Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women of the middling and lower levels of society left no letters or diaries. Criminal courts and magistrates kept few records of their testimonies, and no ecclesiastical court records are known to survive for the French Roman Catholic Church between 1540 and 1667. For the most part, we cannot hear the voices of ordinary French women—but this study allows us to. Based on 1,200 cases brought before the consistories—or moral courts—of the Huguenot church of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615, this book allows us to access ordinary women’s everyday lives: their speech, behaviour, and attitudes to love, faith, marriage, friendship, and sex. Women appeared frequently before the consistory because one of the chief functions of moral discipline was the regulation of sexual sin, for which women were thought to be primarily responsible. The registers include over a thousand testimonies by and about women. Women also featured prominently because of an unintended consequence of the system: women quickly learnt how to use the consistory. The registers therefore offer unrivalled evidence of women’s agency in a range of different contexts and let us see how independent, self-determining, and vocal women could be in an age when they had limited legal rights, little official power, and few prospects. This book suggests we need to reconceptualize female power: it was not just hidden, manipulative, and devious, but also far more public than previously recognized. Women emerge as more resourceful, more violent, and more powerful than we ever thought.