A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France PDF Author: William Beik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521883091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France PDF Author: William Beik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521883091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 State in Early Modern France

The State in Early Modern France PDF Author: James B. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521387248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
This major new textbook addresses fundamental questions about the nature of the state in early modern Europe through an analysis of the most important continental state, France. Professor Collins abandons the traditional formulation of the absolute monarchy, and presents in its place a state that evolved to meet the needs of the French elites. Collins offers a detailed analysis of French society, to provide the broader context for the development of the French state. The model that emerges from his synthesis is one that relied more on persuasion and congruity of influence than on arbitrary authority, and Collins argues that fundamental changes in French society made the monarchical, ministerial state a dangerous anachronism by the 1750s, leading to political impasse by the second half of the eighteenth century. Collins offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the state relevant to historians and students of political thought.

The Shock of the Ancient

The Shock of the Ancient PDF Author: Larry F. Norman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226591506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

Natural History in Early Modern France

Natural History in Early Modern France PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004375708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Natural History in Early Modern France offers a longue durée account of recurring poetic structures of the genre through case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the eve of the nineteenth century. These case studies reveal the lasting epistemic importance of bookish knowledge and commonplacing in the natural-historical description from Belon to Buffon. They also highlight the French reception of Baconianism. Natural History in Early Modern France makes a case for the literary status of the genre by attending to the permanence of its 'Plinian' features, such as wonders. Natural history was not only concerned with increasingly rational modes of ordering natural particulars: this book reveals its enduring social, affective, spiritual, and aesthetic underpinnings. Contributors are: Peter Anstey, Susan Broomhall, Isabelle Charmantier, Arlette Fruet, Raphaële Garrod, Paul Gibbard, Dana Jalobeanu, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Stéphane Schmitt, Paul J. Smith, and Stéphane Van Damme.

Society and Culture in Early Modern France

Society and Culture in Early Modern France PDF Author: Natalie Zemon Davis
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804709729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France PDF Author: Donna Bohanan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350317357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyses the evolving relationship between the French monarchy and the French nobility in the early modern period. New interpretations of the absolutist state in France have challenged the orthodox vision of the interaction between the crown and elite society. By focusing on the struggle of central government to control the periphery, Bohanan links the literature on collaboration, patronage and taxation with research on the social origins and structure of provincial nobilities. Three provinical examples, Provence, Dauphine and Brittany, illustrate the ways in which elites organised and mobilised by vertical ties (ties of dependency based on patronage) were co-opted or subverted by the crown. The monarchy's success in raising more money from these pays d'etats depended on its ability to juggle a set of different strategies, each conceived according to the particularity of the social, political and institutional context of the province. Bohanan shows that the strategies and expedients employed by the crown varied from province to province; conceived on an individual basis, they bear the signs of ad hoc responses rather than a gradnoise plan to centralise.

Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism

Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism PDF Author: Phillip Mitsis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197522009
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 848

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE), though often despised for his materialism, hedonism, and denial of the immortality of the soul during many periods of history, has at the same time been a source of inspiration to figures as diverse as Vergil, Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, and Bentham. This volume offers authoritative discussions of all aspects of Epicurus's philosophy and then traces out some of its most important subsequent influences throughout the Western intellectual tradition. Such a detailed and comprehensive study of Epicureanism is especially timely given the tremendous current revival of interest in Epicurus and his rivals, the Stoics. The thirty-one contributions in this volume offer an unmatched resource for all those wishing to deepen their knowledge of Epicurus' powerful arguments about happiness, death, and the nature of the material world and our place in it. At the same time, his arguments are carefully placed in the context of ancient and subsequent disputes, thus offering readers the opportunity of measuring Epicurean arguments against a wide range of opponents--from Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics, to Hegel and Nietzsche, and finally on to such important contemporary philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The volume offers separate and detailed discussions of two fascinating and ongoing sources of Epicurean arguments, the Herculaneum papyri and the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Our understanding of Epicureanism is continually being enriched by these new sources of evidence and the contributors to this volume have been able to make use of them in presenting the most current understanding of Epicurus's own views. By the same token, the second half of the volume is devoted to the extraordinary influence of Epicurean doctrines, often either neglected or misunderstood, in literature, political thinking, scientific innovation, personal conceptions of freedom and happiness, and in philosophy generally. Taken together, the contributions in this volume offer the most comprehensive and detailed account of Epicurus and Epicureanism available in English.

Translating Nature

Translating Nature PDF Author: Jaime Marroquin Arredondo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Translating Nature recasts the era of early modern science as an age not of discovery but of translation. As Iberian and Protestant empires expanded across the Americas, colonial travelers encountered, translated, and reinterpreted Amerindian traditions of knowledge—knowledge that was later translated by the British, reading from Spanish and Portuguese texts. Translations of natural and ethnographic knowledge therefore took place across multiple boundaries—linguistic, cultural, and geographical—and produced, through their transmissions, the discoveries that characterize the early modern era. In the process, however, the identities of many of the original bearers of knowledge were lost or hidden in translation. The essays in Translating Nature explore the crucial role that the translation of philosophical and epistemological ideas played in European scientific exchanges with American Indians; the ethnographic practices and methods that facilitated appropriation of Amerindian knowledge; the ideas and practices used to record, organize, translate, and conceptualize Amerindian naturalist knowledge; and the persistent presence and influence of Amerindian and Iberian naturalist and medical knowledge in the development of early modern natural history. Contributors highlight the global nature of the history of science, the mobility of knowledge in the early modern era, and the foundational roles that Native Americans, Africans, and European Catholics played in this age of translation. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, Daniela Bleichmar, William Eamon, Ruth Hill, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Sara Miglietti, Luis Millones Figueroa, Marcy Norton, Christopher Parsons, Juan Pimentel, Sarah Rivett, John Slater.

Worlds of Natural History

Worlds of Natural History PDF Author: Helen Anne Curry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651031X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

A History of Modern France

A History of Modern France PDF Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315508206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
Organized chronologically, A History of Modern France presents a survey of the dramatic events that have punctuated French history, including the French Revolution, the upheavals of the 19th century, the world wars of the 20th century, and France's current role in the European Union. Written for today's undergraduate students, the text presents scholarly controversies in an unbiased manner and reflects the best of contemporary scholarship in French history.