The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France
In an examination of eyewitness travel writing in thirteenth- through sixteenth-century France, Andrea Frisch studies the figure of the witness at a historical juncture and in a cultural context in which that figure is generally thought to have begun to assume a recognizably modern form and function.
Whereas most accounts of early modern travel literature tend to read modern presuppositions about witnessing and testimony back into the material, Frisch approaches the early modern witness in terms of the cultural legacy of the Middle Ages. Through primary readings in law and theology, Frisch documents the tension between the ethical witness (the characteristic witness of premodernity) and the epistemic witness (the modern witness) and explores the impact of that tension on the figure of the witness in pre- and early modern French-language travel literature.
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In medieval jurisprudence , scientia or knowledge was the province of the judge ,
and not the witness . Moreover , neither medieval folklaw nor the early inquisition
assumed that testimony was essentially or even primarily a discourse of first ...
Those who bore the title Admiral of France were never able to exercise their
authority in the provinces . When Henri , duc de Montmorency , became Admiral
of France in 1612 and was able to assume the admiralty of Guyenne two years
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THE WITNESS AND THE JUDGE
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