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A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion is a dramatic account of the impact of the Wars of Religion on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations, Figures, and Maps
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- Who's Who
- Introduction
- 1: Inheritances
- 2: Rape at Chaumot
- 3: The Great License of Soldiers
- 4: The Persistent Widow
- 5: Waging Law
- 6: Testifying to the Troubles
- 7: Execrable Crimes
- 8: Legacies
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
About the author
Tom Hamilton is Associate Professor in Early Modern European History at Durham University. He works on the history of the French Wars of Religion and early modern criminal justice. His research has been awarded the Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize of the Society for Sixteenth Century Studies, and shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize of the Society for French Studies. Previously he has studied and taught at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
Summary
A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion is a dramatic account of the impact of the Wars of Religion on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts.
Additional text
A short book that reads like a detective novel, and conducts a major investigation into an exceptional trial after the Wars of Religion in France.... The book overturns a number of received ideas about the period.... It shows that the laws of war were created well before the great theorists of the classical age, and - counter-intuitively - demonstrates how the great cataclysm of the Wars of Religion became a moment of critical reflection on the laws of war and the definition of war crimes.
