ABSTRACT
As Natalie Davis and others have argued, the soteriological system of the medieval Church created potent ties between the living and the dead.1 Funerary rites, masses for the dead as well as popular folklore and practice placed the cult of the dead at the center of a range of social and ritual interactions which engaged the living in an ongoing dialogue with the dead. Although Reformed theologians explicitly repudiated what Edward Muir has called the “ritual industry of death,”2 they nonetheless recognized that death and the rituals associated with it constituted a unique and strategic moment for the affirmation of confessional identity and community. This essay will examine the ways in which Calvinists in early modern France mobilized the symbolic and material rituals of will-making, death, and burial to preserve the Reformed community and legitimate its presence within the body politic. In the face of royal policies which circumscribed the public support for and the public practice of the Reformed faith, French Calvinists increasingly turned to private methods, especially their last will and testaments, to sustain the Church in body and soul.3 The notaries who attended the sick and dying along with friends and family members
often reinforced confessional networks by helping to draft testaments which directed legacies toward members of the Reformed community and fostered the bonds of mutual obligation so crucial to the construction of vibrant spiritual polities. In the contested religious landscape of early modern France, Protestant will-making reveals the enduring contours of an embattled community and the rituals that sustained it.
