Forrestal, Alison and Nelson, Eric, eds., Politics and Religion in Early Modern France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 270 pps. ISBN: 978-0-230-52139-1
From the Book Jacket:
“Containing ten essays representing the latest research by specialist scholars of the period, Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France explores the political and religious world that developed in France over the course of the thirty years between 1594 and 1624. While historians of both the religious wars and seventeenth-century France readily recognize the importance of the opening decades of Bourbon rule for long-term developments in the country’s political and religious culture, they have rarely chosen to make it a focus of investigation. By addressing and reformulating key issues for the conclusion of the Wars of Religion and the development of seventeenth-century French political and religious culture, these essays confirm the pivotal role that the early decades of the seventeenth century played in inventing and consolidating the classic features of the Bourbon polity and Catholic Reform. In doing so, they usher these years towards a position of historiographical parity with the hitherto dominant eras of the Wars of Religion and Bourbon Absolutism.”
Alison Forrestal is lecturer in Early Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland. She is the author of Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Early Modern France (2004) and Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600-1900 (1998).
Eric Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University, U.S.A. He is the author of The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590-1615).
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