Варфоломеевская ночь: событие и споры - [76]

The collection "Saint Bartholomew’s Day: the event and disputes" is the result of the work of historians from Russia, Great Britain, France, USA and Israel that took part on the colloquium of the same name in 1997 in Moscow. The efforts of the participants of the colloquium were concentrated not only on the reasons and problematic of the event, but also on the mythology of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day which had been formed in the historiography, public opinion and culture of the West and Russia. The items of the colloquium reflect a significant part of the basic problems put forward by the actual historiography on the question of the massacre and myths about the event: internal policy (R. Knecht) and matrimonial strategy (D. Shishkin) of Catherine de Medici, sacral topography of Paris existing to that time (R. Decimon), neoplatonic conception of the Prince, had formed at the royal court of France, and probability of a participation of Chari IX in the massacre from the point of view of an adequathy to these representations (D. Crouzet), politics of prevention of a slaughter at province, on the basis of materials of Dijon magistrate (M.P. Holt), reflection on of the bloody outcome of the Parisian wedding in the political circles and public opinion of England (O. Dmitrieva), role of Parisian magistrate in the massacre (B. Diefendorf), dispute on opportunity of studying religious problematic in the French Religious wars (N. Ivanova), generation of myth about the massacre at the works of F. Hotman (I. Elfrond), cinematographic version of historical reality in the Russian cinematograph, at the screen adaptation of the novel of A. Dumas "The Countess de Monsoreau" (M. Bobkova). Conjoint work of the authors reconstructs the context of the situation, in which the massacre had taken place, and the situation had been caused by the event, a perception of the tragedy by contemporaries that had caused the further development of events, and remains of that interpretation, generated in 16 century and kept by the cultural tradition.

Thus, the colloquium, and then the collection are not an attempt to give a comprehensive answer to a question of the causes of the massacre or to determine any historiografical positions, but a synthesis of the general panorama of the event and ways of its description from various research and thematic prospects. The collection in a definite sense fills a lacuna at the historiography of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day formed after an allocation of the research of a social problematic in a separate direction, caused break up of the integral description and a significant differentiation of research estimations of the event of August 24,1572. The editorial board hopes, that the efforts of the authors didn’t go for nothing and a reader will manage to generate his notion of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day.