ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on France's 'Middle Ages' and 'Renaissance', and explores the influence of the conviction that 'the French Renaissance' was a sixteenth-century phenomenon and thus began in or about 1500, at which time 'the French Middle Ages' ended. The year 1500 corresponds to no particularly memorable event in the history of France, separating as it does the first two years of the reign of Louis XII from the final fifteen, and marking the inception of Italian ventures that are impossible to treat without reference to those of his distant cousin and predecessor Charles VIII. The division between 'the Middle Ages' and 'the Renaissance', like the names assigned to the two time-spans, has had unfortunate results. The chapter focuses on continuities between the centuries before and after the year 1500 in three different areas: kingship and lordship, property-holding, and historical-mindedness and the law.
