Seventeenth-Century France Research Articles

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging theAethiopicaacross the Channel

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

Jeanne Dumée as Astronomer and Woman in Seventeenth-Century France: The Myth and Her Lost Voice

As the author of a manuscript defending the Copernican system in 1680, Jeanne Dumée is often cited among the few women who practised astronomy in early-modern France. However, her reputation is largely founded on a myth that was in place even before her work was available to the public. After her manuscript resurfaced at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it took a long time for people to recognize that it hardly was original at all, a misunderstanding that is still leading some historians astray. In this paper, attempts are made to understand more about Dumée’s life and work, especially through a careful reading of her work and of her sources. It is argued that a careful rendering of Dumée’s voice may provide clues for a better understanding of astronomy’s place in early-modern women’s sociability.

Boursault's Career Strategies

Using Edme Boursault as a case study, this article explores the strategies used by authors in seventeenth-century France to advance their careers. It illustrates ways in which authors sought patronage, some of the positive and negative experiences of the patronage system, and the importance placed on ‘gift-giving’. It considers the ways authors used controversy and polemical literary quarrels as a means of generating interest in their works – a strategy of which Boursault made particular use. Finally, the article examines Boursault's strategic approach in extending his repertoire by writing in several genres to ensure his career was sustainable. Boursault was writing at a period of key changes in the French literary world, and also at a time of decline in royal patronage, so his career trajectory provides a useful analysis of a minor author's employment of a range of strategies to build and maintain a career as a writer at this time.

Micah True.Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France.

Micah True.<i>Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France</i>.

Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France. By Micah True.

<i>Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France</i>. By Micah True.

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715 by Jonathan Dewald

Dewald, Jonathan. Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0271 -06616-5. Pp. 264. $75. Perhaps it was du Bellay’s 1549 Défense that convened the writings on paper that established seventeenth-century France—fraught with nascent, unfolding conventions , and upstarts and false starts—upon stone. But none should expect the French scholar to approach history with the straight rigidity of the pillars that erected the French academies of the time, because history bends. Between paper and stone, we receive Dewald’s study of the Rohan family. His work not only thoroughly and successfully examines the particular social history of a prominent family in early-modern France, it also presents history as the resultant, organic movements of a thing thrown against diametrically opposed materials. Between time and physical space, for example, his work on seventeenth-century France eventually moves us to (re)interpret current notions of dominance and power in our society. Starting as early as the year 1000 and ending in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Dewald narrates the creation of the Rohan identity, a process that moved between imagined and real alliances with powerful ancestors; actual inner conflicts with living relatives; and political and religious principalities that threatened to out the family as untrustworthy of both credit and credibility. Dewald argues that the dominance of the Rohan family was not fed by blood, but by ideologies based on strategy, myth, persuasion, and luck. He also presents notions of change and stasis—otherwise considered as mutually incomprehensible—as opposing materials that form a symbiotic relationship, both fulfilling perpetual, requisite functions needed to guarantee their existence. It is, in fact, movements between seemingly diametric opposites that rhythmed the life of Duke Henri de Rohan, the central figure in the book. Between his father’s absence and his mother’s ballet; the politics of man, and the religions of God; between public spaces, and isolation; between war and exile; the noise of barbarous actions, and the silence of reasoned philosophy; somewhere between the tradition of sexism and sexual oppression, and the fear of powerful women, and the female sex, Dewald shows how Rohan’s reputation was written on paper, and his image carved in stone at Geneva’s St. Pierre Cathedral. Dewald’s work—for its keen attention to the multiple stimuli that influenced the Rohan’s particular history—is beneficial to social historians and contributes widely to early-modern French studies, namely to the fields of politics, economics, religion, and women and gender studies. Though Dewald does not venture to reveal specific applications of his work to current discourse on status, power, and identity, one discovers constructive interpretative frameworks to define privilège, a term that has become a part of popular cultural conversations today. Of particular importance, one notes that Dewald’s work, for the same reasons mentioned above, fully complements studies of French literature of the early-modern period. The representation of Henri de Rohan gives the courtly agitations of Madame de La Fayette’s 242 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 243 Princesse new meaning. The contexts of social mobility and dangerous ambition that staged the demise of La Fontaine’s grenouille, for example, are better understood. Sewanee: The University of the South Julian Ledford Duyker, Edward. Dumont d’Urville: Explorer & Polymath. Honolulu: UP of Hawai‘i, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8248-5139-2. Pp. 671. $69. Duyker’s book is a detailed account of French admiral Dumont d’Urville’s three voyages of exploration in the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. The first journey was on the ship Coquille in 1823–26; the second and third, under his own command, on the Astrolabe in 1827–29 and 1837–40. These expeditions were undertaken under the official sponsorship of the French royal governments of Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe, respectively. Besides being sent on missions of exploration, he was commissioned to find out about the circumstances surrounding the death of his predecessor La Pérouse and his crew in 1778. He was also entrusted with the secret task of scouting out possible locations for penal colonies similar...

Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence by Julia Prest

Julia Prest. Controversy in French Drama: Moliere's Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. xi + 247. $100.00. Julia Prest's Controversy in French Drama: Moliere's Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence elucidates standard narratives of the 1664-69 Tartuffe controversy and adds new dimensions by examining a wide swath of primary and secondary sources. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, political history, and religious history, Prest situates Tartuffe as central to power struggles in the early reign of Louis XIV. She convincingly argues that scholarship on the play has erred in framing Tartuffe's religious fervor as a true-false question. Though the play exposes Tartuffe as a faux devot (falsely pious hypocrite), he is never truly placed in contrast with a vrai devot (true believer). Instead, Prest contends, Moliere presents a dangerously secular worldview by proposing that moral goodness can exist outside the Church's sphere of influence. Chapter headings and subheadings help the reader to see the intricacies of this argument, which progresses through an absorbing narrative. Prest writes in an accessible style, showcasing a wry wit and a flair for building suspense. A major strength of this book is the author's ability to explain the political stakes of religious issues without getting bogged down in theological minutiae. Prest's expertise in the religious culture of seventeenth-century France is evidenced by her original and engaging readings of sermons of the period. Readers who specialize in dramatic literature will appreciate her laser-sharp focus on how religion relates to Tartuffe and to the consolidation of power by Louis XIV. Prest offers clear and nuanced explanations of the political problem of Jansenism, including its critiques of Jesuit casuistry and lay spiritual advisors, religious arguments for and against theatre, and the powerful yet unpopular Company of the Holy Sacrament. Readers who have a solid understanding of the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists will find fresh perspective here, while those who have never heard of Jansenism will learn enough to follow Prest's arguments. An Augustinian sect based in Port-Royal, Jansenism harshly criticized the alleged moral laxity of Jesuitism. Jansenists were perceived as a threat to the monarchy, largely because Jesuits held influential positions at court. The first chapter introduces these religious issues and several key players in the early reign of Louis XIV who would later become important in the Tartuffe controversy. Prest frames the young king as embodying a tension between mondain and devot: between worldliness and religious devotion. This tension is also typified by Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. A cousin to the king who was involved in the Fronde rebellion, Conti transformed from a young libertine to a man of extreme piety. After supporting Moliere's theatre troupe in the early 1650s, Conti wrote religiously inspired antitheatrical treatises in the 1660s. His conversion included joining the Company of the Holy Sacrament, a secret organization that aspired to exert religious influence on worldly matters and was best known for its efforts to ban Tartuffe. Prest carefully distinguishes the Company of the Holy Sacrament from Jansenism, despite their similar rejection of worldliness. Also introduced in the first chapter are Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer and Hardouin de Beaumont de Perefixe, who served as preceptors to the king during the 1640s and ended up on opposite sides of the Tartuffe affair in the 1660s. In this chapter and elsewhere, Prest mines the Memoires of Louis XIV for evidence of the King's own attitudes toward situations that might be relevant to the Tartuffe controversy. Here, Prest notes the King's desire, under the influence of his Jesuit confessor, to destroy Jansenism. Theatre was a site of contention among religious groups, with some praising its potential for moral education and others condemning it as immoral. …

Testing the Spirit of the Prophets: Jean Chéron, Melancholy and the “Illusions” of Dévotes

This article contends that the vulnerability of mystics to accusations of “melancholy” was harnessed in late seventeenth-century France as part of an anti-mystical movement. Several historians have noted how the suspicion of mystics gained momentum in France during this period. Reports of anti-mystic scandals from elsewhere in Europe such as the Alumbrados in Seville (1623) were translated into French and widely publicized. There were also a number of domestic incidents including the persecution of the Illumines of Picardy in 1635, the possession at Loudun in 1635, and the infamous Quietist affair of the 1690s. This paper will present a case study from the middle decade of the century, focusing on the Carmelite Jean Cheron’s (1596-1673) critique of the “false spirituality” of female mystics. It will situate Cheron’s published treatise the Examen de la theologie mystique (1657) in the wider context of the anti-mystical spiritual currents of the century, as well as locating it within a longer tradition of using melancholy to discredit spiritual experiences. In the course of this discussion, this article argues that Cheron’s text can provide a window onto the anxieties about spiritual directors who were failing in their duties to subject mystical experiences to the criteria which “discernment” literature had set out for them. In doing so, it finds support for the recent approaches of historians who have sought to destabilize the notion that the anti-mystical movement of the seventeenth century constituted an attack on female spirituality.

Linguet’s Lettre du Mandarin, a Forgotten Apology for the Jesuits: The Mandarin Wei Zheng as a Model

Abstract The Jesuit order was vehemently spreading the gospel since it was founded, and China was a major target. After 1601, many Jesuits had arrived in China and their learned reports to their headquarters accumulated rapidly. The Jesuits adapted to the Chinese scholar-officials called Mandarins and their Confucian theories, leading to a conflict with the French church, the Pope, and the Chinese Emperor. Throughout Europe, the Jesuits further played a prominent role in society: as educators, teachers, and advisors of royalty. Seventeenth-century France, troubled by a fundamental socio-cultural reorientation, class struggles and wars, blamed them for holding such esteemed positions and this resentment grew shortly before the French Revolution. The writer Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet takes an apologetic position in their lawsuit for the Parlement de Paris of 1762 in the Lettre du Mandarin. Bibliographic and biographic details are provided. The “opening part” shows the morally high position of Mandarins such as Wei Zheng, an image produced on the basis of Jesuit correspondence, and it denotes the European trend of “Chinoiserie.” This part is here presented in an English translation and richly commented on. The ideas of “Chinoiserie” are here illustrated with works from the literature. The Jesuits and their humane advocate Linguet lost the unique case, but it is concluded that the image of the Mandarin as a rational and moral man is portrayed as a model for a new French society.

The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France by Pannill Camp (review)

