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touch off riots against religious targets. But without evidence to the
contrary, let us grant our sixteenth-century subjects, even when they
are not literate, the ability to discriminate among social goals, and the
possibility of religious concerns that go beyond hunger and confusion.
That inflationary prices were part of the general context of violence
in the last half of the sixteenth century I affirmed in my article.
(I am glad that Madame Estebe now takes a position closer to my own
on this matter.) As for the other factors that account for the chrono-
logical distribution of religious riots, I hope they will soon be
examined by historians with attention to both the national and local
milieu. Madame Estebe's suggestions about the triggering rdle of
certain edicts on religion or violations thereof seem very sensible.
They certainly mesh well with my discussion of the varied cues and
models for behaviour given to crowds by persons in authority.
Madame Estebe next charges that I "completely omit the role of
social tensions in these religious disturbances". I must confess that
my argument here is compressed, complex, and all the harder to
follow because unfamiliar. But I think the patient reader of my
article will not endorse Madame Estebe's verdict. Most evidently,
I first gave several individual instances of urban violence in which
some reinforcement of religious anger by socio-economic resentment
was likely. More important, I pointed to a whole stratum for which
socio-economic conflict might readily converge with religious
commitment: the peasant majority of the countryside.2 But it was
the cities which provided the formative experience for early
Protestantism and which were the arena for the most expressive
conflict between the old and new religions. And if we look carefully
here at the composition of the Calvinist movement up to 1572, at
its statements and conduct we find a new social meaning in the
Reformation, one that cuts differently and in some ways more deeply
than that discussed by Madame Estebe. We find we must imagine
a multi-dimensional model of social structure, one that incorporates
and goes beyond the standard one of socio-economic classes. We find
we must stretch our definition of "social tensions" well beyond the
issue of wealth and poverty. And rather than being "covered by a
religious cloak", the social face of the Reformation is as real as its
obverse, the spiritual face, different sides of the same coin.
My evidence on the social and vocational distribution of the
1
This convergence must not be exaggerated, however. Peasants too were
quite capable of differentiating between economic and spiritual issues, as
demonstrated by the tithe-strikes of Catholics in the Lyonnais and in the
Languedoc.
poisonous liars and profane objects dividing man from man and man
from God. Catholic violence was often murderous; 6 but it also was
intended to "teach" the powerlessness of Scripture alone, the
vulnerability of those not protected by the mass or the parish, the
vengeance that would be wrought on the cruel destroyers of saints and
priests. The Catholics of Agen called their gibbet "the Consistory";
the Protestants of Beziers called their clubs "feather dusters".
Renaming symbolizes; so can weapons symbolize. But weapons
also kill.
University of California, Berkeley Natalie Zemon Davis