Conclusion

Legal reforms in early modern France marked a confluence of the crown’s judicial and legislative agenda, aimed at achieving what can be called in modern times judicial economy. They attested to the old-fashioned idea that the law, reinforced by royal authority, afforded better protection for the less-than-mighty subjects. Success in making the kingdom’s laws more systematic and equitable vindicates an important aspect of the meaning that historians and theorists have attached to the idea of a monarchie absolue. Early modern legal history has shown that a robust expression of sovereignty was intrinsically tied with the control of the sources of law. The historical forces behind the French law, long in the making, shed critical light on European legal tradition and jus commune.

Introduction

Historiography of early modern France has of late taken a definite social and cultural turn as scholars shied away from political and intellectual history. While the value of illuminating social life and practices is undisputable, examination of the sources of law, including legal texts and juristic writings, and of the role of the political authorities in creating the state legal hierarchy is indispensable before a theorization of interaction between law and society can be envisaged. How the legal system comprising various sources of law in early modern France functioned to meet the changing needs of society and also the growing institutional demands of the state presents an important question to historians and jurists alike. History of custom as law articulates the concept of custom and its relationship to royal sovereignty and provides a clear path to our understanding of the absolute monarchy. Literature on custom is now large enough that the literature itself is a proper subject of research.

The Tyranny of the Gingerbread House: Contextualising the Fear of Wolves in Medieval Northern Europe through Material Culture, Ecology and Folklore

In this paper, I propose to contextualise the popular perception ofthe "fairy tale wolf" as a window into a normative past, by focusing on responses to this animal in Britain and southern Scandinavia from the 8th to the 14th centuries, drawing on archaeological, artistic and written sources. These responses are subsequently juxtaposed with the socio-ecological context of the concept of the "fairy tale wolf" in early modern France. At a time when folklore is being increasingly incorporated into archaeological interpretation, I suggest that alternative understandings ofhuman relations with animals must be rooted in specific ecological and social contexts.

Présence d’esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France

This chapter contributes to the story of how and where criticism functions in early modern France by analysing descriptions of présence d’esprit or ‘presence of mind’, which emerge in the mid-1650s as a way of signalling quick thinking. Présence d’esprit is clearly associated with the salons, where it is required for participation in literary and linguistic games, and emerges simultaneously at a crucial juncture in Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales (1656–7), where it is used to shine a satirical light on the casuistry of the Jesuits. In both contexts, the attribution of présence d’esprit can be both negatively and positively accented. It crystallizes anxiety about the privileging of spontaneity and instinct over careful curation and the work of scholarship. These ambivalent views, mirroring changing attitudes to ‘la critique’, also demonstrate the complex interweave of poetics, rhetoric, and theology in the early modern period, and the places they share.