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An absolutely brilliant, seminal, forefront work. Neil Kamil combines the deepest kind of erudition with a one-in-a-thousand level of sheer intellectual creativity. Most striking is the disciplinary range of this work: material culture analysis, demography, genealogy, geography, textual exegesis, ethnography, as well as more conventional forms of political, military, religious, and economic history. All are here in various contexts and proportions. Kamil's overall touch is so sure and deft that the reader is barely aware of these numerous methodological crossings. His prose is remarkably effective as well. Even where the ideas are complex and difficult, the words are simple, direct, and forceful. -- John P. Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of American History, Yale University

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Maps
Preface
Introduction
Part I: The Art of the Earth
Chapter 1. A Risky Gift: The Entrance of Charles IX into La Rochelle in 1565
Chapter 2. Palissy's Fortress: The Construction of Artisanal Security
Chapter 3. Personal History and "Spiritual Honor": Philibert Hamelin's Consideration of Straight Lines and the Rehabilitation of the Nicodemite as Huguenot Artisan of Security
Chapter 4. War and Sûreté: The Context of Artisanal Enthusiasm in Aunis-Saintonge
Chapter 5. Scenes of Reading: Rustic Artisans and the Diffusion of Paracelsian Discourses to New Worlds
Chapter 6. American Rustic Scenes: Bernard Palissy, John Winthrop the Younger, and Benjamin Franklin
Chapter 7. The River and Nebuchadnezzar's Dream: War, Separation, "the Sound," and the Materiality of Time
Chapter 8. The Art of the Earth
Part II: The Fragmentation of the Body
Chapter 9. "In Patientia Sauvitas," or, The Invisible Fortress Departs
Chapter 10. Being "at the Île of Rue": Science, Secrecy, and Security at the Siege of La Rochelle, 1627–1635
Chapter 11. The Geography of "Your Native Country": Relocation of Spatial Identity to the New World, 1628–1787
Chapter 12. La Rochelle's Transatlantic Body: The Commons Debates of 1628
Chapter 13. "Fraudulent father-Frenchmen": The Huguenot Counterfeit and the Threat to England's Internal Security
Chapter 14. "The destruction that wasteth at noonday": Hogarth's Hog Lane and the Huguenot Fortress of Memory
Part III: The Secrets of the Craft
Chapter 15. Hidden in Plain Sight: Disappearance and Material Life in Colonial New York
Chapter 16. Fragments of Huguenot-Quaker Convergence in New York: Little Histories (Avignon, France, 1601–1602; Flushing, Long Island, 1657–1726)
Chapter 17. Reflections on a Three-Legged Chair: Sundials, "Family Pieces," and Political Culture in Pre-Revolutionary New York
Notes
Index

About the Author

Neil Kamil is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

Well-researched tome that is 'the story of a subterranean culture on the move, its membership fragmented by chronic warfare, exclusion, and political instability and actively in search of new modes of security.' Maine Antique Digest Imaginative and innovative treatment of the French Reformation. Renaissance Quarterly This lavish volume presents a wide-ranging and complex reading of its rather amorphous subject. -- Carla Gardina Pestana Journal of American History Fortress of the Soul demands deep respect from its readers... quite evidently the product of decades of scholarly labor. -- Glenn Adamson Studies in the Decorative Arts Ambitious in its goals, complex in its interpretation and methodology, and groundbreaking in its approach. -- Gayle K. Brunelle Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History Fortress of the Soul... opens up prospects for new directions in early American scholarship. -- Mark A. Peterson William and Mary Quarterly Throughout, the Fortress of the Soul displays considerable erudition and substantial energy. -- Raymond A. Mentzer Sixteenth Century Journal It is clear that this study will be a landmark study, a monument in the intellectual and material history of the early modern Atlantic world. -- John L. Brooke Winterthur Portfolio Kamil's innovative historical monograph richly deserves to be described as interdisciplinary. Journal of Interdisciplinary History A monumental work on a number of levels. -- Mary Henninger-Voss Technology and Culture A brilliant, controversial book, full of fireworks, some real Huguenot rockets, and some metaphysical damp squibs. -- Mark Greengrass Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland