Until the nineteenth century Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was among the most famous and most valued of historians. While his first fame was a succes de scandale - the History of His Time was placed on the Index in 160g - de Thou's work quickly found favor with the humanistically-educated learned class throughout Europe. The esteem in which the History was held transcended religious divisions. The historian received letters of praise from staunchly orthodox Spain and Portugal as well as from heretic England and Germany; through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries his History was read with enthusi asm by certain cardinals at the very curia which condemned it; and so staunch a champion of orthodoxy as Bishop Bossuet did not hesitate to appeal to "such a great author" for support in his own historical works. ! To the philosophe of the Enlightenment de Thou's impartiality in de scribing the impassioned times through which he lived and the exact yet eloquent style with which he wrote the History of His Time were familiar touchstones. Voltaire appealed to the "truthful and eloquent de Thou" again and again in his works,2 William Pitt rose in the House of Commons to quote the words of the "great historian of France" during the early years of the French Revolution,3 Lessing 4 and Herder 5 praised him with poetic hyperbole, and Edward Gibbon re ferred to "the authority of my masters, the grave Thuanus and the philosophic Hume . . . .

The Parisian magistrate Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was a major figure in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) and their immediate aftermath. Best known for his magisterial History of his own times (covering 1546-1607), and his complementary Memoirs (covering 1553-1601), de Thou was a key political negotiator, a famous book-collector and an influential patron to scholars and writers, as well as a respected poet in his own right and a prolific correspondent. This is the first monograph on de Thou since Samuel Kinser's bibliographical study of 1966. In the course of five chapters, thematically arranged between a substantial introduction and a dramatic conclusion, Ingrid De Smet meticulously unpicks de Thou's strategies of self-fashioning and career enhancement as well as the conditions that led to his fall from grace. In doing so, this monograph not only rehabilitates de Thou as a creative (neo-Latin) writer of international allure, it also uncovers and contextualizes the complexities of de Thou's life, writings, and thought.

In this engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.

This book—the sixth volume in The Great Cultural Eras of the Western World series—provides information on more than 400 individuals who created and played a role in the era's intellectual and cultural activity. The book's focus is on cultural figures—those whose inventions and discoveries contributed to the scientific revolution, those whose line of reasoning contributed to secularism, groundbreaking artists like Rembrandt, lesser known painters, and contributors to art and music. As the momentum of the Renaissance peaked in 1600, the Western World was poised to move from the Early Modern to the Modern Era. The Thirty Years War ended in 1648 and religion was no longer a cause for military conflict. Europe grew more secularized. Organized scientific research led to groundbreaking discoveries, such as the earth's magnetic field, Kepler's first two laws of motion, and the slide rule. In the arts, Baroque painting, music, and literature evolved. A new Europe was emerging. This book is a useful basic reference for students and laymen, with entries specifically designed for ready reference.

Diese Studie liefert die erste umfängliche Untersuchung der „Republiken“, den ersten und einflussreichsten frühneuzeitlichen Staatsbeschreibungen, die als Buchreihe publiziert wurden. Die Republiken wurden in den 1620er und 1630er Jahren in Leiden und Amsterdam gedruckt und avancierten zu Grundlagentexten der frühneuzeitlichen Staatenkunde. Zunächst verfolgt die Untersuchung die Verbreitung der Bände in Buchsammlungen und Bibliotheken des 17. Jahrhunderts und liefert so neue Erkenntnisse zu verschiedenen Leser- und Nutzergruppen der Republiken sowie ihrer prominenten Rolle auf dem frühneuzeitlichen Buchmarkt. Weiter verfolgt die Studie anhand dreier Fallstudien – der Republik der Niederlande, des spanischen Weltreichs sowie des safawidischen Persien – die Funktionen der Bände im Wissenschaftsbetrieb sowie die Text-, Ideen- und politischen Traditionen, in denen sie stehen. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the earliest and most notable early modern book series of state descriptions, the ‘Republics’. Printed in Leiden and Amsterdam in the 1620s and 1630s, the Republics evolved into foundational works of early modern political studies. By first tracing the volumes’ circulation and presence in book collections and libraries in the seventeenth century, this study provides fresh insights into their diverse readerships as well as their prominent role in the early modern book market. It then delves into their various academic purposes and their textual, intellectual, and political traditions through selected case studies on the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Empire, and Safavid Persia.

The second volume of a major two-volume study of the fortunes of Michel de Montaigne's Essais in both the early modern (1580-1725) and modern periods (1900-2000). Volume Two focuses on the reader/writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works.

In Mytho-poetics at Work Rengenier Rittersma offers an account of the posthumous fame of the Count of Egmont (1522-1568), whose public decapitation triggered the Dutch revolt. Drawing from numerous European sources – pamphlets, chronicles, and literature – this monograph tries to unravel why and how the alleged freedom fighter became an icon in European thought. It demonstrates that Egmont unfurled an evocative power over several centuries and cultural regions, as his name could be deliberately instrumentalized by different groups of people in order to corroborate their own confessional and political programs. In addition, this book offers the very first systematic study of the phenomenon of mytho-genesis and provides a conceptual model that can be applied to analogous historical myths.

The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. When historians interpret these events they inevitably depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and collection of Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this is the first life of L'Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called 'the storehouse of my curiosities'. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this study challenges historians' assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L'Estoile's prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life-writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilise rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L'Estoile's curiosity, this volume rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.