This work considers how Frenchwomen participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. Using extensive original and archival sources, it provides a comprehensive study of how women contributed to institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters. Broomhall explores women's involvement in institutional heirarchies and regulation, their ideas about religious doctrine and the divine and diabolical, how they shaped meanings of active spiritual expression, and contributed to political and military aspects of religious life. Significantly, the work shifts focus from what men said about women's religious participation to what women themselves said about their contributions to religion. Challenging the view of religious reforms and ideas imposed by male authorities upon women, this study argues instead that women, Catholic and Calvinist, lay and monastic, were deeply involved in the culture, meanings and development of contemporary religious practices.

Introduction
Institutional Religion
Understanding the Divine
Religious Knowledge
Visible Religious Practices
Religious Politics and Violence
Conclusions
Select Bibliography
Index

SUSAN BROOMHALL is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Western Australia. Her previous publications include Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France and Women's Medical Work in Early Modern France.