The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre


Book Description

A riveting account of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, its origins, and its aftermath, this volume by Barbara B. Diefendorf introduces students to the most notorious episode in France’s sixteenth century civil and religious wars and an event of lasting historical importance. The murder of thousands of French Protestants by Catholics in August 1572 influenced not only the subsequent course of France’s civil wars and state building, but also patterns of international alliance and long-standing cultural values across Europe. The book begins with an introduction that explores the political and religious context for the massacre and traces the course of the massacre and its aftermath. The featured documents offer a rich array of sources on the conflict — including royal edicts, popular songs, polemics, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, paintings, and engravings — to enable students to explore the massacre, the nature of church-state relations, the moral responsibility of secular and religious authorities, and the origins and consequences of religious persecution and intolerance in this period. Useful pedagogic aids include headnotes and gloss notes to the documents, a list of major figures, a chronology of key events, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index.




The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime


Book Description

"A fresh and quite original contribution to an understanding of an extremely important period in English history and to a quite remarkable discussion of the role of Queen Elizabeth in the complex diplomacy and policy of the era.... An original, a learned, and very persuasive history of these years.... This is political history at its best."—W.K. Jordan “It will be both important and useful to other scholars since it is the first effort of such dimensions since Froude to deal in a narrative pattern with the extraordinary complex problems of power that emerged during the first years of Elizabeth I's reign.”—J.H. Hexter Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Leicester and the Court


Book Description

During the past 25 years Elizabethan history has been transformed by the work of Simon Adams. Famous for the depth and breadth of his research in libraries and archives throughout Britain, Western Europe and the USA, he has brought to life the most enigmatic of the greater Elizabethans: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Together with his edition of Leicester's accounts and his reconstruction of Leicester's papers, Adams has published numerous essays and articles on Leicester's influence and activities. They have reshaped our knowledge of Elizabeth and her Court, Parliament, the localities from Wales to Warwickshire and such subjects of recent debate as the power of the nobility and the noble affinity, the politics of faction and the role of patronage. Sixteen of Simon Adams' essays are found in this collection, organized into three groups: the Court, Leicester and his affinity, and Leicester and the regions. The collection ranges from much-cited essays in standard textbooks to papers at international conferences, as well as articles in a variety of journals.







Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms


Book Description

An important re-evaluation of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland.




Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572-1576


Book Description

An epochal event in French history, the St. Bartholomew's Day religious massacres are still the subject of controversy. A leading historian of the early modern period, Robert Kingdon, writes about the reactions to the massacres that were published at the time, showing how the relatively new medium of print was used by the Protestants to shape reaction to the catastrophe an early example of the printing press as an agent of social and political change. Kingdon describes the loosely connected network of printers in Geneva, Basel, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, London, La Rochelle, and other cities that printed and distributed the grisly accounts of the murders of thousands of Protestants by Catholic zealots. But the pamphlets encompassed more than the making of martyrs. Some linked the massacres with an evil international conspiracy led by the French monarchy, Rome, and Spain. Others were political treatises arguing for a type of government that would no longer claim absolute power and would permit the survival of an ideological minority. Thus, the book contributes to an understanding of the history of printed propaganda and the role of myths in historical events, and illuminates important aspects of international diplomacy and political thought during the period of the later Reformation.




The Massacre of St. Bartholomew


Book Description

On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood" and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French Calvin ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the court made the fatal decision to take advantage of the situation and assassinate the admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, the recognized leader of the Huguenot armies which had helped plunge the country into ten years of intermittent civil war, and who now threatened to embroil the kingdom in a full-scale foreign war with Spain. On Friday the twenty-second, as he returned from the Louvre to his lodgings, Coligny paused in the street - some say to receive a letter, others to doff his hat to an acquaintance or to adjust his hose - and was fired on by a hired assassin hidden in a house known to belong to one of the ultra-Catholic Guise faction. The arquebus shot missed its mark and succeeded only in wounding the admiral in his hand and arm, where upon he was carried by his followers to his bed.




Providence in Early Modern England


Book Description

This is an extensive study of the 16th and 17th century belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, try and chastise. It seeks to shed light on the reception, character and broader cultural repercussions of the Reformation.




Tree of Hate


Book Description

This work is an exploration of 'the Black Legend', the popular myth that colonial Spain and her military religious agents were brutal and unrelenting in their conquest of the Americas.