Dewald Jonathan. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture France, 1570-1715

This book explores ways in which men and women of the French nobility thought about their world and themselves during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It asks how nobles responded to a series of recurrent problems in their lives: problems of personal worth, ambition, and the unfolding of an individual's career; problems of money, friendship, sexuality, and civic order; problems of time and communication. Each of these is a distinct topic, which I initially selected because of its frequency in aristocratic correspondence and literature of the period. But these topics can also be understood as aspects of a single larger problem. Each represents one form of connection between the individual and her or his society. What follows, then, is an extended essay on how aristocratic men and women understood their bonds to the society around them at a decisive moment in the evolution of early mode society.