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Article: VISITING MEDIAEVAL FRANCE TODAY.
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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DESPITE the global marketplace, satellite television, European integration, and countless other inducements to homogeneity, there is a section of France, the southwest, that steadfastly resists that trend. It retains its mediaeval air in a plenitude of Romanesque churches, castles, town walls, domestic buildings, and fortifications, despite being riven by a succession of wars that damaged or destroyed the originals of those structures centuries ago.
Although other sections of France and, indeed, parts of England and Italy, retain monuments of past ages, they do so in the midst of a commitment to modernity. The southwest has resisted rapid modernisation: it ...