This volume traces the development of France and its identity in a period replete with crisis, from the Albigensian crusades in the first half of the thirteenth century, through the Hundred Years War, to the beginnings of the Italian wars in the 1490s.

Few studies of the history of provincial France have hitherto spanned the conventional medieval/early-modern divide, and David Potter's detailed examination of war and government in Picardy, a region of France hitherto neglected by historians, has much to say about the development of French absolutism. Picardy emerged as a province after the campaigns of 1470 1477, and its experience of the first period of absolutism provides an enlightening contrast with that of other, more outlying provinces: the Picard nobility was notable for the extent of its participation in the army, the court and the...