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The Age of the Cathedrals
Art and Society, 980-1420
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Recognizing that a work of art is the product of a particular time and place as much as it is the creation of an individual, Duby provides a sweeping survey of the changing mentalities of the Middle Ages as reflected in the art and architecture of the period.

"If Age of the Cathedrals has a fault, it is that Professor Duby knows too much, has too many new ideas and takes such a delight in setting them out. . . insights whiz to and fro like meteorites."—John Russell, New York Times Book Review
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History Continues
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In this engaging intellectual autobiography, Georges Duby looks back on a career that has led him to be called one of the most distinguished historians in the Western world.

Since its beginning in the 1940s, Duby's career has been rich and varied, encompassing economic history, social history, the history of mentalites, art history, microhistory, urban history, the history of women and sexuality, and, most recently, the Church's influence on feudal society. In retracing this singular career path, Duby candidly remembers his life's most formative influences, including the legendary historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the Annales School so closely associated with them, and the College de France.

Duby also offers insights about the proper methods of gathering and using archival data and on constructing penetrating interpretations of the documents. Indeed, his discussion of how he chose his subjects, collected his materials, developed the arguments, erected the scaffolding and constructed his theses offers the best introduction to the craft available to aspiring historians.

Candid and charming, this book is both a memoir of one of this century's great scholars and a history of the French historical school since the mid-twentieth century. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the French academic milieu, medieval history, French history, or the recording of history in general.

Georges Duby, a member of the Academie francaise, for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the College de France. His numerous books include The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and The Three Orders—all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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A History of Private Life
Paul Veyne
Harvard University Press, 1987

First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world. Behind the vast panorama of the pagan Roman empire, the reader discovers the intimate daily lives of citizens and slaves—from concepts of manhood and sexuality to marriage and the family, the roles of women, chastity and contraception, techniques of childbirth, homosexuality, religion, the meaning of virtue, and the separation of private and public spaces.

The emergence of Christianity in the West and the triumph of Christian morality with its emphasis on abstinence, celibacy, and austerity is startlingly contrasted with the profane and undisciplined private life of the Byzantine Empire. Using illuminating motifs, the authors weave a rich, colorful fabric ornamented with the results of new research and the broad interpretations that only masters of the subject can provide.

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A History of Private Life
Antoine Prost
Harvard University Press

This fifth and final volume in an award-winning series charts the remarkable inner history of our times from the tumult of World War I to the present day, when personal identity was released from its moorings in gender, family, social class, religion, politics, and nationality. Nine brilliant and bold historians present a dynamic picture of cultures in transition and in the process scrutinize a myriad of subjects—the sacrament of confession, volunteer hotlines, Nazi policies toward the family, the baby boom, evolving sexuality, the history of contraception, and ever-changing dress codes. They draw upon many unexpected sources, including divorce hearing transcripts, personal ads, and little-known demographic and consumer data.

Perhaps the most notable pattern to emerge is a polarizing of public and private realms. Productive labor shifts from the home to an impersonal public setting. Salaried or corporate employment replaces many independent, entrepreneurial jobs, and workers of all kinds aggressively pursue their leisure time—coffee and lunch breaks, weekends, vacations. Zoning laws segregate industrial and commercial areas from residential neighborhoods, which are no longer a supportive “theater” of benign surveillance, gossip, and mutual concern, but an assemblage of aloof and anonymous individuals or families. Scattered with personal possessions and appliances, homes grow large by yesterday's standards and are marked by elaborate spatial subdivisions; privacy is now possible even among one's own family. Men and women are obsessed with health, fitness, diet, and appearance as the body becomes the focal point of personal identity. Mirrors, once a rarity, are ubiquitous. In the search for sexual and individualistic fulfillment, romantic love becomes the foundation of marriage. Couples marry at an older age; families are smaller. The divorce rate rises, and with it the number of single-parent households. Women, entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, frequently function as both breadwinner and homemaker. The authors interrelate these dramatic patterns with the changing roles of state and religion in family matters, the socialization of education and elder care, the growth of feminism, the impact of media on private life, and the nature of secrecy.

Comprehensive and astute, Riddles of Identity in Modern Times chronicles a period when the differentiation of life into public and private realms, once a luxury of the wealthy, gradually spread throughout the population. For better or worse, people can now be alone. This fifth volume, differing significantly from the French edition, portrays Italian, German, and American family life in the twentieth century. The authors of these additional chapters—Chiara Saraceno, Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, and Elaine Tyler May—enlarge and enhance the already broad European and Atlantic canvas that depicts the modern identity.

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A History of Private Life
Michelle Perrot
Harvard University Press

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. The present book, fourth in the popular 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.

Guided by six eminent historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into nineteenth-century Romanticism with its affirmation of distinctively individual creatures in all their mystery and impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read and write, to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they liked, to consort with and love whomever they fancied. Growing democracies advanced those wishes to the status of rights, expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged them. That new frontier, the city, simultaneously weakened family and community constraints, spurred personal ambitions, and attenuated traditional beliefs.

