S uzannah L ipscomb . The Voices of Nîmes

In The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc, an excellent study of consistorial records in sixteenth-century Languedoc, Susannah Lipscomb excavates the experiences of ordinary women who are often absent from the historical record. Lipscomb brings to light the thoughts and motivations of women, but also the strategies they deployed to make space for themselves within the patriarchal context of the Protestant Reformation. Revealing how low-status women in France shaped possibilities for themselves, Lipscomb deftly balances daily life and historical analysis in ways that revise how we have understood both. After briskly setting the scene, Lipscomb traces how the rise of Protestantism and religious civil war affected the populace. Vividly revealing the quotidian pressures of food scarcity, plague, and violence, Lipscomb argues that conflict shaped Protestant responses toward control of morality. Assumed to be physically and morally weak, women were privileged subjects of moral surveillance. Women...

Context (archaeology) · Heresy · Morality · Political science · Protestantism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies