About this Book

Current scholarship is fascinated by early modern material culture. This volume of 'Yale French Studies' examines a variety of objects, protocols, and spectacles that conveyed meaning in early modern France. Its contributors analyze processes of meaning in events and objects part of material practices that range from modes of dress, to types of decoration, to disciplinary methods, to medical procedures, to heraldic representation, to public displays of mourning and celebration. This embodiment of ideas in concrete objects, lived experiences, and sets of conventions provided physical bases for signification that these essays discuss in their historical specificity.