Neil Kamil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’
New World, 1517-1751. Early America: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xxiv + 1058 pp.
$75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-7390-4.
Reviewed by Owen Stanwood (Department of History, Catholic University of America)
Published on H-Atlantic (March, 2006)
Words and Things in the Protestant Atlantic
The great promise of the “Atlantic approach,” say its
promoters, is that it allows historians to break free of
national historiographies. Despite the rhetoric, however, relatively few Atlanticists have made good on this
promise. Much Atlantic history is little more than imperial or colonial history under a different name, examining one nation’s “Atlantic” experience, but rarely
probing connections between peoples or empires. Moreover, a disproportionate number of these studies focus
on the English or British Atlantics, paying far less attention to seafarers and colonizers from other nations.
While much of this scholarship has been excellent–even
groundbreaking–it has done little to encourage early
modernists to move outside of their national bubbles.[1]
Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul, however, is an entirely
different kind of study. With a cavalier disregard for geographic or disciplinary boundaries, Kamil ranges around
the Atlantic world trying to recover the experiences and
beliefs of Huguenot artisans from the Aunis-Saintonge
region of southeastern France, survivors of the Wars of
Religion who ranged as far as colonial America. What he
finds is a world in which faith, family, and craft meant a
lot more than ethnicity or nationality. The book provides
a template for a new kind of Atlantic history–particularly
relevant for those who study the seventeenth century–
that perceives transoceanic links in terms of confession
rather than nationality.
by the rhetoric of John Calvin, chose to fight, and
they lambasted those who chose to hide as hell-bound
“Nicodemites,” too frightened of earthly punishment to
remain true to their consciences. Kamil shows more sympathy to those who avoided confrontation and tries to
tell their story. According to him, hiding was a spiritual
strategy inherited from Lutheran Pietism that came about
as a response to the utter hopelessness of violent conflict.
The only way to preserve their faith, these Huguenots
saw, was to turn it inward. They still expressed their
beliefs, but only in coded ways, especially through material culture. Thus, Kamil connects Huguenot religious
and political beliefs to their legendary skills as craftspeople. As a result, if a historian wishes to know what the
Huguenots thought or felt, he or she must look at what
they made: ceramics, or furniture, or silverware. These
objects served as “memory places,” encoding beliefs in
a language that only the artisan and a few others could
have deciphered (p. 644).
The key figure in this story is the Saintongeais potter and natural philosopher Bernard Palissy (1510-1590).
It was he who first came up with the idea of “artisanal
security,” that Huguenot artisans could find safety not
in violent confrontation with Catholics, but by expressing spirituality in their craft. Palissy aired this opinion in an essay entitled “De la ville de forteresse” (1563),
a critical appraisal of the militant policies of the consistory of the “fortress city” of La Rochelle, a Calvinist bastion that stood as a symbol of orthodoxy and resistance in the Protestant world. Palissy believed that
Kamil begins by examining the painful choice faced
by French Protestants during the sixteenth-century civil
wars: to fight or to hide. Many Huguenots, inspired
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this physical fortress offered a false sense of security,
and that believers had better develop internal defenses to
serve them when its walls could no longer provide protection. Palissy’s warning appeared prescient when La
Rochelle finally fell to Louis XIII and Richelieu in 1628,
marking a major disappointment for the global Protestant cause. While Protestantism was still legal in France,
it took a lower profile, and in Kamil’s estimation, many
Huguenots began to accept Palissy’s ideal of artisanal security, finding comfort in their craft rather than militant
opposition to Catholicism.
commentary on Huguenot furniture production in North
America, he makes little effort to demonstrate what kinds
of messages were hidden in these objects, claiming rather
meekly that “historians can never fully know the variety
of cultural associations” that New Yorkers saw in chairs
and other furnishings (p. 761). Perhaps Kamil is being
honest about the limitations of his evidence, but in a book
packed with speculation, it seems unfair not to indulge
the reader a bit more, especially since Kamil’s method
shows such great promise. In the beginning of his discussion of New York’s Huguenots, Kamil challenges the
premise of Huguenot assimilation posited by historians
such as Jon Butler, pointing out that Huguenots were always good at hiding, and that they retained their distinctive culture in their craftsmanship even while appearing
to blend into the dominant English culture.[2] It is a wonderful argument and a stunning example of how material culture analysis could lead to an interpretive breakthrough; unfortunately, Kamil is not able to find much to
back up his claims.
