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\"Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV's propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century--three historical touchstones--to examine what it would have meant for France's elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy's elaborate palace decors, the court's official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIV's reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchy's hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the king's portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopâedie of Diderot and d'Alembert.\"-- Provided by publisher.

This article seeks to understand the theoretical formulations that throughout the 17th century systematized court ballet as an art, a term defined at the time as a set of precepts and rules. After a brief discussion about the first dance manuals produced in modern Europe, we analyze the treatises, discourses and librettos that addressed ballet composition. From the works of Beaujoyeulx, Saint-Hubert, Marolles, De Pure and Ménestrier, among others, it is possible to appreciate the erudite principles and precepts that guided the practice of ballet composition in France under the Ancien Régime, as well as the inclusion of dance and ballet in the domain of written production and literate culture.

This article analyzes the different selves operating in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier. Contrary to scholarship, which tends to position the text as a mere precursor of La Princesse de Clèves, it is in La Princesse de Montpensier where one first locates the interior. Lafayette presented a princess coming to terms with her identity, debating with different selves against a backdrop of social, historical, and political ideals. The nouvelle historique was central to the development of selves; it was an important medium through which Lafayette could perceive, explore, and contest a woman’s identity in relation to society. The genre also enabled writers to examine themselves. Lafayette used it to test out her own authorial self and locate her place in the literary sphere.

A new interpretation of the Jesuit mission to New France is here proposed by using, for comparison and contrast, the earlier Jesuit experience in Japan. In order to present revisionist perspectives of the Jesuit missions based on a broader international framework beyond North America, the existing historical paradigms of the Jesuit missionary activity to Amerindians based on the limited regional history of New France are re-examined.

Our essay analyses a little-known book, Observations sur les eaux minerales des plusieurs provinces de France (1675), which is a study of French mineral waters, commissioned by and conducted at the French Royal Academy of Science (est. 1666). Its author, Samuel Cottereau Duclos (1598–1685), was a senior founding figure of the Academy, its chief chymist and one of its most influential members. We examine Observations with a focus on the changing attitudes towards chymical knowledge and practice in the French Academy and the Royal Society of London in the period 1666–84. Chymistry was a fundamental analytical tool for seventeenth-century natural historians, and, as the work of Lawrence Principe and William Newman has shown, it is central to understanding the 'long' Scientific Revolution. Much study has also been done on the developing norms of openness in the dissemination and presentation of scientific, and particularly chymical knowledge in the late seventeenth century, norms that were at odds with traditions of secrecy among individual chymists. Between these two standards a tension arose, evidenced by early modern 'vociferous criticisms' of chymical obscurity, with different strategies developed by individual philosophers for negotiating the emergent boundaries between secrecy and openness. Less well studied, however, are the strategies by which not just individuals but also scientific institutions negotiated these boundaries, particularly in the formative years of their public and political reputation in the late seventeenth century. Michael Hunter's recent and welcome study of the 'decline of magic' at the Royal Society has to some extent remedied these omissions. Hunter argues that the Society—as a corporate body—disregarded and avoided studies of magical and alchemical subjects in the late seventeenth century. Our examination problematizes these distinctions and presents a more complex picture.

Within the context of national traditions in colonial science, the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries present us with a unique combination of challenges. The multinational membership of the Society of Jesus gave its missionaries access to virtually every Portuguese, Spanish, and French colony. The Society was thus compelled to engage an astonishingly diverse array of cultural and natural environments, and that diversity of contexts is reflected in the range and the complexity of Jesuit scientific practices. Underlying that complexity, however, was what I see as a unique combination of institutional structures; namely, European colleges, overseas mission stations, and the regular circulation of personnel and information. With this institutional framework as a backdrop, I briefly trace what I see as the most salient themes emerging from recent studies of Jesuit overseas science: 1) the Societys ability to use scientific expertise to its advantage amid the complex web of dependencies upon which it missionary activities rested; 2) the ability of its missionaries to become intimate with a wide range of cultures and to appropriate natural knowledge held by indigenous peoples, especially in the fields ofmaterial medicaand geography; and 3) the different ways Jesuits used published accounts of “remote nature” (i.e., natural histories of overseas colonies) to advance their corporate and religious causes.

In taking note of women's access to guild membership, one must avoid triumphalism. A number of women resisted \"inclusion\" in the guild system, finding the cost and regulation entailed by membership to outweigh its benefits. When given control over guilds, women used that control to restrict and regulate the labor market in the same way as men did. The vast majority of men and women were not able to join guilds; it is their responses to that situation and the complex bonds they nonetheless forged with the corporate system that are beginning to emerge more clearly.

This essay argues for the emergence of a cultural and epistemological divide between amateur savants and members of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in late Old Regime and revolutionary France and suggests that the amateur ideal rose in significance even as intellectual activity came to be increasingly centralized in the postrevolutionary era. At the crux of the tensions between the amateur ideal and the professionalizing reality in the immediate postrevolutionary period stood Aubin-Louis Millin and his journal, theMagasin Encyclopédique. The essay examines, in particular, the revival in the pages of theMagasin Encyclopédiqueof interest in Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the seventeenth-century icon of an amateur ideal in which investigations in the natural sciences and scholarship were private, decentralized, often provincial activities. Although the sciences in the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras were often perceived as forward looking and dismissive of the past, this essay finds that a sentimental and nostalgic attachment to the past—to a myth of Peiresc—continued to play an important role in the identity of postrevolutionary men of letters.

This article is the first in-depth analysis of the direct intellectual engagement between one of America's most important Founding Fathers, John Adams, and the work of the leading modern feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. It draws on the first complete transcription of Adams's marginalia in his copy of Wollstonecraft's French Revolution to argue that these two thinkers disagreed profoundly in their respective assessments of the watershed event of political modernity due to their divergent interpretations of the relationship between human nature, history, and Revolutionary violence on the one hand, and the appropriate structure of political and social institutions on the other.

This article contributes to current historical knowledge on the relationship between Crown and local municipal power in Old Regime France. In particular, it examines the political language of bien public mobilized by Marseillais elites and royal administrators between 1660 and 1700 in the context of French commercial expansion. Traditionally, ‘public good’ could be understood in two distinct ways. Derived from royal absolutist doctrine, public good was what the king willed to preserve the state, a collection of diverse, corporate bodies held together by royal justice and reason. Derived from civic humanistic, municipal traditions, public good was the united will of the civic community. Investigating three moments where these two definitions of public good converged and collided – during Marseille's urban expansion (1666), in the local justification of modern commerce, and in the deliberations at the Council of Commerce (1700) – this article points to several mutations in the language of public good at the end of the seventeenth century. Pointing to the convergence of civic humanistic and absolutist traditions, this article demonstrates that centralization under Louis XIV, rather than obscuring local traditions, allowed for the intensification of civic humanistic, republican sensibilities.