Reviewed by: The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France by Pannill Camp R. Darren Gobert The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France. By Pannill Camp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; pp. 300. Pannill Camp’s The First Frame explores the stylistic proliferation of plays, theories, and especially buildings that marked the eighteenth-century French theatre. Drawing on a vast archive of texts and figures—from Molière to Beaumarchais in the playhouse and from d’Aubignac to Diderot outside of it—Camp’s book recalls Jeffrey Ravel’s magisterial The Contested Parterre (1999) not only in its fine historical analysis, but also in its methodology. Camp too understands the theatre as a space of encounter for artists, philosophers, social reformers, and spectators; he identifies lines of thought that brought them into dialogue with one another, and he honors his period by avoiding anachronistic distinctions among types of inquiry. Indeed, even the demarcation between rationalism and empiricism, rigidly enforced in our intellectual histories, here reveals itself to be notional or at least constantly navigated in both theory and practice throughout France’s “century of the theatre.” We see traces of rationalist theory even in the most sensational accounts of natural philosophy, just as we see an emphasis on perception and experience in the work of that most rational of philosophers, Descartes. To offer an “interpretation of the evolving spatial ideology beneath a profound mutation in theatre aesthetics” (6), Camp begins by focusing on the immediate prehistory of this mutation. His first chapter describes the spatial logic of the dominant theatre style in seventeenth-century France, the rectangular jeu de paume, which struggled to accommodate both forced-perspective scenery and bodies increasingly given to the perspective-defying movement. In the second chapter he maps these two phenomena onto competing pressures in neoclassical dramatic theory: on the one hand, an understanding of the stage as a mirror, containing a discrete world; and on the other, an understanding of the theatre as a window, a transparent field affording sensational encounter between actors and audience. As the eighteenth century progressed, the latter view became more dominant, and its relationship to Lockean empiricism grew more reciprocal. Camp details in his third chapter how French theatre spectator-ship and natural philosophy became drawn into a “discursive and spatial convergence” exemplified in the Théâtre de Nicolet, a fairground space whose varied scenic attractions included physics demonstrations (95). This remarkable section is the book’s center of gravity. The author demonstrates how ideas from drama and dramatic theory found their way into natural philosophy, with researchers (and, no doubt, some quacks) turning their experiments into theatre. Meanwhile, French playwrights turned increasingly to an empiricist understanding of stage action and character psychology, and décorateurs—the multitasking designers and technical directors who managed French theatres—turned to new understandings of physics. The book is not organized chronologically, nor does it develop its argument in chapter-by-chapter increments. Rather, the first three discussions—of pre-reform theatres; of a dramatic theory torn between reflection and transparency; and of the mutually reinforcing scenes of drama and natural philosophy—ground and make possible the analysis suggested by the book’s subtitle and offered by the fourth chapter. Here, Camp focuses on the theatre space itself, a space undergoing conceptual and literal renovation in eighteenth-century France. The science of optics, in important ways initiated by Descartes in his 1637 Dioptrics, had flourished a century later, providing rationales for new theatre designs: abandoning the rectangular shapes and perspective sets, architects and designers increasingly looked to circular or oblong spaces that were better disposed to the spectator’s sensory perception. Reflecting the cultural currency of empiricism, these theatre reformers abandoned vanishing-point perspective in favor of more natural blocking whose patterns they arrayed under wider proscenium arches and therefore broader fields of sensory perception. In other words, the preoccupations of contemporary dramatic theory, optical theory, and natural philosophy constellated in the theatre reformers’ understanding of spectatorship as a “largely visual activity predicated on innate sensory and mental capacities that playhouses could either help or hinder” (131). Consequently, Camp argues, the French theatre abandoned the rationalist proofs and Vitruvian geometries that had...

The Production of Space in the ‘Tragédie En Musique’: ‘Absence Effects’ in Lully and Quinault’s ‘Atys’

The boundaries between tragedie and tragedie en musique in seventeenth-century France traced the limits of theatrical space itself. Violent acts and supernatural manifestations proliferated in the offstage space of tragedy, entering stage space through narrative discourse in keeping within the constraints of the ‘unity of place’. By substituting scenic heterogeneity and striking visual display for this unity, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault established acts of physical immediacy as a central feature of the tragedie en musique . Yet they also appropriated techniques of concealment and intimation more characteristic of spoken tragedy by fabricating unseen actions through discursive reference. Such ‘absence effects’ generate a broader field of action than spectacle alone can achieve. In Atys they create imaginary spaces for solitary expression and scenes of avowal and intimacy, revealing the impact of discourse on the production of dramatic space and lending spatial significance to the opera’s themes of power and suppressed desire.

René Descartes as Theatre Theorist and the Revolution of the Western Stage

R. Darren Gobert’s The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater is a remarkable study of French philosopher René Descartes as a theorist of the theatre, which convincingly shows not only that theatre offers a demonstration of Descartes’s “theories in action” but also that Descartes had a transformational impact on theatre practice in seventeenth-century France and beyond.

Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England, by Gesa Stedman

Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England, by Gesa Stedman

Historical innovations in the regulation of business and accounting practices: A comparison of absolutism and liberal democracy

This historical review article draws upon two theoretical models to compare state regulatory innovations pertaining to business and accounting practices in two contrasting periods: the Colbert Period, a period of absolutism under Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France; and the period of liberal democracy in the United States in the early twentieth century, during which the US federal government sought to expand its power over the regulation of unregulated capitalist activity. These two contrasting periods of state intervention in business and accounting practices can be characterized as innovations whose underlying design was conditioned by contemporary circumstances. The theoretical models employed include that of Miller (1990), who maintained that a primary “reason of state” (i.e. “political rationality”) justifying intervention in business and accounting practices during the Colbert period was “military competition” between France and other European powers. The second theoretical model employed is based on Clarke (2004), who argued that there is cyclicality to reasons of state focusing on “restoring economic stability” in the face of economic crises. This article identifies innovations in the regulation of business and accounting practices that have helped states to obtain the economic resources necessary for the exercise of sovereignty while maintaining social order within their national boundaries.

Innovation in accounting thought and practice – an introduction

Innovation is crucial to the evolution of human society. Accounting, as a complex human construction, both defines and reflects our behaviour (Rose and Miller, 1992). It has emerged in different settings across time and space and plays a key role in ordering the affairs of individuals, organisations and society. Accounting not only emerges but also changes. Historical accounting researchers are not indifferent to this evolution. A variety of approaches have been used to examine the evolution of accounting ideas, thought and practice in different historical periods. From this point of view, and since the opus prima by AC Littleton entitled Accounting Evolution to 1900 (Littleton, 1933), accounting history research has expanded in its coverage of periods, areas, episodes and institutions (Carnegie and Potter, 2000; Carmona, 2004, 2006; Walker, 2008) and elucidated the ability of the human being to invent, to innovate and to change. In addition, the lenses used in approaching accounting history have been widened (Gaffikin, 2011; Carnegie, 2014). This special issue comprises six contributions, the earlier versions of which were presented at the seventh Accounting History International Conference (7AHIC), held in Seville, Spain, in September 2013. The authors of these works are from France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the USA. The topics studied within the settings under examination involve professional associations, accounting authors, government agencies, the adoption of forms of accounting regulation, private companies and not-for-profit organisations. Interestingly, the periods studied relate mainly to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Baker and Quere draw upon two theoretical models describing state regulation of economic activity in order to analyse two contrasting historical periods. The first is the Colbert period under Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France. The second is the United States, in the early twentieth century, when the federal government sought to control capitalist activity. The first theoretical model employed is that of Miller (1990) who maintained that the principal “reason of state” for intervention in business and accounting practices during the Colbert period was “military competition” between France and other European powers. The second model is based on Clarke (2004) 596396 ACH0010.1177/1032373215596396Accounting HistoryEditorial research-article2015

Subversive Freedom: Libertine Anthropology and the Geography of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France

To understand how the idea of freedom operates in seventeenth-century France, and in libertine writing in particular, this article argues that it is important to take into account new social and spatial constraints that arose in the period, as well as the fictional figures of libertine travel writing. French libertine conceptions of freedom are then seen primarily as the reflection of a developing practice of mobility. To give substance to the hypothesis of a relationship between mobility, moral geography, and conceptions of freedom, the article contrasts two examples of attitudes to kinds of freedom in the French libertine world. The first example is that of French libertines themselves, and their relationship to the decline of liberty in France which took place in the aftermath of Theophile de Viau's trial. The second is centred on the banks of the Ganges and the experience of libertine travellers to India in the mid-seventeenth century. The suggestion is that libertine travelling culture modified its representations of freedom by introducing anthropological and comparative dimensions to the discourse.

Fortuna Goes to the Theater: Lottery Comedies in Seventeenth-Century France

Fortuna Goes to the TheaterLottery Comedies in Seventeenth-Century France Michael Call In his 1637 poem “Excuse à Ariste,” Pierre Corneille describes the contrasting historical fortunes of authorship by alluding to a game of chance, stating that in the “âge doré” of the French Renaissance, literature had been “une Blanque à de bons bénéfices,” that is, a lottery full of enticing monetary rewards (780). At present, Corneille laments, “[la Blanque] est épuisée,” conveying his opinion that writing had become an unstructured, desperate competition among would-be authors. Corneille’s choice of metaphor not only expresses the movement away from friendly and aleatory authorial success toward a contemporary agon but does so in terms that were historically specific: the blanque had been a prominent royal institution in the reign of François I but was banned in the period in which Corneille was writing. However, the decades that followed would see the French revival of both the actual lottery and Corneille’s metaphorical money machine as gambling and theater (in their myriad forms) became the entertainment options of choice for all classes of Parisian society. In fact, several comedies collapsed the two, staging the lottery and the variety of individuals who participated in it; notable examples include Donneau de Visé’s Les Intrigues de la Loterie (1670), Montfleury’s Le Gentilhomme de Beauce (1670), Bordelon’s La Loterie de Scapin (1694),1 and Dancourt’s La Loterie (1697). These comedies reflect the era’s increasing fascination with games of chance as well as the concepts and strategies developed by individuals grappling with shifting notions of the random. More importantly, they illustrate the problematic nature of representing chance on the seventeenth-century stage, obliquely fulfilling Lisette’s promise in Dancourt’s comedy that exposure to Monsieur Sbrigani’s lottery will prove revealing: “On y connoîtra le fonds & le très-fonds de la bonne foi des Loteries” (310). The theatrical lottery in these plays effectively [End Page 1] becomes a touchstone for early modern efforts to understand and represent chance—or more accurately, the double failure to do so. The seventeenth-century origins (or rather the reappearance) of the lottery in France were well documented by Henri Sauval in his Histoires et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris (manuscript 1676, published 1724). Despite the popularity of the practice in surrounding countries, the sixteenth-century blanques had a lingering poor reputation in French public memory—of the term blanque, Sauval notes that it was “si connu & si decrié en ce Royaume” (60). In 1644, a certain De Chuyes nevertheless received royal permission for a proposed revival of the Blanque Royale. While the project initially attracted some prominent advocates, including the writer and grammarian Vaugelas, significant legal opposition arose from the merchants’ guilds, anxious to protect their economic prerogatives. Vaugelas’s death and De Chuyes’s departure to the colonies placed the lottery on unstable footing until the successful intervention of the Scudéry family led to the appointment of two new directors, Carton and Boulanger. Having changed the name from blanque to loterie (Sauval notes that Carton and Boulanger were “plus entreprenans & moins scrupuleux en notre langue que Monsieur de Vaugelas” [62]), the two were again prevented from carrying out their plans by the merchants’ guilds and had to reapply for royal permission in 1658. A further legal prohibition ensued, dramatized in the 1658 Ballet de la Loterie, which stages the vision of wealth and riches promised by the lottery and ends with the abrupt ban that upsets the fantasy.2 Despite these setbacks, Carton and Boulanger’s misadventures piqued the public’s interest and led to the widespread organization of smaller private lotteries. The year 1658 constituted a veritable lottery mania—according to the gazetteer Jean Loret, more than four hundred lotteries were held in the aftermath of the ban placed on the royal lottery, including prominent events held at court by Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin (Fournel 477). Boulanger’s perseverance, along with the broad social acceptance of the practice, would result in the successful establishment of a royal lottery in 1659. That lotteries would reemerge as a French institution at this historical moment is...

Theatres of Torture: Martyrs, Pagans, and the Politics of Conversion in Early Seventeenth-Century France

This essay examines writing about and representations of pain and torture by looking specifically at two French Catholic martyr plays that appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century: Nicolas Soret’s La Céciliade (1606) and Jean Boissin de Gallardon’s Le Martyre de saincte Catherine (1618). It interprets these plays alongside Antonio Gallonio’s Trattato degli instrumenti di martiro (1591; 1594) and Richard Verstegan’s Théâtre des cruautez des Herectiques de nostre temps (1587; 1607). On the one hand, by analysing the representations of physical torture, this article investigates the relationship between religious violence in the real world and the significance of the martyr figure on stage in La Céciliade. On the other, it takes into account the crushing of the executioners’ bodies in Boissin’s play and in iconographical representations of St Catherine’s wheel of torture, arguing that representations of the martyrs’ and pagans’ injured bodies not only serve to profess publicly the truth of the Catholic faith but also act as vehicles for the Catholic Church’s politicization of martyrdom and conversion.

