The Gondi

In this well-researched monograph, Joanna Milstein explores and explains the meteoric rise of the Italian Gondi clan to power, wealth and influence in later sixteenth-century France. The leading men of the Gondi family—Jean-Baptiste, Jérôme, and, above all, Albert and Pierre—are well known to historians of the time, yet they have received relatively little attention from them. The Gondi success came amid an atmosphere of widespread hostility to Italians in general and the Gondi in particular, for one of their clan, Albert, was widely assumed to have played a role in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Albert was cast as Machiavellian, embodying the perennial trope of the evil counsellor. Many of the most respected authors of the time wrote against the Gondi in general and Albert in particular—among them, Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, François Hotman and Pierre de l’Estoille. Milstein seeks to explain how, amid such hostility and xenophobia, the Gondi so successfully navigated the turbulent and dangerous political and social waters of late sixteenth-century France

Clan · Hostility · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Xenophobia · Anthropology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Social Psychology