History of Private Life
The widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated History of Private Life series traces a clear line from how society moved from an entirely-public to an almost entirely-private way of life. The five-volume collection shows how people's perceptions of themselves, their homes, their families, and their possessions changed, and how their ways of celebrating life events changed.
Below is a list of in-print works in this collection, presented in series order or publication order as applicable.
Sort by title, author, format, publication date, or price »| 1. |  | History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world. |
| 2. |  | History of Private Life, Volume II: Revelations of the Medieval World 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. |
| 3. |  | History of Private Life, Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance 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. |
| 4. |  | History of Private Life, Volume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War 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. Volume IV of this award-winning 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. |
| 5. |  | History of Private Life, Volume V: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times |
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