The authors dramatize the nineteenth century’s organized effort to stabilize the boundary between public and private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign. Such chapters as “The Sweet Delights of Home,” “The Family Triumphant,” and “Private Spaces” describe the new domestic ideal of the private dwelling as a refuge from perils and temptations in the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the wife as contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small versions of adults, equipping themselves to follow in their parents’ righteous footsteps. Particularly in England, the middle class was central to the formation of this homely standard, which spread to the working classes through evangelical preaching, utilitarian writings, and economic changes and improvements that resulted in a separation of home and workplace. At the same time, the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The domesticating process also expressed itself in hygienic practices (soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions in clothing, and vogues in sports, courtship, and lovemaking.

From the time of the French Revolution, when private or special interests were looked upon as shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors reveal the more radical forms of modernity that arrived with the twentieth century, with its explosions of trade and technology. Besides the external development of goods and conveniences, the expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new openness about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage. Feminism, a relatively sporadic movement in the nineteenth century, became a more persistent force, while young people and the avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change as an end in itself. As always, law lagged behind reality: in practice, more and more people rebelled against communal and family discipline. The declaration of war in 1917 put a hold on some of the flowering of individuality, but the unstoppable trend toward personality nurtured by private life was only temporarily curbed.

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A History of Private Life
Roger Chartier
Harvard University Press
Readers interested in history, and in the development of the modern sensibility, will relish this large-scale yet intimately detailed examination of the blossoming of the ordinary and extraordinary people of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This third in the popular five-volume series celebrates the emergence of individualism and the manifestations of a burgeoning self-consciousness over three centuries.
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A History of Private Life
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press
The second volume of A History of Private Life is a treasure-trove of rich and colorful detail culled from an astounding variety of sources. This absorbing “secret epic” constructs a vivid picture of peasant and patrician life in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.
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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press, 1992

The French Revolution opened a whole new stage in the history of women, despite their conspicuous absence from the playbill. The coming century would see women’s subordination to men codified in all manner of new laws and rules; and yet the period would also witness the birth of feminism, the unprecedented emergence of women as a collective force in the political arena.

The fourth volume in this world-acclaimed series covers the distance between these two poles, between the French Revolution and World War I. It gives us a vibrant picture of a bourgeois century, dynamic and expansive, in which the role of woman in the home was stressed more and more, even as the economic pressures and opportunities of the industrial revolution drew her out of the house; in which woman’s growing role in the family as the center of all morals and virtues pressed her into public service to fight social ills.

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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press, 1992

Drawing on myriad sources—from the faint traces left by the rocking of a cradle at the site of an early medieval home to an antique illustration of Eve’s fall from grace—this second volume in the celebrated series offers new perspectives on women of the past. Twelve distinguished historians from many countries examine the image of women in the masculine mind, their social condition, and their daily experience from the demise of the Roman Empire to the genesis of the Italian Renaissance.

More than in any other era, a medieval woman’s place in society was determined by men; her sexuality was perceived as disruptive and dangerous, her proper realm that of the home and cloister. The authors draw upon the writings of bishops and abbots, moralists and merchants, philosophers and legislators, to illuminate how men controlled women’s lives. Sumptuary laws regulating feminine dress and ornament, pastoral letters admonishing women to keep silent and remain chaste, and learned treatises with their fantastic theories about women’s physiology are fully explored in these pages. As adoration of the Virgin Mary reached full flower by the year 1200, ecclesiastics began to envision motherhood as a holy role; misogyny, however, flourished unrestrained in local proverbs, secular verses, and clerical thought throughout the period.

Were women’s fates sealed by the dictates of church and society? The authors investigate legal, economic, and demographic aspects of family and communal life between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries and bring to light the fleeting moments in which women managed to seize some small measure of autonomy over their lives. The notion that courtly love empowered feudal women is discredited in this volume. The pattern of wear on a hearthstone, fingerprints on a terracotta pot, and artifacts from everyday life such as scissors, thimbles, spindles, and combs are used to reconstruct in superb detail the commonplace tasks that shaped women’s existence inside and outside the home. As in antiquity, male fantasies and fears are evident in art. Yet a growing number of women rendered visions of their own gender in sumptuous tapestries and illuminations. The authors look at the surviving texts of female poets and mystics and document the stirrings of a quiet revolution throughout the West, as a few daring women began to preserve their thoughts in writing.

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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press, 1992
Has the worst of times for humanity—this century bloodied by wars and revolutions without precedent in history—been the best of times for women? How have the promises of freedom, parity with men, full participation in society, actually been met amid all the transformations and upheavals the twentieth century has witnessed? This fifth volume in the world-acclaimed series brings the history of women up to the present, placing it in the context of momentous events and profound social changes that have marked our time.
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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press, 1992

Informed by the work of seventy-five distinguished historians, this five-volume series sets before us an engaging, panoramic chronicle that extends from antiquity to the present day.

