This collection consists of a 112-page introduction by the editors and thirty-two documents relating to the formative years of the Reformed churches in France just before and during the outbreak of the French religious wars. Of the thirty-two documents, twenty-eight relate to provincial synods mainly in 1561 and 1562, three relate to the regulation of behavior and discipline, while one, albeit the most substantial at seventy-eight pages, consists of the consistory registers from the church at Le Mans from January 1561 to February 1562. (Another even more substantial consistory register for the church at Nîmes covering the period from March 1561 to January 1563 and edited by Philippe Chareyre will be published separately by Droz in the same series as the volume being reviewed here.) Of the thirty-two documents included by Benedict and Fornerod, four were originally published in the Mémoires de Condé (six volumes, [1743]), while a further nineteen appeared in a variety of local histories and periodicals from the nineteenth century. Even if the editors had done nothing more than bring all these diverse sources together in one convenient volume, this would be a very useful collection of sources for scholars of the formative years of the reformed churches in France. But they have done much more than this, in fact, as their introduction is the most complete and up to date monographic summary and analysis of this period to date.

The introduction does much more than merely summarize the thirty-two documents, as Benedict and Fornerod have written a new and more up to date narrative of the years leading up to and the opening years of the Wars of Religion. In the process, they stress several themes that make for a much clearer understanding of the opening years of the period. One theme that receives particular attention, for example, is that the early churches in France had to rely mainly on each other for guidance and instruction in these years, as communication with Geneva was much less certain than has been traditionally thought. Partly this was due to the logistics of the chaotic situation in France that prevented any possibility of a regular and open communication channel between the Huguenot churches and Geneva. Up until now, however, most historians have relied so heavily on Theodore Beza’s Histoire ecclésiastiques des églises reformées au royaume de France, as well as on Beza’s own correspondence, both of which stress these important contacts between France and Geneva, that we have tended to assume that communication with the reformed churches in France was regular and constant. Benedict and Fornerod show otherwise, showing that it was the mutual assistance that the French congregations offered each other rather than direction and support from Geneva that was paramount to the survival of these congregations in the early years of the civil wars. The records of the provincial synods in Normandy, Brittany, Lyonnais, Berry, Picardy, and Languedoc, among others, all make this very clear.

The longest selection in this collection is the consistory register from the church at Le Mans from January 1561 to February 1562. These records show that the consistory court in Le Mans primarily occupied itself with many of the same things that other consistories did: settling quarrels and disputes, attempting to regulate the use of playing cards and dice, and trying to define the frontiers between Calvinists and Catholics in mixed communities. And even if further evidence is hardly needed, these documents show that the consistories were hardly the prurient peeping toms some of their Catholic critics often claimed.

One question this excellent collection raises, however, is how these texts can best be exploited by scholars and students. In an ideal world one dreams of a digital archive of all consistory registers and provincial synod records in sixteenth-century France in one searchable database, an archive that can be expanded as new materials become digitalized. Librairie Droz is in a unique position to make this happen, though that the press has eschewed any such effort to create such an archive for their Geneva collections of the Company of Pastors and consistory registers is not a promising sign. Selling huge collections of documents or monographs one volume at a time at ever escalating prices is simply not sustainable.