Images of Kingship in Early Modern France: Louis XI in Political Thought, 1560-1789

Louis XI, known as "The Spider King" because he wove many intricate plots, lives on in popular imagination primarily as a villain and a cruel, cunning, rather unscrupulous character. Absolutists fled to his banner while constitutionalists reviled him as a rapacious totalitarian murderer. InImages of Kingship in Early Modern France,Adrianna Bakos uses the changing nature of Louis XI's historical reputation to explore the intellectual and political climate of early modern France. She examines the political aims of those who wrote about Louis XI's reign and how these aims informed their writings. She also discusses the landscape of early modern French political discourse as well as surveying the literature from the period, offering new and more complex interpretations of the complicated intellectual climate of France.