The following brief essay provides an example of documentation form that may be 
used in this class. 
 
 

                 THE EDICT OF NANTES: A NEW VIEW OF CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS 

          The Edict of Nantes of 1598 introduced a new perspective on the relations between

church and state. Contrary to previous thinking, the decree implemented the belief that 

the government should not prescribe religious belief and conduct.   For most of the second

half of the 1500s civil conflict raged in France. These "French wars of religion" (Hunt, 546)

pitted Calvinist protestants, called Huguenots, against Catholics, who were supported by

the king of the Valois dynasty. Each side believed that if France was to become a strong

kingdom, only one religion could be permitted within society (Stankiewicz, 10-11) 

           When the last heir of the Valois dynasty, Henry III, was assassinated, the leader 

of the Huguenots ascended the throne as Henry IV. Henry chiefly desired that religious conflict

cease and tranquility return to France. Therefore he proclaimed himself a Catholic, recognizing

the reality that more than ninety percent of the French people were Catholic (Hunt, 547).

But subsequently he also gave the Huguenots freedom to practice their religion. Henry explained

in the introduction to his edict that he thought his duty as king was to guarantee civil peace

so that God "may be adored and prayed unto by all our subjects," and that as long as they

agreed on this, it did not matter if people chose to be of different religions (Nantes [1598]). 

          Henry did not quite succeed in introducing full religious liberty to France. The decree

permitted protestants to worship freely in many, but not all, parts of France.  But the king

obviously favored the Catholics by restoring Catholicism to all areas of France and making

the extension of protestantism into purely Catholic areas illegal (Nantes [1997]). 

          Henry's Edict of Nantes signified the emergence of a new way of thinking in European

civilization. Earlier protestants and Catholics agreed that the stability of a society required

religious conformity. But Henry adopted the contrary premise, that the state's interest in

maintaining civil security and tranquility required that it assure that people could practice

the religion they preferred. 
 

SOURCES: 

Hunt, Lynn, Thomas Martin, Barbara Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, Bonnie G. Smith. The
Challenge of the West (Lexington, Mass., 1995). 

Nantes, Edict of (1598), in Roland Mousnier. The Assassination of Henry IV (New York, 
1973), 316-347, [http://www.stetson.edu/~psteeves/edictnantes.html], accessed
on 21 August 1996. 

"Nantes, Edict of" (1997) Britannica Online. [http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/415/10.html], accessed on 6 January 1998. 

Stankiewicz, W.J. Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1960). 

Explanation about this documentation system: 

Within the text the citation identifies the source using a label that is as short as possible,
while still being informative. Ordinarily this should be one word that identifies the author 
of the material you are citing. 

Then in the "SOURCES" section the sources referenced by the in-text citations are listed
alphabetically by the identifiers used. Generally the form used should be "author, title, 
location, date." The "location" of a printed source is the name of the book or periodical in
which you found it; the "location" of an Internet source is the URL where you found it. In 
the case of printed sources, include the date of publication; for sources found on the Internet,
in addition to the date of publication of the original (if available) it is necessary to include 
the date on which you accessed them (because Internet sources are liable to change).