Volume 35, Number 4 · March 17, 1988
Spying on the Neighbors
By Maurice Keen
A History of Private Life Vol. II: Revelations of the Medieval World
edited by Georges Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 672 pp., $39.50
In the foreword to the first volume of the ambitious new series on the history of private life from classical times to the present day, Georges Duby, the survivor of the two original coeditors, wrote thus: 'Our subject was fraught with peril. The ground we hoped to explore was untouched. No one had sifted through or even identified useful source materials.' The pride in the conception that he and Philippe Ariès had envisaged is entirely justified; the claim to novelty, at least on the basis of this second volume, is perhaps just a little exaggerated. What it presents is not so much something entirely new as a very skillful blend of two well-established branches of historical study: the history of everyday things and what has come to be called the histoire des mentalités.
Review, 3713 words
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