ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


260 /  C&RL News ■ A p r il 2002

H u gu en o t resistan ce to  the G re go ria n  cale n d a r 
reform  in France

Ed. note: This is a report on research conducted 
by the 2000 recipient of the Martinus Nijhoff In­
ternational West European Specialist Study Grant, 
Jeffry Larson. ACKL will be accepting applica­
tions for the 2002 grant through May 1. For 
more information about the Martinus Nijhoff 
grant, visit http://www.ala.org/acrl/nijhoffhtml.

Almost all that has been written on the revision 
of the Julian calendar in the 16th century deals 
with the astronomical reasons for it or with the 
concom itant problem s in dating events and 
documents. The calendar reform had seldom 
been studied in depth as an event in itself. In 
2000,1 received a Martinus Nijhoff International 
West European Specialist Study Grant to study 
the dissemination of the Gregorian calendar re­
form in France during the Wars of Religion.

Outside the papal states, the channels for 
disseminating the new  calendar were from the 
Vatican via the papal nuncios to national sov­
ereigns, w ho in turn, after ratifying it and hav­
ing it printed, sent it on to the bishops in their 
countries. Thus, the chain was from ecclesiasti­
cal to secular then back to ecclesiastical au­
thorities. In France, because of delays in print­
ing and perhaps due to muted opposition in 
Parlement by Gallicans—partisans of national 
ecclesiastical autonomy—the reform was imple­
m ented only in December 1582, two months 
after Italy and Spain.

Coincidentally, with the granting of the 
Nijhoff award, there appeared a lengthy article 
by Jérôm e Delatour in the Bibliothèque de 
I’École des Chartes based on collaborative ar­
chival research, largely in the Archives Na­
tionales and the Bibliothèque Nationale, focus­
ing just on this topic (my thanks to Bill Monroe 
of Brown University for the tip). Since such a 
large amount of the task had already been ac­
complished by others, I resolved to look for 
relevant materials w here the team of research­
ers from the l’École des Chartes had not, namely 
among the unpublished letters of Henri III and 
Huguenot pamphlets in Parisian collections, and 
in diplomatic correspondence in the Secret Ar­
chives of the Vatican.

Henri Ill’s letters are still in the process of 
being published; fair copies of them have been 
brought together in the Bibliothèque de l’lnstitut 
de France for the editorial project (in 2000, af­

ter a gap of 16 years, the letters for 1580 to 
1582 were published, but not extending into 
1583). Scanning these documents, I discovered 
that calendar reform was not dealt with at the 
level of correspondence betw een sovereigns, 
which focused mostly on dynastic politics, for­
eign relations, and ecclesiastical appointments. 
The calendar was discussed, though not exten­
sively, in the correspondence of the papal nun­
cio to France, whose letters have been pub­
lished, with a few passages summarized. (I later 
checked the summaries against the originals in 
the Vatican Archives, but found nothing miss­
ing of import.)

Delatour had also analyzed the erudite Hu­
guenot and Catholic treatises about the 1582 
reform (which had led up to a bull in 1603 
reaffirming the reform). So I looked for polem ­
ics at a more grass-roots level. Although the 
Bibliothèque de la Société de 1’Histoire du 
Protestantisme Français was said by two re­
search guides to have extensive pamphlet hold­
ings, I found no such collections there. I shall 
e x te n d  my search to the B ibliothèque de 
l’Arsenal, repository of m uch ephemeral mate­
rial, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Conflict over the calendar was isolated in time 
and space, and was reported not from Paris to 
th e Vatican, but in the opposite direction. 
Delatour writes that a lawyer of Avignon (“un 
avocat d ’Avignon”) informed the Vatican of a 
priest being chased out of his parish in Courthe- 
zon, a town in southern Orange, for having pub­
lished the new calendar. It was this incident that 
the Vatican asked its nuncio to bring to the at­
tention of the French court. The correspondence 
from Avignon to the papal secretary revealed 
that the informant was in fact the Cardinal 
d ’Armagnac (misread as “avocat”?), co-legate of 
Avignon and bishop of the diocese.

As representative of the Pope in Avignon, 
the Cardinal had implemented the new  calen­
dar at the same time in Italy and Spain. How­
ever, as the Cardinal clearly explains in his let­
ter to the Vatican, the archdiocese was not co­
terminous with the papal state, but overlapped 
to include the parish of Courthezon in the prin­
cipality of Orange, a hotbed of Protestant resis­
tance. Evidently, the locals did not accept be­
ing ten days ahead of their compatriots and 
fellow market-goers in Orange, even if it was

http://www.ala.org/acrl/nijhoffhtml


C&RL News ■ A p ril 2002 /  261

only for a few weeks and only in one parish. 
This clarification I plan to publish with ap­
propriate documentation.

