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All the mystery, earthiness, and romance of the Middle Ages
are captured in this panorama of everyday life. This second volume of the sumptuous
History of Private Life, successor to the widely acclaimed Volume 1, From
Pagan Rome to Byzantium, explores the evolving concepts of intimacy from the
semiobscure eleventh century through the first stirrings of the Renaissance world
in the fifteenth. Did people in the Middle Ages have
a concept of privacy? How closely does it resemble what we understand as privacy
and intimacy today? Here the historian as archaeologist unearths a growing number
of letters, literature, marriage contracts, arts, artifacts from which to construct
a vivid picture of life in peasant's hut and pope's palace, in monastery and merchant's
house, in castle, fortress, and village. This heretofore
hidden epic begins with the emergence of the individual from the mostly anonymous
masses of the eleventh century into the new contours of life in the private domain
that marked the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Private life, rudimentary
in the early court and castle, at last became almost entirely family life. As
the tale unfolds, we come to know the fascinating private world of affection and
sex, child-rearing and old age, the inner life of piety, and the transformation
of domestic space into the ultimate refuge and retreat. Woven into this rich tapestry
are ornamental details of garden layouts, jewelry design, house decoration, and
the celebration of weddings. The importance of the individual emerges, as do the
secret language of signs, the symbolic value of the father, and even a new meaning
of nudity as a state that incites desire. By the fifteenth century we become aware
not only of a more individualistic existence but also of a growing introspection
that heralded the flowering of that most intimate preserve -- the inner privacy
of the self. Georges Duby said: "While wars were
being waged, while the Black Death was decimating the cities, men and women went
on living and dying. They arranged their lives, adapted as best they could to
history's comings and goings, and defended their autonomy -- material and spiritual.
It is almost a secret epic that we have tried to bring back to life."
Contributors to this volume include Georges Duby, Dominique
Barthelemy, Charles de La Ronciere, Danielle Regnier-Bohler, Philippe Contamine,
and Philippe Braunstein. Georges Duby is Professor at the College de France. |
