Introduction: Camisards and Huguenots: old and new world -- Crisis in the Cevennes -- Survival strategies: prophets, preachers, and paradigms -- The testimonials: the French prophets and the Inspirés of the Holy Spirit -- "From a farr countrie": an introduction to the French Protestant experience in New England -- Protestant and profiteer: Gabriel Bernon in the new world -- Cotton Mather, Ezéchiel Carré, and the French connection -- Elie Neau and French Protestant pietism in colonial New York -- Conclusion: "A habitation elsewhere": Huguenots, Camisards, and the transatlantic experience.
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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; Ezéchiel Carré, 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"--Jacket.
Camisards-- United States-- History.
Huguenots-- United States-- History.
Protestantism-- France-- History.
Protestantism-- United States-- History.
United States, Civilization, French influences.
United States, History, Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.