The title is a bit curious for this book. It is taken from verse 8 of the King James Version of Psalm 107 (verses 1–9 are printed on p. vii). It is curious because while Tulchin chose the title to indicate “a sense of the longing for God that was at the heart of the Protestant experience” (xv), his focus is on the social and political motivations of the why and how of the Huguenot “triumph” in Nîmes. His “primary goal . . . is to explain these startling, extraordinary, and bloody events” integral to Nîmes becoming “the heart of Protestant France” (xiii–xiv) by means of sociological, psychological, and anthropological “models of religious conversion” (xvi). “The central hypothesis of this book [is] that Protestant growth in most French towns eventually stalled, while in Nîmes Protestant leaders skillfully exploited the local political situation. They identified arguments that resonated with Nîmes's elite, given the elite's background and circumstances. The background was Nîmes's legal humanistic outlook. The circumstances were the crown's indifference to the town's economic difficulties and to established legal procedures” (181).

Tulchin pursues and buttresses his hypothesis through painstaking compilation and analysis of relational databases and social networks, the details of which he provides in two appendices. The database of Nîmes's notary records (appendix B), including every surviving will and marriage contract from 1550–1563, amounts to thirteen thousand references of named individuals, their occupations, and social status. His relegation of most of this quantitative analysis to the endnotes enhances his smooth narrative style. Tulchin further aids the reader in the introduction by outlining his argument chapter by chapter: (1) an overview of Nîmes's institutions and economy, noting that lawyers were the most influential people; (2) the history of the town from 1530–1547, including the early introduction of Protestant ideas, embraced disproportionately by wealthy artisans and cloth workers, and by the early 1550s, two Protestant notaries; (3) emboldened Protestant claims for the “moral renewal” of the town prompted by crises of the late 1550s including a disastrous flood, harvest failures, and further severe economic strain imposed by levies of the crown; (4) increasing Protestant strength in the wake of the disarray of the crown following the death of Henri II, during which the Protestants argued that Calvinism would lead France out of crisis; (5) Protestant formulation of their program through a list of grievances that claimed the necessity of religious reform for political and social renewal signed by over three hundred people including many of the elite; (6) with the conversion of the elite, seizure of churches, iconoclasm, and social concerns such as poor relief, the majority Protestant population began creating a society in conformity with their ideals; (7) the crown's effort to repress the heresy infecting Nîmes led to Protestant massacres in 1567 and 1569 of the Catholic minority as well as the destruction of most of the city's Catholic churches thus creating a Protestant-dominated town. The conclusion compares Nîmes with other French cities to explain relative Protestant successes and failures to institute reform.

Some decades ago, Bernd Moeller noted, in effect, that the study of the Reformation is too important to leave to the theologians. Concentration on theology may lose “sight of the Reformation as history, as an event of the distant past, and as a complex network of historical relationships” (“Problems of Reformation Research,” in Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. by H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. [1965; Durham: Labyrinth, 1982], 7). Since then, social historians have addressed the deficit named by Moeller. Tuchlin's fine social and cultural history is a further significant contribution in that genre. Yet, I am left wondering if economic, social, and political crises were sufficient causes for Tuchlin's protagonists to pursue religious reform in Nîmes. To be sure, Tuchlin acknowledges that “the political and economic strains of the later 1550s in Nîmes were not the only proximate causes of the Reformation” (69). And he mentions the visit of Calvin's colleague Pierre Viret (134), but there is no discussion of the massive influx of evangelical propaganda in French (confer, for example, Philip Benedict, “Settlements: France,” in Handbook of European History 1400–1600, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy [Leiden: Brill, 1995], 2:417–54, here 423–24) nor, in Andrew Pettegree's phrase, “the culture of persuasion” (Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]) emanating from Geneva and elsewhere that convinced readers and hearers to embrace a new faith. References are made to theological and faith loci such as the Lord's Supper (Tulchin uses the term “Eucharist”) and predestination but not developed as motivations. Tulchin also refers to the Nîmes consistory and its establishment of a poor fund, but fails to draw the connections to Calvin's understanding of ministry and the social effects of the diaconate. Perhaps Tulchin will complement his contribution in this study by incorporating and explicating religious motivation in a future revised edition.