Preaching a Dual Identity : Huguenot Sermons and the Shaping of Confessional Identity, 1629-1685

In Preaching a Dual Identity Nicholas Must studies the development of Huguenot confessional identity through sermons in the seventeenth century. In doing so, Must emphasizes a hybrid identity that combined religious particularism and political loyalism.

This study will demonstrate, firstly, the key elements of a hybrid Huguenot identity as they were expressed in sermons, and secondly, the political strategies that were a product of seeking a particular place for Huguenots in France. In both their preached and printed forms, sermons were at the very centre of this, providing a vocabulary of images and a set of mental tools through which to interpret the Huguenot situation in France. And as such, they are key to understanding how a specific conception of the place of Huguenots in France was promoted. What results is an image of a confessional community that was fundamentally concerned with remaining a distinct yet integral part of the French kingdom while fighting the erosion of their numbers and their political privileges. With this end in mind, sermons presented a position that was firmly in favour of an absolutist Bourbon monarchy, but in doing so they were offering their own image of what that absolutism should look like, while framing their religious devotion as a way to be confessionally separate and politically engaged.