Craft Secrets Religiously Kept: Neil Kamil's Fortress of the Soul

Over a thousand pages long, and years in the making, Neil Kamil's Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots' New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. xxiv+1058, $75) is a monumental work on a number of levels. Here Kamil weaves a brilliant tapestry of objects, texts, artisanal networks, apocalyptic battles, and political maneuvers. He elaborates the political context and material forms of an "artisanal soulishness" that stretches over two centuries: from the Huguenot French potter Bernard Palissy in the sixteenth century, through the artistic expression of Johann Theodore de Bry and William Hogarth and the alchemical searches of Robert Fludd and John Winthrop the Younger, and finally to the eighteenth-century Long Island furniture makers James and Samuel Clements. It is this "soulishness," with its artisanal synthesis of holiness and materiality, which serves as the refuge, means of mobility, and stable center of unity for Huguenot Protestant culture in its diaspora throughout the Atlantic world.

Given such a broad canvas, it is not surprising that Kamil crosses over a variety of historical specialties. In fact he offers some significant reinterpretations for the political and economic history of Atlantic states, the history of science and technology, and art history and connoisseurship. This is so not only in regard to the specifics of the events and objects Kamil elucidates, but also more broadly in historical perspective. Fortress of the Soul asks us to think about power and assimilation in a new way, at least as appertains to Protestant Europe and colonial America. The book does not explore structures of domination and appropriation, but uncovers strategies for safety, resistance, and covert interpretation among Huguenot survivors of the wars of religion. Fortress follows these strategies into a new vision of identity and assimilation in the new "Babel" of the New World.

Of particular interest to historians of technology is the argument most fully articulated by the potter Bernard Palissy: No faith can be put in the technologies of conventional military resistance such as fortresses and cannon (as later borne out by the tragic collapse of La Rochelle during Richelieu's final siege in 1628); the Protestant cause in Catholic France will be maintained by artisans who can carry the tools of their trade on their backs. Like the snail, the Protestant commoner should remain small, hidden, and mobile, and present the appearance of assimilation in his hostile environment. The power of these small, politically insignificant artisans is that they create material objects, not that they destroy them. This material production on the one hand serves the worldly desires of dominant political masters, but on the other manifests the artisans' own spiritual discipline.

It is through intensive examination of material artifacts that Kamil builds out the artisanal networks that created them and reconstructs the mental, spiritual worldview they were meant to convey. At the outset, Kamil claims that "Material things were silent extensions of an entire cosmos of Huguenot artisanal discourse, mediating, like the refugees themselves, among different Protestant groups, as well as vis-à-vis their intractable enemies" (p. xix). Palissy's pottery, Hogarth's art, Long Island furniture: all have been seen in terms of their popularity as commodities, but all are connected to Huguenot communities and a sinuous aesthetic that according to Kamil must be followed through winding paths. Kamil takes his readers on just such winding journeys. He traces Palissian figures to "rustic" motifs, alchemical symbology, and Jean de Léry's history of Brazil; he connects the signs of a Hogarth painting to Huguenot artisans in London, Robert Fludd's magical arts, and popular stories of biblical characters; he draws the similarities between the front stretcher of a chair turned in Long Island, the architecture of a French Protestant church, and the printer's device in a Protestant reader.

Kamil argues that these sinuous connections are necessary to a community that learned to dissimulate in order to avoid assimilation, or even annihilation. If safety for Huguenots was to be found in dissimulation, assimilation in appearance only, then resistance and identity could be...