Introduction

The collective practices and procedures that constituted different kinds of communities in Renaissance France generated a massive body of works, many of which detailed processes of memory and remembering. Religious processions, carnival celebrations, funerals, royal entries, and weddings were described in both serious and satirical pamphlets, books, and poems, as were massacres, battles, sieges, colonial expeditions, negotiations, speeches, sermons, religious services, and important meetings. This chapter focuses on the working of memory as a collective and intentional set of practices and performances, closely linked to texts intended to disseminate and reinforce ideologies and political positions. It highlights the extent to which even the most independent of writers remained firmly anchored in the more collective conception of identity that characterized the period, and which relied upon an active practice of memory as one of the foundations of different kinds of communities.