Edited by
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks

A novel approach to the study of the Huguenot experience and memory in seventeeth-century France, in the diaspora, and beyond

6 x 9, 352 pages, 4 illus.
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-484-2, $39.95s
The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, series editors

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Huguenot diaspora is one of the most important and most spectacular dispersions of a religious minority in early modern Europe. Traditionally known as le Refuge, this migration led to the exodus of nearly 200,000 Protestants out of France in 1685 at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Memory and Identity offers a comparative perspective on this event and its repercussions by an international group of seventeen specialists of early modern France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands and historians of British and French Colonial America and Dutch South Africa. This collection is the first look at the Huguenot diaspora in a broad Atlantic context rather than as a narrowly European or Colonial American phenomenon. It sheds new light on the Protestant experience both in and outside of France.

The Huguenot experience of seventeenth-century France and in the diaspora is examined through the lens of minority status and assimilation. This volume explains why some Huguenots chose to emigrate instead of being assimilated by the dominant Catholic group, while others recanted their faith and remained in France. Revealing how minority status at home affected the creation of refugee communities outside France, scholars trace the Huguenots' eventual integration into the different host societies that the exiles encountered. Comparing Huguenot diasporic experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, essays focus on Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, British North America (particularly South Carolina and New York), the French Caribbean, New France, and Dutch South Africa. Finally, beyond the issues of persecution, dispersion, and assimilation, several essays study the long-term impact of the Revocation and of le Refuge in examining nineteenth-century Huguenot memory in France and in the diaspora and the maintenance of a Huguenot identity.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is associate professor of American civilization at the Université de Toulouse, France. He is currently completing a monograph on the Huguenot migration to proprietary South Carolina. Van Ruymbeke lives in Toulouse.

Randy J. Sparks is an associate professor of history at Tulane University. He is the author of Religion in Mississippi and On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876. Sparks lives in New Orleans.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jon Butler • Bernard Cottret • Joyce D. Goodfriend • John Miller
Carolyn Chapell Lougee • Keith P. Luria • Leslie Choquette • Willem Frijhoff
Gérard Lafleur • Lucien Abénon • Philippe Denis • Raymond A. Mentzer
R. C. Nash • Diane C. Margolf • Timothy Fehler • Charles Littleton
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

ALSO FROM THE EDITORS

From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina

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