ABSTRACT
Situated between two great Catholic powers – the kingdom of France and the Comtat Venaissin, the small principality of Orange experienced the full force of the religious wars that gripped early modern Europe. A feudal possession of the counts of Chalon in the fifteenth century, Orange became an enclave of Dutch power and authority when it passed into the hands of the house of Nassau in 1530. Until the French occupation of the principality in the 1660s, Catholics and Protestants grudgingly observed the decree, living cheek-by-jowl in relative peace. From the 1660s onward, however, religious tensions between the two communities increased. In the late seventeenth century, Jacques Pineton de Chambrun, a Calvinist pastor from Orange, penned his autobiography, in which he described the events that transpired after a Jesuit preacher challenged him to refute the doctrine of transubstantiation during the Corpus Christi celebrations of 1678.
