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Description of  Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)

Examines the impact of the royal politics of amnesia on tragedy and national historiography in France, 1560-1630 This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences, undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century, leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation and generally associated with an increasingly modern sensibility, will nonetheless prove useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. Read more