ABSTRACT
A second arena of Catholic militancy in Guyenne centred on the town of Agen and its environs, the Agenais. The Bordeaux parlement has successfully imposed legislation against unrest at feast day celebrations and public gatherings such as burials, processions and the charivari during 1558, but at Agen, such violent incidents remained largely unchecked. George Tholin saw the congress as a pivotal moment for local confessional relations at Agen, as explicit cooperation between secular and clerical institutions helped realize the creation of a pan-Agenais coalition of Catholic delegates that would define Catholic activism in the region for the coming decade. Incredibly, given the pre-eminence of the coalition, and the greater involvement of the Catholic nobility, Agen fell, on 17 April, to a Protestant force that caught the authorities off guard. While the prevalence of anti-Protestant legislation may indicate the presence of a pro-Catholic consensus within the patriciate at Agen, no formal corpus existed as such.
