Germany and the French Wars of Religion, 1560-1572 explores how the first decade of the religious wars in France was interpreted by German Protestants and why they felt compelled to intervene.

Through translations of documents concerning communal religious violence, political confrontation and war, this book aims to provide the means to study the French Wars of Religion through contemporary sources. Documents include: legislative acts of the period from the edicts concerning religion and toleration in 1560-62 to the 1590s; sources on types of religious violence during the early years of the wars; an examination of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew; and the breakdown in the 1580s and its restoration by Henry IV.

Through translations of documents concerning communal religious violence, political confrontation and war, this book aims to provide the means to study the French Wars of Religion through contemporary sources. Documents include: legislative acts of the period from the edicts concerning religion and toleration in 1560-62 to the 1590s; sources on types of religious violence during the early years of the wars; an examination of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew; and the breakdown in the 1580s and its restoration by Henry IV.

A new look at the French wars of religion, designed for undergraduate students and general readers.

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 destabilize 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.