Download or read book The French Monarchical Commonwealth, 1356-1560 written by James B Collins and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The centralizing monarchical discourse has long dominated our perception of the kingdom of France. Jacques Krynen, Jean Barbey, Arlette Jouanna, and many others have traced the evolution of this discourse between the 14th and 17th centuries, when, in their view, it led to a Bourbon monarchy whose relationship to the concept "absolute" differed substantially in their presentations.1 Jouanna has added important correctives to this narrative, both in her insistence on the importance of a noble ideology of resistance and in her careful presentation of "puissance absolue" as an "extraordinary weapon" [arme extraordinaire] in the sixteenth century.2 As she rightly emphasizes, "absolu(e)" took on a new meaning in the seventeenth century, and we must avoid the temptation to view early sixteenth-century developments as the germ of what happened in the middle of the seventeenth century.3"--