The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events they inevitably depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and collection of Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this is the first life of L'Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called "the storehouse of my curiosities." The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this study challenges historians' assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L'Estoile's prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life-writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilize rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L'Estoile's curiosity, this volume rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.

Spectralities in the Renaissance explores the history of the idea of ghosts in early modern Europe, moving away from thinking of them as a purely religious phenomenon, but as something rooted in cultural traditions, particularly in times of violence, where the living and the dead were in close proximity. Callard focuses on ancien regime France, to explore how the notion of ghosts and the supernatural played a part in France's early modern past, in such disparate areas as politics, law, natural philosophy, and the cultural and emotional history of everyday life.

During the French Wars of Religion, the nature and identity of politics was the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Exploring early modern French uses of the word 'politique' and the statesman who practised this art, this book investigates questions of language and of power over the course of a tumultuous century.

This volume offers fifteen chapters written by leading specialists which explore the range of ways in which the book industry negotiated conflicts and controversies in the early modern European world.

Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.