The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual, with a political, scientific, and above all existential value, emerged. Volume IV of this award-winning series chronicles this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I--a century and a quarter of rapid, ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke, altered life in the Western world.
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
These volumes, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, are aimed at both the scholar and layperson who wonder how people lived and behaved from ancient times to the present: "their thoughts, their feelings, their bodies, their attitudes, their habits and habitations, their codes, their marks, and their signs." The focus is on western European life, primarily French.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
The new emphasis on the history of everybody has now been consecrated in [this] ambitious five-volume series...masterfully translated by Arthur Goldhammer...Copious illustrative materials--paintings, drawings, caricatures, and photographs, all cannily chosen and wittily captioned to display domestic life...Magnificent.
--Roger Shattuck (New York Times Book Review )
The fourth volume of this brilliant series arrives with the poignance of a letter that through some fluke of the postal system has been delayed 70 or 100 years and is read by descendants of the original addressee...A whole century's cries and murmurs are here, reminding us that their echoes are with us still.
--Joseph Coates (Chicago Tribune )
Evocatively written, well translated and beautifully illustrated.
--Richard Sennett (New York Newsday )
Spanning the period from the 11th century to the Renaissance and focusing on France and Tuscan Italy, this continues the projected five-volume history of private life from the Roman world to the present. 'Private' is here defined as what medieval people considered intimate, familial, domestic...[The book] display[s] an astounding knowledge and use of sources and offer rich detail about everything from affection and sex to domestic arrangements and latrines. The many illustrations strongly support the text. Essential for both research and general collections.
--Bennett Hill (Library Journal )
What gives the volume its unity is not so much a rigorous definition of the subject, private life, as a consistency of concentration on a series of very interesting, interrelated themes: living space, and the degree of privacy that it can afford; family relationships, with special references to the nucleargroup that centers around a single married couple; relations between the sexes (both amorous and domestic); attitudes toward the body and nudity; the senseof individuality and self-perception...This volume offers a very full, richly variegated picture of the life, in different places and at different periods, of the Middle Ages. It has lavish and well-chosen illustrations to match the text. (New York Review of Books )
General readers as well as academic specialists will revel in the wealth of historical detail and insight offered here. Aries saw three basic forces contributing to the profound social changes of the early modern era: the rise of state power, the spread of literacy, and new forms of religious piety. Together, the essays address each of these realms from several angles, providing glimpses at everything from cookbooks to charivaris, love letters to lettres decachet. The pattern that emerges is the creation of a sphere of private life, thought, and feeling that was unknown in the Middle Ages. (Choice )
--Roger Shattuck (New York Times Book Review )
The fourth volume of this brilliant series arrives with the poignance of a letter that through some fluke of the postal system has been delayed 70 or 100 years and is read by descendants of the original addressee...A whole century's cries and murmurs are here, reminding us that their echoes are with us still.
--Joseph Coates (Chicago Tribune )
Evocatively written, well translated and beautifully illustrated.
--Richard Sennett (New York Newsday )
Spanning the period from the 11th century to the Renaissance and focusing on France and Tuscan Italy, this continues the projected five-volume history of private life from the Roman world to the present. 'Private' is here defined as what medieval people considered intimate, familial, domestic...[The book] display[s] an astounding knowledge and use of sources and offer rich detail about everything from affection and sex to domestic arrangements and latrines. The many illustrations strongly support the text. Essential for both research and general collections.
--Bennett Hill (Library Journal )
What gives the volume its unity is not so much a rigorous definition of the subject, private life, as a consistency of concentration on a series of very interesting, interrelated themes: living space, and the degree of privacy that it can afford; family relationships, with special references to the nucleargroup that centers around a single married couple; relations between the sexes (both amorous and domestic); attitudes toward the body and nudity; the senseof individuality and self-perception...This volume offers a very full, richly variegated picture of the life, in different places and at different periods, of the Middle Ages. It has lavish and well-chosen illustrations to match the text. (New York Review of Books )
General readers as well as academic specialists will revel in the wealth of historical detail and insight offered here. Aries saw three basic forces contributing to the profound social changes of the early modern era: the rise of state power, the spread of literacy, and new forms of religious piety. Together, the essays address each of these realms from several angles, providing glimpses at everything from cookbooks to charivaris, love letters to lettres decachet. The pattern that emerges is the creation of a sphere of private life, thought, and feeling that was unknown in the Middle Ages. (Choice )
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is the best book in the series,
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This review is from: History of Private Life, Volume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Paperback)
If you only read one volume of this five volume set, volume IV is the book I would recommend. The History of Private Life, vols. I-V, is concerned with the project of demonstrating private life in the west (read: France) from its Roman origins to the present day.
Volume IV concerns itself with the 19th century. The 19th century, with the emergence of industrialization, democratic feeling and the bourgeois, is where modernity begins. It should come as no surprise that the 19th century is also where the modern conception of "private life" began as well. After reading volume IV, I was left wondering whether this set of five books might have read better as a set of three books: Volume one would contain Roman life, the middle ages and the renaissance/early modern period, volume two would be this book and volume three would be the twentieth century. Not to say that I found vol's I-III irrelevant. However, those volumes were more concerned with antecedents of "private" life and it is only in this volume that "private" life takes center stage. I noticed a shift in the style of writing in this volume. Whereas the previous three volumes were straight forward with only occasional prose that lurched into the familiar (and oft incomprehensible) style of the "theorists of social control"(Foucalt, etc). This volume sometimes descends into the circular logic and incomprehensible theory of that school. None the less, this is the one book of the five that I would most recommend.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A History of Private Life, Volume IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (History of Private Life),
By
This review is from: History of Private Life, Volume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Paperback)
Excellent book - one that had already been highly recommended to me. Just what I wanted. Arrived quickly and in perfect condition. Thank you Amazon!
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Eugénie de Guérin, morbid heredity Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Second Empire, Bibliothèque Nationale, The Actors, First Communion, George Sand, Third Republic, Sirot-Angel Collection, Civil Code, July Monarchy, Art Nouveau, World War, Caroline Brame, Hannah More, Victor Hugo, The Curtain Rises, French Revolution, New Year, Father Christmas, Massif Central, Bibliothcque Nationale, Martine Segalen, Bibliothèque des Arts, Middle Ages, Bibliothèquc Nationale, Musée des Beaux-Arts New!
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Eugénie de Guérin, morbid heredity Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Second Empire, Bibliothèque Nationale, The Actors, First Communion, George Sand, Third Republic, Sirot-Angel Collection, Civil Code, July Monarchy, Art Nouveau, World War, Caroline Brame, Hannah More, Victor Hugo, The Curtain Rises, French Revolution, New Year, Father Christmas, Massif Central, Bibliothcque Nationale, Martine Segalen, Bibliothèque des Arts, Middle Ages, Bibliothèquc Nationale, Musée des Beaux-Arts New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
53
books
cite this book:
See all 53 books citing this book
- The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body by Richard Leppert in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 by Woodruff Smith in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) by Ann Gaylin in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) by Jo Burr Margadant on page 131, page 254, and Back Matter
- Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 by Woodruff D. Smith in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
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