The Newberry Library is in the news again, with a feature on its collection of marginalia appearing in the New York Times today. The story highlights the importance of studying marginal comments in books and raises questions about how e-marginalia can be preserved in the future.
Read the article at the New York Times.
Renaissance France is coming to Chicago! A new exhibition, entitled “Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France,” will open at the Art Institute of Chicago on 27 February 2011.
Students in my HIST 420 The Renaissance course at Northern Illinois University may earn extra credit by writing a review of this exhibition.
See the exhibition website for “Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France.”
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has been consulting comparative revolutionary studies as it works to formulate responses to the protests in Egypt and across the Arab world.
Read the article by Scott Wilson in the Washington Post.
An important reminder of why female war correspondents are vital: Kim Barker, “Why We Need Women in War Zones,” New York Times, 19 February 2011.
French historian David A. Bell examines the Egyptian Revolution through the history of the French Revolution.
Read the article on Foreign Policy
This cultural history of civil warfare in early seventeenth-century France examines how warrior nobles’ practices of violence shaped provincial society and the royal state.
Warrior Pursuits analyzes in detail how provincial nobles engaged in revolt and civil warfare in southern France between 1598 and 1635. The southern French provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc suffered almost continual religious strife and civil conflict in this period, providing an excellent case for investigating the dynamics of early modern civil violence. Brian Sandberg’s extensive archival research on noble families in these provinces reveals that violence continued to be a way of life for many French nobles, challenging previous scholarship that depicts a progressive “civilizing” of noble culture. He argues that southern French nobles engaged in warrior pursuits — social and cultural practices of violence designed to raise personal military forces and to wage civil warfare in order to advance various political and religious goals. Close relationships between the profession of arms, the bonds of nobility, and the culture of revolt allowed nobles to regard their violent performances as “heroic gestures” and “beautiful warrior acts.” Warrior nobles represented the key organizers of civil warfare in the early seventeenth century, orchestrating all aspects of the conduct of civil warfare — from recruitment to combat — according to their own understandings of their warrior pursuits.
Building on the work of Arlette Jouanna and other historians of the nobility, Sandberg provides new perspectives on noble culture, state development, and civil warfare in early modern France. French historians and scholars of the Reformation and the European Wars of Religion will find Warrior Pursuits engaging and insightful.
Warrior Pursuits on Amazon.com
Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
Brian Sandberg is an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Illinois University whose research concerns the intersections of religion, violence, and political culture during the European Wars of Religion. His first monograph entitled, Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) examines provincial nobles’ orchestration of civil violence in southern France in the early seventeenth century. He has published a number of articles and essays on religious violence, gender relations, and noble culture in early modern France, and is currently working on a new book project on Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629.
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