Religious rivalry, persecution, and violence have bedeviled so many societies past and present that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Religion ostensibly breeds loyalties so deep and feelings of particularism so strong that enmity between faiths comes to seem inevitable and natural. Even if conflicts have other causes—socioeconomic antagonism, political competition, kin group or personal feuds—they can most readily be explained as religious in origin if believers of different groups are involved. The list of contemporary areas beset by such strife is all too familiar: South Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Ireland; and on...

IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE to begin a history of Catholic-Protestant relations in seventeenth-century France by suggesting that the boundary between the two groups was anything but solid. After all, over three decades of vicious religious warfare should have more than sufficed to construct an impermeable confessional barrier. But in the years after the Edict of Nantes, the boundary was not so clear, nor the division between Huguenots and Catholics so strict. We have much evidence that in many communities they were willing to cooperate across the confessional divide, a willingness essential for the restoration of order. Yet, at the same...

COEXISTENCE IN RELIGIOUSLY mixed communities depended on the willingness of Catholics and Protestants to traverse the confessional boundary in pursuit of common aims or to negotiate agreements across it. Such cooperation always had opponents among the clergy and militant members of both churches. To them, good relations between the groups signified a dangerous disorder in religious and social life. To combat it, the confessional boundary had to be closed by separating neighbors of different faiths and constructing a clear sense of difference between them. Border crossing would be stopped; each confession would be clearly differentiated and objectified to firm up...

IN THE CIVIC SPACES Catholics and Protestants shared, their daily interactions could provoke conflict but also present opportunities for cooperation. The most sensitive of these locations were those constituting communal sacred space—Protestant temples and Catholic churches, chapels, religious houses, and processional routes—in which the religious groups undertook their devotional activities. In or around these places the possibility for strife was at its greatest, but so too was the potential for religious mixing across the first type of confessional boundary or negotiated accommodations along the second. Through these interactions the confessional boundary took literal, physical shape. This process of...

THE COMMUNITY’S SACRED SPACES were one arena in which Catholics and Protestants constructed and contested the confessional boundary. But there was another even more fundamental to early-modern conceptions of social order, political organization, and spiritual life: the family and its household. For political and religious authorities, the proper functioning of families was essential to collective harmony, political stability, and the spiritual development of its members, as well as to their social and economic betterment. Royal power drew one its most effective metaphorical justifications from the ideal of the properly ordered family, and through its legislation and jurisprudence the state sought...

CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS dissolved the confessional boundary or cooperated across it to establish families and religious coexistence. Those in both churches who wanted to stop such boundary crossing sought to construct the strictest form of division between the faiths to keep each religion distinct, concretize the confessional identity of church members, and limit interactions between Catholics and Protestants. The guardians of orthodoxy in both churches had to combat religious indeterminacy and pliable confessional identities, which, as in mixed marriages, made boundary crossing possible. Since early-modern gender attitudes often figured malleability and inconstancy as feminine characteristics, the nature of women and...

THIS STUDY HAS EXPLORED the confessional frontier between Catholics and Protestants in the arrangement of communal space, in the establishment of religiously mixed families, and in the gendered characterizations of religious identity. These sites of boundary construction reveal how the confessional barrier could be more or less porous in the everyday relations of Catholics and Protestants. However, for those determined to make the barrier impermeable and to end religious mixing, constructing the boundary in these locations was not enough. It also had to be established in a place that was simultaneously the most inaccessible to the power of church and...

ACCORDING TO THE CHURCHES’ conversion models, truth resided in the individual conscience. Once a convert accepted the truth, conscience would secure his or her religious affiliation and prevent any recrossing of the confessional boundary. Relapses, however, described conscience as a bridge back across the divide, thereby raising doubts about the boundary’s impermeability and the converts’ true confessional identity. The boundary also remained open because Catholics and Protestants had to live together, govern their communities, carry on their business and professional affairs, marry each other, and bury their dead. French Catholics and Protestants shared these concerns, crossed the confessional border to...