Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The expansion of Parisian merchant capital
- 2 Labour in Paris in the sixteenth century
- 3 Civil war and economic experiments
- 4 Inventions and science in the reign of Charles IX
- 5 Expropriation, technology and wage labour
- 6 The Bourbon economic restoration
- 7 Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie and the inertia of history
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY
3 - Civil war and economic experiments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The expansion of Parisian merchant capital
- 2 Labour in Paris in the sixteenth century
- 3 Civil war and economic experiments
- 4 Inventions and science in the reign of Charles IX
- 5 Expropriation, technology and wage labour
- 6 The Bourbon economic restoration
- 7 Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie and the inertia of history
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY
Summary
… how many great inventions were there not only to the profit of His Majesty, but, indeed, for the benefit of his whole people …
Philibert De l'Orme, Instructions (1563)As we have seen confidence in the notion of progress was widespread among the middle class of France during the first part of the sixteenth century. No one expressed this idea more fully than the humanist Louis Le Roy. It is in his work that the sixteenth-century idea of progress was most completely developed. In his Consideration sur l'histoire … universelle of 1568, Le Roy expressed himself as follows with respect to the achievements of his own age:
However, balancing the bad with the good, there has not been in the past an age where knowledge and the arts have reached a higher perfection than the present. Not at the time of Cyrus during which Pythagoras and Thales lived … not at the time of Alexander the Great when Greece produced what it had of the highest excellence in letters, arms and all the arts, when Plato, Euripides, Demosthenes and Aristotle lived. Not at the time of Augustus … Caesar, Pompey, Horace and Ovid … Not at the time of the Saracens among whom there flourished Averroes, Avicenna and Abenzonar …
For in the past one hundred years, not only have things which were previously hidden by shadows been brought to light, but also many other things have become known which were entirely unknown to the ancients: new seas, new lands, new kinds of men, morals, laws, customs, new plants … trees … minerals … newly discovered inventions, like printing, cannons, and the use of the compass … the restoration of ancient languages … […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500–1620 , pp. 57 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995