William Doyle is Emeritus Professor of History and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He is a
Fellow of the British Academy.

In The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien R?gime, an international team of thirty contributors survey and present current thinking about the world of pre-revolutionary France and Europe.
The idea of the Ancien R?gime was invented by the French revolutionaries to define what they hoped to destroy and replace. But it was not a precise definition, and although historians have found it conceptually useful, there is wide disagreement about what the Ancien R?gime's main features were, how they worked, how old they were, how far they stretched, how dynamic or inert they were, and how far the revolutionaries succeeded in their ambitions to eradicate them.
In this wide-ranging and authoritative collection, old and newer areas of research into the Ancien R?gime are presented and assessed, and there has been no attempt to impose any sort of consensus. The result shows what a lively field of historical enquiry the Ancien R?gime remains, and points the way towards a range of promising new directions for thinking and writing about the intriguing complex of historical problems which it continues to pose.