Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Culture in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751

Kamil's innovative thesis argues that Huguenot artisans from southwestern France were the main carriers of a Huguenot subterranean and secretive culture best expressed through the artifactual and literary works of Bernard Palissy 1510-90, with apocalyptic accents and a metaphysical dimension, and which emerged in the violence of France's Catholic reconquest of Protestant bastions and was transplanted first to England and then to colonial New York. The author's thorough training in material culture enables him to offer very sophisticated analyses of furniture, especially the leather chairs in vogue in Boston and New York in the late seventeenth-century - and through meticulous description he manages to identify a "hidden in plain sight" (title of chapter 15) Huguenot artisanal influence on early American material culture. The book contains fascinating passages on, among other things, the entrance of Charles IX into the fortress of La Rochelle during his royal tour of France in 1562, the devastating siege of La Rochelle in 1627-28, John Winthrop, Jr.'s library and artisanal clientele, William Hogarth's painting Noon L'église des Grecs, Hog Lane, Soho (chapter 14), and the Huguenots' capture of the New York leather chair market.