Huguenot Identities During the Wars of Religion: The Churches of Le Mans and Montauban Compared

Abstract

Studies of sixteenth-century Calvinist churches lay great emphasis upon the importance and coherence of discipline and congregational organisation. They do less justice to the wide variety of practice that existed between and even within the new national Churches. This was true even of France, the first Reformed Church to be organised on a national level according to Calvinist precepts, and the one most clearly controlled by Geneva. Despite the influence of Geneva, exercised remotely by Calvin and more immediately by his lieutenants within France, French congregations cultivated a wide range of organisational practices on critical issues, stubbornly maintaining a number of practices of which the Genevan leadership definitely disapproved.