668 Book Reviews

The Huguenots in England, Immigration and Settlement c. 1550-1700, Bernard Cottret trans. Peregrine and Adriana Stevenson (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press, Editions des Sciences de I’Homme, 1991). Originally published in French as Terre

d’exi/ (1985). Afterword by E. LeRoy Ladurie: Glorious Revolution, Shameful Revocation; xii $317 pp., $59.95 cloth.

The text of the translation has been slightly enlarged, and updated in the light of publications in the tercentenary year and subsequently. Aliens or foreigners, the French Huguenots were a minority, even at the height of immigration in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Are minority groups not too marginal to be the best source of information, as the author puts forward as a working hypothesis? Attitudes of the native population varied between sympathy, xenophobia and rivalry. As to a ‘common religious faith’ (p. 2), a brief perusal of the Book of Common Prayer would have shown that it contains belief in ‘the holy catholic church’, a structured liturgy, derived from the old Catholic tradition, and composed by Cranmer as Mattins and Evensong. Continental reformers exercised some influence, but hostility towards the papacy does not by itself make up protestantism.

The book follows the reigns from Edward VI to the end of the seventeenth century. Under Edward continental reformers exercised their influence; Bucer and one John a Lasco, leader of the then still small Refuge church. In the long reign of Elizabeth I the Strangers’ communities felt the repercussion of home and foreign policies. The queen attempted, without much success, to create religious uniformity, as head of State and Church. She encountered resistance from Puritans, Roman Catholics and foreign churches. A century later, Louis XIV, in a different religious situation, aimed at the same unity (‘Une foi, une loi, un roi?‘), also by force, and met with resistance; a parallel which should be pointed out. Foreigners, French, Walloons and Dutch, wanted to be integrated into the host society, even if reluctance and administrative difficulties persisted into the second English-born generation. Joining the Church of England meant contributing to it and to the poor relief of their own community. A first French influx came after the traumatic experience of the St Bartholomew (1572).

The break came with James I; his own religious changes and an interest in theology made him sympathise with the Huguenots and assured him of their loyalty. Reformed churches on the continent looked to the king as a possible leader of a union of non-papist churches which might include gallicans. French Huguenot clergymen, Casaubon and Du Moulin, became influential in the established church.

In the reign of Charles I the foreign churches came up against archbishop Laud, who aimed at uniformity, increasingly difficult in a ‘catholic’ inspired church. He imposed the English liturgy, in French translation, and met some outward compliance, but real resistance. A personal approach from the Huguenots proved useless; what was for him a matter of the official State Church was for them a private conviction. During the Civil War and the Commonwealth (1642-1660) the foreign community wavered in their allegiance between the king (before 1649) and Parliament. Some of the prophesying and millenarian members supported the king’s execution. Whether divisions among the foreign churches reflected divisions within the country is difficult to prove. Under Cromwell and the Puritan majority various sects, linking politics and religion, broke away from mainstream Calvinism. The Huguenot community remained marginal and the author admits not to have found a key to everyday history, as he had hoped.

At the Restoration there was a reconciliation among Huguenot sects and they benefited from Charles’s conciliatory attitude (‘indulgence’). However, the king’s absolutism contrasted with an emerging republican spirit and Huguenots could be seen as potential rebels. A distinct move to acculturation began, as foreigners became socially and professionally integrated; they tended to join the established church, although some

Book Reviews 669

favoured non-conformists. The author seems to underestimate the obvious attraction for marginal foreigners to become part of the adopted country and its church. When the massive immigration began in the 1680s Charles was favourably disposed, not without an eye on the economic advantages. Xenophobic opposition and professional jealousy (many Huguenots were highly skilled craftsmen) increased for sheer numbers and fear of other foreigners, not genuine refugees, infiltrating the country. A parallel between Huguenots persecuted in France and Catholics in England cannot really be drawn: the periods do not altogether coincide, Catholics never had the equivalent of the Edict of Nantes; the brutality of the dragonnader was more than matched by persecution of those of the ‘old faith’, legal and financial harassments, while missionary priests were put to death by being hanged drawn and quartered (Document F).

James 11, openly Catholic, wanted to ease the fate of his Catholic subjects. The author, as so many others, points to the connection between Revocation and Glorious Revolution. Huguenots readily transferred their allegiance to William and fought on his side. Some became double agents in a complex situation. In France, economic damage has long been overestimated until Scoville’s investigaton [W.C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development (1680-1729), 19601. Huguenot craftsmen became integrated into the guilds and often took their compatriots through their apprenticeship (cf R.D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 1985).

Religious opinions shifted over the years, ‘heresies’ emerged, causing scandal as they spread. This either led to belief in magic or to a rejection of Christian belief, a desacralisation of the worldview and prepared for the Enlightenment, to some extent through Bayle’s influence. The attempt to hold the Huguenot churches together by strict moral discipline did not prevent their gradual disappearance, as the community became integrated into the Establishment.

LeRoy Ladurie’s preface of the French edition is transferred to an Afterword, underlining the long period of intolerance in Europe from 1492 to the end of the seventeenth century, as he contrasts ‘Glorious Revolution Shameful Revocation’. This scholarly investigation of the fate of Huguenots over a century and a halfpresents English history from an interesting, if narrow angle, to some extent an outside view. It covers ground not usually to be found in general histories.

Oxford Elfrieda Dubois

History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-century Renaissance, Karl F. Morrison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), xxviii + 262 pp., $35.00.

In his latest investigation of medieval hermeneutics, Karl F. Morrison addresses the issues of alienation and (mis)understanding that beset the modern reader of historical works produced during the so-called twelfth-century renaissance. His central argument is that these feelings of disconnection are triggered by the grounding of such texts in a creative mould that conceived and perceived history as a work of visual art. Our modern distaste for the discontinuities, endless meandering and blatant distortions displayed by these texts may prevent us from categorising them as history at all. But, Morrison explains, there is more than mere disaffection at work: these writings evade modern