Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV’S France
This article considers France’s military potential in the later seventeenth century through an examination of logistical resources and the communication systems that could link these resources to military operations. It challenges the assumption that France possessed a military advantage as a geographically contiguous and resource-rich territory apparently able to sustain military operations on interior lines. [...]
A godly Fronde? Jansenism and the mid-seventeenth-century crisis of the French monarchy
This article gives sceptical attention to claims made by both contemporaries and subsequent historians about the involvement of Jansenists in the Fronde and subsequent resistance to royal government in the 1650s. It explores both the difficulties of separating Jansenists from a wider group of reforming rigorists within the Catholic Church, and the dangers of accepting [...]
Rendering justice in witch trials: the case of the val de Liepvre
The borderland of the val de Lièpvre, with lands in Alsace and in the Duchy of Lorraine, and divided by religion and language, offers a rich collection of sources for the history of witchcraft persecution. The territory sharply reveals what was undoubtedly characteristic of witchcraft trials more widely. The crime of witchcraft was considered abominable [...]
Thinking with Montaigne: Evidence, scepticism and meaning in early modern demonology
In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556–1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother’s side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608). De Lancre confounded historians’ expectations by using the revelation to [...]
Crossing boundaries: women’s gossip, insults and violence in sixteenth-century France
Using evidence from cases recorded in the registers of the consistories of southern France, the author investigates the way in which Languedocian women policed each other’s behaviour, enforcing a collective morality through gossip, sexual insult and physical confrontation. In contrast to case studies by other historians, it is argued here that gossip does appear to [...]
Robin Briggs–Historian
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