Huguenot History as Game of Thrones

Huguenot History as Game of Thrones Neil Kamil (bio) Geoffrey Treasure. The Huguenots. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. xiv + 480 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. At the large public university where I teach, on the first day of the U.S. survey, 330 students take their seats, most with low expectations. A good number come from small towns where football coaches do double-duty as public school history teachers. This arrangement does not usually engender much love for the discipline. They play a different brand of football in Britain, of course, where Geoffrey Treasure taught history for forty years before retiring as senior master at Harrow—a very different sort of public school, where such aristocratic schoolboys as Byron and Winston Churchill prepared for Oxford and Cambridge. Harrow remains an exclusive boys’ school, and Treasure's “stimulating—though often sobering—experience of form room teaching” (p. xiv) in this rarified place has influenced his prolific historical writing. As The Huguenots—his fifth book on seventeenth-century France—makes clear, it is a good bet that Treasure is a remarkable teacher. His epigrammatic and shrewd writing reveals a formative link to the privileged classrooms where he has spent most of his distinguished career. The Huguenots is a learned synthesis intended for well-informed history buffs who seek a challenging foray into the political, military, and religious history of early-modern French elites. Lay readers with strong interests in the seventeenth-century will find Treasure an enthusiastic storyteller who gets in and out of well-known narratives with style and dispatch. Nevertheless, this is a substantial book that will require much concentrated reading time. It is divided into thirty-eight chapters, few exceeding ten pages, so selective readers can pick and choose. Treasure's format has obvious liabilities, but it emphasizes what successful history teachers at the secondary level learn from “sobering” experience: keep it lively and don't rattle on too long. The lapidary approach to chapters will also please specialists, but for different reasons. Advanced historians of early modern France and the outremer will discover little new here, as they will have read everything in the well-informed and annotated secondary-source bibliography. For them, more [End Page 203] adventurous reading and discussion in other disciplines would enrich this project enormously. However, graduate students who have yet to tackle their comprehensive exams will find several parts of the book useful for preparation, and later too, particularly as they begin lecture-writing. Indeed, even as more Americanists engage avidly with the current growth in French-Atlantic scholarship, the job market softens for historians of seventeenth-century France. This hinders development in both fields. Treasure's formidable knowledge of the historiography and those canonical narratives that early modern French historians have commonly taught in their graduate seminars will therefore prove valuable to a growing number of early American historians. Treasure aims to breathe fresh life into centuries of such familiar stories that revolve around mimetic violence (a term he does not use) between the forces of orthodoxy and heresy framed by the Valois and Bourbon response to the French Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Thus, as Treasure describes it, by the 1530s, Francis I, his monarchy by tradition the guardian of the Gallican Church's imperative to assert independence in French religious and geopolitical interests against what the court perceived to be undue papal influence, “was unimpressed by the actions of his fellow sovereign Henry VIII, which led to a schism and the establishment of an English church under the crown” (p. 23). Francis and his successors knew “[f]rom the way in which monarchy had evolved over the centuries there had come to be a special relationship between church and crown” (p. 23). This meant that despite deep differences with Rome that also stemmed from competition with Spanish or Italian interests and occasional alignment by reason of state with Protestant powers, this “special relationship” would inevitably “determine the Huguenots’ eventual fate. So long as the crown remained Catholic the Huguenot would be more than a heretic,” Treasure writes. “He was guilty of lèse majesté, a rebel” (p. 23). For Treasure then, a “kind of security” (p. 23...

Book review: Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England, written by Gesa Stedman

Book review: Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England, written by Gesa Stedman