Review of Pierre Birnbaum's A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669

Pierre Birnbaum, A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 178 pp, 12 illus

War and Diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV: A Historical Study and Annotated Bibliography Volume II

In the last forty-five years historians have produced numerous books and articles on European diplomatic relations and military affairs during the era of Louis XIV. However, there exists no up-to-date annotated bibliography listing and describing these works or older, but valuable studies. The latest annotated bibliography to appear regarding early modern history is Hugh Dunthorne and Hamish M. Scott, Early Modern European History c. 1492–1789 (London: Historical Association, 1983) which devotes less than six pages to international relations and warfare. John Roach\u27s A Bibliography of Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) also contains little on war and diplomacy and fails to provide anything more than a list of books. In addition, the most recent edition of The American Historical Association\u27s Guide to Historical Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) contains only a highly select listing of works on European war and diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV. William Calvin Dickinson and Eloise R. Hitchcock\u27s The War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1713: A Selected Bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996) is valuable, but it concentrates on only one aspect of the Wars of Louis XIV. The following research project is an annotated bibliography of studies concerning war and diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV. The bibliography contains eight chapters concentrating on different aspects, including general studies in international political history, 1648–1715/21; the art of diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV; warfare in the Age of Louis XIV; French expansionism and the wars against Spain and the Dutch Republic, 1648–1678; English foreign policy under Cromwell and Charles II, 1649–1685; the formation of the Grand Alliance and the Nine Years\u27 War, 1678–1697; the First and Second Partition Treaties and the War of the Spanish Succession, 1698–1714; as well as the struggle for supremacy in the Baltic and the Turkish threat to Europe, 1648–1721. The bibliography reviews over 500 works including books, journal articles, and theses published in English. The beginning of each chapter includes a short narrative of the topic considered before listing the annotated citations. The citations include a brief review of each work. The bibliography also cross references studies between chapters as well as contains an index of authors cited. This bibliography serves as a valuable research tool for history teachers, graduate students, researchers, and specialists

Fictions of the Courtly Self: French Ballet in the Age of Louis XIV

Court ballet after the Fronde has been understood as a technique for subjugating nobles, literally and metaphorically keeping them dancing in the monarch's orbit. This essay reconsiders ballet's role in fabricating aristocratic identities under Louis XIV through a reading of the performances of two celebrated English dancers (the Dukes of York and Buckingham) in the Ballet royal de la nuit (1653). These performers' status as outsiders and as court celebrities with well-known personalities highlights the dancers’ influence over the roles they incarnated on the ballet stage. The body types and especially the self-fashioned social personas of performers were the raw material to which court artists added costume, choreography, and poetic text to create ballet characters. Dancers therefore acted as implicit collaborators in creating their onstage personas. Drawing upon Performance Studies' re-interrogation of the dynamics of subjection and agency in embodied practices, the analysis of the English dancers' unique case allows us to speculate about the degree of autonomy afforded to all noble performers and, more broadly, to consider how ballet expresses the mutual interdependence of sovereigns and nobles in court society

The Art of Elegance

Publié durant l’été 2014 sous la direction de Kathryn Norberg et Sandra L. Rosenbaum, Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV : Interpreting the Art of Elegance constitue le résultat de deux symposiums organisés en 2005 à Los Angeles, suite à l’acquisition par le musée d’art du comté de Los Angeles (LACMA) d’un ensemble relié d’estampes intitulé Recueil des modes de la cour de France, provenant de la Librairie Sourget. Accompagnant une exposition (Images of Fashion from the court of Louis XIV)..

A Metaphysical Approach to the Philosophy of History: An Introduction to a Universality

If history is aligned with metaphysics, it can promote universality, and until this alignment occurs, one culture, or one people, or one age has little chance of being successfully compared with another. Individual histories of isolated periods of time, such as ancient Egypt, or Aztec America, or the age of Louis XIV are important individually, but they confer little meaning when compared with others, that is, if they are comparable at all. It is the task of historians to search for humanity among all humans who lived in bygone ages. Certainly, universality indicates that the world is the result of a process of individuals pulling together and pushing apart, of support for underlying proposals and denials of the same. History signifies a process that is the result of the unknown, and a process is simply a series of steps, actions, or procedures producing a result. Whether the result is desirable is irrelevant to the process itself because the latter manifests an indifference to its outcome

Chateaubriand et le cloître du temps. Disparition de la bibliothèque dans la Vie de Rancé

Romantique hanté par le classicisme de Massillon ou de Bossuet, exilé dans le siècle des révolutions mais se rêvant à l’époque de Louis XIV, Chateaubriand n’a d’ancrage que dans un Moyen Âge dont l’intertexte fait défaut. S’il n’a cessé de prendre le Grand Siècle pour modèle, il n’en demeure pas moins une ambiguïté irréductible dans son rapport au siècle classique, qui fait d’une part office d’écran sur lequel il peut projeter sa non-coïncidence au XIXe siècle, mais qui d’autre part, dans le sens second de l’expression, fait écran au Moyen Âge dans lequel il entend ancrer sa légende de façon tacite et aussi inaperçue que Rancé réformant la Trappe en regard des prescriptions médiévales de l’ordre cistercien.As a romantic haunted by the classicism of Massillon or Bossuet, exiled in a century of revolutions but envisioning himself in the age of Louis XIV, Chateaubriand is at home only in the Middle Ages, even though the intertext is lacking. Though he never ceased to use the « Grand Siècle » as a model, an irresolvable ambiguity remains in his relationship to the « siècle classique ». On the one hand it acts as a screen onto which he projects his « non-coincidence » with the 19th century, and on the other it obscures the period of the Middle Ages in which he wants to discreetly set his legend

Voltaire's "Racine": the paradoxes of a transformation

This article highlights some paradoxical aspects of Voltaire's admiration for Racine. He paid little attention to Racine's plays as dramatic entities, followed received opinions, and made many unfavourable judgements, especially concerning Racine's mix of tragedy and galanterie. What he idolized was Racine's use of language and his poetic skill. He thus removed Racine's tragedies from the contingencies of the theatre, and transformed them into an eighteenth-century linguistic and cultural ideal that he used for polemical purposes in a war against Shakespeare and encroaching barbarism, leading the Romantics subsequently to reject the `Racine' he had been so influential in creating