A riveting account of the Saint Bartholomew#s Day Massacre, its origins, and its aftermath, this volume by Barbara B. Diefendorf introduces students to the most notorious episode in France#s sixteenth century civil and religious wars and an event of lasting historical importance. The murder of thousands of French Protestants by Catholics in August 1572 influenced not only the subsequent course of France#s civil wars and state building, but also patterns of international alliance and long-standing cultural values across Europe. The book begins with an introduction that explores the political and religious context for the massacre and traces the course of the massacre and its aftermath. The featured documents offer a rich array of sources on the conflict # including royal edicts, popular songs, polemics, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, paintings, and engravings # to enable students to explore the massacre, the nature of church-state relations, the moral responsibility of secular and religious authorities, and the origins and consequences of religious persecution and intolerance in this period. Useful pedagogic aids include headnotes and gloss notes to the documents, a list of major figures, a chronology of key events, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index. Biography: Barbara B. Diefendorf (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at Boston University. Her book From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (2004) won the American Historical Association#s J. Russell Major Prize for the best book in French History. She is also the author of Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (1991), which was awarded the New England Historical Association and National Huguenot Association Book Prizes, and Paris City Councillors: The Politics of Patrimony (1983). She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Prince