The Bipartisan Consistorial Court of Echallens in the Vaud (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century)
Chapter 2 A “Catholic” Consistory? The Bipartisan Consistorial Court of Echallens in the Vaud (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century) Christian Grosse Translated by Christine Rhone With patience and perseverance in equal measure, Raymond Mentzer has, for several years, conducted research all across France to locate and meticulously describe the registers held by the Huguenot consistories from the Reforma- tion to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.1 We know that the recording and preservation of the minutes of the consistories was not only a major tool in the exercise of Reformed ecclesiastical discipline, the instrument of its efficacy, but also a collective record and testimony before the divine of the constancy with which the Reformed Churches sought to guide the penitential progress of the faithful, between the fall into sin and the return to the way of amendment.2 The project, essential for stimulating students and researchers to produce new works on Reformed ecclesiastical discipline under the Ancien Régime in France, was ambitious and difficult to achieve, given the extreme dispersal of these registers in various collections of archives. Raymond Mentzer has nevertheless managed to uncover and inventory 309 registers and to furnish the complete list to the scholarly community together with an important introduction and an extensive bibliography in his book: Les registres des Consistoires des églises réformées de France, xvie–xviie siècles: un inventaire (Geneva: Droz, 2014). His work has directly inspired a similar un- dertaking that aims to create a directory, as complete as possible, of the regis- ters left by the Reformed consistories of French-speaking Switzerland (Suisse Romande), from the Reformation to the end of the Ancien Régime.
[Show full text]