Kamil’s attempts to measure the impact of Palissy’s
ideas meet numerous pitfalls. First off, there is the obvious problem that secret knowledge is difficult to recover,
especially centuries later. By his own admission, Kamil
identified few “simple artisans” who shared Palissy’s philosophy or were demonstrably influenced by the potter’s ideas (p. 191). Indeed, he could not even show
that Palissy’s books circulated widely in French Protestant communities. Palissy’s writings did have an impact, but not among Huguenot artisans. Instead, they became key texts in the international Protestant scientific
community, influencing such luminaries as Robert Fludd
(1574-1637) and especially John Winthrop Jr. (16061676). Much of the middle part of the book focuses on
Winthrop’s scientific endeavors in seventeenth-century
New England, viewing the scientist as the embodiment
of the “Palissean” worldview after the fall of La Rochelle.
The discussion is enlightening, but it suffers from two
problems. First, the connections between Palissy and
Winthrop are not compelling; Winthrop owned one
of Palissy’s books and shared his alchemical interests,
but anything more is speculation. More importantly,
Winthrop was neither a Huguenot nor an artisan, so he
seems a bit out of place in a book that is supposed to be
about how ordinary French Protestants dealt with religious violence. Kamil is to be commended for showing
links between Protestants of various nationalities, but he
has the tendency to go off on tangents that last hundreds
of pages and take him far away from the book’s central
argument.
The book’s section on New York also suffers from
an incomplete portrait of how Huguenots fit into the
colony’s polyglot society. Kamil focuses on Huguenot
connections to English Quakers, another refugee people who practiced a faith focused on inward spirituality and dominated artisanal trades. While these links
were important, Kamil exaggerates them, implying that
most or all of New York’s Huguenots advocated latitudinarian religion and toleration against the persecution
of “established” Dutch Calvinist and Anglican hierarchies. In fact, New York’s religious climate was rarely
so straightforward. The colony’s French inhabitants, like
their English and Dutch neighbors, were divided on matters of faith and politics. Many of them preferred the
example of La Rochelle over that of Palissy, advocating a militant response to the Catholic threat. When
the German-born militia captain Jacob Leisler took over
the colony’s government in the name of the international Protestant cause in 1689, for example, some of the
colony’s Huguenots followed Leisler, while others questioned his extreme methods and favored a quieter approach. A close analysis of the event could have bolWhen Kamil returns to Huguenot artisans in the fi- stered Kamil’s argument–especially if Huguenot artisans
nal section of the book, the limitations of his argument
favored the anti-Leislerian side. But the book barely deals
become clear. After seven hundred pages of background,
with the rebellion (see pp. 803, 885) and in his brief treatthe reader expects the final section to deliver the goods, ment Kamil unfortunately misidentifies Jacob Leisler’s
so to speak, providing expert interpretation of mate- main opponent Nicholas Bayard as a “leading Huguenot
rial culture evidence to show how Huguenot artisans in- Leislerian” (p. 803). What Kamil fails to realize is that
scribed their spirituality in their work after migrating the key debate in sixteenth-century Huguenot circles–
to New York following the Revocation of the Edict of
to hide or to fight–also appeared in seventeenth-century
Nantes in 1685. But while Kamil does provide interesting
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America among Protestant refugees.[3]
1800 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of
Despite its problems of interpretation and evidence– the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
as well as its extraordinary length and complexity– University Press, 2005).
Kamil’s book is a welcome addition to Atlantic studies. While it ultimately fails to make a very compelling
[2]. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee
case, its method and approach are so innovative that it People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
deserves to be read and pondered by any historian in- University Press, 1984).
terested in early modern religion and culture. First, it
[3]. On Huguenots in Leisler’s Rebellion see espedemonstrates the great promise of material culture analcially,
David William Voorhees, “The ’fervent Zeale’ of
ysis not only to social historians, but to scholars of ideas
Jacob
Leisler,
” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 51
as well. Second, the book shows how Atlantic histori(1994):
pp.
447-472.
ans can move beyond the nation state and finally view
the early modern Atlantic in terms that contemporaries
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Citation: Owen Stanwood. Review of Kamil, Neil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the
Huguenots’ New World, 1517-1751. H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. March, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11489
Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
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