Huguenot Belief and Practice in Eighteenth‐Century Paris

Protestantism was illegal in eighteenth‐century France, yet many French Reformed Protestants, better known as Huguenots, managed to maintain their religion and identity until the French Revolution granted religious freedom. Several thousand of them lived in Paris, but remained a tiny minority in a very Catholic city. Given this context, and little access to pastors or collective worship, what kind of Protestantism did they observe? This article suggests that, like other minority groups, their religious practice and thinking were influenced both by the Catholic environment in which they lived and by the culture of the late eighteenth‐century city. By 1789 they had moved away from certain Calvinist traditions, and some of them had adopted a surprising ecumenism.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.