My paper will examine some of the new ways in which urban identity in France came to be expressed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of erudite histories. Some erudite histories approached the subject by focusing on the ecclesiastical history of a particular town, looking at its religious institutions, laws, and monuments. Others delved into the ancient past or antiquité of a town modeled after the laudes civitatum found in Classical exemplars and quite popular during the Middle Ages, sought to aggrandize a town’s image and standing by tracing it origins back to the Gallo-Roman and even Celtic eras, often with large dollops of fantasy and myth thrown in. Many of these histories combined legend, biblical antecedents, medieval chronicles, topographical descriptions, archival research, and even archaeological excavations to paint what seem at first glance rather eclectic portraits of particular towns. This interest in the urban France’s hoary past grew just as the last vestiges of the towns’ semi-autonomy as bonne villes vanished. Antiquarian representations of towns thus came to replace the earlier, but now fast disappearing or increasingly irrelevant symbols of urban identity found in a town’s walls and charter. Intellectual curiosity and a desire to improve administrative organization through the founding of public archives also informed to erudite histories. My paper will offer a preliminary investigation into the manifold reasons behind the rise of this new kind of urban history, survey the various forms it took, and relate how these books strove to reconstruct urban identity during a time when towns came under the growing sway of the monarchy.