Il fit sa confession de foi avouantqu'il avoit beaucoup reçu et peu profité.Et comme on lui répondait qu'il avoit fidèlement employé son talent:“Eh! qu'y a-t-il du mien?” s'écria-t-il.“ne dites pas moi, mais Dieu par moi.”— Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, on his deathbed, 1623The strange case of French Calvinist women writers poses one of the more puzzling questions that scholars face in their efforts to reanimate the lost or silenced voices of early modern women. The pool of possibilities for the examination of these Huguenot writers is paltry, due to many factors, all of which obstruct a clear hearing of their voices. Admittedly, since women writers are relatively rare in sixteenth-century Calvinism, there is an inevitable temptation to stretch meager evidence too far.
George McTaggart's house sits across the road from the tiny clapboard Baptist church, the only landmark in the postage-stamp sized, rural town of Saint-Blaise, Québec, a town where, as inhabitants confide, “Protestants and Catholics have always had a love-hate relationship.” McTaggart will probably be mowing the long fields behind his narrow farm with his tractor, just as he was the day we met him. He speaks English with a Scots brogue and French with the characteristic Québecois broadness. He has wise eyes, wrinkles like a topographic map, and a mischievous sense of humor. Pushing eightyfive, he remembers virtually every event in his long life, every person he has ever known, but he speaks with special animation about someone he never met, a strong-minded, charismatic, independent Swiss woman named Henriette Feller.
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