Introduction

When the first edition of this book was published in 1995, the state of scholarship on the French Wars of Religion was in flux. For nearly a century the predominant narrative was that religion played only a minor role in the civil wars, and that high politics and socio-economic factors were largely responsible for the wars. To be sure there was some pushback against this narrative, as historians such as Robert Kingdon, Nancy Roelker, Natalie Davis, Nicola Sutherland, Barbara Diefendorf, and Denis Crouzet among others demonstrated that religion did indeed play a major role in the wars.