That Men Would Praise the Lord
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$75.00 (06)Description
That Men Would Praise the Lord breaks apart the process of mass conversion in the sixteenth century to explain why the Reformation occurred, using Nimes, the most Protestant town in France, as a case study. Protestantism was overwhelmingly successful in Nimes (since most people converted), but the process culminated in two bloody massacres of Nimes's remaining Catholics. Beginning in 1559, Nimes went through a revolutionary period comparable to 1789 in its intensity. Townspeople flocked to hear Protestant preachers and then took over Catholic churches, destroyed statues and stained glass, and zealously took part in the Wars of Religion, which convulsed France beginning in 1562. As the Protestant movement grew, it had to adapt to changing circumstances. Nimes's first Protestants were attracted to Calvin's theology. Later converts believed that the Church needed to be cleansed of its excesses to encourage moral reform and to assist the royal treasury. Iin the end, many converted because of peer pressure or under duress. Thus rather than argue that one factor - whether religious, economic, or political - explains the Reformation, Tulchin emphasizes that the Protestant movement was the result of compromises forged among its members. The conclusion extends his arguments to the rest of France.That Men Would Praise the Lord marries techniques from the social sciences, anthropology, and cultural history in an analytic narrative, resulting in a new, interdisciplinary theory of the Reformation.
Features
- new theory explaining the Reformation
- makes unprecedented use of a relational database to understand Nimes's society
Reviews
"...there is much in this valuable study that will contribute to our ongoing and 'messy' debates about the progress of the wars."--American Historican Review
"Because the southern French city of Nimes was one of the success stories of French Protestantism, it has been the subject of many scholarly works; Allan Tulchin's contribution is one of the best. It is more than a history of how Nimes became Protestant; it becomes, for Tulchin, a test study of how religious conversion takes place in a hostile society."
--Catholic Historical Review
"fine social and cultural history" --Church History
". . . intelligently written, well argued, and statistically sophisticated." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Allan Tulchin gives us remarkable new insight into the connections between religious conversion, politics and violence in Nimes, a stronghold of the Reformation. That Men Would Praise the Lord is an important and powerfully argued contribution to the history of the religious wars in France."
-- Natalie Zemon Davis, Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
"Through a meticulously researched and constructed case study on the spread of Protestantism in Nimes, Tulchin leads us to new paths and horizons in Reformation history. He prefers the how to the why. Nevertheless, in his analytical passages, he brilliantly shows the links between cognitive dissonance, economics, social structure and intellectual life. This is a book which will further our understanding not only of Early Modern France, but also that of the whole Reformation Era."
-- Myriam Yardeni, Professor of History, University of Haifa
"What sets [Tulchin's] study apart is his ability to demonstrate the actual processes [of religious conversion] at work. . . The result is a compelling moving picture in real time of an urban community undergoing profound upheaval."--Renaissance Quarterly
"This study of the conversion process is much more than another local study of a French city during the religious wars. . . This book is a must-read for scholars of the French Religious Wars and the European Reformation more generally, but it is written in an engaging style suitable for an undergraduate readership."--Religious Studies Review
About the Author(s)
Allan A. Tulchin completed his undergraduate education at Yale and Cambridge, and his doctorate at the University of Chicago. The results of his research on early modern French social and religious history have been published in prize-winning articles for the Journal of Modern History and French Historical Studies. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Shippensburg University.
