This short piece evokes some of the key arguments of the author’s doctoral thesis, ‘Proud Humility: Paradoxes of Representation in Huguenot Memoir’, defended in November 2023.  Some archival discoveries made during the doctoral research period are also described herein. This research focused on autobiographical documents written by Protestants who took refuge in a variety of European countries following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The corpus for investigation was comprised of three distinct sub-genres of Huguenot refugee writing. The focus is initially placed on accounts of women who were temporarily imprisoned, having been arrested amid attempts to cross the border into Switzerland. Secondly, an examination is made of the memoirs of those Protestants who experienced the hardship of Louis XIV’s galley ships. The third section of the thesis then directs its attention to the refugees who focused on cultural assimilation in their writing.

The thesis insists on the importance of these accounts as tools inspiring reflection and the interrogation of the self amid highly volatile circumstances. The theoretical framework of the research is therefore situated within the field of the history of emotions.