Ethics and Politics in Seventeenth Century France
Contributions by Mark Bannister, Madeline Bertaud, Simone Bertière, Richard Bonney, William Brooks, Keith Cameron, John Campbell, David Clarke, Yves Coirault, John Cruickshank, Edward Forman, C. J. Gossip, Noémi Hepp, William D. Howarth, Colin Jones, Margaret McGowan, Wendy Perkins, Henry Phillips, Jean Rohou, Guy Snaith, Elizabeth Woodrough Edited by Keith Cameron, Elizabeth Woodrough
Publication date:
01 July 1996Length of book:
274 pagesPublisher
University of Exeter PressDimensions:
229x144mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780859894661
This collection of twenty essays, of which five are in French, written by leading English and French literary and historical scholars, deconstructs the ethical and political framework supporting and circumscribing the actions of a powerful elite in France between the early 1600s and the final years of Louis XIV’s reign. Reflecting a diversity of individual concerns, the essays are divided into two interrelated parts in acknowledgement of the complex tensions between codes of behaviour and political practice in the different theatrical spaces of government in the real and imaginary world. Together these contributions offer a radical double questioning of the absolute values in which were founded the authority of Church, King and nobility.
The dual political and moral theme of this study is not new, but it is one that has always been highly regarded by historians and literary specialists alike. It is in fact one of the classic preoccupations of seventeenth-century studies, to which critics must always return, and to which students must always address themselves, if they are to comprehend the intellectual core of seventeenth-century French studies.
"The editors are to be complimented for assembling this international team of scholars, who have explored a theme which is central to the cultural and political history of seventeenth-century France." French History Vol. 12, No. 3 1998 ". . .this collection contains much that will interest the historian and the literary scholar." (English Historical Review, April 1998)