Reformation in La Rochelle: Tradition and Change in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1568.

Judith Pugh Meyer. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 298.) Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996. 1 pl. + 181 pp. FS 80. ISBN: 2-600-00115-8.

Although much has been written on the city of La Rochelle for later periods, there is a surprising dearth of accounts of the birth of the Reformation in this Huguenot stronghold. Judith Pugh Meyer has thus written this book to fill a void. It is not until chapter three - virtually halfway into the book - that the Reformation is introduced, and it is here that Meyer spells out what I perceive to be the central thesis of the book: that the Reformation not only took root, but thrived in La Rochelle due to two principal factors: lay independence and popular anti-clericalism.

The author defines lay independence in terms of a lack of a resident bishop in the city, thus no direct clerical control or ecclesiastical taxation. Moreover, there was no Parlement or sovereign court in La Rochelle to maintain the traditional ties to the crown or the traditional religion when Protestantism began to be disseminated from Geneva. All of these factors, presumably, allowed the laity to gravitate to new ideas and ultimately a new church when the old one was found wanting. These are sensible conclusions, but there is no explicit effort here really to distinguish La Rochelle from other French cities in the very same situation. That is, an overwhelming majority of French cities without a bishop or sovereign court remained Catholic. So, what is it specifically about La Rochelle that led to the Reformation there?

Meyer's emphasis on anti-clericalism might be a more significant factor, especially since the recent work of Philip T. Hoffman, Larissa Taylor, and Virginia Reinburg suggests that relations between clergy and laity were relatively close on the eve of the Reformation and that anti-clericalism in France was nothing like what it was in parts of Germany and Italy. Anti-clericalism in La Rochelle is more implied than proved, however. Meyer makes use of wills in the notarial archives to suggest that in the decades of the 1540s and 1550s "nearly half left no legacy at all to the Church." She interprets this as evidence of "a weakened Church, one with negligent clergy and increasingly indifferent parishioners" (86-87). This conclusion might be more convincing if the sample size of wills she used for these two decades was larger than nineteen. As it is, in a city that she says had a population of roughly 20,000 people, how does the fact that nine out of nineteen wills left no legacy to the Church in the period 1540-1560 justify a conclusion of "a weakened Church" or "indifferent parishioners"? She does cite anecdotal evidence of popular opposition to individual clergy, but again, the general anti-clericalism she describes remains more suggested than proved.

Other questions remain equally unresolved. How did the Calvinist community grow from a group of about fifty people in 1557 to "a majority of the population" (94-95) by 1563? Moreover, why did the Reformation go unchallenged? The conclusion that "there was relatively little to stop them" (142) may be true enough, but why was that the case? Why did municipal magistrates and royal officers join the Protestant ranks in La Rochelle, whereas in most of France they resisted the Reformation at every turn? No doubt a lack of sources - tax rolls, church accounts, city council deliberations, etc. - prevented Meyer from answering these questions. And while she does what she can with the notarial records, the book remains more descriptive than analytical. Nevertheless, a great deal can still be learned from it, and it is now the place to start for the history of the Reformation in La Rochelle.

MACK P. HOLT George Mason University