Learning in the Life of a French Nobleman: Nicolas De Livre, Friend of Jean Bodin

Abstract

Starting with Donald Kelley's Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (1970), a number of important studies over the last thirty years have painted a rich picture of the cultural activities and self-conceptions of French noblemen of different types during the intense transformations of the second estate that characterized the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The nobles of the robe, often recently ennobled by holding high office in the judiciary, were noted for their cultivation of learning and erudition, grounded in long years of legal studies, large personal libraries and a special interest in local and national history and law; this milieu spawned the scholars responsible for the "historiographical revolution" in late sixteenth-century France. At the same time, the nobles of the sword, traditionally defined by their long record of military valor and service to the king, and more recently by their hostility to the newcomers from the robe, increasingly recast the justification for their status in terms of inherited virtue and refinement of manners. The shift to courtly values, which were soon widely emulated among the nobility and beyond, involved a new emphasis on conversation, complex rules of decorum, and a wide-ranging "curiosité," distinct from the bookish erudition of the sixteenth-century robe and displayed instead in witty repartie and in the practice of collecting the valuable, the beautiful and the unusual.