The first half of the book is a detailed study of how the salons influenced the development of literature. Beasley argues that many women were not only writers, they also served as critics for the literary sphere as a whole. In the second half of the book Beasley examines how historians and literary critics subsequently portrayed the seventeenth century literary realm, which became identified with the great reign of Louis XIV and designated the official canon of French literature. Beasley argues that in a rewriting of this past, the salons were reconfigured in order to advance an alternative view of this premier moment of French culture and of the literary masterpieces that developed out of it. Through her analysis of how the seventeenth century salon has been defined and transmitted to posterity, Beasley illuminates facets of France's collective memory, and the powers that constituted it in the past and that are still working to define it today.

Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s. Essays from prominent historians, musicologists, and art critics examine methods of non-verbal cultural expression through the broad themes of time, motion, the body, and global relations. Together, they show that seventeenth-century cultural expression was more than just an embryonic stage within Western artistic development. Instead, the contributors argue that this period marks some of the most profound changes in European subjectivities.

Fathers, Pastors and Kings is a first-class research monograph on an important issue in the history of the Catholic Church, exploring the conceptions of episcopacy that shaped the identity of the bishops of France in the wake of the reforming Council of T.

This volume is devoted to the variety of relationships that defined France and ist citizens. Man's connection with God is explored, the travel raelation and the particular hierarchy that exists between a director and a dramatist, respectively. These themes are further addressed in the articles that follow on relationships of authority, Catholics and Protestants, books and Illustrations, literary genres, travel relations, aesthetics and ethics and family relationships.

A study of the involvement of the Catholic Church in the cultural life of France in the seventeenth century.

The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.