How did warrior nobles’ practices of violence shape provincial society and the royal state in early seventeenth-century France? Warrior nobles frequently armed themselves for civil war in southern France during the troubled early seventeenth century. These bellicose nobles’ practices of violence shaped provincial society and the royal state in early modern France. The southern French provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc suffered almost continual religious strife and civil conflict between 1598 and 1635, providing an excellent case for investigating the dynamics of early modern civil violence. Warrior Pursuits constructs a cultural history of civil conflict, analyzing in detail how provincial nobles engaged in revolt and civil warfare during this period. Brian Sandberg’s extensive archival research on noble families in these provinces reveals that violence continued to be a way of life for many French nobles, challenging previous scholarship that depicts a progressive “civilizing” of noble culture. Sandberg argues that southern French nobles engaged in warrior pursuits—social and cultural practices of violence designed to raise personal military forces and to wage civil warfare in order to advance various political and religious goals. Close relationships between the profession of arms, the bonds of nobility, and the culture of revolt allowed nobles to regard their violent performances as “heroic gestures” and “beautiful warrior acts.” Warrior nobles represented the key organizers of civil warfare in the early seventeenth century, orchestrating all aspects of the conduct of civil warfare—from recruitment to combat—according to their own understandings of their warrior pursuits. Building on the work of Arlette Jouanna and other historians of the nobility, Sandberg provides new perspectives on noble culture, state development, and civil warfare in early modern France. French historians and scholars of the Reformation and the European Wars of Religion will find Warrior Pursuits engaging and insightful.

Rafe Blaufarb examines the interwoven problems of taxation and social privilege in this treatment of the contention over fiscal privilege between the seigneurial nobility and the tax-payers of Provence

The basic rules and implications of every state's system of government provide an authoritative and objective basis to guide and judge the actions of the state's decision makers, including courts. Christopher Taucar provides a detailed history of the British system's development from state power being exercised by centralized royal courts to its present-day distinct legislative, judicial, and executive bodies with diverse powers. The British System of Government and Its Historical Development fills a large and important gap in contemporary understandings of British legal and political history by providing a broad overview of a system that influenced political systems across the world. The main constitutional settlements are examined, including the development of parliamentary sovereignty, courts, and the common law, emphasizing the supremacy of law and natural law. Thus, the findings question the assumptions held by many contemporary scholars and judges by reaffirming the centuries-old view of the supremacy of law as an objective and external standard. The British System of Government and Its Historical Development argues that knowing this system is vital not only to our understanding of systems of government in Britain and elsewhere, but also as the basis to hold governments accountable to their most basic rules and imperatives.

An examination of kings' courts and lords' courts in Normandy that opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France. Hidden deep in the countryside of France lay early modern Europe's largest bureaucracy: twenty- to thirty-thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial courts that served more than eighty-five percent of the king's subjects. The crowncourts and lords' courts were far more than arenas of litigation, in the modern sense. They had become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who controlled the villages, towns, and bailiwicks of France. Yet even as the centralizing state was reaching its zenith under Louis XIV, the king's largest permanent bureaucracy became increasingly alienated and cut adrift from the crown, many decades before the French Revolution. In The King's Bench, Zoë Schneider vividly brings to life the teeming world of the local courts, with their magistrates and jailers, townspeople and peasants. Together they contested that vital border where the private world of families and property collided with the public commonwealth. Schneider chronicles the transformation of local governance after the mid-seventeenth century, as judges and their courts became the face of public order in the countryside. With this richly detailed local study of Normandy in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, Zoë Schneider opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France. Zoë A. Schneider has taught at Georgetown University and with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.