Pierre de L'Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion

The Past and Present Book Series

by Tom Hamilton

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.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 andcommemorated 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 thanfix 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.

255 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 14, 2017

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wahoo! Finally finished this. The book has a very interesting concept: it's fascinating to consider the biases which the people we rely on to tell our history may have held. I enjoyed learning about the greater intricacies of Paris' operation during wartime. But boy was this hard to get through cover to cover. I also felt that some of the 'grand claims' were underwhelming, but maybe I'm just not steeped in the literature enough to judge.