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"Aristocracy (Social class)-England-Biography"
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Status, power, and identity in early modern France : the Rohan family, 1550-1715
In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family's needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime's ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.
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Meadowlands
\"August, 1914. The silver wedding celebrations of Sir George Barsham, MP, and his wife, Lady Adelaide, are overshadowed by the declaration of war with Germany. Over the following months, as the male estate workers head for the Front and the maids disappear to work in the newly-opened munitions factory, the Barsham family's comfortable, aristocratic lifestyle is set to change forever\"--Amazon.com.
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The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300
Theodore Evergates provides the first systematic analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. He argues that three factors-the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family-were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity. Evergates mines the rich, varied, and in some respects unique collection of source materials from Champagne to provide a dynamic picture of a medieval aristocracy and its evolving symbiotic relationship with the counts. Count Henry the Liberal (1152-81) began the process of transforming a quasi-independent baronage accustomed to collegial governance into an elite of landholding families subordinate to the count and his officials. By the time Countess Jeanne married the future King Philip IV of France in 1284, the fiefholding families of Champagne had become a distinct provincial nobility. Throughout, it was the conjugal community, rather than primogeniture or patrilineage, that remained the core familial institution determining the customs regarding community property, dowry, dower, and partible inheritance. Those customs guaranteed that every lineage would survive, but frequently through a younger son or daughter. The life courses of women and men, influenced not only by social norms but also by individual choice and circumstance, were equally unpredictable. Evergates concludes that imposed models of \"the aristocratic family\" fail to capture the diversity of individual lives and lineages within one of the more vibrant principalities of medieval France.
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Architecture and elite culture in the united provinces, england and ireland, 1500-1700
This study aims to elucidate concepts of castle in the Netherlands, England and Ireland in both past en present times. The first part of the book examines current, respectively, academic, national and personal appropriations of 'castle'; the second part moves into the past, juxtaposing elite culture and the spatial organisation of 16th and 17th century domestic architecture.
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Aristocracy and its enemies in the age of revolution
Since time immemorial Europe had been dominated by nobles and nobilities. In the 18th century their power seemed better entrenched than ever. But in 1790 the French revolutionaries made a determined attempt to abolish nobility entirely. ‘Aristocracy’ became the term for everything they were against, and the nobility of France, so recently the most dazzling and sophisticated elite in the European world, found itself persecuted in ways that horrified counterparts in other countries. This book traces the roots of the attack on nobility at this time, looking at intellectual developments over the preceding centuries, in particular the impact of the American Revolution. It traces the steps by which French nobles were disempowered and persecuted, a period during which large numbers fled the country and many perished or were imprisoned. In the end, abolition of the aristocracy proved impossible, and nobles recovered much of their property. Napoleon set out to reconcile the remnants of the old nobility to the consequences of revolution, and created a titled elite of his own. After his fall, the restored Bourbons offered renewed recognition to all forms of nobility. But 19th-century French nobles were a group transformed and traumatized by the revolutionary experience, and they never recovered their old hegemony and privileges. As the author shows, if the revolutionaries failed in their attempt to abolish nobility, they nevertheless began the longer term process of aristocratic decline that has marked the last two centuries.
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Dandy Gilver and the proper treatment of bloodstains
Receiving a letter from a woman who fears that her husband is planning to kill her, Dandy Gilver goes undercover as a maid and uses her aristocratic connections and prowess to discern the truth.
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Out of Love for My Kin
InOut of Love for My Kin, Amy Livingstone examines the personal dimensions of the lives of aristocrats in the Loire region of France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She argues for a new conceptualization of aristocratic family life based on an ethos of inclusion. Inclusivity is evident in the care that medieval aristocrats showed toward their families by putting in place strategies, practices, and behaviors aimed at providing for a wide range of relatives. Indeed, this care-and in some cases outright affection-for family members is recorded in the documents themselves, as many a nobleman and woman made pious benefactions \"out of love for my kin.\"
In a book made rich by evidence from charters-which provide details about life events including birth, death, marriage, and legal disputes over property-Livingstone reveals an aristocratic family dynamic that is quite different from the fictional or prescriptive views offered by literary depictions or ecclesiastical sources, or from later historiography. For example, she finds that there was no single monolithic mode of inheritance that privileged the few and that these families employed a variety of inheritance practices. Similarly, aristocratic women, long imagined to have been excluded from power, exerted a strong influence on family life, as Livingstone makes clear in her gender-conscious analysis of dowries, the age of men and women at marriage, lordship responsibilities of women, and contestations over property.
The web of relations that bound aristocratic families in this period of French history, she finds, was a model of family based on affection, inclusion, and support, not domination and exclusion.
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