Professor%20Giora%20Sternberg: List of publications

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Writing to undo: protestation as a mode of early modern resistance

March 2023
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Journal article
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American Historical Review
<p>This study investigates protestations as a unique lens into the workings of coercion and resistance in the early modern period. Protestation was a wide-ranging genre of document, written to counter the consequences of coercive forces in myriad forms: familial, economic, religious, and political; on the levels of micro and macro; and across social and geographical space. This remarkable scope has paradoxically proven an obstacle to realizing the historiographical potential of the phenomenon, which remains largely uncharted and familiar only to a few specialists separated by sub-disciplinary divides. This article thus offers a unifying conceptual, analytic, and methodological framework. It interrogates protestations as material objects as well as verbal texts; follows them throughout their lifecycle; and explores their spectra of producers, protagonists, and functions. A variety of case studies from the&nbsp;<em>ancien r&eacute;gime</em>&nbsp;illustrate the significance of the phenomenon on both the micro and macro levels, whether in the struggles of young people against the abuses of patriarchal and familial authority or in the subversive use of protestations in the constitutional crises of absolute monarchy. Protestation is thus shown to be of wide interest to a broad swath of scholars, including historians of gender, family, working-people, elites, high politics, law, and writing.</p>
material culture, France, early modern, FFR, methodology, media, archives

The Monseigneur and the grands seigneurs: questions of priority in early modern France

November 2019
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Journal article
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English Historical Review
This article investigates a series of epistolary contestations among the French high command in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to unlock their far-reaching military, political, cultural and social ramifications. Remarkably, disagreements over the use of the term Monseigneur and other epistolary status-markers took priority over military expediency, disrupting French armed operations in the midst of external war or internal rebellion. Such priority of traditional values over new ideals of royal service qualifies the thesis of a reconfiguration of noble Mentalités under the Bourbon monarchy. What is more, close analysis of these conflicts and tensions reveals their impact on everyday communication, sociability and friendship, and uncovers a rich spectrum of coping strategies, from open confrontation to subtler forms of evasion or accommodation. Drawing on new archival findings as well as on a reinterpretation of celebrated literary texts, this analysis also serves to recontextualise these writings as part of information networks that played an active role in the conflicts themselves. Finally, the underlying contestations over social priority newly illuminate the changing landscape of the French aristocracy during this period, revealing points of fissure, collective identities and moments of transformation. In particular, the article brings into relief the changing fortunes of those who remained part of the aristocratic system but did not obtain the positions that increasingly became emblematic of the highest rank. These contestations thus powerfully illustrate how epistolary ceremonial, and cultural practices more generally, can advance our understanding of social structures and dynamics.

Status Interaction During the Reign of Louis XIV

July 2014
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Book
But status interaction was not a pastime or a matter of personal inclination. While protagonists and generations may change, the importance of symbolic markers for mediating social positions and tensions remained. When Louis XIV died...
History

Manipulating Information in the Ancien Regime: Ceremonial Records, Aristocratic Strategies and the Limits of the State Perspective

June 2013
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Journal article
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Journal of Modern History

Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV

August 2009
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Journal article
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Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies
The post of marshal was the highest rank that a military career could offer in seventeenth-century France. But for a soldier who was not well versed in the hierarchical codes of the aristocracy, this high court office could prove to be a ceremonial nightmare. Nicolas Catinat, scion of a newly ennobled family, discovered that his extensive military experience was of no avail in Versailles. Following his elevation to the marshalate in spring 1693, Catinat immediately faced his first ceremonial challenge: to respond to the mountain of congratulatory letters that accumulated on his field desk. In so doing, the neophyte marshal had to make sense of how his newly acquired status affected the style of his correspondence. Which formulae should he adopt? How should he address the Vendôme brothers, descendants of Henry IV through a legitimated bastard line, who also happened to serve under his command? And how was his correspondence with the Secretary of State for War to be conducted henceforth? In a state of exasperation, Catinat turned to his brother Croisille, who was more versed in courtly etiquette. In a series of letters the new marshal expounded his epistolary dilemmas and urged his brother to help him. ‘I am much bothered about ceremonial’, he wrote to him in one letter; ‘I hope you will send me a reliable protocol in good form as soon as possible’, in another. In the meantime, however, he managed to make several blunders. On the one hand, some of his correspondents were offended by what seemed to them an unjustifiably imperious manner; on the other, some of his fellow marshals complained that his excessively deferential style failed to uphold the dignity of their rank.1 Catinat's predicament illustrates that, in the seventeenth century, epistolary ceremonial was no mere nicety. Endings were not always reducible …

Are formules de politesse Always Polite? The Bauffremont-Villars Incident, Discursice Struggles and Social Tensions under the Ancin Regime

January 2009
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Journal article
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Zeitsprunge

The Race for the Mantle: Dress and Status at the Court of Louis XIV

January 2006
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Journal article
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Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly