I initially started reading this for a "Sex and Death" class I took at school. Amazingly, "Western Attitudes Towards Death" has been one of the most inciteful books I've ever read. Aries makes it interesting to look at death in a historical aspect. For me, it was most interesting in the fact that you can see how people lived during a specific time period by studying how they viewed death. The parallels between life and death in EVERY society has become astonishingly clear to me. It's short reading...definately in a day...and well worth the time.

This is the first volume of a multi-author endeavor to trace the changes in private attitudes, beliefs, benaviors, and lifestyles from the early Roman Empire to the late twentieth century. The first volume begins with the early Roman Empire and ends with the apogee of the Byzantine Empire. Containing five lenghty essays by different authors (mainly French -- the whole project is a French one) dealing with the early Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire, housing and architecture in Roman Africa, Merovingian Gaul, and tenth and eleventh-century Byzantium.

The project is a fresh and invigorating look at the ways that societies change. There are several excellent illuminations in this book. We are shown that the notion of Roman "sexual liberation" is not well-founded; that Christianity did not change Western views on sex and the body, but that Christianity adopted the views of the poorer (and more numerous) Roman classes; how architecture can reveal much about a society; and that the major change between the late Empire and the early medieval had to do with notions of "private" and "public."

Although the book is interesting and useful, there are some reasons to criticize it. Most of the attention is given to the early Roman Empire, which consumes almost one third of the book. Entirely too much space is given to the chapter on architecture in Roman Africa -- it is significantly longer than the chapter on the late Empire. The chapter entitled "The Early Middle Ages in the West" is really only about Merovingian Gaul, and does not always have the change between the late Empire and early medieval as a focus. The chapter on Byzantium did not seem to fit with the rest of the book. The reason for including Byzantium in this volume rather than the next volume (Middle Ages) was to show Byzantine culture as a continuation of Roman culture. Unfortunately, the piece was not about the early Byzantine, but rather the middle Byzantine era, thus having no connection with the rest of the book. It is also dubious that the book begins with the Roman Empire, not the Roman Republic or classical Greece. Paul Veyne says that this decision was made because Rome was essentially Greek in character, and that a section on Greece and a section on Rome would be repetitive. This is weak reasoning at best, but, given the lenght of the book as it stands now, it may still have been a good decision. Finally, the book is not footnoted or endnoted. There is a lengthy bibliography and a small notes section in the back, but assertions, ideas, and evidence are not clearly referenced. I do not know if this is how French scholarship is done, or if this major chunk of scholarship was left out in the interest of marketing the book to a lay audience. Either way, it is frustrating, and only hurts the academic value of this major project.

Despite these critical comments, I view the book as an excellent effort and an enlightening read. Too often history is about events, not people, and these historians have made a noble attempt to humanize our past.

This book covers about 1,000 years of private life, from the polytheistic era of classical Rome through the acceptance there and then institutionalization of Christianity in the dark ages. It is a dazzling side glance into the cultural evolution of these tumultuous times with some reference to the larger political context.

The distinctions between these cultures are at once subtle and brutal. First, we view the civitas of Rome, that is, the obligation that Roman citizens felt towards their cities, which involved complex community-oriented mores and expensive public displays that were paid for by private means; aristocratic children, brought up with relatively less sense of their individuality than we enjoy, saw their lives and careers as reflections of the glory of their cities. The reader is also treated to the way that slaves and families were treated in great detail.

Then, in the early Christian era, more privatized cultures arose, first with the increased introspection that the christianization of the empire entailed. Next, the barbarian invasions - in which nomadic tribes smashed the urban cultures in whose wealth they had wanted to partake - merely accelerated this trend; they greatly valued their possessions, often war booty that they had to carry with them, and hence had little regard for fixed property and its supporting laws that enabled cities to flourish. Infrastructure and larger communities and political units in this period deteriorated, which severely impacted trade and hence economic welfare. The standard of measure of a life at that time became purely personal wealth and power.

A sub-theme of the book is the influence of monasticism, which created its own closed communities and became the model for family life at the beginning of the gothic era. Monks and the clergy were the holders of standards of conduct and literacy through this little-known period, and exerted immense influence on the mores of the people who lived nearby. In all its detail, this was new to me. Indeed, if it were not for their labors, much of classical learning would have been lost forever. They are also virtually the only source for information about life in Byzantium.

While there is something lost in having so many authors involved in a single volume, the chapters in this book are so long and detailed that they are like self-contained books. Ample illustrations transport the reader to each era, revealing the mystery of what made us who we are in the west over so many centuries. Nonetheless, the chapters are uneven. The chapter on Roman architecture in N. Africa is very boring indeed, and the one on Byzantium is dull as well. But those on pagan and then Christian Rome are superb, as are those on the dark ages.

Finally, this book relies more on written sources than on archaeology, which is a pity in my opinion, as the sources written after pagan Rome are rather formulaic and outright boring in their rhetorical flourishes as you read about them over hundreds of pages. At times, it reads like a compendium of obscure sources, including exhaustive analysis of funery inscriptions, though that is often what academia comes down to. Another odd thing is that there are only two pages of footnotes, which are followed by a rather poor bibliography. While the book is trying to strike a balance between popular and specialized audiences, I would have preferred better info on sources.

