Connor, Huguenot Heartland: Montauban and Southern French Calvinism Clause Samples

Connor, Huguenot Heartland: Montauban and Southern French Calvinism. During the Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002), p. 40. 203 There are many other similarities between Montauban and Geneva that Connor highlights including the development of a Protestant academy, the swift conversion of the citizens within the city to Reformed Protestantism, and the chosen form of government, with the political and ecclesial bodies being separate: Ibid., pp. 210-15. 204 R. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555-1563, Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 82 (Geneva, 2007), pp. 86-7 and Connor, Huguenot, p. 210. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, Geneva’s print influence in France was beginning to wane. Geneva’s presses dominated the printing market in France for a majority of the mid 1500s; in 1559, however, France’s output drastically expanded. The most dramatic example is 1562 when Geneva only published around thirty of the over three hundred Protestant books.205 Pettegree gives two reasons for this surge: first, France in the 1560s finally became a formidable entity in its own right in the Reformed Tradition. Geneva simply could not keep up with the demand. Second, the French churches were somewhat dissatisfied with Geneva’s conservative culture. The leaders of Geneva were “unwilling to supply, or even to permit Geneva publishing houses to print” certain books that addressed the cultural and political climate of France.206 France’s growth began to decline, though, after the first of the French Wars of Religion ceased in 1563 and Geneva’s prominence began to expand to its pre-1562 levels.207 However, it is clear that the French Reformed had the infrastructure and market for evangelical books printed in France when the political climate was conducive. As the Wars of Religion in France continued to escalate, though, printing shifted to eastern France and back to Geneva.208 In greater France there is ample evidence that Geneva continued to play an important part in the spread of the evangelical faith, albeit not an exhaustive one. Kingdon notes 205 Andrew Pettegree has published an informative graph showing the undulation of published works in the Protestant community in general and Geneva in particular: see A. Pettegree, “Genevan Print and the Coming of the Wars of Religion,” in S. Barker (ed.), Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the Coming of the French Wars of Religion (St Andrews, 2012), pp. 62-4. 206 Many of these works were political in nature, intended to provoke the Huguenot leaders, but th...