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This book investigates the reasons why the Catholic population of Paris increasingly tolerated the minority Protestant Huguenot population between 1685 and 1789.
This “carefully argued and well-written study” examines French royal statecraft in the globalizing economy of the early modern Mediterranean (Choice). This is the story of how the French Crown and local institutions accommodated one another as they sought to forge acceptable political and commercial relationships. Junko Thérèse Takeda tells this tale through the particular experience of Marseille, a port the monarchy saw as key to commercial expansion in the Mediterranean. At first, Marseille’s commercial and political elites were strongly opposed to the Crown’s encroaching influence. Rather than dismiss their concerns, the monarchy cleverly co-opted their civic traditions, practic...
A study of a religious organization for youths (aged 13-14) founded in Florence in 1411 that is firmly grounded on archival and contemporary documents, and covers a variety of fields of interest.
At the political and religious crossroads where John Calvin and the Protestant Reformation had taken hold, the Catholic Diocese of Geneva struggled to convert their Protestant neighbors back to the Catholic Church while maintaining a tradition of piety and a firm disciplinary hand. This critical study examines the success of Catholic counter-reform in key rural villages and looks at the significant role played by Bishop François de Sales, who had the unusual challenge of dealing with the two political authorities of Savoy and France. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, including visitation records of bishops and other diocesan documents, Jill Fehleison contributes to our understanding of early modern Catholicism as it addressed the challenges of coexisting with Protestantism.
How religious belief and practice shaped daily life in early modern France.
Palaces of Time resurrects the seemingly banal calendar as a means to understand early modern Jewish life. Elisheva Carlebach has unearthed a trove of beautifully illustrated calendars, to show how Jewish men and women both adapted to the Christian world and also forged their own meanings through time.
Last winter, a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo’s David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. With each incident, intellectuals must confront the unsettling dynamic between destruction and art. Renowned art historian Dario Gamboni is the first to tackle this weighty issue in depth, exploring specters of censorship, iconoclasm, and vandalism that surround such acts. Gamboni uncovers here a disquieting phenomenon that still thrives today worldwide. As he demonstrates through analyses of incidents occurring in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and Europe, a complex relationship exists among the evolution of...
Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century. The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance thei...
This wide-ranging and authoritative book fully synthesizes the French experience of religious change in the period stretching between the Reformation and the early Enlightenment.
This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French so...