Rulership in France, 15th-17th Centuries

Ralph E. Giesey is Emeritus Professor in the Department of History, University of Iowa, USA.

• Contents: Preface; The French Estates and the Corpus Mysticum Regni; When and why Hotman wrote the Francogallia; The monarchomach triumvirs: Hotman, Beza, and Mornay; 'Quod omnes tangit' - a post scriptum; Medieval jurisprudence in Bodin's concept of sovereignty; The presidents of Parlement at the royal funeral; Rules of inheritance and strategies of mobility in prerevolutionary France; State-building in early modern France: the role of royal officialdom; Models of rulership in French royal ceremonial; From monarchomachs to dynastic officialdom; Cardin le Bret and lese majesty; The king imagined; Inaugural aspects of French royal ceremonials; Royal ceremonial and the advent of absolutism; Noël de Fribois et la loi salique; The two bodies of the French king; Ernst H. Kantorowicz: scholarly triumphs and academic travails in Weimar Germany and the United States; Index.

’Despite the great variety of these articles, they nonetheless share a focused set of historiographical concerns which lend this volume unusual coherence... Through their deeply learned, rigorous yet always creative practice of history, through their juxtaposition of close reading of legal texts, reconstruction of the social and cultural context of the jurists who write these laws and did the work of royal administration, and thick description of the ceremonial trappings of kingship, Giesey's essays serve as models for today's historians interested in deepening our understanding of the early modern monarch.’ Sixteenth Century Journal