Writing to Undo: Protestation as a Mode of Early Modern Resistance.

This article examines "protestation" as a distinctive genre of written acts used in the early modern period to resist various forms of coercion—familial, economic, religious, and political—across social strata and geographic regions. Protestations were assertive, performative documents that declared opposition to harmful occurrences and sought to nullify their consequences, often produced with the mediation of notaries to gain legal and material authority. Through diverse case studies from ancien régime France and beyond, including micro-level familial disputes and macro-political crises such as the French regency succession conflicts, the study reveals protestation as a versatile mode of resistance that bridged private and public spheres. The article highlights the temporal dimension of protestation, emphasizing its role in preserving claims for future redress amid immediate constraints, and underscores its significance for historians of gender, law, politics, and material culture.