During the French Wars of Religion, and also during the period of purported religious toleration following the Edict of Nantes, Catholic hierarchies and political institutions worked to marginalize Protestant theological and artistic expression. Yet while institutionally marginalized in most respects, evangelicals and Calvinists formed the elite corps of artists, artisans, and architects responsible for theorizing, designing, and building the royal and ecclesiastical structures of the dominant Catholic majority.

In Building Codes, Catharine Randall contends that all Calvinist architecture recalls a scriptural intertext, and seeks to build upon the firm foundations of the Gospel. These architects, instructed to erect monuments glorifying Catholic patrons, inscribe the tension between their confessional perspective and their commission upon their structures. Randall explores the ways in which structures such as Chambord, Chenonceau, the Luxembourg Palace, and the Louvre bear encoded criticisms of religious and political authority.

By examining the lives of several famous architects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with blueprints, engravings, actual structures, garden layouts, builders' manuals, and illustrated allegories, this study excavates the Calvinist faith of these architects and demonstrates the dramatic effects their embattled religious perspective had on the structures they built.

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In From a Far Country Catharine Randall examines Huguenots and their less-known cousins the Camisards, offering a fresh perspective on the important role these French Protestants played in settling the New World.

The Camisard religion was marked by more ecstatic expression than that of the Huguenots, not unlike differences between Pentecostals and Protestants. Both groups were persecuted and emigrated in large numbers, becoming participants in the broad circulation of ideas that characterized the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Randall vividly portrays this French Protestant diaspora through the lives of three figures: Gabriel Bernon, who led a Huguenot exodus to Massachusetts and moved among the commercial elite; Ezechiel Carre, a Camisard who influenced Cotton Mather's theology; and Elie Neau, a Camisard-influenced writer and escaped galley slave who established North America's first school for blacks.

Like other French Protestants, these men were adaptable in their religious views, a quality Randall points out as quintessentially American. In anthropological terms they acted as code shifters who manipulated multiple cultures. While this malleability ensured that French Protestant culture would not survive in externally recognizable terms in the Americas, Randall shows that the culture's impact was nonetheless considerable....