How a region sells - and misrepresents - its past

The first thirteen centuries in France saw a new religion, a new language, new learning institutions and the beginnings of a great nation. The region evolved from an amalgamation of warring Gallic tribes to the most powerful kingdom in Europe and the secular arm of the Church of Rome. Much of these first centuries are unfairly regarded as The Dark Ages. There were, propitiously, redeeming periods of light during these times, strongly influenced by an ever-present Church and the will of extraordinary leaders. Many things we experience or hear about today and many places we visit are symbolic markers of the history of France during that period--they have been called ""lieux de memoire."" If you are not familiar with this history and these lieux, that should not prevent you from enjoying la belle France, but if you anchor your discovery in a historical context, your experience will be more profound and memorable. Hence this book.

In this celebrated analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio presents a view of the author as America's first significant intellectual historian. Colacurcio shows that Hawthorne's fiction responds to a wide range of sermons, pamphlets, and religious tracts and debates--a variety of moral discourses at large in the world of provincial New England. Informed by comprehensive historical research, the author shows that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio shows, Hawthorne did not merely borrow from the historical texts he deliberately studied; rather, he is best understood as having written history. In The Province of Piety, originally published in 1984 (Harvard University Press), Hawthorne is seen as a moral historian working with fictional narratives--a writer brilliantly involved in examining the moral and political effects of Puritanism in America and recreating the emotional and cultural contexts in which earlier Americans had lived.