted into the legal frameworks that laid the groundwork for Henry of Navarre now Henry iv’s efforts to lead his subjects out of the horrors of civil war.

This book does a lot of things very well. It is meticulously researched: Hamilton’s grasp of the relevant archival material is second to none, and he steers the reader through a complex and often very upsetting case in a way that gives the reader a lot of technical detail but does not overwhelm. He demonstrates similar mastery over a wide range of secondary literature: the details of the case lead the historian to consider much more than the legal issues themselves, but also issues around gender, social status, the behaviour of soldiers, marriage negotiations and urban tensions in late sixteenth-century towns, to say nothing of the complexity of the actual military campaigns of the Wars of the League. The structure is broadly chronological, but each of the eight main chapters uses the circumstances of the case to illuminate broader concerns, around inheritances, sexual violence in wartime, expectations around soldiers’ behaviours, expectations around widows, the operation of the legal system, the cumulative impact of peace edicts and their provision around what we might now call restorative justice, the concept of execrable crimes and the disposal of family inheritances. As such, the work is extremely rich, and will be of interest to a wide range of social, cultural, gender and legal historians. It introduces a wide-ranging cast of characters, including the various villagers facing down Delacanche, the social circles Renée Chevalier moved in in Paris and in the provinces, the legal hierarchies in the parlement and in provincial settings like Sens, as well as the legal authors who were trying to theorise their way out of the mess of the wars of religion.

Hamilton argues strongly for the need to consider what the courts were actually deciding when it came questions of violence within war and what could be prosecuted in the post-Nantes regime, alongside the more detached works of theory by people like Hugo Grotius. Hamilton also largely succeeds in his aim to uncover and give voice to the people who usually don’t get a chance to speak in works on the wars. At times, it is hard to resist the allure of his two main protagonists: there are two remarkable set pieces, one where Chevalier arrives in Paris on a boat with the villagers who are about to give testimony, one where Delacanche lets loose a stream of expletives in a public setting. Both are recreated with a neat eye for immersive detail, but they are not allowed to overpower the key themes: whilst we might not strictly need to know what happened to Renée Chevalier once the case was over, it is nevertheless satisfying to hear about her later marriages and her application of her accumulated legal knowledge when she came to think about her own death and the fate of her fortune. A thread that runs through several of the chapters is that many in Chevalier’s circle were Protestants who converted to Catholicism, either in the aftermath of an episode of violence, or following the lead set by Henry of Navarre. Hamilton is extremely adept at communicating the challenges that people at all social levels faced at the end of the Wars of Religion.

There are a few points to note, mostly quite minor. There are some useful supporting materials, but a chronology would perhaps have simplified the reader’s experience of the text, and it is notable that in the brief ‘Who’s who’ at the start of the text, Renée Chevalier herself is not included, although her husbands, friends and relations are all mentioned. A run of images in chapter vii gives us faces to match to the names of the various lawyers adjudicating on the case, but they are at best cameo appearances, and the inclusion of the images does not add much to the text at this point. Of more importance is to think about when and how this book might be used. This is a work that definitely should be read by historians and students of the French Wars of Religion, as well as interested historians, but tutors using this work will need to introduce its themes carefully. At times, the discussion of the sexual violence appears somewhat unannounced – it is clear that a chapter entitled ‘Rape at Chaumot’ will include challenging material but the events of the winter of 1590‒1 are mentioned almost in passing at other points. This is not to suggest that Hamilton treats his subject matter lightly – in fact, it is evident that a lot of care and consideration has been taken in how to discuss some extremely distressing episodes in terms that do not gloss over what happened whilst avoiding exploiting historical trauma. But this is a work that will need an explanatory note on reading lists and in teaching materials. Above all, Hamilton makes a strong case that it was ordinary people like the villagers of Chaumot, alongside extraordinary individuals like Renée Chevalier, who had an active stake in working out how the peace was actually going to work in practice.