The Huguenot Experience of Persecution and Exile: Three Women's Stories by Charlotte Arbaleste Duplessis-Mornay et al. (review)

This book provides English translations of extracts taken from the memoirs of three Huguenot women, framed with an excellent Introduction by Colette H. Winn and accompanying notes by Winn and Lauren King. The texts have been chosen well, broadly covering 1572 to 1688 and recounting the varied experiences of Charlotte Arbaleste Duplessis-Mornay, Anne de Chaufepié, and Anne Marguerite Petit Du Noyer. The selections from Chaufepié and Du Noyer are translated here for the first time while the extract from Mornay corrects the inaccuracies and omissions of previous attempts. The subject of Mornay's Mémoires de Messire Philippes de Mornay is her husband, the celebrated Huguenot leader Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, but it is the section on her personal experience of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre and its aftermath that is included in this edition. It is an unnerving tale of escape; at one point, the guards at Tournelles suspect her to be a Huguenot. Announcing their intention to drown her, the guards drag Mornay off the boat for questioning until the serendipitous appearance of a well-respected Catholic woman who makes them rethink their convictions. When she finally arrives in Sedan, the explicit sense of relief underscores Mornay's deliverance from the near-fatal perils of her voyage. The second extract comes from the journal of Chaufepié whose account details her imprisonment in 1686 following her failed attempt to flee France. Her story lingers painfully on the uncertainty and terror inflicted by a succession of guards and governors during her incarceration as she is moved from prison to dungeon, into isolation and then into interrogation and back again, all the while threatened with both the violence of the state and of God. Her forced placement into an Ursuline convent draws attention to the systematic cloistering of Huguenot women as part of the efforts of the Counter-Reformation. Chaufepié's eventual deportation to Holland in 1688 marks a turning point in this bleak narrative. She and her fellow deportees remain together after their arrival in Rotterdam to attend a Reformed service as a collective nod to their newfound freedom. The third and final excerpt is from the memoir of Du Noyer. When her initial attempt to emigrate to Switzerland with her adoptive mother fails, Du Noyer must separate from her mother and leave for Geneva alone. Disguised as a cook's apprentice, she finds herself at the mercy of an unkind innkeeper whom she has paid to take her across the Rhône. The extract ends with her successful arrival at The Hague, but as Winn's illuminating Introduction recounts, Du Noyer ends up returning to Paris where she abjures her faith and marries. It is only in 1701 that she converts back to Calvinism and returns to The Hague for good, writing for La Quintessence des nouvelles to support her new life in exile and becoming its editor-in-chief in 1710. The translations in this edition are remarkably clear and coherent. Impressively well referenced, this edition offers an important contribution to the study of early modern women and their life-writing.