The French Wars of Religion are featured in a new special issue of Past & Present, which reexamines Natalie Zemon Davis’s concept of “rites of violence” 40 years after her landmark article. The issue is entitled “Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France,” ed. Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer, Past & Present, supplement 7 (2012).

The supplement’s table of contents:

Preface, 7
Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer

1. Introduction

Writing ‘The Rites of Violence’ and Afterward, 8
Natalie Zemon Davis

2. Rites and Ritual

Rites of Repair: Restoring Community in the French Religious Wars, 30
Barbara B. Diefendorf

Religious Violence in Sixteenth-Century France: Moving Beyond Pollution and
Purification, 52
Mack P. Holt

Peace, Ritual, and Sexual Violence during the Religious Wars, 75
Penny Roberts

3. Rights and Agency

Massacres during the French Wars of Religion, 100
Allan A. Tulchin

The Rights of Violence, 127
Stuart Carroll
Prophets in Arms? Ministers in War, Ministers on War: France, 1562–74, 163
Philip Benedict

4. Rites and Representation

Rites of Torture in Reformation Geneva, 197
Sara Beam
From Christ-like King to Antichristian Tyrant: A First Crisis of the Monarchical
Image at the Time of Francis I, 220
Denis Crouzet (Translated by Philippa Woodcock)

Painting Power: Antoine Caron’s Massacres of the Triumvirate, 241
Neil Cox and Mark Greengrass
5. Afterword, 275
Graeme Murdock and Andrew Spicer