The historiography of the French religious wars continues to be a lively field of debate. These two first books by early career scholars reflect, in their very different ways, wider trends in that historiography to which they both make a significant contribution.

Tom Hamilton's book is a beautifully crafted study of the life and times of one of the most well-known and oft-quoted authors of the period, the royal office-holder and diarist Pierre de L'Estoile (1546–1611). He demonstrates how L'Estoile was far from ‘an objective observer of his times’, as historians have tended to present him, and how he consciously ‘reshaped his material’ so as to present a particular memory or reading of the wars which has influenced interpretations to this day (p. 5). In the gentlest possible way, the author rightly chides scholars for using and appropriating historical texts without reflecting very much on the circumstances and context of their compilation and construction. Without understanding the forces that shaped L'Estoile, it is impossible to understand the partial way in which he selected his sources and, therefore, his ‘active process of cultural reception’ (p. 15). As a collector and polymath, L'Estoile and his diaries and miscellanies are the perfect subject for Hamilton's scrutiny, allowing him to set them in a more historically rich context.

Hamilton is an excellent story-teller and makes effective use of vignettes to draw the reader into the physical and professional world of L'Estoile and his fellow royal office-holders. At the heart of sixteenth-century Paris, the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité, where they worked, was also frequented by booksellers, and was a centre of gossip and news from which L'Estoile could draw. Hamilton describes not only the properties in which L'Estoile and his family lived, but also their interior layout and contents, including close analysis of inventories that reveal the material culture of the household, paintings and prints as well as books. While living fairly modestly for one of his rank, exceptional among L'Estoile's peers was his study and cabinet which contained all that he collected, from portraits to medals, providing us with particular insights into how this collection was constructed. While he reshaped his diaries for a public audience, L'Estoile's family book reflects the intimacies of his life, including the death of his first wife and several of their children. His writings reveal much, too, about his religious tendencies and beliefs, particularly in the role of divine providence, as he sought to understand and interpret the events around him.

The second half of the book is chronologically organised; like L'Estoile's diaries, it covers the reigns of Henri iii (1574–89) and Henri iv (1589–1610) and, in particular, the rise of and seizure of power by the Catholic League. Hamilton provides careful analysis of L'Estoile's manuscripts and the sources that informed them, including printed images and broadsheets, as well as the contents of his library. He offers a meticulous reconstruction of how L'Estoile brought his collections together and what this tells us about his choices. As ever, Hamilton is sensitive to the wider context of the pressures and influences swirling around L'Estoile: of a royalist household living under the hostile regime of the League, of the problems of establishing truth from rumour, of the humanist circles in which he moved. While present at the time of the events that he described, L'Estoile rewrote much of his memoirs in retrospect and, therefore, ‘it is important to recognize just how partial and self-justifying his reports were’, especially in relation to the League (p. 139). At the same time, his collection of so many sources that might otherwise have been lost to us has greatly enhanced and enriched historical interpretation of this period, and nowhere more insightfully than in Hamilton's analysis. Finally, in the conclusion, Hamilton considers the afterlife of the text and its subsequent editions down to the present day. This is a remarkable book, fluently written and nicely illustrated.

In contrast to this focus on the 1580s and 1590s, Jonas van Tol's book concentrates on the 1560s and early 1570s, before the League was formed and when Protestant confidence ran high. Once confined to an old-fashioned political and diplomatic approach to the wars, which side-lined religion and culture, recent works have re-embraced the international, or rather transnational aspects as central to our understanding of the conflict. Hugues Daussy, in his wide-ranging exploration of the fortunes of the Huguenot movement, Le Parti Huguenot: chronique d'une disillusion (1557–1572) (Geneva 2014), draws on archival sources from across Europe in order to reconstruct these links. Jonas van Tol also focuses on the early wars, and the pre-St Bartholomew's Day massacre period in particular, for his close analysis of the German contribution to the Protestant cause in France. First, he maps out the extent and character of existing connections and confessional relations before the religious wars began. Importantly, these shaped how the conflict in France was perceived and interpreted by those in the Empire. News about the complex situation in France reached the German states mostly through the circulation of pamphlets, but these were often confusing and contradictory. Interest in events over the border was intense, but responses to them were mixed and not always simply along confessional lines. Lutheran distrust of the Reformed fed their suspicion about the Huguenot movement. Nevertheless, by the late 1560s, Protestant concerns about an international Catholic conspiracy were sufficient to encourage princely intervention to restore peace and, when that faltered, to offer more direct support to their coreligionists in France.

This support, however, was not consistent. Through an analysis of their correspondence, Van Tol nuances our understanding of the motivations that persuaded some German Protestant princes, and deterred others, from aiding the Huguenots with troops and military expertise. Thus, several Lutheran lords chose rather to uphold divine right and the French king, while Wolfgang of Zweibrücken and Johann Casimir, in particular, threw their weight behind the French and Dutch Calvinist aristocracies. The resulting Protestant coalition, bringing together German princes, the Huguenot leaders, the prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny, with the Dutch nobles, William of Orange and Louis of Nassau, and part-funded by England, presented a formidable opposition to the French crown in the years 1567–70. Despite the odds, and several notable defeats in battle, this alliance allowed the Huguenots to negotiate further concessions from the monarchy, resulting in a beneficial peace in 1570 that included an agreement to pay the German troops to leave. The shock of the St Bartholomew's Day massacres of 1572 posed a further challenge to the Huguenot cause both at home and abroad. This study, therefore, reinforces the importance of cross-border relationships in shaping the progress of the wars and, in particular, strengthening the Protestant cause during the first decade of the conflict.

While concentrating on different periods and, therefore, stages of the French religious wars and on different aspects of the conflict, these two books contribute fresh approaches and angles to our understanding of the wars and the characters, motivations and choices of those who lived through and participated in them. They demonstrate the enduring importance of context, from the personal and local to the international, the influence of religious choice at a time of contested beliefs, and both the pragmatic and ideological responses to the unpredictability of political events.