This volume brings together an international team of experts who have synthesized and summarized the most recent research on French history of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Using a topical approach to provide broad thematic coverage of the period from 1500 to 1660, each chapter focuses on a specific area of French history: politics and the state, the economy, society and culture, religion, gender and the family, and France's burgeoning overseas empire, which was constructed in this period. The result is the most up-to-date synthesis of this period, showing how recent scholarship has significantly revised the traditional narrative of French history.