The inaugural volume brings women from the margins of ancient history into the fore. It offers fresh insight into more than twenty centuries of Greek and Roman history and encompasses a landscape that stretches from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Pillars of Hercules to the banks of the Indus. The authors draw upon a wide range of sources including gravestones, floor plans, papyrus rolls, vase paintings, and literary works to illustrate how representations of women evolved during this age. They journey into the minds of men and bring to light an imaginative history of women and of the relations between the sexes.

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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press
Volume III of A History of Women draws a richly detailed picture of women in early modern Europe, considering them in a context of work, marriage, and family. At the heart of this volume is “woman” as she appears in a wealth of representations, from simple woodcuts and popular literature to master paintings; and as the focal point of a debate—sometimes humorous, sometimes acrimonious—conducted in every field: letters, arts, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine. Against oppressive experience, confining laws, and repetitious claims about female “nature,” women took initiative by quiet maneuvers and outright dissidence. In conformity and resistance, in image and reality, women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries emerge from these pages in remarkable diversity.
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The Knight, the Lady and the Priest
The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1993
This ambitious study sets out to discover what marriage meant in the daily lives of the nobles of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Through entertaining anecdotes, family dramas, and striking quotations, Duby succeeds in bringing his subjects to life, making us feel as if we understand the motives and conflicts of those who inhabited the distant past.

"It is typical of Duby's modest spirit and his book-long concern with the ancient status of beleaguered wives that he ends his study with a plea: 'We must not forget the women. Much has already been said about them. But how much do we really know?' Not everything, certainly, but far more than we did before the author began these charmingly erudite investigations."—Ken Turan, Time

"It is refreshing to find a historian who is always conscious that we simply do not know what or how people thought 1000 years ago. . . . Duby explains the complicated machinations of the medieval churchman and the paterfamilias in a scholarly but lively style."—Sarah Lawson, New Statesman

"Duby has written an extraordinarily rich book—a panoramic view of medieval marriage and the relations between men and women, full of arresting insights and human detail. . . . It is the work of a master historian at the peak of his powers on a subject of central relevance, compulsive and essential reading."—P. Stafford, British History

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Preeminent medieval scholar Georges Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism—both bastions of masculinity—as he reveals the role of women, what they represented, and what they were in the Middle Ages.

Beautifully written in Duby's characteristically nuanced and powerful style, this collection is an ideal entree into Duby's thinking about marriage and the diversities of love, spousal decorum, family structure, and their cultural context in bodily and spiritual values. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages will be of great interest to students in social and cultural history, medieval and early modern history, and women's studies, as well as those interested in the nature of social life in the Middle Ages.

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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The Three Orders
Feudal Society Imagined
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1980

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Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 1
Eleanor of Aquitaine and Six Others
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this volume, Georges Duby examines the lives of prominent twelfth-century French women as well as popular female literary figures of that time. Focusing on medieval notions of women and love, Duby looks for the ideological motivations for the representation of the female sex. He analyzes the ways in which women's biographies were written and how female characters were treated in fable and legend, pointing to the social and political forces at work in these representations.

The historical personages include Eleanor of Aquitaine whose several marriages brought her wealth and autonomy; the virtuous Héloïse; and the visionary recluse Juette. Duby also studies the literary figures of St. Marie-Madeleine, a composite figure who personified the essential female traits of frailty, ardent love, and evangelicalism; Iseut, literary beloved of Tristan; and two other emblematic figures, Dorée d'Amour and Phénix—women who became ladies through chivalrous love.

Provocative, informative, and entertaining, this book offers new insight on courtly love and the representations of women under medieval patriarchy.
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Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 2
Remembering the Dead
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this volume, one of the greatest medieval historians of our time continues his rich and illuminating inquiry into the lives of twelfth-century women. Georges Duby bases his account on a twelfth-century genre that commemorated the virtues of noblewomen who had died and the roles they came to play in the history of their lineage. From these genealogical works a vivid picture emerges of the lives these women led, the values they held, and the way in which they were viewed by the ecclesiastical and chivalric writers who immortalized them.

The first section outlines the ways in which the dead—in both memory and legend—served to bond noble society in the twelfth century. Drawing on the Gesta by Dudo of Saint Quentin, the second section reflects on the roles that wives, concubines, and other women played during times of war and in the great exchanges of power that established the grand lineages of the Middle Ages. The third section reconstructs women as wives, mothers, and widows through the work of Lambert, Priest of Ardres.
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Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 3
Eve and the Church
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this volume, Georges Duby studies the relationship between the Church and women in twelfth-century Europe. By that time, the Church had begun to see the evolving roles and expectations of women as serious matters, resulting in a wide range of clerical writings addressing "the woman question."

Drawing on these writings, Duby describes how women were thought to embody particular sins, such as sorcery, disobedience, and licentiousness. He evaluates Eve's role in man's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and analyzes the reasoning behind the view that women are unstable, curious, frivolous creatures. He also notes that these charges are leveled against women, even as praise is heaped upon them for the conventional virtues they exhibit in their roles as wives and mothers.

As the final installment in Duby's three-volume study of French noblewomen of the twelfth century, Eve and the Church is the last work of this superb historian. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval history and women's history as well as to anyone interested in current debates about women and religion.

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

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