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The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events they inevitably depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and collection of Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this is the first life of L'Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called 'the storehouse of my curiosities'. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making.
Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this study challenges historians' assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L'Estoile's prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life-writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilise rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L'Estoile's curiosity, this volume rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Material World of a Household and Collection
- 2: The Social World of the Palais de Justice
- 3: Family Life and the Early Civil Wars, 1546-1580
- 4: The Reign of Henri III, 1574-1589
- 5: Drolleries of the League, 1589-1598
- 6: Book Collecting at the End of the Civil Wars, 1598-1611
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Tom Hamilton is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He studied History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and at New College, University of Oxford, and is the author of several articles about the social and cultural history of early modern France and Europe.
Summary
The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. This study offers a new history of these Wars of Religion from the perspective of the period's great diarist and collector, Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), telling the story of his life and times.
Additional text
Tom Hamilton has managed to sketch a vivid portrayal of someone who has served as a prism for generations of scholars through which to view everyday events in 16th-century Paris during the turmoil of wars, with his sharp, distanced and trenchant characterizations ... All in all, Tom Hamilton presents a densely researched, sensible and carefully written intellectual and socio-political biography of one of the most central, individual, and interesting testimonies of the period of radicalization during the French Wars of Religion.
Report
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... 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... 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... This is a remarkable book, fluently written and nicely illustrated. Penny Roberts, University of Warwick, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
