A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France
A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

Author: William Beik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-14

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0521883091

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A magisterial history of French society between the end of the middle ages and the Revolution by one of the world's leading authorities on early modern France. Using colorful examples and incorporating the latest scholarship, William Beik conveys the distinctiveness of early modern society and identifies the cultural practices that defined the lives of people at all levels of society. Painting a vivid picture of the realities of everyday life, he reveals how society functioned and how the different classes interacted. In addition to chapters on nobles, peasants, city people, and the court, the book sheds new light on the Catholic church, the army, popular protest, the culture of violence, gendered relations, and sociability. This is a major new work that restores the ancien régime as a key epoch in its own right and not simply as the prelude to the coming Revolution.

Society and Culture in Early Modern France
Society and Culture in Early Modern France

Author: Natalie Zemon Davis

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780804709729

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These essays, three of them previously unpublished, explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition among the lower orders in sixteenth-century France. The result is a wide-ranging view of the lives and values of men and women (artisans, tradesmen, the poor) who, because they left little or nothing in writing, have hitherto had little attention from scholars. The first three essays consider the social, vocational, and sexual context of the Protestant Reformation, its consequences for urban women, and the new attitudes toward poverty shared by Catholic humanists and Protestants alike in sixteenth-century Lyon. The next three essays describe the links between festive play and youth groups, domestic dissent, and political criticism in town and country, the festive reversal of sex roles and political order, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The final two essays discuss the impact of printing on the quasi-literate, and the collecting of common proverbs and medical folklore by learned students of the "people" during the Ancien Régime. The book includes eight pages of illustrations.

The State in Early Modern France
The State in Early Modern France

Author: James B. Collins

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-09-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521387248

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A major new textbook examining the nature of the state and the monarchy in early modern France.

Early Modern France 1560-1715
Early Modern France 1560-1715

Author: Robin Briggs

Publisher: Oxford [etc.] : Oxford University Press

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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This book provides a comprehensive interpretation of a decisive period in French history, from the chaos of the Wars of Religion to the death of Louis XIV. Briggs combines discussion of the major political events with an analysis of the long-term factors which decisively molded the evolution of both state and society. He concentrates especially on identifying and linking changes in economic, social, and political life, as well as discussing the changes in religious attitudes and the nature of popular beliefs.

Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France
Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France

Author: Philip Benedict

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-06-28

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1134892195

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The major changes experienced by France's cities over the period from the end of the middle ages to the eve of the Revolution are explored by six French and North American historians.

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France
Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France

Author: Kate van Orden

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 022676799X

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In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society. She constructs a fresh account of music's importance in promoting the absolutism that the French monarchy would fully embrace under Louis XIV, uncovering many hitherto unpublished ballets and royal ceremonial performances. The great pressure on French noblemen to take up the life of the warrior gave rise to bellicose art forms such as sword dances and equestrian ballets. Far from being construed as effeminizing, such combinations of music and the martial arts were at once refined and masculine-a perfect way to display military prowess. The incursion of music into riding schools and infantry drills contributed materially to disciplinary order, enabling the larger and more effective armies of the seventeenth century. This book is a history of the development of these musical spheres and how they brought forth new cultural priorities of civility, military discipline, and political harmony. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France effectively illustrates the seminal role music played in mediating between the cultural spheres of letters and arms.

Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France
Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France

Author: John D. Lyons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317168690

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In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France
The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France

Author: Roger Chartier

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0691657076

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The first book-length presentation of Roger Chartier's work in English, this volume provides a vivid example of the new directions of cultural history in France. These essays probe the impact of printing on all social classes of the ancien regime and reveal the surprising range of ways in which texts and pictures were used by audiences with different levels of literacy. Professor Chartier demonstrates that those who attempted to regulate behavior and thought on behalf of church or state, for example, were well aware of the wide influence of the printed word. He finds fascinating evidence of fundamental processes of social control in texts such as the guides to a good death or the treatises on norms of civility, rules that originated at court but that were eventually appropriated in various forms by society as a whole. Essays on the evolution on the fete, on the cahiers de doleances of 1789, and on the early paperback genre known as the Bibliotheque bleue complete the picture of what people read and why and of what was published and what influenced the publishers. These essays offer a critical reappraisal of the complex connections between the new culture of print and the oral and ritual-oriented forms of traditional culture. The reader will discover essential patterns of the cultural evolution of France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Roger Chartier is Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Warrior Pursuits
Warrior Pursuits

Author: Brian Sandberg

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0801899699

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How did warrior nobles’ practices of violence shape provincial society and the royal state in early seventeenth-century France? Warrior nobles frequently armed themselves for civil war in southern France during the troubled early seventeenth century. These bellicose nobles’ practices of violence shaped provincial society and the royal state in early modern France. The southern French provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc suffered almost continual religious strife and civil conflict between 1598 and 1635, providing an excellent case for investigating the dynamics of early modern civil violence. Warrior Pursuits constructs a cultural history of civil conflict, analyzing in detail how provincial nobles engaged in revolt and civil warfare during this period. Brian Sandberg’s extensive archival research on noble families in these provinces reveals that violence continued to be a way of life for many French nobles, challenging previous scholarship that depicts a progressive “civilizing” of noble culture. Sandberg argues that southern French nobles engaged in warrior pursuits—social and cultural practices of violence designed to raise personal military forces and to wage civil warfare in order to advance various political and religious goals. Close relationships between the profession of arms, the bonds of nobility, and the culture of revolt allowed nobles to regard their violent performances as “heroic gestures” and “beautiful warrior acts.” Warrior nobles represented the key organizers of civil warfare in the early seventeenth century, orchestrating all aspects of the conduct of civil warfare—from recruitment to combat—according to their own understandings of their warrior pursuits. Building on the work of Arlette Jouanna and other historians of the nobility, Sandberg provides new perspectives on noble culture, state development, and civil warfare in early modern France. French historians and scholars of the Reformation and the European Wars of Religion will find Warrior Pursuits engaging and insightful.

Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe
Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe

Author: Roger Chartier

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13:

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This book, by one of the most distinguished of contemporary cultural historians, examines the relationship between plays in performance and plays in print and the often tortuous transmission of texts from the theatre to the printing-house (and back again) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In exploring this theme Dr Chartier touches on a wide variety of examples and topics drawn from the golden age of European drama, including the work of Shakespeare and the Jacobean theatre, Lope de Vega, and Moli¦re: punctuation as a form of orality in written texts, memorial reconstruction of theatrical performances, authorship, ownership and piracy of printed plays, the functions of plays for audiences and for readers, the significance of performance history, manuscript marginalia as evidence for the cultural contexts of reception and interpretation. The result is a fascinating and thought-provoking study of the endlessly generative cultural instability of all texts and their material forms.