Cosmography, Local History, and National Sentiment: François de Belleforest and the History of Paris.

Despite its poor contemporary reception, François de Belleforest's Cosmographie universelle (1575) made important contributions to French history and national identity in the sixteenth century. Not only did it provide the first erudite history of Paris in the style forming at that time, but it also contributed to the development of a conception of the French people that grounded national consciousness in an amalgam of local experiences and Gallic history. Historians have tended to treat cosmography, chorography, and national history as separate genres with different concerns. Yet the influence of the Cosmographie universelle, measured more by the continual appropriation of its texts than by the commercial success of the volume, demonstrates that in the sixteenth-century intellectual world, these were interrelated and mutually influencing endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]