Provence
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Provence. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
pro-voNs', an old province of southeastern France. It comprised the region about the mouth of the Rhone and the region eastward as far as the Maritime Alps.It was an important province of the Roman Empire. Roads, baths, theaters, triumphal arches, and other remains indicate that it was the seat of much wealth. It was the seat also of an early western civilization. Arles and Marseilles were important cities. The customs and language of the people seem to have been inherited from the Romans, but they were not Italian, neither were they French. Even to this day, ancient Provence seems like a country sandwiched in between France and Italy. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Provence was noted for its troubadours or minstrels. They shared the religious enthusiasm of the period of the Crusades, but were developed by chivalry. It was the custom of the time for a knight to devote his lance to the service of some lady, quite usually the wife of his superior. His feats at arms were won in her name. His trophies of war he laid at her feet. Conversation was stilted and artificial, and, we may well believe, without sincerity. The troubadours went from castle hall to castle hall with their harps singing the adventures of knights and the trials they underwent, all for the sake of their lady loves. Adventurous love for lady was the one theme of the troubadours, on which they literally "harped" for two centuries. As the singing passed away before the invention of printing, few of their lays have been preserved. The troubadours belonged to the period of knight-errantry, to a time of castles, lords, and ladies. They sang of gay hunting parties, pennons, feats of arms, and stately dames. They dressed in gay apparel and were followers of the aristocratic few. They knew little and cared less about the joys and sorrows of the common people.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
formerly a maritime province of France, bounded on the S. by the Mediterranean, and comprising the modern departments of Bouches du Rhône, Var, Basses-Alpes, and parts of Alpes Maritimes and Vaucluse. Provence was overrun in the 5th century by the Visigoths and Burgundians, for a time was under the Saracens, and in 879 was mostly incorporated with Cisjuran Burgundy and with it was attached to Germany. The main part of the region remained, however, under the Counts of Arles, also known as Counts of Provence, and was practically independent. Under the Angevin princes the constitution of Provence, with its three estates holding the power of the purse, was well balanced and free; and it is possible that through Simon de Montfort the English parliamentary constitution may be indebted to it. The last of the counts, Charles, grandson of René the Good, bequeathed his country to the dauphin of France; and it was united to that country in 1486 by Charles VIII.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The old province Aiton's described in 1910 is now the administrative region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, created in the 1950s-60s reforms and marketed since 2018 under the brand "Région Sud"; the department Collier's called Basses-Alpes was renamed Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in 1970. Aiton's claim that "few of their lays have been preserved" because troubadour song "passed away before the invention of printing" is wrong: some 2,500 Occitan lyrics by roughly 450 named troubadours survive in medieval songbooks, a couple of hundred with their melodies, and modern scholars take the poetry far more seriously than as insincere aristocratic play — they also count some twenty women poets, the trobairitz, whom Aiton does not mention. Provençal itself, which both entries treat as a living regional speech, is now classed as endangered, spoken mainly by older people and taught as a heritage subject. The most striking addition to the region's ancient past came in 1991, when the Cosquer Cave, its painted chambers reachable only through a long underwater tunnel near Marseille, was found to hold images made when sea levels were far lower, some 27,000 years ago.
Written for this edition, 2026.