“God Reigning through You, Reigns with You”: The Charenton Controversy and the Development of Royal Authority in Early Bourbon France
During the years of 1617–20, a little-known polemical debate raged between the Protestant ministers, led by Pierre du Moulin, in the town of Charenton, just outside of Paris, and the Jesuit Jean Arnoux, confessor to Louis XIII. Marked by the crisis of Henry IV’s assassination in 1610 and the revolt of the princes against the regency government of Marie de’ Medici, the first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed an intense debate over the nature of royal authority. The author argues that the Charenton Controversy, influenced by the ideological clashes that occurred during the Estates-General, demonstrates that the ambiguous notions of royal authority were beginning to take concrete form.
Clovis and Constantine. The Uses of History in Sixteenth-Century Gallicanism
A strong case has been made for the appearance of a new kind of history in late sixteenth-century France. Whether or not it deserves the label ‘historicist’, it has been credited with a desire to discover the objective face of the past, with a critical approach to sources, and even, though more rarely, with attempts to explain historical process. Prominent among the new brand of historians are Jean du Tillet, Charles du Moulin, Pierre and François Pithou, Claude Fauchet and Etienne Pasquier. All these men of the robe are also celebrated as defenders of the liberties of the Gallican Church. The Gallican tradition shared an attitude towards the past that was quite contrary to the new history. It did not accept change for its own sake, nor did it see change as improvement pointing towards the present.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.