The Cambridge City Seminar Series: Dissident Urbanisms: Mapping Religious Violence in 16th Century Paris

Tom Hamilton (Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at Durham University)

Tom Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at Durham University, working predominantly on the social and cultural history of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt, and a visting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Tom is the author of two books: ‘Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion’ (2017) and ‘A Widow’s Vengeance after the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France’ (forthcoming).

Tom’s talk combines archival research and GIS methods to map the changing dynamics of religious violence in urban space, focusing on Paris at a moment of major conflicts between Catholics and Protestants during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598). It will historicise the concept of ‘the right to the city’ by analysing the inherent contradictions of social life in this major premodern metropolis. Parisiansorganised a representative form of civic government that was relatively autonomous from the absolute monarchy. Confessional divisions, however, forever threatened to tear the commune asunder.