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A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion

Gender and Justice in Renaissance France

Tom Hamilton author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:15th Feb '24

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion cover

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion is a dramatic account of the impact of the troubles on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical studies. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.

A short book that reads like a detective novel, and conducts a major investigation into an exceptional trial after the Wars of Religion in France.... The book overturns a number of received ideas about the period.... It shows that the laws of war were created well before the great theorists of the classical age, and - counter-intuitively - demonstrates how the great cataclysm of the Wars of Religion became a moment of critical reflection on the laws of war and the definition of war crimes. * Diane Roussel, Criminocorpus *

ISBN: 9780192870179

Dimensions: 240mm x 160mm x 16mm

Weight: 534g

240 pages