|
|
|
The Cambridge Illustrated History of France
In a tour de force, Colin Jones gives a gripping, superbly and intelligently illustrated account of the political, social and cultural history of France, placing an innovatory emphasis on the impact of regionalism, class, gender and race in French heritage. Ranging from prehistoric menhirs to the Pompidou Centre, from Louis XIV's Versailles to twentieth-century highrises, from Marie Antoinette to Marie Claire, The Cambridge Illustrated History of France is host to lively and penetrating new insights that take us through the shaping of France from the earliest times to the brink of a new millennium. Combining superb illustration with outstanding scholarship, the diversity of the French heritage--scientific and artistic, national and regional--is explored with an engrossing and accessible style. Special features on places, people and events, a glossary, and a further reading section enhance this engaging book that will appeal to history buffs and students of French history and culture. Colin Jones is also the author of the Longman Companion to the French Revolution and The Cultural Atlas of France..
Price: $25.00
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt ..Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the ordinary people of the past."—Times Literary SupplementWith a new introduction by author Le Roy Ladurie, this special edition offers a fascinating history of a fourteenth-century village, Montaillou, in the mountainous region of southern France, almost destroyed by internal feuds and religious heterodoxy. Ladurie's portrait is based on a detailed register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and future Pope Benedict XII, who conducted rigorous inquisition into heresy within his diocese. Fournier was a consummate inquisitor, an acute psychologist who was able to elicit from the accused the innermost secrets of their thoughts and actions. He was pitiless in the pursuit of error, and meticulous in recording that pursuit. LeRoy Ladurie analyzes the behavior, demography, social mentality, and cosmology of the community of peasants and shepherds, and vividly evokes the daily life of the village and mountain pastures. His portrait of Montaillou is dominated by the personal histories of two men: the curé Pierre Clergue, a brutal and powerful man who placed his enemies in the hands of the inquisitor; and the shepherd Pierre Maury, a friend of the Albigensian perfecti and a fatalist who returned from Spain to disappear in the inquisitor's prison in his own country. Montaillou, which has received even more praise than LeRoy Ladurie's earlier work, provides a portrait of a fascinating place with a dark, intriguing history..
Price: $12.54
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga
From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity. "Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."— The Independent"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."— The New Republic"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca.
Price: $10.00
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV
The Duke of Saint-Simon (1675—1755) was by all accounts, including his own, a sensitive, self-obsessed, ill-tempered man. A courtier and phenomenal chronicler of court life under Louis XIV, he produced the monumental work Memoirs, running to thousands of pages, in which the intrigues, personalities, activities, and gossip of life at Versailles are recorded in acerbic detail. Drawing heavily on these Memoirs, renowned historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie offers a wonderful portrait of life under Louis XIV, focusing on the fundamental issues of hierarchy and rank in this tightly controlled universe. Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, expertly translated by Arthur Goldhammer, is a historical essay about court life, built with the wide range of tools Ladurie so expertly employs: ethnography, history, literary criticism, and historiography. Ladurie recreates a world in which man is most definitely born unequal, a world circumscribed entirely by purity of bloodline, which nonetheless directly preceded the birth of democratic thought and political action. Locked into a virtual caste system, courtiers formed within their ranks cabals, factions, and groups bonded by common ideological principles in order to survive the political order of the court. Thus Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV is not only about Saint-Simon's place in this constellation but also the constellation itself and how understanding it forces us to a reevaluation of political life in France during the Old Regime. Including a biographical sketch of Saint-Simon and more than 30 illustrations of court life and its members, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV will delight those interested in French history as well as instruct those interested in political history. .
Price: $14.99
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324
The village of Montaillou was the last stronghold of the cult of Catharism in medieval France. Under the Inquisition of Bishop Fournier, members of this sect were persecuted and some burnt at the stake, and the interrogations about the way they lived were chronicled in a Register. From this document Ladurie has reconstructed an intriguing account of everyday peasant life in a medieval village. "Montaillou" gives us a glimpse into how people really lived 700 years ago: from their homes and the food they ate, to their body language and attitudes to sex..
Price: $11.74
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|