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Although the regime of Henri IV marks a watershed in traditional political history in France, for feuding parties it had less discernible impact or merely interrupted their quarrels. For historians of violence, the traditional chronology is an imperfect guide: the deep scars caused by the Wars of Religion were not quick to heal after 1598, the infection of violence and disorder had spread to all areas of the body politic, and old wounds were reopened and sometimes inflamed by the remedies proposed for their amelioration. This chapter looks at feuding in France prior to the Wars of Religion, Calvinism and its role in the perpetuation of vengeance and conspiracy, how confessional identity and religious conviction sharpened feuding among the nobles and intensified disputes, and the blood feud between the two most powerful families in France in the 16th century.

In the 1560s, the Spanish authorities felt themselves beset on several fronts owing to the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe; the fear of a heretical 5th-column at home, in Catalonia, in the Spanish Netherlands, and in the New World; suspicion of France at the time of the Wars of Religion in that country; and the rising of the moriscos in the Andalusia. This situation produced the gravest crisis Spain had experienced for many years. At just this time, a network of foreign printing-workers with Reformist inclinations was uncovered in Spain. The Inquisition moved swiftly to crush it. The records of the Holy Office present a series of challenges to the researcher, but nevertheless provide a unique source of information about the humble artisans who formed the backbone of the Iberian printing industry.

The Wars of Religion in sixteenth century France were the backdrop of Montaigne’s Essays and specifically his elaboration of a stance of philosophical relativism. In his early essay “Of Custom”, he used the bewildering diversity of customs worldwide to suggest that there was no rational basis for deciding how to behave. In his more famous and important essay “Of Cannibals”, he drew on an account of the Tupi of Brazil to call into question categories such as “barbarian” or “savage”, pointing out that otherness did not necessarily mean inferiority. The barbarity of the ways in which Catholics and Huguenots treated their adversaries in France was far more egregious than the cannibalism of the Tupi. More generally, Montaigne disparages himself and his age as mediocre, poised between the simplicity of the cannibals and the true excellence of ancient Greeks and Romans.

Each of the communication spheres presented so far also needed to communicate with the others. This chapter analyses their contacts and conflicts. First, it discusses the interaction between literate and oral communication, suggesting that literacy was itself a drive for social transactions. It then addresses the official publication of laws and decrees: for all its secretiveness, the government's authority rested on its capacity to reach out to the subjects. Yet official publication also often led to resistance, as people prevented publication and destroyed decrees. Thus, normative messages never dominated the city's public space, but had to compete with alternative forms of public communication, for example graffiti and posted texts (Venice's equivalent of the Roman pasquinades). The chapter concludes with a case study of one such texts, the Paternoster degli Spagnoli, which circulated widely during the French wars of religion and beyond, as a critical parody of political domination.

This chapter dispels the myth of Pierre de L’Estoile as a passive observer of his times and introduces his role as an engaged collector who negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France in the Wars of Religion. It outlines an approach to L’Estoile and his world that emphasizes individual agency over cultural determinism and the possibilities of religious pluralism in the post-Reformation period over the binaries of confessional conflict. A Gallican Catholic resistant to papal authority, L’Estoile prudently avoided confessional conflict in his own life and showed great respect for individual Protestants among his friends and relations. From his perspective, the Wars of Religion appear more confessionally ambiguous in the responses they provoked, more socially specific in their impact on individuals at different levels of the hierarchy, and more culturally diverse in the memories they left behind.

This chapter traces the story of three convents caught up in the religious wars that devastated Montpellier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The southern city fell into Protestant hands on the eve of France’s Wars of Religion and remained largely under Protestant control until 1622. Catholic religious life was thoroughly undermined by the repeated expulsions and destruction of property that resulted from the conflicts. This was especially hard on nuns, who, having lost their homes and income, also lost the prestige and sanctity of religious enclosure. Living under wartime conditions that made it difficult to observe their rule, they were unable to recruit new members, much less to enact reforms needed to raise the standards of community life. At the wars’ end, the bishop established convents of Visitandines and Ursulines, reformed orders then gaining popularity elsewhere in France, instead of helping the old orders to reform and rebuild.

The Spanish intervention under Phillip II in the French Wars of Religion during the 1590s was seen as a high point of Spain’s bid for universal monarchy over Christian Europe. This chapter explores Spain’s justification of its intervention to tease out the legal doctrines applied. The two main documents through which Spain justified its intervention, the declaration issued in March 1590 after Spain’s decision to send armies to France in aid of the Catholic League, and the 1595 counter-declaration following Henry IV of France’s declaration of war against Spain, are analysed. It is argued that Spain adhered closely to the traditional discourse of just war. The major thrust of its efforts at justification was directed at persuading target audiences that intervention was necessary to safeguard higher interests. For this Spain relied on a strategy which can be dubbed ‘hegemonic’ or ‘imperial’ defence, whereby the conservation of the position of the Spanish-Habsburg empire was equated to the universal interests of the community of Christian princes, and thus of the one true, Catholic faith.

This chapter introduces the major themes of the book as well as the cast of characters: the over one hundred writers and intellectuals whose work and activities are the focus of what follows in the seven chapters. It dwells considerably on the ethos of retreat—otium—as a governing principle of men and women of letters in this period following the Wars of Religion. It also deals with the historiographical background of this study, acknowledging several generations of historians and literary scholars. The chapter also presages other themes that will follow: honnêteté, Gallicanism, as well as the literary and intellectual sociability of Paris in the generations following the Wars of Religion.

Michel de Montaigne’s treatment of fourth-century Roman emperor Julian in De la liberté de conscience offers a fascinating lesson in church-state relations and Montaigne’s relationship with himself. In both, the lesson concerns treatment of the Other. Though deemed ‘the apostate’ by early Christians for disestablishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire, Julian adopted public toleration of all religions—a pragmatic approach toward public order Montaigne considers praiseworthy in contrast to the violent way Europeans were dealing with the ‘Other’ (Protestant and Catholic) during the Wars of Religion. A distinction needed to be made, as Julian did, between one’s private religious convictions and one’s public duty to tolerate religious difference for the sake of social peace. As a descendent of Spanish Jews, Montaigne was aware of the analogous distinction between the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ man. Posner claims that it is easy to imagine Montaigne himself in the position of Emperor Julian: conforming to the state religion for the sake of order, while remaining internally Other.

The introduction first explains why “planting the cross” is an apt metaphor for the renewal of monastic life that took place in the wake of France’s Wars of Religion. It introduces the six case studies that make up the book and explains how each explores a particular question, or set of questions, about how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented the changes commonly known as the “Catholic Reformation.” The cases show that “reform” was not simply imposed from above, nor was it fixed or completed with the adoption of a new constitution or rule. Arguments for a return to a religious order’s original purity or a life of greater austerity encouraged debate about how the order should best live out its rule. The introduction concludes with a summary of the circumstances that made religious reform so urgently needed and a brief overview of how the reform movement spread.

This book presents itself as a history of how natural rights became human rights, from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolutions, and ultimately up to 1948. But it is also and more precisely a genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined during the American and French Revolutions. Reconstructing this genealogy requires reaching back to the sixteenth century, and casting glances farther back still. The purpose of these historical soundings is not to hit rock bottom and locate ground zero of revolutionary rights. It is rather to gain sufficient perspective on the sprawling series of debates between jurists, theologians, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others pushing rival rights regimes to defend conflicting ideologies. These disputes were not merely academic quarrels, but flared up most during moments of political turmoil, when the very structure of governments was called into question.

This chapter talks about the various forms of Protestantism that had been accepted by large swathes of the population of many territories in Europe. It also mentions political leaders that had adopted the Reformation, whether out of genuine commitment or as a means to achieve personal goals. The chapter recounts the introduction of Reformation in England and Scotland that was achieved with relatively little bloodshed. It describes the minor impact of Protestantism in other European countries, such as Spain and Italy, where stability was largely maintained. It also highlights the Wars of Religion that dominated the political and religious landscape of France through the second half of the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth.

This chapter focuses on the interconnectivity of war and peace in Europe with a variety of forms of European incursion in the Caribbean during the 1500s and 1600s. It traces the emergence and evolution of piracy and privateering as well as European colonial expansion by settlers and buccaneers. It provides a systematic analysis of how belligerence in the Old World (such as the prolonged Wars of Religion) impacted Cuba and the rest of the region. It also explores Spain’s efforts to protect its colonies through fortifications, fleet systems of navigation, and increased military presence.

This chapter examines the dynamics of shipwreck as played out in Renaissance travel writing. Through a reading of the work of Jean de Léry and the lesser-known Jean-Arnaud Bruneau de Rivedoux, it shows how in eyewitness or recently passed-on first-hand accounts of shipwreck, very real events were marked and shaped by the conventions established earlier in the century by allegorical, fictional and polemic shipwreck texts. But the extreme conditions of (actual) shipwreck place great strain on these otherwise persistent tropes, and both Léry’s and Bruneau’s Histoires generate new incarnations of once-familiar figures. Léry, for example, offers both a conventional narration of the storm at sea modelled on Psalm 107 and Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’, and, later, several rearranged versions that point to the limitations of proverbial, classical, and biblical commonplace in such extraordinary circumstances. These texts, both written by Reformists intent on foregrounding their empirical approach, present the most forceful vindications of sea travel of all the texts studied here. While they describe vividly and often distressingly the suffering endured by seafarers and the victims of shipwreck, they also emphasise the value of such experience, and its power to affect even those who are spectators to it from dry land.

In the early 1560s, Ronsard joined the pamphlet wars of the French Wars of Religion. This chapter argues that one of his principal concerns was the inappropriateness of Huguenot public speech: preaching and proselytizing did not happen in the right places, or at the right times, nor was it delivered by the right people. Ronsard’s Remonstrance au peuple de France gives a series of vigorous tableaux in which Huguenot public speech is denounced as excessive and dangerous. But what Ronsard calls dangerous licence was described by Protestant writers as liberté, or free speech a kind of necessarily abrasive truth-telling that shares characteristics with the ancient Cynic virtue of parrhesia.

Montaigne’s exploration of rumour in ‘Des boyteux’ (‘Of the Lame’) owes much to Virgil’s description of Fama in the Aeneid: unstoppable, proliferating, indiscriminate. Montaigne adds a reflection on the subjective investment that everyone involved in passing on a rumour must make in the credibility of the story, and illustrates this with an anecdote about a hoax spirit that had just been uncovered in a village close to his château. Montaigne emphasizes the need for a cool, detached, sceptical audience, particularly in the faction politics of the French Wars of Religion; and there is a model for this kind of audience in the theatrical theory of late sixteenth-century comedians. Montaigne’s own treatment of rumour in his letters to the Maréchale de Matignon give it some importance in determining the tone and the mood of a particular place; but he warns against the impassioned espousal of rumour that makes sceptical judgement impossible.