A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test
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Jeannine Olson
Abstract
Anne Colladon, widow of Laurent de Normandie, financier of the mid-sixteenth century Genevan book trade, grappled with Laurent’s first wife’s estate and her adult stepsons’ claims on her estate. This case study of a famous family of French origin reveals complexities of early-modern systems of dowries and wills and problems for a second wife and her daughter. Normandie was a great hero of the Reformation because of his financing of Calvin’s publications and his dispatching of colporteurs carrying Bibles, catechisms, and Psalters into France. Anne was from a prominent family that fled France for Geneva (1550). She was an astute business woman and seemingly responsible mother but she inherited a complex situation after Normandie’s untimely death of the plague in 1569. She was left with financial problems and two stepsons in a blended family that included three children she had conceived with Laurent. It was not an easy mix.
Dedicated to Raymond Mentzer, archival historian “extraordinaire.”
Acknowledgement
Support thanks to Rhode Island College, RIC Alumni Association, and RIC Foundation.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Music, Rhetoric, and the Edification of the Church in the Reformation: The Humanist Reconstruction of Modulata Recitatio
- The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: A Sacred Community?
- Some Aspects of Jean Gerson’s Legal Influence in Sixteenth Century England: The Issue of Epikeia
- A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test
- The Civil Magistrates of Geneva and the Placement of Pastors in France on the Eve of the First War of Religion (1562)
- The Muses in Mourning: Identity and Classicism in Calvinist Heidelberg
- Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Music, Rhetoric, and the Edification of the Church in the Reformation: The Humanist Reconstruction of Modulata Recitatio
- The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: A Sacred Community?
- Some Aspects of Jean Gerson’s Legal Influence in Sixteenth Century England: The Issue of Epikeia
- A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test
- The Civil Magistrates of Geneva and the Placement of Pastors in France on the Eve of the First War of Religion (1562)
- The Muses in Mourning: Identity and Classicism in Calvinist Heidelberg
- Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory
