Conclusions

Abstract

Many early modern French works, ranging from individual poems to large-scale histories, were produced with a sense that they emanated not just from individuals but from families. Such works, which I call family literature, played a big part in the attempts by families and individuals to rise, or at least to avoid falling, within the social hierarchy. Their production became part of what some families were socially or of a new direction in which some members wished to push the family. Literature could be presented as the voice of a lineage as much as of an individual. It was often designed to pin down the image of a family that circulated among readers rather than to open it up. But, through its orientation towards the future, family literature offered descendants and other future readers affordances, including as yet undetermined ways of renewing that image, and sometimes of questioning or disrupting it.