Book:
That Men Would Praise the Lord: The Triumph of Protestantism in Nîmes, 1530-1570 (Oxford University Press, 2010). The book combines a number of methodological approaches to produce a new understanding of why the Reformation was successful in some French cities and not in others. The argument takes the form of a case study of Nîmes, the French city where the Reformation was most successful, and where the documentation is consequently the best. Using a database compiled from all 1,750 surviving wills and marriage contracts from Nîmes between 1550 and 1562, including more than 13,000 references to persons of every social condition, it traces the spread of Protestant ideas, beginning with merchants and artisans, then spreading to lawyers and officials. The book also includes a final chapter where Nîmes is compared to other cities, both in France and elsewhere in western Europe.
Articles and book chapter:
“Weekly Enlightenment: The Affiches de Bordeaux, 1758-1765,” French Historical Studies, 42 (2) (April, 2019):175-202.
“Ending the French Wars of Religion,” American Historical Review 120 (5) (December, 2015): 1696-1708, part of a Round Table on “How Civil Wars End,”
“Church and State in the French Reformation,” Journal of Modern History 86(4) (December, 2014): 1-36. Review essay.
“Low Dowries, Absent Parents: Marrying for Love in an Early Modern French Town,” Sixteenth Century Journal 44(3) (Fall, 2013): 713-738.
“Massacres During the French Wars of Religion,” Past and Present Supplement 7:100-126 (February 2012), a special issue entitled “Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France,” ed. Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer..
“Geneva by the Sea: the Reformation in Nîmes in Historiographical Context,” in Gabi Piterberg, Teo Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox eds., The Mediterranean After Braudel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
“Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement,” Journal of Modern History 79(3):613-47 (September 2007). The University of Chicago Press, which publishes JMH, put out a press release to publicize it, and reports appeared in a number of publications, and on the radio. See also my op-ed, “The 600 Year Tradition Behind Same-Sex Unions,” which appeared online at the website of the History News Network: http://hnn.us/articles/42361.html.
“The Michelade in Nîmes, 1567,” French Historical Studies 29(1):3-35 (Winter 2006).
“The Reformation in Nîmes: The Demographics of Protestant Growth,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History: Selected Papers of the 1999 Annual Meeting, 27:74-83 (2001).
“Les étudiants au collège des arts de Nîmes au XVIe siècle,” Bulletin of the Societé de l’histoire moderne et contemporaine de Nîmes (October, 1994).