Clarke Garrett examines the differing responses of Catholics and Protestants and the resulting disturbances. Roderick Phillips describes the wide variation in provincial response to the revolutionary assembly's family reform measures. He traces the different reactions of urban and rural residents to such legal measures as liberalization of divorces, secularization of birth, death, and marriage registrations, and inheritance reform. Peasants in central France were already engaged in total revolution when Joseph Fouche arrived there in late 1793. Nancy Fitch argues that Fouche was formed by his encounter with indigenous peasant radicalism as much as the peasants were influenced by his rhetoric of a new political culture. Donald Sutherland, summarizing scholarly debate on the subject, argues that, in the final analysis, the Revolution itself was tragically and profoundly alien to many French men and women in 1789.

A systematic interpretation of Durant's remarkable project to transfer supreme legislative authority from the papacy to general councils.

In this study, Jan K. Bulman examines the interrelationships between the written records of the ecclesiastical court, the preservation of historical memory, and the defense of episcopal seigneurial rights.

In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider. Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger. The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.