Event Details

Beginning with a single document, this talk uncovers a hidden network of Huguenot and other agents, exploring secrecy, trust, and the problems of using clandestine sources to reveal the unseen world behind sixteenth-century war and confessional diplomacy.

CWD Research Seminar: Professor Penny Roberts (Warwick), ‘Uncovering a sixteenth-century Clandestine Network’

Thursday 19 February 2026, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Faraday Seminar Room 1

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This paper will explore how, beginning with a single document and subsequent other ‘discoveries’, a network of Huguenot and other agents was uncovered. It will consider the reliability of primary sources and the particular problems posed by those, and their carriers, that are supposed to be kept secret. In this way, it will open up a hidden world behind the public face of sixteenth-century war and confessional diplomacy.

Professor Penny Roberts works on the social, religious, cultural and political history of sixteenth-century France, especially its wars of religion (c.1562-1598). Her new book, Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), explores the clandestine world of Huguenot correspondence, espionage and information-gathering. Her previous book, Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars, c. 1560-1600 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), focuses on the attempts to establish some kind of 'peace process' during the wars and the impact of this on confessional relations and royal authority.