My research interests focus on early modern France, with particular focuses on erudition, family memory, and the urban culture of French provincial cities in the sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries. My first book, Between Crown and Community, investigated the political culture of Poitiers, a mid-sized provincial capital from the reign of François I (1515-1547) to that of Henri IV (1589-1610). My second book, entitled Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France, focused on local history writing in French provincial towns throughout France in the period of roughly 1550-1660. I am currently working on a book-length project on family memory and genealogical culture in France, which will draw on archival and published works to connect the ways that particular families constructed their own trajectories with the developing genres of genealogical histories and memoirs. My interests thus embrace questions of knowledge formation, the construction and use of archives, cultural interactions between local elites and the well-known scholars of the Republic of Letters, the nature of the early modern family, the development of history writing from the early modern period to the present, the relationship between localities and the state, the intersection of politics and religion, the nature of religious conflict, and more generally the social, cultural, intellectual and political conditions of the early modern period.
For details, please visit: https://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/hilary-bernstein/