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

Abstract

Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France. By Keith P. Luria. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2005. Pp. xl, 357. $69.95.) This new book by Keith R Luria on religious coexistence and conflict in seventeenth-century Poitou is one of 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 very beginning of book, Luria sets himself against 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 of competing faiths can and do get along in daily life (p. xiv). To test this hypothesis, Luria looks at Poitou from 1598 acceptance of Edict of Nantes to its revocation in 1685.Turning his back on long historiography of Catholic and Protestant conflict, he follows in 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, book concentrates on how boundaries were created between 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 confessions of type that Edict of Nantes envisaged with distinct special and operational divisions recognized and negotiated by members of both religious groups; third, a complete separation of groups, often by force, with villages becoming exclusively Catholic or Protestant as minority group was evicted or converted. These three models are explained in detail in Luria's introduction, and they are at 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, construction of ritual, role of family histories, discourses of missionary rhetoric, gendered religious polemics, and conversion accounts. They all work to explain fluidity of boundaries that separated two religious groups, at times showing permeability of boundaries, at other times showing way a town, a group, or an institution slid from one form of boundary to another. …