Far from Home in Early Modern France
Far from Home in Early Modern France

Author: Marie Guyart de l'Incarnation

Publisher:

Published: 2022-06-04

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781649590541

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An engaging account of women's travels in the early modern period. This book showcases three Frenchwomen who ventured far from home at a time when such traveling was rare. In 1639, Marie de l'Incarnation embarked for New France where she founded the first Ursuline monastery in present-day Canada. In 1750, Madame du Boccage set out at the age of forty on her first "grand tour." She visited England, the Netherlands, and Italy where she experienced firsthand the intellectual liberty offered there to educated women. As the Reign of Terror gripped France, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin fled to America with her husband and their two young children, where they ran a farm from 1794 to 1796. The writings these women left behind detailing their respective journeys abroad represent significant contributions to early modern travel literature. This book makes available to anglophone readers three texts that are rich in both historical and literary terms.

Perilous Performances
Perilous Performances

Author: Katherine Crawford

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004-11-30

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780674029989

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In a book addressing those interested in the transformation of monarchy into the modern state and in intersections of gender and political power, Katherine Crawford examines the roles of female regents in early modern France. The reigns of child kings loosened the normative structure in which adult males headed the body politic, setting the stage for innovative claims to authority made on gendered terms. When assuming the regency, Catherine de Medicis presented herself as dutiful mother, devoted widow, and benign peacemaker, masking her political power. In subsequent regencies, Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria developed strategies that naturalized a regendering of political structures. They succeeded so thoroughly that Philippe d'Orleans found that this rhetoric at first supported but ultimately undermined his authority. Regencies demonstrated that power did not necessarily work from the places, bodies, or genders in which it was presumed to reside. While broadening the terms of monarchy, regencies involving complex negotiations among child kings, queen mothers, and royal uncles made clear that the state continued regardless of the king--a point not lost on the Revolutionaries or irrelevant to the fate of Marie-Antoinette.

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.

The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France
The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France

Author: Joseph Bergin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-11-25

Total Pages: 563

ISBN-13: 0300210469

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Rich in detail and broad in scope, this majestic book is the first to reveal the interaction of politics and religion in France during the crucial years of the long seventeenth century. Joseph Bergin begins with the Wars of Religion, which proved to be longer and more violent in France than elsewhere in Europe and left a legacy of unresolved tensions between church and state with serious repercussions for each. He then draws together a series of unresolved problems—both practical and ideological—that challenged French leaders thereafter, arriving at an original and comprehensive view of the close interrelations between the political and spiritual spheres of the time. The author considers the powerful religious dimension of French royal power even in the seventeenth century, the shift from reluctant toleration of a Protestant minority to increasing aversion, conflicts over the independence of the Catholic church and the power of the pope over secular rulers, and a wealth of other interconnected topics.

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.

Blood and Violence in Early Modern France
Blood and Violence in Early Modern France

Author: Stuart Carroll

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2006-05-25

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191516147

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The rise of civilized conduct and behaviour has long been seen as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners and codes of civility laid the foundations of civilized Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows we continue to romanticize violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted. Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance-taking in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Montaigne to Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but the militarization of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilizing process.

Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France
Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France

Author: Sarah Ferber

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0415212642

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In this highly original examination of possession by demons and their exorcism, Sarah Ferber offers a challenging study of one of the most intriguing phenomena of early modern Europe.

Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama
Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Jean-Christophe Mayer

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780874130003

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This wide-ranging collection of essays, written by leading specialists, furnishes previously unpublished evidence of France's role and importance in the early modern English literary and dramatic fields. Its chapter-length introduction offers an up-to-date critical presentation of the issues involved: representation, cultural identity, the construction of otherness, Frenchness, and the social and cultural dynamics of theater. The essays in the five sections of the book continue the debate with a series of in-depth studies touching on important critical themes such as intertextuality; old and new historicisms; language, semiotics, and nationhood; imagined geographies; and stereotypes and social satire. The book will appeal to students and specialists of Renaissance literature, to scholars working on the construction of national identity and will be required reading for anyone interested in cultural exchange or comparative literature. Jean-Christophe Mayer is a senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

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

Author: Ms Kathleen Wine

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1409475271

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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.

A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age
A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age

Author: Bert De Munck

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350078255

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Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant relative to political and social transformations. The size of the workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century: family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be a “renaissance” in the political, social and cultural contexts of work which set the stage for the technological developments to come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.