Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (review)

This new book by Keith P. Luria on religious coexistence and conflict in seventeenth-century Poitou is one of the most original and refreshing books to come out recently on confessional relations in early modern France. Using new approaches and non-traditional sources, he opens up new doors to confessional coexistence outside of traditional conflictual frameworks. From the very beginning of the book, Luria sets himself against the commonly held view that "religion breeds loyalties so deep and feelings of particularism so strong that enmity between faiths comes to seem inevitable and natural" (p. xiii). He attempts to reverse this paradigm, arguing that a close examination of societies that appear ridden by confessional conflict often shows that coexistence is not exceptional and that "people of competing faiths can and do get along in daily life" (p. xiv).

To test this hypothesis, Luria looks at Poitou from the 1598 acceptance of the Edict of Nantes to its revocation in 1685. Turning his back on the long historiography of Catholic and Protestant conflict, he follows in the footsteps of Bernard Dompnier, Gregory Hanlon, Robert Sauzet, and Elizabeth Labrousse.⁴ But going even farther methodologically, Sacred Boundaries shifts its focus from examining opposed religious cultures to see how group identities were constructed and reconstructed. Using a structuralist sociological model, the book concentrates on how boundaries were created between the different religious groups, defining who they were and separating them from those they saw as different. He sees this boundary building as an "oppositional process" in which people "think themselves into differences" and as a result of proselytising, preaching, and internal church discipline, they set themselves off from "the others."

Luria identifies three different types of boundaries that were constructed: first, a blurred religious boundary crossed over for intermarriages, for shared cemeteries, for assistance or participation in baptisms or marriages; second, a negotiated boundary demarking the confessions of the type that the Edict of Nantes envisaged with distinct special and operational divisions recognized and negotiated by members of both religious groups; third, a complete separation of the groups, often by force, with villages becoming exclusively Catholic or Protestant as the minority group was evicted or converted.

These three models are explained in detail in Luria's introduction, and they are at the base of his succeeding six chapters. The chapters do not follow a strict chronological order and each one explores a different theme. They look at community relations, the construction of ritual, the role of family histories, the discourses of missionary rhetoric, the gendered religious polemics, and conversion accounts. They all work to explain the fluidity of the boundaries that separated the two religious groups, at times showing the permeability of the boundaries, at other times showing the way a town, a group, or an institution slid from one form of boundary to another.

These chapters demonstrate the long and delicate negotiations over sharing institutions and carving out representative political and social spaces that were begun under the Edict of Nantes. The work of the local commissioners extended these negotiations down to the grass-roots level and provided the basis for what Luria sees as the second boundary. But the assassination of Henri IV and the accession of Louis XIII to the throne marked the beginning of the process of confrontation. Simultaneously, the state intervened more and more frequently to exacerbate religious divisions, and the Catholic Church launched its efforts to reconvert French Protestants. Using case studies of local communities and of particularly active individuals, Luria's chapters explain how these local groups played a part in this double attack upon "religious coexistence" (the heated theological debates between Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, the Capuchin missions in Poitou, forty-hours devotions, Catholic processions, judicial enquiries...