Henry Martyn Baird

Henry Martyn Baird built his historical scholarship around the French Reformation and the experience of the Huguenots. A professor at New York University, he produced a connected body of work that included histories of the rise, struggle, and later fortunes of French Protestantism, as well as a study of Theodore Beza. The Strength and Weakness of the Edict of Nantes grew from an address delivered to the Huguenot Society of America for the edict's three-hundredth anniversary. In it, Baird weighs the protections granted to French Protestants against the limits and vulnerabilities built into the settlement. The subject suited his broader method, which joined institutional history to close attention to religious liberty, political authority, and changes imposed through royal policy. His writing helped English-language readers follow a long historical sequence instead of presenting the Edict of Nantes as an isolated decree. The address is therefore a concise entry into the questions that occupied his larger histories.