Peasants, Frenchmen and cultural historians (original) (raw)
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Written in a clear, engaging style, this book makes a compelling argument about an important topic that has rarely received book-length attention, and never in English. Matteson presents a detailed, fascinating history of social, intellectual, and political struggles over rights to French woodlands and their resources, which were a key part of traditional agro-ecosystems.
Wood for Burning: The Continuity of Woodland Management in Medieval and Early Modern France
This essay argues that over the last five or six centuries of the preindus-trial era northern French patterns of woodland management, which prioritized the production of fuelwood, were more stable than is usually thought. Regulations were gradually tightened, most famously in the Forest Ordinance of 1669, but such administrative reforms aimed primarily to reassert the state's authority and improve its finances. Silvicultural techniques themselves changed only incrementally, and more often as the result of market forces than of central planning. Early modern norms of woodland management had much deeper and broader sources than the tendency to trace them to royal initiative suggests. The French state appropriated and standardized practices that were in many cases already common by the thirteenth century. This essay focuses on the pervasiveness of coppicing, the enduring norms governing tree density and species, and the persistence of use rights. At least until the late twentieth century forest historians tended to accept at face value the abundant testimony of contemporary observers that later medieval and early modern Western Europe suffered from serious shortages of both timber and fuelwood. Yet as many recent scholars have noted, such testimony must be critically evaluated. Particularly problematic are complaints about shortages of timber, which usually reflect relatively narrow, elite demand for specific sizes and qualities of lumber for shipbuilding and large-scale construction projects. The supply of such timber corresponds only weakly with the extent or sustainability of preindustrial woodlands. This is because in the Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern period most West European woodlands in deciduous forest zones, that is, virtually everywhere outside of the coniferous woodlands found in mountains and the boreal
The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life, ed. Miriam Müller (Routledge), 2021
This chapter is concerned with a dispute over customary dues that took place in the second quarter of the fourteenth century between the villagers of Saint-Leu d’Esserent and their lords, the monks of the Cluniac priory of Saint-Leu d’Esserent. The conflict elucidates the contours of this community and how it defined itself, revealing its ability to identify and assert its self-interest and providing a starting point for thinking about rural politics and village protagonism in the absence of communal institutions.
Legends and peasant histories of feudalism and emancipation in France and beyond
This paper was originally presented to the Celtic-Baltic-Scandinavian Legends conference on 'Supernatural Places' held in Tartu, Estonia, in 2012. Historians regularly claim that peasant voting patterns in the nineteenth-century and after were influenced by memories of feudalism and emancipation. But what memories? How were they transmitted? The aim of this paper is to look at legends collected by folklorists in the nineteenth-century for evidence of such memories, and how they might have shaped rural engagement with electoral processes.
Revue de géographie alpine, 2019
The great mountain geographer André Allix published in 1950 in the prestigious journal Géocarrefour, of which he was then director of the publication, a vitriolic text aimed at establishing the balance of the wrongs and assets of the French geographer Pierre Deffontaines (Allix, 1950). Allix put up a list of simplifications, imperfections, forgetfulness, errors, typos and oddities contained in a long article by Deffontaines. The form, he confessed, was "alert and pleasant" (Idem, p. 75), mainly because: "Pierre Deffontaines has all the qualities that made Jean Brunhes so successful. One feels (one knows moreover) that in his turn, and like his illustrious predecessor, he is a brilliant writer, a very justly tasteful speaker of broad and sometimes distant audiences. French propaganda, and we must praise it, owes a great deal to his talent and his eloquence. Science, unfortunately, at the risk of becoming sad with pedantry, has more austere requirements "(Idem, p. 76). The first publication of the Revue de géographie humaine et d'ethnologie in 1948, drew up a Prévert-style inventory in a book review and showed some errors of Deffontaines, after having sung the praises of the ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, codirector of the publication. But where did Deffontaines "find that La Bérarde en Oisans do not see the sun for five months? [...] Where, that the hunters of marmots 'Magdalenian and Aziliens' went up in Dauphiné more than 2.000 meters, 'in colder times than today', where they found glaciers and no marmots at such altitudes?". He also notes: an error in the location of a museum, some confusion in the definition of different types of Mountainous and forested hinterlands as a front line.Small peasants and petit...
The rise in ecocrtical studies of literature is really a way of understanding humanity through nature, but with the development of civilization, this has somehow been forgotten, or at least relegated to the realm of the unconscious. As Cheryl Glotfelty notes, " all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it " This paper will analyze the role of the forest in three lais of Marie de France: Lanval, Chevrefoil, and Bisclavret, emphasizing the significance of the natural world and the forest that must be kept secret, and as a place where humanity is restored out of a pagan, pre-Christian past
Peasants Into Frenchmen Thirty Years After
French Politics, Culture & Society, 2009
Abstract: This essay provides an introduction to the articles by Laird Boswell, Stéphane Gerson, and Gilles Pécout in this forum, which is based on a one-day conference held at UCLA in December 2006, several months before the death of Eugen Weber. It gives a ...