William Beik was a professor of history at Emory University. An authority on the social and institutional history of seventeenth-century France, he is the author of Abolutism and Society: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (1985), which won the 1986 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association; Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Culture of Retribution (1987); and A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (2009). He has written numerous articles and is coeditor of the New Approaches to European History series at Cambridge University Press.