Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion

Abstract

The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events, inevitably they depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and the collection of Pierre de L’Estoile (1546–1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this book is the first life of L’Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called ‘the storehouse of my curiosities’. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this book challenges historians’ assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L’Estoile’s prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilize rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L’Estoile’s curiosity, this book rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.