I defended
my doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto in April 2004
under the supervision of Prof. Nicholas Terpstra, along with committee members
Professors Natalie Zemon Davis, Allan Greer, and James Knox Farge. This thesis
is entitled “After the Wars of Religion: Protestant-Catholic Accommodation in
the French Town of Loudun, 1598-1665.” It focuses on the potential for
accommodation in the seventeenth century between Protestants and Catholics in
the French provincial town of Loudun after a long period of religious conflict.
This is a study that investigates the application at the local level of the
Edict of Nantes, a piece of legislation that ended the French Wars of Religion
and granted some degree of civil and religious privileges to the Protestant
minority while ensuring the eventual ascendancy of Catholicism in this kingdom.
I work mainly with parish registers and notarial records, applying
database technology extensively to analyze and dissect the data and build an
overall understanding of these family networks and their behaviour.
In addition to preparing his thesis for publication as a monograph, I am currently pursuing several research projects. First,
I am preparing and
analyzing data for an article on attitudes among Loudun’s Catholic population
towards important elements in their religious life, specifically the sacrament
of baptism. Second, I am working on a number of smaller articles on Loudun’s consistorial register, an extraordinarily rich,
600-page document that provides unique insight into the life of this Reformed
Protestant community.
Beyond these projects, I plan to finish a prosopographic study of one hundred
widows from Loudun, examining the potential for independent female agency among
them. As well, I have laid the groundwork for projects beyond Loudun, and
in particular a study that would combine social history and anthropology by
investigating Catholic and Protestant religious processions in early modern
France.
last updated: August 15, 2006