To identify the chronology of effective Hu­
guenot acceptance of Öre Gregorian calendar, I 
now plan to look for ten-day gaps in congrega­
tional registers (baptisms, marriages, funerals), 
which are primarily in the Archives Nationales.

rograms such as SPARC and SPARC Europe, 
hich facilitate competition in scientific com­
unication, and the establishment of institu­

ional and discipline-based archives that allow 
ublic access to content and employ the O pen 
rchives Metadata Harvesting Protocol.

le e t d o n a te s h isto ric  b u ild in g  to  
ISD  lib ra ry
he Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will 
eceive a donation of space from FleetBoston 
inancial to house the school’s new  library. 
he donation of a portion of Fleet’s facility in­
ludes the building’s historic banking hall, sec­
nd floor, and part of the basement. It will 
nlarge the capacity of RISD’s library from 

12,000 square feet to nearly 60,000 square feet.
The new  library will provide for greater 

now ledge of the arts, design, and art educ­
ion for the region and, through its location in 
ow ntow n Providence, widen RISD’s commit­
ent to the Rhode Island public. The RISD 
ibrary o pened in 1878 with its holdings in a 
ingle bookcase. Created as a specialized li­
rary of art and design publications and visual 
esources, the collection provides strong his­
orical and contem porary perspectives and 

aterials in landscape architecture, ceramics, 
extiles, sculpture, drawing, painting, Colonial 
urniture, and jewelry.

C h a rle s A. S ch w a rtz nam ed n e w  PIL 
d ito r by A C R L  board
he ACRL Board o f D irectors has nam ed 

Charles A. (Tony) Schwartz to be editor of 
CRL’s distinguished monographic series, Pub­

lications in Librarianship (PIL). Founded in 
1953, the series focuses on research and theo­
retical d isc u ssio n  o f issu e s in a c ad e m ic  
librarianship. The series has produced 54 titles 
ince its inception.

Schwartz, w ho recently accepted the posi­
ion of associate director for collection m an­

agement at the Green Library at Florida Inter­

Much rem ains to be done, but I have 
unearthed a clarified account of the only 
recorded overt H uguenot resistance to the 
Gregorian calendar reform. I am very grate­
ful to Martinus Nijhoff International and to 
my WESS colleagues for the opportunity 
to initiate this research.—Jeffry Larson, Yale 
University Library, jeffry.larson@ yale.edu

national University, brings considerable pub­
lishing experience to the editorship. He has 
edited Restructuring Academ ic Libraries (num­
ber 49 in the PIL series), published num erous 
articles in ACRL’s refereed scholarly journal 
College a n d  Research Libraries, and served on 
the PIL editorial board. He will serve one year 
as an editor-designate apprentice with the cur­
rent editor, John Budd, and begin his five-year 
term in July 2003-

P a u lin g  research n o te b o o k s released 
o n lin e
O regon State University (OSU) Special Collec­
tions has m ade available digitized versions of 
46 research notebooks of two-time Nobel Lau­
reate Linus Pauling. The Pauling Papers span 
from 1922 to 1994 and cover a range of the 
scientific fields in which Pauling was involved. 
The notebooks contain more than 7,500 pages 
and include m any of Pauling’s laboratory cal­
culations and experimental data, scientific con­
clusions, ideas for further research, and auto­
biographical musings. The digitization, which 
was carried out by the OSU Special Collec­
tio n s staff, is av ailab le o n lin e  at h t tp : //  
osulibrary .orst. e d u /s p e c ia lc o lle c tio n s /rn b / 
index.html.

A C R L  p u b lica tio n  fo cu se s on 
lib ra rie s' im p a ct on stu d e n ts
M aking the Grade: A c a d em ic Libraries a n d  
S tu d en t Success, edited by 
Maurie Caitlin Kelly and An­
d re a  K ross, lo o k s at th e  
positive role that libraries 
play in stu d e n t retention. 
The b o o k  presen ts useful 
analyses that consider the 
m any factors that can im­
p act student success, such 
as technological capability, diversity, and 
inform ation literacy.

The importance of libraries’ partnerships

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mailto:jeffry.larson@yale.edu