This volume is a synthesis of the research articles of one of Europe’s leading scholars of 16th-century exile communities. It will be invaluable to the growing number of historians interested in the religious, intellectual, social and economic impact of stranger communities on the rapidly changing nation that was Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Southern England in general, and London in particular, played a unique part in offering refuge to Calvinist exiles for more than a century. For the English government, the attraction of exiles was not so much their Reformed religion and discipline as their economic potential - the exiles were in the main skilled craftsmen and well-connected merchants who could benefit the English economy.

This volume is a synthesis of the research articles of one of Europe’s leading scholars of 16th-century exile communities. It will be invaluable to the growing number of historians interested in the religious, intellectual, social and economic impact of stranger communities on the rapidly changing nation that was Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Southern England in general, and London in particular, played a unique part in offering refuge to Calvinist exiles for more than a century. For the English government, the attraction of exiles was not so much their Reformed religion and discipline as their economic potential - the exiles were in the main skilled craftsmen and well-connected merchants who could benefit the English economy.

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

This edited collection examines different aspects of the experience and significance of childhood, youth and family relations in minority religious groups in north-west Europe in the late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation era. It aims to take a comparative approach, including chapters on Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities. The chapters are organised into themed sections, on 'Childhood, religious practice and minority status', 'Family and responses to persecution', and 'Religious division and the family: co-operation and conflict'. Contributors to the volume consider issues such as religious conversion, the impact of persecution on childhood and family life, emotion and affectivity, the role of childhood and memory, state intervention in children's religious upbringing, the impact of confessionally mixed marriages, persecution and co-existence. Some chapters focus on one confessional group, whilst others make comparisons between them.

This groundbreaking book explores the migration of Calvinist refugees in Europe during the Reformation, across a century of persecution, exile and minority existence. Ole Peter Grell follows the fortunes of some of the earliest Reformed merchant families, forced to flee from the Tuscan city of Lucca during the 1560s, through their journey to France during the Wars of Religion to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre and their search for refuge in Sedan. He traces the lives of these interconnected families over three generations as they settled in European cities from Geneva to London, marrying into the diaspora of Reformed merchants. Based on a potent combination of religion, commerce and family networks, these often wealthy merchants and highly skilled craftsmen were amongst the most successful of early modern capitalists. Brethren in Christ shows how this interconnected network, reinforced through marriage and enterprise, forged the backbone of international Calvinism in Reformation Europe.