Volume 24, Number 21 & 22 · January 26, 1978
Conspicuous Grandeur
By Keith Thomas
The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage and Royalty 1400-1800
edited by A.G. Dickens
McGraw-Hill, 335, 342 illus pp., $24.95
It is not very long since court gossip seemed almost the only kind of history the general public wanted to read. One need only look into a secondhand bookshop to see all those faded lives of queens and royal mistresses, those interminable memoirs by Saint-Simon or Count Gramont, and those titillating accounts of Elizabeth I's maids of honor or the affair of the Diamond Necklace. How dated they seem today, when so many historians have turned their backs upon these gilded parasites, preferring rather to explore the lives of the submerged and inarticulate! In a self-consciously democratic age, sophisticated historical writing is less concerned with courtiers than with peasants, workers, women, or slaves.
Review, 2804 words
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