In August 1572 a marriage was arranged from Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henry II of France

and Catherine de Medici and the sister of the incumbent French king Charles IX. Her husband

was the Protestant Henri de Neveur and the wedding took place in Paris at Notre Dame. The

union was an attempt to bring peace between the warring confessions or denominations, but

it wrote with the exact opposite. To mark it all the aristocracy of France gathered in Paris

and a group of Catholics decided to use the opportunity to assassinate one of the Protestant,

also called Huguenot, leaders Admiral Colligneur. That attempt was discovered by the king who

extraordinarily decided the best way to prevent further trouble was to eliminate the Protestant

leadership, beginning with Colligneur himself. So on the 24th of August 1572, Saint-Barthomeus

Day, a detachment of royal guards killed Colligneur and flung his body in the street,

where a Catholic crowd triumphantly mutilated it. Now crucially the prison Catholics had misunderstood

the king's orders. Rumors suggested that the king had commanded them not to kill all the Protestant

leaders but all Protestants. So over the next four days ordinary Catholics sacked the houses

of the Huguenots and brutally butchered their inhabitants. From Paris the violence spread to

at least a dozen provincial cities and perhaps some 10,000 victims died in awe.

And over the channel in England a woman called Anne Daerisch wrote a book about it.

Today we're going to be talking about French Protestants,

Bloody Massacres and Female Writers.

Daerisch's French history is one of the few 16th century books written entirely by a woman.

It's perhaps, hardly the sort of book you might have expected a woman to have written

and it has largely been overlooked by all but of very few scholars.

But my guest today has not overlooked it. She is Dr. Joanne Paul, senior lecturer in early

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