Author: Nicola Mary Sutherland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description

Author: Meredith Martin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059476
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, Meredith Martin tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden structures—most famously the faux-rustic, white marble dairy built for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles—have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. Martin challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and hermitages, pleasure dairies were crucial arenas for elite women to exercise and experiment with identity and power. Opening with Catherine de’ Medici’s lavish dairy at Fontainebleau (c. 1560), Martin’s book explores how French queens and noblewomen used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers. Pleasure dairies also provided women with a site to promote good health, by spending time in salubrious gardens and consuming fresh milk. Illustrated with a dazzling array of images and photographs, Dairy Queens sheds new light on architecture, self, and society in the ancien régime.

Author: Richard Bonney
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040242774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This selection of articles is organized around three broad themes: the nature of the governing system in France (’Absolutism’); the political crisis of the mid-17th-century (the ’Fronde’); and the development of royal finance. The author first considers the growth of the French state in its ideological and institutional aspects, then the opposition such developments provoked, much centred on the figure of Cardinal Mazarin. In the last section particular attention is given to fiscal history, including a comparison of mid-18th-century France with the other states of Europe. Professor Bonney would argue that the ’fiscal imperative’, the increased requirements posed by the costs of war, and the long-term consequences of fiscal growth may be seen as one of the decisive factors in the development of the modern state.

Author: Jonathan Spangler
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754658603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The princes étrangers were an influential group of courtiers in early modern France, none more so than the princes from the Lorraine-Guise family. This book examines the Lorraine-Guise at the court of Louis XIV and their renewed power, wealth and influence after the turbulent Wars of Religion. It is a substantial contribution to scholarship in court studies and will add greatly to debates on the nature of crown-noble relations in the era of absolutism.

Author: Susan Broomhall
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004461817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
An innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations.

Author: Una McIlvenna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317059328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt. Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage. Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.

Author: R J Knecht
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317896866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Catherine de' Medici (1519-89) was the wife of one king of France and the mother of three more - the last, sorry representatives of the Valois, who had ruled France since 1328. She herself is of preeminent importance to French history, and one of the most controversial of all historical figures. Despised until she was powerful enough to be hated, she was, in her own lifetime and since, the subject of a "Black Legend" that has made her a favourite subject of historical novelists (most notably Alexandre Dumas, whose Reine Margot has recently had new currency on film). Yet there is no recent biography of her in English. This new study, by a leading scholar of Renaissance France, is a major event. Catherine, a neglected and insignificant member of the Florentine Medici, entered French history in 1533 when she married the son of Francis I for short-lived political reasons: her uncle was pope Clement VII, who died the following year. Now of no diplomatic value, Catherine was treated with contempt at the French court even after her husband's accession as Henry II in 1547. Even so, she gave him ten children before he was killed in a tournament in 1559. She was left with three young boys, who succeeded to the throne as Francis II (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74) and Henry III (1574-89). As regent and queen-mother, a woman and with no natural power-base of her own, she faced impossible odds. France was accelerating into chaos, with political faction at court and religious conflict throughout the land. As the country disintegrated, Catherine's overriding concern was for the interests of her children. She was tireless in her efforts to protect her sons' inheritance, and to settle her daughters in advantageous marriages. But France needed more. Catherine herself was both peace-loving and, in an age of frenzied religious hatred, unbigoted. She tried to use the Huguenots to counterbalance the growing power of the ultra-Catholic Guises but extremism on all sides frustrated her. She was drawn into the violence. Her name is ineradicably associated with its culmination, the Massacre of St Bartholomew (24 August 1572), when thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and elsewhere. To this day no-one knows for certain whether Catherine instigated the massacre or not, but here Robert Knecht explores the probabilities in a notably level-headed fashion. His book is a gripping narrative in its own right. It offers both a lucid exposition of immensely complex events (with their profound imact on the future of France), and also a convincing portrait of its enigmatic central character. In going behind the familiar Black Legend, Professor Knecht does not make the mistake of whitewashing Catherine; but he shows how intractable was her world, and how shifty or intransigent the people with whom she had to deal. For all her flaws, she emerges as a more sympathetic - and, in her pragmatism, more modern - figure than most of her leading contemporaries.

Author: Jeffrey Merrick
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This collection of revised and previously unpublished articles explores aspects of the history of monarchy, family, suicide, and sodomy in early modern, especially eighteenth-century France. The durable but flexible traditions of the Ancien Régime not only sanctified but also limited the prerogatives of sovereigns over subjects and husbands/fathers/masters over wives, children, and servants. Private and public weakness and excess in those who ruled the kingdom and the household undermined their masculinity and legitimacy. Merrick analyzes expositions of and contestations about the origins, extent, and use and abuse of gendered royal and domestic authority in a wide variety of sources, including descriptions of beehives, pamphlets published during the Fronde, statues of Louis XV, police reports about disturbed subjects, parlementary remonstrances, Jansenist polemics, essays submitted to the Academy of Berlin, the memoirs of the marquis de Bombelles, and complaints of wives against husbands and marital separation cases in Paris. In principle, kings and husbands/fathers/masters preserved order in the kingdom and the household by controlling themselves as well as their subordinates. In practice, they sometimes provoked disorder and failed in many ways to prevent and punish disorder. Merrick’s articles on suicide and sodomy not only revisit some celebrated incidents (the deaths of the dragoons Bourdeaux and Humain, who shot themselves on 25 December 1773) and notorious characters (the “pederast” marquis de Villette and “tribade” mademoiselle de Raucourt) but also document patterns in the lives and deaths of ordinary men and women. Based, like the articles on marital disputes, on extensive archival research, they investigate changes in jurisprudence and mentalities during the eighteenth century. As a whole, this volume challenges simplistic assumptions about absolutism, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Given the number of subjects addressed and the nature of the issues involved, the engaging articles will interest many readers.

Author: N. M. Sutherland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0826464017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The period following the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis and the death of Henry II in 1559 is of crucial importance in the history of France and of Europe; yet little that is satisfactory has been written about it. To this, the work of Dr N.M. Sutherland is a notable exception. Princes, Politics and Religion, 1547-1589 brings together all her major articles, not already reprinted elsewhere, together with an introduction and two completely new contributions. While mainly focusing on the immediate origins and early decades of the French civil wars, she also deals in a wider sense with the great ideological struggle of the sixteenth century.

Author: Alessio Assonitis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.