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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.

Review The wealth of materials is impressive, and Arthur Goldhammer's skillful translation captures the contributors' voices...Lavishly illustrated with well-captioned reproductions. --Joseph Coates (Chicago Tribune )

A History of Private Life has been an immense undertaking...The series has deservedly attracted huge praise from historians of all hues for its scholarly imagination and beautiful presentation. It is thus an unusually strong recommendation to say that the final volume is worthy of its predecessors. --Andrew Freeman (Financial Times )

The text is leavened with an abundant display of imagery...The entire series amounts to a vast treasury of human thought and experience, a sourcebook of ideas and images. At times lyrical, then analytical, but always provocative...A tool for the analyst and the novelist as much as the historian and anthropologist. --Jonathan Kirsch (Los Angeles Times )

ISBN 978-0674400047

There's something wonderfully audacious about the very concept of 'History of Private Life,' a five-volume study that seeks to reveal the most intimate details of everyday life over three millennia of Western European history. Here is one scholarly work in which the bathroom and the bordello figure as importantly as the storming of the Bastille or the defeat of Napoleon ... A fascinating glimpse into the distant and exotic past. --Jonathan Kirsch (Los Amgeles Times )