The Return Of Martin Guerre Sparknotes

Upon the backdrop of the Protestant reformation Natalie Davis' book The Return of Martin Guerre serves as a detailed and well-researched account of Martin Guerre and his impostor, Arnaud du Tilh as well as peasant life in 16th century southwestern France. Although historically conservative and catholic, these same peasants would become intrigued by the promise of political/social liberation and freedom from ecclesiastical landlords, peasants would become very enticed by the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Guerre, after stealing grain from his family, disappeared in 1548. Eight years later a man returned home to Martin’s wife, Bertrande de Rols. This man, Arnaud du Tilh, began imposing as Martin even with Bertrande’s knowledge of the truth.

Bertrande became a willing participant in Arnaud’s act of deception.
Arnaud and Bertrande were intrigued with Protestantism and the Reformed Church seeing it as a change to provide justification for their new relationship.

Although The Reformation was just beginning, it began to quickly spread along the trade routes that dotted southwestern France - it allowed for marriage without a priest or other witness. The conservative marriage laws of Artigat at the time were that “…a wife was not free to remarry in the absence of her husband, no matter how many years had elapsed, unless she had certain proof of his death.” (Davis, p. 33). However new Reformation marriage laws were passed in Reformed Geneva – “There [in Geneva], marriage was no longer a sacrament; a wife abounded by her husband, ‘without the wife having given him any occasion or being in way guilty’ could after a year of inquiry obtain from the Consistory a divorce and permission to remarry” (Davis, p. 50), such reformed laws would appeal to abandoned peasant wives and the new couple alike. Protestantism went to also encourage direct counsel with God, eliminating confession as a necessity and allowing Arnaud and Bertrande to justify their relationship more or less independently from the adamant strict moral laws of the Catholic

Church.
Where the Reformation would go on to change the marriage laws that the Catholic Church adamantly established it would also chip away at the political power of the papacy too. The life of a peasants in Europe abroad wasn’t well. High taxes and the ownership of all land belonging to nobles, and rich families left peasants as slaves who worked the land without receiving any benefit from it. Peasants faced the heaviest taxes. The Reformation people in all layers of the social hierarchy—serfs or city dwellers, guildsmen or farmers, knights and aristocrats—started to question the established hierarchy