Noble Power During the French Wars of Religion

Download or read book Noble Power During the French Wars of Religion written by Stuart Carroll and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noble affinities were the essence of power in sixteenth-century France. This is the first book to analyse the development of a noble following during the whole course of the Wars of Religion and the first substantial study of the Guise - the most powerful family of the period - to appear for over a century. The Guise, champions of the catholic cause, were the largest landowners in the province and used Normandy as a base for their support of catholicism in the British Isles. The family exploited religious dissension to build a formidable ultra-catholic party in Normandy which ultimately challenged the monarchy. This study breaks new ground by illuminating the relationship between high politics and popular confessional solidarities, especially the rise of radical catholicism. It exploits new archival sources to consider all groups in political society, reinterpreting court politics and discussing groups usually excluded from the traditional political narrative, such as the peasantry.