Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France

In the secret backshop of the mind recommended by Montaigne, historians muse on occasion about exchanging the archival habitat for an ethnographic one. Straightaway the vision signifies different modes of inquiry: the mundane and the exotic, the traditional and the contemporary, the scholarly life focused on documents of deceased persons and the one shared with living members of communities. In truth, however, the historian-cum-ethnographer vision springs not from exotica, but from the epistemological dilemma that haunts historical research circumscribed by past time, unchartable space, and selective documents. At times the research format itself may confound historical investigation. There are dangers posed by research systems that subscribe to the replication of uniformity-the compilation of essentially confirming facts. But rewards may be reaped from systems that struggle with the organization of diversity-the investigation of amorphous layers of contradictory evidence. There are empty silences left in research formats that accept the finality of textual opaqueness. But silences may be mitigated by formats that attempt to read encoded phenomena, such as gendered rhetoric and relations, patterns of symbol and ritual, notions of honor and shame. Historians have always written about the power of rights; now we write about the rites of power.