A round-table discussion with Reynald Abad, Professor of History at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and Jeffrey Ravel, Professor of History at MIT

These are complicated times for students of the early modern period. In many ways the field is flourishing as never before, with an abundance of new studies and innovative approaches. But early modernists also face new challenges, both internal and external. Interpretive schemas that once organized the field have collapsed, with few satisfactory replacements in sight; and the surrounding culture has become more insistently presentminded, raising new questions about what studying the pre-1800 past can contribute to twenty-first-century societies.

Two distinguished specialists will offer their thoughts on the state of the field, then take
questions and comments from the audience.

Reynald Abad is the author of Le grand marché: l’approvisonnement alimentaire de Paris sous l’Ancien Régime (2002) and La grâce du roi: les lettres de clémence de la Grande Chancellerie au XVIIIe siècle (2011)

Jeffrey Ravel is the author of The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (1999) and The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France (2008).

Sponsored by the Department of History and the Early Modern Research Workshop