Author: Mark Greengrass Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199214905 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
A major scholarly re-evaluation of the central period in the French 'wars of religion', concentrating on the reactions of France's governing groups to these wars and drawing extensively on sources not hitherto examined to illuminate the sense of crisis that existed among the French governing elite at this time.
Author: Jotham Parsons Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454972 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 413
Book Description
Coinage and currency—abstract and socially created units of value and power—were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. In Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, Jotham Parsons investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise.The Cour des Monnaies, Parsons shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. Parsons's broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money's arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.
Author: Hilary Bernstein Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801442346 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
The sixteenth century was an important period of transition in France, in which antagonistic religious beliefs led to prolonged civil wars and a growing state apparatus competed with medieval notions of political authority and the social order. Poitiers, a midsized provincial capital, actively experienced these tensions. Early known as a center of Reformed belief, it became a stronghold of ultra-Catholic sentiment by 1575. In examining sixteenth-century Poitiers, Hilary J. Bernstein argues that civic governments and the French monarchy enjoyed a mutually beneficial and reinforcing relationship rather than an antagonistic one; that disparate urban groups shared a political language for defining the identity and interests of the city that helped to balance the exclusive nature of urban government; and that French provincial cities did not suffer inevitable decline at the hands of the developing state but, instead, continued to help define the nature of early modern political culture. Though Poitiers continued to celebrate the traditions and institutions of local rule, it sought throughout the century to maintain a strong bond with the monarchy. Bernsteins meticulous research in the rich archives of Poitiers allows her to analyze early modern rhetorical culture and reveal the processes of daily decisionmaking. Using contemporary printed sources, she compares Poitiers to other cities and draws general conclusions about royal policies toward provincial cities. Between Crown and Community illustrates in precise and sometimes dramatic fashion the actual performance of politicsthe interaction of political identities, rhetorical strategies, and ritual practices with the civic traditions of the premodern urban world.
Author: Mark Greengrass
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Author: Charles Spencer Earl of Sunderland
Author: Jotham Parsons
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Author: Henry Huth
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Author: Hilary Bernstein