Huguenot Networks

Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Penny Roberts
From New Books Network
2025, Cambridge UP

Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world of secret intelligence gathering during the French Wars of Religion. Robert's discovery of the interrogation record of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Tivinat, arrested in May 1570 for attempting to secretly carry letters to England, unspools into a broader story about the intersections between confessional affiliations, international affairs, knowledge, trust, and networking in a tumultuous time. As she argues, clandestine communication was crucial to maintaining ties amongst a widely dispersed and threatened religious community. Huguenot Networks is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of espionage, Huguenots, international affairs in Elizabethan England, or the French Wars of Religion. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

Notes

Cited at the opening as the canonical reference for the dominant network-modeling paradigm, in which nodes are fixed and only edges are stochastic. riva2026intensity uses Newman's textbook to anchor the asymmetry it then proposes to relax.

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