Early modern Brittany has often suffered from the long shadows cast by our image of the province in the nineteenth century. The backwardness of nineteenth-century Brittany, both in economic and social terms, has often been projected back into early modern times. Nineteenth-century Breton historians and antiquarians neglected the royal period because of their nostalgic yearnings for the independent Breton state of the fifteenth century, for the Golden Age of duke Pierre II and of the duchess Anne. In recent years, the early modern period has come into its own. There have been remarkable studies of the Breton nobility and of Breton medicine in the eighteenth century and of various aspects of the history of Nantes in both the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Breton institutions are well treated only from the time of Louis XIV, but the recent thèse of Alain Croix on life, death, and faith in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Brittany provides an unparalleled mass of information about demography, morbidity, and popular attitudes towards life and death in an early modern French province. The largest gaps in our knowledge remain in the economic, political, and social spheres. The only comprehensive work on the Breton economy is that of Henri Touchard on Breton maritime commerce in the Middle Ages (that is, in the proverbial Golden Age of the dukes).