About

Following his project “Jews of the Somme,” www.jewsofthesomme.com Dr. David L. Rosenberg proposes a parallel project on the struggles of the Protestants of Amiens in that same city four centuries earlier. Though second in production, this project flows from the substance of Rosenberg’s earlier research in France in 1973-1974 for his Yale Ph.D. in History on the appeal of Protestantism to Amiens weavers and wool combers.  In the current Protestants of Amiens Project, David Rosenberg, a former archivist, brings to light unique documentary materials discovered through his research, and made available in English translations, offering both a comprehensive view of the minority population and a ”subject-outward” view of its adherents.

The forthcoming exhibit “The Early Protestants of Amiens, France, 1530-1625: Traces of their Lives,” to be debuted at the Pew Fine Arts Center Gallery at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania, January 24 - February 22, 2025, embodies this dual perspective. It examines the members of the Protestant movement as they were surveiled, categorized and persecuted as “heretics” by the powers that be in Amiens and Paris before and during the French Wars of Religion but also illuminates them through their own words, deeds, and commitments as persons of faith. Though we lack any pictorial representation of these long ago women and men, for many we have the signatures or marks traced with their own hands which characteristically appear at the bottom of official acts of the Amiens notaries and other sources from the late 1570s onward. These personal signatures or marks of which more than 105 have been extracted and enlarged for this exhibit come to interact with the facts, scarce or plentiful, that we possess about their lives to form memorable individual configurations.