France In The Sixteenth Century

Both the golden age of the Renaissance state and the catastrophic era of the Wars of Religion, this fascinating period in French history has been oddly neglected by English-language historians. Professor Baumgartner's book fills a major gap in the textbook market: an accessible, fully current account which covers the principal political, economic and cultural themes from Francois I's successful centralization of the state, through France's near prostration under the Catholic-Huguenot civil war, and ending with the accession of Henri IV.

Must a gift be given freely? How can we tell a gift from a bribe? Are gifts always a part of human relations--or do they lose their power and importance once the market takes hold and puts a price on every exchange? These questions are central to our sense of social relations past and present, and they are at the heart of this book by one of our most intersting and renowned historians.

Both the golden age of the Renaissance state and the catastrophic era of the Wars of Religion, this fascinating period in French history has been oddly neglected by English-language historians. Professor Baumgartner's book fills a major gap in the textbook market: an accessible, fully current account which covers the principal political, economic and cultural themes from Francois I's successful centralization of the state, through France's near prostration under the Catholic-Huguenot civil war, and ending with the accession of Henri IV.

This study comprises the proceedings of a conference held in St Andrews in 1999 which gathered some of the most distinguished historians of the French book. It presents the 16th-century book in a new context and provides the first comprehensive view of this absorbing field. Four major themes are reflected here: the relationship between the manuscript tradition and the printed book; an exploration of the variety of genres that emerged in the 16th century and how they were used; a look at publishing and book-selling strategies and networks, and the ways in which the authorities tried to control these; and a discussion of the way in which confessional literature diverged and converged. The range of specialist knowledge embedded in this study will ensure its appeal to specialists in French history, scholars of the book and of 16th-century French literature, and historians of religion.

Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France engages the question of remembering from a number of different perspectives. It examines the formation of communities within diverse cultural, religious, and geographical contexts, especially in relation to the material conditions for producing texts and discourses that were the foundations for collective practices of memory. The Wars of Religion in France gave rise to numerous narrative and graphic representations of bodies remembered as icons and signifiers of the religious ’troubles.’ The multiple sites of these clashes were filled with sound, language, and diverse kinds of signs mediated by print, writing, and discourses that recalled past battles and opposed different factions. The volume demonstrates that memory and community interacted constantly in sixteenth-century France, producing conceptual frames that defined the conflicting groups to which individuals belonged, and from which they derived their identities. The ongoing conflicts of the Wars hence made it necessary for people both to remember certain events and to forget others. As such, memory was one of the key ideas in a period defined by its continuous reformulations of the present as a forum in which contradictory accounts of the recent past competed with one another for hegemony. One of the aims of Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France is to remedy the lack of scholarship on this important memorial function, which was one of the intellectual foundations of the late French Renaissance and its fractured communities.

Explores conceptions of politics in early modern France, and the controversies the word 'politique' attracted during the Wars of Religion.

A masterful new survey of sixteenth-century France which examines the vicissitudes of the French monarchy during the Italian Wars and the Wars of Religion. It explores how the advances made under a succession of strong kings from Charles VIII to Henri II created tensions in traditional society which combined with economic problems and emerging religious divisions to bring the kingdom close to disintegration under a series of weak kings from Francois II to Henri III. The political crisis culminated in France's first succession conflict for centuries, but was resolved through Henri IV's timely reconnection of dynastic legitimism with religious orthodoxy.