Sacred Boundaries Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France

Religious rivalry and persecution have bedeviled so many societies that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Sacred Boundaries challenges this assumption by examining relations between the Catholic majority and Protestant minority in seventeenth-century France as a case study of two religious groups constructing confessional difference and coexistence. The book studies bi-confessional communities and families, gender roles, confessional polemics, and conversion narratives to discuss topics that include missions, intermarriage, cemetery sharing, women's religious activities, and the meaning of conversion. Its exploration of how the religious groups found ways to live together provides an approach to studying religious rivalry in other times and places. To explain how confessional groups in this period could be peaceful as well as contentious, the book offers a new conceptualization of ...