ABSTRACT
In southwest France, in the western section of the "Huguenot crescent" highlighted by Samuel Mours, were books, and or rather printed material. For the pretensions of some publications were only very modest—part of the confrontation between rival religious confessions, or did they contribute to pacifying relations between them, as the Edict of Nantes anticipated. The establishment of the printing house was late in coming to southwest France. However, under the Edict of Nantes, competition between the churches was a powerful stimulus to the production of printed material. Protestant printed material favored compact formats, octavo or duodecimo, and contain more pages than their Catholic equivalents. The printing shops in the episcopal towns printed only proven orthodox Catholic works. One finds, at the very most, a controversial Protestant work at Lescar in 1602, and a theological essay by the Anglican bishop Joseph Hall, the "English Seneca," at Agen in 1639, in a Latin translation, which restricted its use to the clergy.
