Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570-1715
Categories: History
Historian Jonathan Dewald examines how French nobles of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced their lives and how this shaped modern culture. Drawing on memoirs, letters and literature, he shows how aristocrats faced conflicting demands of service, money, family and individuality. Dewald argues that these tensions fostered new ideas about the self, love, ambition and privacy that later became part of modern culture.
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- Shane Parrish: “Ironically, the conflicting demands of seventeenth-century aristocratic culture created an untenable state that nurtured the more egalitarian ideologies of the eighteenth century and the weakening of the patriarchal ideology”