City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530-1650: Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier

Presenting a comprehensive history of early modern La Rochelle, this volume traces the port town whose fractious residents became embroiled in the French Reformation. Opening chapters of the book place the town within the geopolitics of an ocean frontier, and the city’s reformation proceeds within this context, showing how various ranks of citizenry idiosyncratically adopted the tenets of Calvinism, amalgamating these salvific doctrines with traditional civic rites and values. Through a juxtaposition of serial sources from multiple archives, Kevin Robbins seeks to show how local political and religious struggles intermeshed, setting the city and its Reformed congregations on a fatal collision with the Bourbon monarchy.