How do you account for the brutality of the violence witnessed during the wars of religion?

What can depictions of confessional violence (in pictures and written accounts) tell us about the religious wars?

General reading

• Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts and Andrew Spicer (eds), Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (2012)
• David Nicholls, 'The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation', Past and Present, 121 (1988), 49-73
• Natalie Z. Davis, 'The Rites of Violence', in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), chap. 6; also in Past and Present, 59 (1973), 51-91
• & J. Garrisson-Estèbe, 'Debate: The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France', Past and Present, 67 (1975), 127-35
• Mark Greengrass, 'The Psychology of Religious Violence', French History, 5 (1991), 467-74
• Philip Benedict, Lawrence M. Bryant, and Kristen B. Neuschel, 'Graphic History: What Readers Knew and Were Taught in the Quarante Tableaux of Perrissin and Tortorel', French Historical Studies, 28 (2005), 175-229
• Philip Benedict, Graphic History: the "Wars, massacres and troubles" of Tortorel and Perrissin (2007)

Further reading

• Susan Broomhall, 'Reasons and Identities to Remember: Composing Personal Accounts of Religious Violence in Sixteenth-Century France', French History, 27 (2013), 1-20
• Mark Greengrass, 'The Anatomy of a Religious Riot in Toulouse in May 1562', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1983), 367-91
• 'Hidden Transcripts: Secret Histories and Personal Testimonies of Religious Violence in the French Wars of Religion', in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (1999)
• Allan A. Tulchin, 'The Michelade in Nimes, 1567', French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), 1-35
• Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (2006)
• 'Vengeance and Conspiracy during the French Wars of Religion', in B. Coward and J. Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (2004), pp. 71-86
• Penny Roberts, 'Martyrologies and Martyrs in the French Reformation: Heretics to Subversives in Troyes', in D. Wood (ed.), Studies in Church History, 30 (1993), 221-9
• Denis Richet, 'Sociocultural Aspects of Religious Conflicts in Paris during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century', in R. Forster & O. Ranum (eds), Ritual, Religion and the Sacred: Selection from the Annales (1982), pp. 182-212
• Judith Pollmann, 'Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence', Past and Present, 190 (2006), 83-120
• Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525-vers 1610) (1990), chaps. 4, 7 & 8
• Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique: l'iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (1991)

Documents: Potter: Chap. 2
Figures: 2, 3, 7