ABSTRACT
The American poet Robert Frost popularized the saying "good fences make good neighbors" in his 1914 poem, "Mending Wall." This chapter explores the complex and varied range of popular attitudes towards religious pluralism in early modern communities. Intolerance of heresy was a widely held virtue among early modern Christians, but it was a virtue that many ordinary people weighed in the balance against other Christian virtues like good neighborliness. At other times, ordinary women and men are represented in sources as disobedient, disruptive, angry, and violent. These portrayals in part reflect general elite prejudices about the troubling character of the poor. The chapter tries to recover this social context of popular religiosity in the lives of Catholic and Calvinist families in the small village of Choulex in the duchy of Savoy. It analyzes one incident taken from the mid-seventeenth century to consider popular attitudes towards religious pluralism and confessional boundaries.
