This book focuses on the public life of the ancien regime over the course of more than 300 years, from the late fifteenth century to the French Revolution. Not merely a narrative of that crowded history, it offers both a reconstruction and an analysis of a variety of religious and cultural movements, from the Renaissance and the Wars of Religion to the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, within the social and political context of Toulouse, a regional capital and a city with a strong local tradition. Professor Schneider takes up a wide range of early modern topics: popular culture, religious riots, municipal government, lay piety, and spiritual kinship, and he also treats learned academies, poor relief, social conflict, civic festivals, Jansenism, and urbanism. He discovers that despite the formation of a new elite in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—an elite composed of powerful royal magistrates attached to the Parlement of Toulouse and wealthy pastel merchants—the cultural and social ties binding this elite to the urban populace persisted, and the city's public life maintained its local character. Schneider shows that in the late seventeenth century, however, these "vertical" ties began to break down; elites began to turn away from local concerns, and Toulouse's public life was fundamentally transformed. He points to several factors influencing this transformation: the local effects of absolutism, the appeal of Parisian culture and academic life, and the increased social tensions between the prosperous and the poor. By the eighteenth century, Toulouse, once considered a municipal republic, had become a cosmopolitan city. Relating developments in Toulouse to changes occurring elsewhere in France, this book heightens our understanding of the complex cultural ramifications of the rise of the increasingly centralized, absolutist state.

For much of the sixteenth-century, France was wracked with religious strife, as the Wars of Religion pitted Catholic against Protestant. Whilst the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism ended much of the conflict, the ensuing peace highlighted the fractious nature of French Catholicism and the many competing threads that ran through it. This book investigates the gradual division of the French Catholic reform movement, often associated with those known as the 'devots' during the first half of the seventeenth century. Such division, it is argued, was emerging before the publication in France (1641) of the posthumous 'Augustinus' of Jansenius, not simply as a sequel to that. Those who were already distinguishing themselves from other 'devots' before that date were thus not yet identifiable as 'Jansenists'. Rather, the initial defining sentiment was increasing French hostility towards Jesuit involvement in Catholic Reform, both at home and abroad. Drawing on sources from the Jesuit archives in Rome and on Port-Royal material in Paris, the book begins with an investigation into the development of Catholic Reform in France, showing the problems that emerged before 1629 and the degree to which these were or were not resolved. The second half of the book contrasts the fragmentation of the movement in the years beyond 1629, and the context of Richelieu's new directions in French foreign policy. Covering a crucial period in the lead up to the establishment of an absolute monarchy in France, this book provides a rich new explanation of the development of French political and ecclesiastical history. It will be of interest not only to those studying the early modern period, but to anyone wishing to understand the roots of French secular society.

Examining Catholic activism in the south-west of France during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, this book argues - contrary to prevailing views - that the phenomenon was both widespread and militant even before the formation of the Catholic League in 1576. Whilst recent research has provided a far greater understanding of the Huguenot struggle for security and legitimacy, there has not been a correspondingly thorough investigation into the grass-roots Catholic reaction to this, and by dismissing episodes of pre-League Catholic militancy as limited and ephemeral, a distorted picture of French confessional conflict and rivalry is painted. Utilizing surviving material from the provincial archives at Bordeaux, Toulouse, Agen, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, this book provides ample evidence for placing the birth of Catholic activism in the period preceding the Wars of Religion, highlighting the confessional tensions that exploded throughout the 1540s and 1550s. As competing bands of religious enthusiasts, and municipal and court officials, fought first with words, then with weapons, for supremacy of the community in the towns of the south-west, a steady escalation of confrontation can be traced. Within this atmosphere of rising tension, it is shown how Catholic militancy mirrored the organizational and fund-raising capacity of their Protestant rivals, and how the local military elite rose to support their co-religionists at the outbreak of formal hostilities in 1562. The ascendancy of Catholic militants in key urban centres by 1570 would deal a fatal blow to Protestant plans for supremacy of the south-west.

This study takes the case of the Trencavel Viscounts of Beziers and Carcassonne, who were the only members of the higher nobility to lose their lands to the crusade, and argues that an understanding of how the Occitan nobility fared in the crusade years must be based in the context of the politics of the noble society of Languedoc, not only in the thirteenth century but also in the twelfth."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents readers with scholarship on public celebrations and popular culture throughout Mexican history. Leading scholars from the Americas and Great Britain discuss aspects of Mexico's popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The vast range of Mexican expression is examined, including Corpus Christi celebrations, New Spain, stone murals, and folk theater. Filling a need that becomes ever more pressing, this volume provides fresh insights.

Drawing on the municipal archives of eleven French provincial towns as well as other related sources, this book explores the links between local and national politics during the Wars of Religion of the later sixteenth century. It argues that the response of the French towns to the challenge of heresy, and later the Catholic League, was conditioned by local circumstances. Whilst previous work has been published on the urban dimensions to the Wars of Religion, few studies provide a study of an entire province, allowing as this book does, the opportunity to explicitly compare several towns. After a detailed topographical introduction, placing in context the towns of the region and describing their differing urban constitutions, the following chapters deal with the crisis points of the Wars of Religion. This book sits squarely in the forefront of one of the dominant themes in the historiography of early modern France: the importance of the local community and local elites in political structures and political life. As such, it will prove fruitful reading for all scholars with an interest in early modern French urban and political culture.

Jean Bodin was a figure of great importance in European intellectual history, known as a jurist, associate of kings and courtiers in sixteenth-century France, and author of influential works in the fields of constitutional and social thought, historical writing, witchcraft, and a great deal else besides. Best known for his contribution to formulating the modern doctrine of sovereignty, Bodin was a scholar of exceptional range, whose works provoked controversy in his own time and have continued to do so down the centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper described him as 'the Aristotle, the Montesquieu of the sixteenth century, the prophet of comparative history, of political theory, of the philosophy of law, of the quantitative theory of money, and of so much else'. Much has been written on Bodin and his ideas, but in this new intellectual biography, Howell A. Lloyd presents the first rounded treatment of the thinker and his times, his writings (major and minor), and his ideas in their contemporary context, as well as in that of broader intellectual traditions.