The Huguenot Experience of Persecution and Exile: Three Women’s Stories

This volume provides an English translation of firsthand testimonies by three early modern French women. It illustrates the Huguenot experience of persecution and exile during the bloodiest times in the history of Protestantism: the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the dragonnades, and the Huguenot exodus following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The selections given here feature these women’s experiences of escape, the effects of religious strife on their families, and their reliance on other women amid the terrors of war.

"Three Women’s Stories of the Huguenot experience in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France is a fine addition to The Other Voice series. Lively and interesting translations accurately reflect the different styles of the originals. Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay’s Memoir of her husband records her own escape during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the death of her son in the religious wars that would follow. Anne de Chaufepié’s Journal, “based on what I wrote in France as those things were happening,” is a fascinatingly detailed account of her own experiences, and those of the women who suffered imprisonment and exile with her. Anne Marguerite Petit Du Noyer, writing nearly twenty years after her own adventurous flight, describes her journey from Lyon to Geneva and on to The Hague."

-Jane Couchman, Professor Emerita, Glendon College and the Faculty of Graduate Studies, York University

COLETTE H. WINN, professor of French at Washington University, specializes in the edition and the study of early modern writings by women.

LAUREN KING is completing a PhD in French literature at Washington University. Her doctoral dissertation examines conceptualizations of the Other in seventeenth-century French literature.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 14.2 (2020): 165–168. Reviewed by Nathan J. Probasco.
French Studies 74.3 (2020), pp. 460–461. Reviewed by Annalisa Nicholson.
Renaissance & Reformation 43.1 (2020): 238–240. Reviewed by Arazoo Ferozan.
Renaissance Quarterly 73.4 (2020): 1418–1420. Reviewed by Amanda Eurich.
The Sixteenth Century Journal 51.4 (2020): 1252–1254. Reviewed by Jesse Spohnholz.