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Huguenot History as Game of Thrones

At the large public university where I teach, on the first day of the U.S. survey, 330 students take their seats, most with low expectations. A good number come from small towns where football coaches do double-duty as public school history teachers. This arrangement does not usually engender much love for the discipline. They play a different brand of football in Britain, of course, where Geoffrey Treasure taught history for forty years before retiring as senior master at Harrow—a very different sort of public school, where such aristocratic schoolboys as Byron and Winston Churchill prepared for Oxford and Cambridge. Harrow remains an exclusive boys’ school, and Treasure’s “stimulating—though often sobering—experience of form room teaching” (p. xiv) in this rarified place has influenced his prolific historical writing. As The Huguenots—his fifth book on seventeenth-century France—makes clear, it is a good bet that Treasure is a remarkable teacher. His epigrammatic and shrewd writing reveals a formative link to the privileged classrooms where he has spent most of his distinguished career. The Huguenots is a learned synthesis intended for well-informed history buffs who seek a challenging foray into the political, military, and religious history of early-modern French elites. Lay readers with strong interests in the seventeenth-century will find Treasure an enthusiastic storyteller who gets in and out of well-known narratives with style and dispatch. Nevertheless, this is a substantial book that will require much concentrated reading time. It is divided into thirty-eight chapters, few exceeding ten pages, so selective readers can pick and choose. Treasure’s format has obvious liabilities, but it emphasizes what successful history teachers at the secondary level learn from “sobering” experience: keep it lively and don’t rattle on too long. The lapidary approach to chapters will also please specialists, but for different reasons. Advanced historians of early modern France and the outremer will discover little new here, as they will have read everything in the well-informed and annotated secondary-source bibliography. For them, more