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16th century AD
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Kevin C. Robbins
7. During the national synods of the French Reformed Church meeting at Montauban (1594) and Montpellier (1598), ecclesiastical deputies merely chastised the "weakness" and "unbelief" of Calvinists who affirmed the reality of magical spells and the capacity of sorcerers to cause others bodily harm. See John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata: Or the Acts, Decisions, Decrees, and Canons of Those Famous National Councils of the Reformed Churches in France, vol. 1 (London 1692), 164-165 and 193. On similar, infrequent pronouncements by regional church assemblies in Languedoc, see Garrisson-Estebe, Protestants du Midi, 265-267.
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8. On the paucity of official church sanctions through consistories against congregants practicing witchcraft and other deviltry see Philippe Chareyre, "'The Great Difficulties One Must Bear to Follow Jesus Christ': Morality at Sixteenth-Century Nimes," and Raymond Mentzer, "Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches," both in Raymond Mentzer, ed., Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 32 (Kirksville, MO, 1994), 63-96 and 97-128. And on the propensity of French Calvinists to share in public convictions about the ubiquity of evil spirits see Elisabeth Labrousse, "Le demon de Macon," in Giancarlo Garfagnini, ed., Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura (Florence, 1982), 249-275; and Stuart Clark, "Protestant Demonology: Sin, Superstition, and Society (c. 1520-c. 1630)," in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustave Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990), 45-81.
9. Although Stuart Clark has argued that "[n]othing distinguishes Protestant demonology more than its preoccupation with popular magical technique - that is with the enormous repertoire of rituals for good health, healing, and fertility, for preventing misfortune, and for divination which existed outside or along the borders of official religion" ("Protestant Demonology," 62), his evidence for this assertion derives almost entirely from German and English sources. In France, at the levels of local consistorial police, synodal policy making, and orthodox textual combat of popular "superstitions," I find less pronounced Calvinist activity. This comparative inaction, especially in contrast to more robust Catholic propaganda against similar popular belief systems, significantly diminished the capacity of Calvinist church authorities to maintain the integrity of Reformed doctrine in the French kingdom.
10. Gerald Strauss, "Local Anticlericalism in Reformation Germany," in Dykema and Oberman, Anticlericalism, 625-637. See in particular 626-627.
11. On the unorthodox dimensions of seventeenth-century folk devotion in southwestern France among Catholics and Protestants, see Hanlon, Confession and Community, 152-156. Philip Hoffman tracks rising popular ire against regular and secular Catholic clerics in the early modern Lyonnais who followed episcopal instructions to censure traditional folk entertainments and quasi-magical rites; see Hoffman's Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 (New Haven, CT, 1984), 139-166.
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