Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France. By Keith P. Luria. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. x1 + 361 pp. $69.95 cloth.

Historians of early modern France have devoted a great deal of attention to examining the religious

conflicts that resulted in numerous outbreaks of popular violence and prolonged periods of civil war during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only recently have they begun to give the same sort of attention to the long periods of at least relatively peaceful coexistence that were punctuated by these episodes of violence. Until now, moreover, studies of Protestant-Catholic coexistence in France have been limited to the scale of a single village or else have remained largely theoretical overviews (See Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993]; and Philip Benedict, "Un roi, une loi, deux lois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Coexistence in France, 1555-1685," in The Faith and Fortunes of France's Huguenots, 1600-1685 [Aldershot, U.K.,: Ashgate, 2001], 279-309; originally published in 1996). Keith Luria takes the question to a new level in Sacred Boundaries and examines it on the scale of both the province of Poitou and the kingdom as a whole.

The doubled vision of province and kingdom is necessary because the situation of French Protestants, who never made up more than 15 percent of the total population, varied with the relative size and distribution of Reformed communities but also with the will of local authorities to enforce successive edicts of pacification and the desire of religious and secular communities to challenge them. The home of a large and diverse Huguenot population, Poitou makes an excellent site for examining confessional coexistence. It experienced direct strife during the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was the scene of an early and important Catholic missionizing campaign, and yet it also had a series of commissioners who took seriously their job of making the Edict of Nantes and other pacification edicts work. Equally important, from the standpoint of writing history, there are good records documenting both official and unofficial dimensions of Poitevin religious and civil life.

Luria makes excellent use of these sources to examine religious coexistence in terms of the individual, the family, and the community. At the same time, he raises his subject above the level of a simple case study by applying a conceptual framework that unifies his analysis and allows for cross-cultural comparisons without oversimplifying complex and changing relationships. He usefully distinguishes three different kinds of confessional boundaries and shows how they were constructed (and deconstructed) under different circumstances and pressures. The first sort of boundary depended on personal conscience. Individuals negotiated their own willingness to accept or be accepted by members of the other faith. Religious difference was seen as only one of a number of important dimensions to family and community life, and it was not necessarily the determining factor in these relationships. As a consequence, this sort of boundary was often fluid and frequently crossed. Because it was unregulated, however, it could prove unworkable when confessional tensions got out of hand. When this first sort of informal boundary failed, authorities stepped in to impose negotiation, make rules, and ensure that the rules were followed. This was the system set up under the Edict of Nantes, despite the fact that previous attempts to impose religious peace had failed. Passing laws and sending in officials necessarily hardened confessional boundaries, and this second sort of boundary was as a consequence more difficult to cross than when coexistence was left to individual conscience. Paradoxically, the very measures intended to make coexistence possible could aggravate religious tensions by offering a forum for rival claims and the expression of grievances. They also publicized limits and made people more aware when they were being crossed. This, in turn, led to a third sort of boundary, which occurred when the state imposed itself more forcefully to insist on compliance with its rules. This was a still more rigid sort of boundary, restricting an individual's room to maneuver and, at its furthest extreme, resulting in the complete prohibition of one of the competing religions, as happened when Louis XIV forbade Protestant worship and declared France an entirely Catholic kingdom with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

What makes this analytical schema particularly useful is Luria's insight that actions taken to reinforce confessional boundaries could also serve to undermine them. Religion was only one part of people's complex social existence in early modern France. Family, community, and, at least for elites, loyalty and service to the state were also important elements in their social consciousness. As Luria shows, confessional boundaries continued to be crossed far more often than the notion of two exclusive and opposing faiths would suggest, and they continued to be crossed despite official and unofficial attempts to harden religious boundaries. Even the most rigid of boundaries, the total prohibition of Reformed worship after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, was undermined by both the continued clandestine practice of Protestantism and the frequency with which Catholics turned a blind eye to, or even assisted, neighbors forced to hide their true beliefs.

Although there is an underlying temporal progression in Luria's distinction among three sorts of confessional boundaries, at least as they apply to early modern France, the book is organized thematically and not simply chronologically. It moves from the level of the community (including application of the Edict of Nantes, Catholic missions, and disputes over cemeteries and burial) to that of the household (including mixed marriages and divided families, as well as relations with more distant kin) to that of personal conscience (including both conversion and relapse). All in all, this is an extremely important and sophisticated piece of analysis. It frames the question of religious coexistence in a way that will facilitate further comparative study both within and beyond the French context, at the same time that it offers a vital new perspective on the practical implications of France's early modern religious divisions for daily life.

Barbara B. Diefendorf

Boston University