Aristocracy in Provence PDF Download

Author: Patrick J. Geary
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aristocracy (Social class)
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Author: J. Russell Major
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040245692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Professor Major's aim in these articles has been to stimulate new assessments of the political, constitutional and social history of France in the 15th - 17th centuries. The first group examines the nature of the Renaissance monarchy, its strengths and its weaknesses and lack of effective controls. The next group explores the issue of why the Estates General, and some of the provincial estates, failed to develop in France, in marked contrast to the triumph of representative government in England. Finally, the author turns to the question of how the nobles succeeded in remaining the dominant social class. On the one hand, he traces the evolution of a patron-client relationship which compensated for the decay of the feudal ties of the Middle Ages; on the other, he challenges assumptions made of a decline in nobles' incomes, and contends that, so long as they held on to their lands and could escape the depredations of war, for most of the period they actually benefited from a marked increase in real income.

Author: Mark Motley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400861225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Focusing on the highest-ranking segment of the nobility, Mark Motley examines why a social group whose very essence was based on hereditary status would need or seek instruction and training for its young. As the "warrior nobility" adopted the courtly life epitomized by Versailles--with its code of etiquette and sensitivity to language and demeanor--education became more than a vehicle for professional training. Education, Motley argues, played both the conservative role of promoting assertions of "natural" superiority appropriate to a hereditary aristocracy, and the more dynamic role of fostering cultural changes that helped it maintain its power in a changing world. Based on such sources as family papers and correspondence, memoirs, and pedagogical treatises, this book explores education as it took place in the household, in secondary schools and riding academies, and at court and in the army. It shows how such education combined deference and solidarity, language and knowledge, and ceremonial behavior and festive disorder. In so doing, this work contends that education was an integral part of the aristocracy's response to absolutism in the French monarchy. Originally published in 1990. 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.

Author: Theodore Evergates
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Theodore Evergates provides the first systematic analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. He argues that three factors—the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family—were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity. Evergates mines the rich, varied, and in some respects unique collection of source materials from Champagne to provide a dynamic picture of a medieval aristocracy and its evolving symbiotic relationship with the counts. Count Henry the Liberal (1152-81) began the process of transforming a quasi-independent baronage accustomed to collegial governance into an elite of landholding families subordinate to the count and his officials. By the time Countess Jeanne married the future King Philip IV of France in 1284, the fiefholding families of Champagne had become a distinct provincial nobility. Throughout, it was the conjugal community, rather than primogeniture or patrilineage, that remained the core familial institution determining the customs regarding community property, dowry, dower, and partible inheritance. Those customs guaranteed that every lineage would survive, but frequently through a younger son or daughter. The life courses of women and men, influenced not only by social norms but also by individual choice and circumstance, were equally unpredictable. Evergates concludes that imposed models of "the aristocratic family" fail to capture the diversity of individual lives and lineages within one of the more vibrant principalities of medieval France.

Author: David Crouch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317878272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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For 300 years separate and mutually uncomprehending English and French historiographies have confused the history of medieval aristocracy. Unpicking the basic assumptions behind both national traditions, this book explains them, reconciles them and offers entirely new ways to take the study of aristocracy forward in both England and France. The Birth of Nobility analyses the enormous international field of publications on the subject of medieval aristocracy, breaking it down into four key debates: noble conduct, noble lineage, noble class and noble power. Each issue is subjected to a thorough review by comparing current scholarship with what a vast range of historical source material actually says. It identifies the points of divergence in the national traditions of each of these debates and highlights where they have been mutually incomprehensible. For students studying medieval Europe.

Author: James Russell Major
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780860782278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Articles originally published 1954-1987.

Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271058672
Category : Nobility
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France's past. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret's revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based.

Author: John W. Baldwin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801869129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Modern historians have generally approached the study of medieval society through chronicles, charters, and other documents composed in Latin by members of the clergy. Although these records may be satisfactory for studying the affairs of ecclesiastics, kings, and high barons, they are inadequate for assessing the major preoccupations of the aristocracy—living extravagantly, fighting, making love, entertaining, eating and dressing ostentatiously, and, generally, earning the disapproval of the clergy. In Aristocratic Life in Medieval France, the respected medieval scholar John Baldwin undertakes a study of this segment of society using, for the first time in nearly a century, the vernacular romances written exclusively for the amusement of aristocratic audiences. Rather than attempting to encompass all of Middle Age Europe, this study selects two writers, Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, and their four romances. It focuses with depth and specificity on the discrete area of northern France during a precise period, 1190–1230. Since Jean and Gerbert framed their fictional stories with contemporary and realistic features that could be recognized by their audiences, their works provide a wealth of detail on aristocratic living. Employing such literary techniques as "reality effects" and "horizons of expectations," Baldwin successfully discerns the historical content in these romance narratives.

Author: Donna Bohanan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807116241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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"Historians have long debated the idea that an aristocratic crisis occurred in France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The traditional view of the period has been that the established nobility, the noblesse d'epee, found itself dispossessed by the most successful members of the middle class, who were slowly emerging as a separate and powerful bureaucratic nobility, the noblesse de robe. Confident that a broad functional division separated these two groups, advocates of this view have maintained that differing patterns of wealth, marriage, and education further widened the gap between the old nobility and the new. According to these historians, the alleged decline of the old aristocracy permitted the expansion of royal authority with little effective opposition." "Donna Bohanan is one of an increasing number of scholars who challenge this theory. She maintains that the traditional interpretation, in concentrating on the nobility of northern France, has failed to take regional differences into account. In her convincing and clearly argued study of the nobility of seventeenth-century Aix-en-Provence, Bohanan shows that the established nobility was not displaced by the new aristocracy but rather was rejuvenated by the influx of new blood, new talents, and new money. This occurred chiefly, she claims, because the noble families of southern France, both old and new, lived mainly in urban settings, from which they were able and accustomed to exert influence in a number of areas: provincial politics, royal government, municipal life, and the local economy. Bohanan argues that the continued use of Roman law, the survival of large tracts of allodial property, and the imperfect development of vassalage further helped to set the Midi and its elites apart from the remainder of the kingdom. She asserts that such regional diversity was intrinsic to France in the early modern period and inevitably affected the strength of provincial nobilities." "For the purposes of her study, Bohanan analyzes in extensive detail the lives of five noble Aixois families--two representing the old aristocracy and three representing the new. She finds that in many ways--the acquisition of wealth, marriage and inheritance patterns, educational achievement, and civic responsibility--the old and new nobility acted in concordance with each other. In the final analysis it was the ability to adapt to changing circumstances that underlay the assimilation of both old and new families and permitted the resulting elite to maintain power in both a local and a regional context." "Bohanan's work, which draws heavily on quantitative analysis, makes a significant contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on the early modern French nobility."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: William Beik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521367820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This analysis of the provincial reality of absolutism argues that the relationship between the regional aristocracy and the crown was a key factor in influencing the traditional social system of seventeenth century France.