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16th century AD
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Kevin C. Robbins
Pastor Jacques Merlin, who meticulously chronicled Rochelais affairs in a private diary he kept between 1589 and 1620, noted the strong congregational sympathies of ordinary Rochelais believers, but more frequently castigated humbler members of his urban flock for myriad violations of church teaching and irreverence toward ministerial authority. Merlin likened the large, volatile laboring segment of La Rochelle's population to "a raging sea."(43) Antipathies between the Rochelais pastorate and unenfranchised middle and lower ranking Protestant citizens boiled over in a bloody 1614 coup d'etat directed by ordinary merchants and artisans against the old regime of town government and its allied Calvinist ministers.(44) Public insults and repudiations of the pastorate, especially for meddling surreptitiously in town politics, now became so heated that more than half of the city's Calvinist clergymen sought to leave town at once. Only Merlin's cajoling and the unwillingness of the consistory to authorize the departures prevented the mass flight of Calvinist clerics. After 1614, ministerial influence over civic affairs evaporated.(45)
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It is within this context of popular religious heterodoxy and growing sociopolitical antagonisms between clergy and laity that La Rochelle's foremost Calvinist printer, Hierosme Haultin, published a most unusual work in 1591. That year, Haultin produced an eighty-seven page text entitled: Traite de l'enchantement qu'on appelle vulgairement le nouement de l' esguillette, en la celebration des marriages en l'Eglise reformee & des remedes a l'encontre pour le soulagement des fideles.(46)
Referenced without commentary in only one survey of La Rochelle's bibliographic history by Louis Desgraves, the Traite de l'enchantement has been ignored until now by every other ancient and modern historian of the city.(47) This neglect is especially unfortunate because the Traite reads like a printed sermon (it may very well have been declaimed in some fashion by its probable author), and we know precious little about the culture of Protestant preaching in La Rochelle and the rest of France.
The Traite's overall format and essential evidence within its preface provide multiple clues to the true identity of the text's likely author. Although the title page is without attribution, the preface, besides containing a dedication of the work to the ministers and elders of La Rochelle's Reformed church, ends with the author's self-identification as "Your very humble brother and servant."(48) This closing salutation is followed by the cryptic initials "L.H.H.M.D.L.'E." A prior owner of the Bibliotheque Nationale's only copy has inked in beneath this passage the supposition that it should read, in part, "Hierosme Haultin, Ministre de l'Evangile." However, as Desgraves notes, this attribution to Haultin, the actual printer of the text, is extremely dubious.(49) It strikes me as entirely erroneous since it ignores the "L" of the abbreviation and ascribes to Haultin the status of a minister which the printer, albeit a zealous Protestant, we know never held.
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