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

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

Georges Duby, a member of the Académie Française, is Professor of Medieval History at the Collège de France.

Arthur Goldhammer received the French-American Translation Prize in 1990 for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

Read More by Phillippe Ariès:

• A History of Private Life, Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance
• A History of Private Life, Volume IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
• A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
• A History of Private Life, Volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World

Read More by Georges Duby:

• A History of Private Life, Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance
• A History of Women in the West, Volume III, Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes
• A History of Private Life, Volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World
• A History of Women in the West, Volume IV, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War
• A History of Women in the West, Volume II, Silences of the Middle Ages
• A History of Private Life, Volume IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
• A History of Women in the West, Volume I, From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints
• A History of Women in the West, Volume V, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
• A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium

Read More by Arthur Goldhammer:

• France in the Enlightenment
• A History of Private Life, Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance
• The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870
• A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
• A Small City in France
• A History of Women in the West, Volume II, Silences of the Middle Ages
• The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century
• A History of Private Life, Volume IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
• The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944
• A History of Women in the West, Volume I, From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints
• Blessings in Disguise: or, the Morality of Evil
• A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
• Dionysos at Large
• The Living Eye
• Tocqueville and the Two Democracies
• A History of Private Life, Volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World
• A History of Women in the West, Volume V, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
• A History of Women in the West, Volume IV, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War
• A History of Women in the West, Volume III, Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes
• Greek Virginity
• Paris: Capital of the World
• The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution