Religious Violence in Sixteenth-Century France

The religious violence resulting from the reformations of the sixteenth century shared much in common with the religious violence of the medieval period that preceded it. It was largely sanctioned by secular and/or ecclesiastical authority. And it tended to break out in places where new religious ideas threatened to subvert established ways of navigating the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds. Having said that, however, historians usually also argue for both historicity and specificity in trying to analyze religious violence. It is hardly something monolithic, universal, and inevitable as some critics of contemporary religion like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have been eager to suggest. 1 Religious violence has to be understood in the political, social, and cultural contexts that produced it. Indeed, one of the most intriguing questions for scholars of the Reformation generally, and the French Reformation in particular, is why violence among civilians—neighbours killing neighbours—escalated significantly in sixteenth-century France, with levels of popular violence there arguably greater than anywhere else in Europe during the era of the Reformation. How do we explain, for example, the scale of popular violence that erupted in Paris and a dozen provincial cities in France in August 1572, known collectively as the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacres?

Ancient history · Biology · Sociology · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Pollution · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• Security, Society, and the Perennial Struggles over the Sacred

  Open Access•Derek Bolton•International Organization•2024

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