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16th century AD
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Kevin C. Robbins
The Traite's preface indicates a much more likely author. Its writer confesses to residing in La Rochelle precisely for the last five years and six months.(50) Moreover, the writer admits to arrival in La Rochelle as a refugee in consequence of contemporary warfare (outbreak of the Ligue wars in 1585). This information, coupled with the highly learned nature of the text (multiple citations in Hebrew), its author's characterization of himself as "a brother" to La Rochelle's clergymen, and the initials "L.H." leading the abbreviation at the end of the preface, all combine, I think, to implicate the visiting Calvinist pastor Louis Hesnard as the most probable author of the Traite de l'enchantement.
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Hesnard's biography fits the chronology of the preface exactly. A former student of theology in Geneva, Hesnard assumed a post as minister to the congregation of Le Vigan in Languedoc. Having previously sought refuge in La Rochelle in troubled times (1568-69 and 1572-73), Hesnard returned to his known safe haven during the Ligue campaigns. Between 1585 and 1591, Hesnard took up all the duties of a minister in La Rochelle, serving its congregations "par emprunt," that is on a temporary basis because he had no dispensation from his former church consistory nor from the regional Calvinist synod to take a permanent post in La Rochelle. Lacking a fixed assignment in La Rochelle and miffed that the Rochelais had commenced a search for a permanent replacement without consulting him, Hesnard left the city in late 1591, obtaining accreditation to the province of Poitou and taking up a pastorate at Fontenay.(51)
What does Hesnard's treatise on the nouement tell us about the existence of this superstition among urban Protestant congregants and about Calvinist clerics' reactions to the prevalent charm? First, Hesnard, like contemporary Catholic demonologists, accepts the reality of the nouement, but emphasizes more strongly that it is a trick of the devil played on those of wavering faith. By this admission, Hesnard himself violates the contemporary Calvinist doctrine holding that the nouement was purely and simply an illusion terrifying the faithless.
Second, Hesnard commiserates with his fellow pastors, lamenting that a general fear of the nouement "in the celebration of marriages," continues to afflict ("affliger") their entire Protestant church.(52) He vehemently denounces this "covert error" poisoning his flock. According to Hesnard, many local Protestants, from all ranks of urban society, "in fearful superstition," feel themselves highly vulnerable to this hex. Even worse, Hesnard relates that other Reformed congregants in town, rich and poor, apparently convinced that "ordinary ecclesiastical assemblies are full of sorcerers," slip away stealthily ("a la derobee") to celebrate their Calvinist marriages at the oddest times and places, in small ceremonies, at night, in the fields, and in tiny neighboring villages where they are unknown.(53)
Third, somewhat contradictorily, while expressing both chagrin and surprise, Hesnard repeatedly qualifies his fellow Calvinists' general credence in the nouement as an "erreur renouvelle," a resurgent, retrograde conviction amongst parishioners, apparently unexpected by their clergy and primarily attributable to the devil's refurbishment of old snares and to the imperfect faith of worried new believers.(54) Hesnard attacks this threatening, recrudescent misbelief because, as he ruefully admits, as yet (1591) no other learned Protestants have taken up the challenge.(55) Evidently, an entire generation has passed since the commencement of the Rochelais Reformation (1558), and no one in the local Reformed camp had so far bothered to combat folkways clearly antithetical to the perfection and salvation of Calvinist congregants under ministerial direction.(56) It appears that Protestant churchmen's largely successful displacement of Catholicism from La Rochelle gave them a false sense of security, leading them to believe wrongly that an eradication of "Papist" dogmas would naturally entail public abandonment of other pernicious superstitions like belief in the nouement.
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