This work considers how Frenchwomen participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. Using extensive original and archival sources, it provides a comprehensive study of how women contributed to institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters. Challenging the view of religious reforms and ideas imposed by male authorities upon women, this study argues instead that women, Catholic and Calvinist, lay and monastic, were deeply involved in the culture, meanings and development of contemporary religious practices.

Diane Margolf looks at the Paris Chambre de l’Edit in this well-researched study about the special royal law court that adjudicated disputes between French Huguenots and the Catholics. Using archival records of the court’s criminal cases, Margolf analyzes the connections to three major issues in early modern French and European history: religious conflict and coexistence, the growing claims of the French crown to define and maintain order, and competing concepts of community and identity in the French state and society. Based on previously unexplored archival materials, Margolf examines the court through a cultural lens and offers portraits of ordinary men and women who were litigants before the court, and the magistrates who heard their cases.

Must a gift be given freely? How can we tell a gift from a bribe? Are gifts always a part of human relations--or do they lose their power and importance once the market takes hold and puts a price on every exchange? These questions are central to our sense of social relations past and present, and they are at the heart of this book by one of our most intersting and renowned historians.

The individual and cultural upheavals of early colonial New France were experienced differently by French explorers and settlers, and by Native traditionalists and Catholic converts. However, European invaders and indigenous people alike learned to negotiate the complexities of cross-cultural encounters by reimagining the meaning of kinship. Part micro-history, part biography, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France explores the lives of Etienne Brulé, Joseph Chihoatenhwa, Thérèse Oionhaton, and Marie Rollet Hébert as they created new religious orientations in order to survive the challenges of early seventeenth-century New France. Poirier examines how each successfully adapted their religious and cultural identities to their surroundings, enabling them to develop crucial relationships and build communities. Through the lens of these men and women, both Native and French, Poirier illuminates the historical process and powerfully illustrates the religious creativity inherent in relationship-building.

This wide-ranging and authoritative book fully synthesizes the French experience of religious change in the period stretching between the Reformation and the early Enlightenment.

Early Christian women : sources and interpretation / Elizabeth A. Clark -- Women in early Byzantine hagiography : reversing the story / Susan Ashbrook Harvey -- Marital imagery in six late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century vitae of female saints / Diane L. Mockridge -- The place of women in the late medieval Italian church / Duane J. Osheim -- Misconduct in the medieval nunnery : fact, not fiction / Graciela S. Daichman -- Telling her sins : male confessors and female penitents in Catholic Reformation Italy / Rudolph M. Bell -- The battle of the sexes and the world upside down / Keith Moxey -- The religion of the femmelettes : ideals and experience among women in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France / Thomas Head -- The nuns of Port-Royal : a study of female spirituality in seventeenth-century France / Alexander Sedgwick -- Calling and career : the revolution in the mind and heart of Abigail Adams / Rosemary Skinner Keller. - Religion in the lives of slaveholding women of the antebellum South / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese -- Between fiction and madness : the relationship of women to the supernatural in late Victorian Britain / Mary Walker -- A spirit of her own : nineteenth-century.

Diane Margolf looks at the Paris Chambre de l'Edit in this well-researched study about the special royal law court that adjudicated disputes between French Huguenots and the Catholics. Using archival records of the court's criminal cases, Margolf analyzes the connections to three major issues in early modern French and European history: religious conflict and coexistence, the growing claims of the French crown to define and maintain order, and competing concepts of community and identity in the French state and society. Based on previously unexplored archival materials, Margolf examines the court through a cultural lens and offers portraits of ordinary men and women who were litigants before the court, and the magistrates who heard their cases.