Graduate student Scott Marr defends dissertation
Scott Marr defended his dissertation, “Urban Encounters and the Religious Divide: Catholic-Protestant Coexistence in Saumur, France, 1589-1665.” As historians of early modern Europe shifted their gaze from episodes of religious violence to expressions of religious tolerance, the mechanics of coexistence in everyday life—how men and women of different confessional allegiances managed to live and worship peacefully in close proximity—have become a focus of research. Marr’s dissertation contributes to this new scholarship by examining relations between Catholics and Protestants in the French city of Saumur in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The social and economic structures of urban life, he notes “provided the context for coexistence, and the citizens of Saumur shared a commitment to the same civic ideals, if not the same religious beliefs.”
