From a Far Country: Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World. By Catharine Randall. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. 176 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3390-8.)

Abstract

Catharine Randall, a professor of French at Fordham University, has made a noteworthy contribution to Huguenot studies with her examination of the mystical Camisards. Unlike the more widely studied Huguenots who lived along France's southwestern coast, the Camisards lived in the isolated, mountainous Cévennes region. Additionally, they were often illiterate and from lower socioeconomic brackets than most Huguenots, who tended to be from the urban middle classes and were more likely to leave France around 1685 when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. Most Camisards remained in France, refusing to abjure their faith and battling the forces of Louis XIV into the early eighteenth century. Because Protestantism was illegal, the Camisards developed an intensely personal and apocalyptical faith and “relied on a sort of inspired prophecy” to help them survive in an atmosphere of persecution and chaos (p. 12). Some Camisards managed to escape, seeking refuge in the Protestant Atlantic world. The best known are the French Prophets, who settled in London. They alarmed more conventional Huguenots, who feared adverse repercussions from the Prophets' enthusiastic excesses, including claims to raise the dead. Camisard piety in British North America has received less attention, hence this book's importance. Randall highlights the careers of Camisard-influenced Gabriel Bernon (founder of a short-lived Huguenot settlement in New Oxford, Massachusetts), Ezéchiel Carré (pastor of the French Church in Boston), and Elie Neau (a New York merchant). Their impact extended beyond the French Protestant community. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather was a fervent supporter of the Huguenot cause and an admirer of the writings of Carré and Neau. Randall observes that some entries in Mather's “diaries sound like descriptions of the ecstasies experienced by Camisards” (p. 84). Moreover, Mather wrote the prefaces for and facilitated the publication of Carré's work and prepared English translations of letters and spiritual songs and poems that Neau had written while imprisoned for his faith in France. Neau's writings were published in 1698 as A Present froma Farr Countrie. The preface “exhorted readers to model their piety after Neau's,” suggesting that Mather hoped to invigorate Puritan piety (p. 106). After returning to New York, Neau eventually conformed to Anglicanism to secure funding from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for his school for slaves.