Tom Hamilton

Tom Hamilton is Associate Professor in Early Modern European History at Durham University, UK. He is the author of A Widow’s Vengeance after the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France (2024) and Pierre de L’Estoile and His World in the Wars of Religion (2017), both published by Oxford University Press. His research has been awarded the Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society, and shortlisted for the R. Gapper Prize of the Society for French Studies. He has previously held fellowships at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris; the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main; and Trinity College, Cambridge. Among other external roles, he serves as co-editor of the journal French History and a member of the committee of the Society for the Study of French History.

Group Formation in French Cities during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598)

The French Wars of Religion are one of the most violent and disruptive conflicts in European history. These wars pitted Catholics against Protestants (known as Huguenots) in a struggle that determined who won power on this earth and salvation in the next.

Some of the most significant events in the religious wars took place in cities, yet excessive interest in incidents of urban mass violence has long taken attention away from fundamental questions about the experience, impact, and character of the conflict as a whole. What it was like to live through decades of religious war and survive to tell the tale? How far did French civic society hold together in the later sixteenth century, despite the incidence of urban mass violence during the troubles? And what are the implications of these issues for the study of religious wars in other periods and places? 

This project assesses group formation as a survival strategy in French cities during the Wars of Religion, especially in Paris and Sens. It develops the concept of social bonds (l’attachement social) developed by the sociologist Serge Paugam, and argues that a resilient society is characterised by multiple, overlapping social bonds, whereas a major feature of social strain and vulnerability is the dissolution or weakness of these bonds. Social bonds function effectively as survival strategies because they offer mutual protection and recognition, and resist precarity and alienation.

French cities in the Wars of Religion offered significant opportunities to form social bonds because of their dense populations, complex organisation of work and worship, and contested political life. Ultimately, analysing social bonds as a survival strategy opens a new perspective on group formation in early modern cities which does not depend on confessional identity alone, and rather shows how religion was woven into every aspect of urban life.

For a full list of publications, see https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/tom-b-hamilton/ and https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5143-957X

Books

• (2024). A Widow's Vengeance after the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192870179.001.0001
• (2017). Pierre de L'Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198800095.001.0001.

Selected Articles

• (in press). The Crisis and Recovery of Criminal Justice in Late Sixteenth-Century France. The Sixteenth Century Journal.
• (2023). Un 'cas exécrable' devant le Parlement de Paris à la fin des guerres de Religion (1599-1600). Criminocorpus (Revue), https://doi.org/10.4000/criminocorpus.12196.
• (2022). The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre Up Close. French History, 36(4), 467-470. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crac055.
• (2021). A Sodomy Scandal on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion. Historical Journal, 64(4), 844-864. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x20000564.
• (2020). Adjudicating the Troubles: Violence, Memory, and Criminal Justice at the End of the Wars of Religion. French History, 34(4), 417-434. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa044.
• (2020). Sodomy and Criminal Justice in the Parlement of Paris, c.1540-c.1700. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 29(3), 303-334. https://doi.org/10.7560/jhs29301.
• (2016). Recording the Wars of Religion: The ‘Drolleries of the League’ from Ephemeral Print to Scrapbook History. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 230(S11), 288-310. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw024.
• (2016). The Procession of the League: Remembering the Wars of Religion in Visual and Literary Satire. French History, 30(1), 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crv087.

French History, Oxford University Press

The Society for the Study of French History