In spite of these criticisms, there is no question that this book is an ample and fascinating meal. Recommended.

The back of the book says that the "History of Private Life" series is "written and edited by leading scholars yet intended for any reader who wonders how people lived and behaved in earlier times". In this, the first volume has definitely succeeded. It is divided into five parts: The Roman Empire, Late Antiquity, Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa, The Early Middle Ages in the West, and Byzantium in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. Each of the five sections is divided into chapters, which are then each divided into portions, each portion with its own heading, for easy identification. So, for example, under "The Roman Empire" is a chapter entitled "Marriage," which is divided into sections headed "Criteria for Marriage," "The Transformation of Marriage," "Marriage as a Duty," "The Harmonious Union," etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of the sections, although "The Roman Empire" was a bit too long-more than 200 pages, twice as much as any of the other sections. Often it sounded like the author was repeating himself.

I didn't find "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa" very interesting, probably because the emphasis was on the Domestic Architecture part. Since the section was based mostly on architectural excavations, it had little information on "private life." Most of the section was overviews of the plans of houses and cities in Roman Africa. Since minor details, like furniture arrangements, often do not survive to be discovered by archeological expeditions, there was little information on such minor details.

The other four parts were much more interesting. The book contains a wealth of information on private life: the way people thought, the way they acted, the way they lived. It is extremely readable. I am not a scholar of the period, but I found the book very easy and enjoyable to read. This simpleness in writing means that a lot of scholarly arguments and debates are left out. The whole text is sort of streamlined. Generally this is a good thing, but sometimes it makes one suspicious of some of the author's statements. On page 224, for example, one illustration's caption reads, "Tomb of a physician, 3rd-4th century. He is not, as was once thought, reading a medical treatise but rather his classics..." Looking at the illustration, the scrolls the physician is reading are blank, with no identification on or around them. How could one decide what the man was reading? The author may have had a reason for making this statement, but without the reason given, I found myself thinking, "For heaven's sake, the man could be reading ANYthing." However, if nothing else, this forces the reader to realize how subjective interpretations of history often are. The editors of this book are to be commended for having included enough information that the reader can make their OWN subjective judgements about how to interpret the evidence.

This book's biggest problem, I think, is its length (600+ pages). The large number of illustrations helps, but this is a book that has to be read in bits and pieces. Luckily, the book is divided in such a way that reading it a piece at a time is the easiest way to read it.

Read this book to widen the scope of your learning. Do not read this book if you want the entire truth on medieval childhood. To be short - Aries is wrong. Dead wrong. He claims that there was no childhood at this time, based on depictions of children wearing adult clothes in medieval art. He disregards sources such as the coroner's records and accounts of saints' miracles which clearly show that 1. parents expected children to behave in certain ways at different ages, and 2. parents really did love their children, considering how upset they were when something bad happened to them. They weren't just mourning another worker, but their CHILD. I call this the most ridiculed book in medieval scholarship and it is true. Read any other account on childhood and his name will be mentioned as someone who was wrong. You should still read the book, though, even if it is just to avoid the pitfalls of too little research.

During the sixties (those were the times!) this was probably the most influential book on education. The funny thing is, that actually it is not at all about education, but its history and how our Western understanding of childhood as a concept has evolved. For everyone who uses to take for granted the values of a sheltered childhood and a period of prolonged 'innocence', it must come as a surprise, how relatively recent, in historical terms, these developments actually had been. In such light, the medieval society and even the Renaissance look very alien, like people from a distant planet. They had a custom to exchange their children in a network of chartered apprenticeships. Once a little sucker had passed the critical age of five and was deemed to be ready to fend for itself, it became time to learn the way of the world, and to be rented out to service at the tables of a trade or of landed nobility. Only a select few received rudimentary tuition and set out on an aca!demic career, which meant years of vagrancy and the open road between Universities and urban centers of learning. As for the pre-school age, the child was a sexless, almost nameless piece of livestock and roamed the townships in street gangs, wore an undistinguished piece of garb, rummaged the garbage dumps and contributed to the family's income with petty theft and beggary. It never washed, hunkered down to torture an unfortunate beetle or wrenched a cat's tail; it learned to drink small beer, in order to escape the diarrhea that lurked in every well. It was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and crippling polio, and the odds weren't good. Parents preferred not to involve themselves too emotionally in the frequent deaths of their small ones. A little thing had died, sad, but a replacement is already under way. Scenes from modern day Calcutta come to mind. (This condition was not necessarily class-specific. The future emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), heir t!o the most powerful dynasty of his time, one of the best educated and most enlightened rulers in history, who was fluently conversant in six languages, including Arabic, had passed his early childhood and adolescence as a thieving thug in a Sicilian street-gang. He coined the notorious phrase of the three con-men: Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Needless to say, the popes took turns to excommunicate this man.) These days, teachers use to complain over class-sizes. I still remember my first year in primary: we first graders shared the same classroom with the second grade, and one teacher took care of both at the same time. But this is idyllic if compared to the beginnings of the modern school system in the late Renaissance! You had first graders of every age between seven and twenty-five sitting in one room with second, third, and fourth graders. Many of the most renowned educators were practising pedophiles and nobody found anything wrong with it. Only gradually, the Jesuits in th!eir colleges set a trend for stricter discipline and the separation of the ages. This was paralleled by a new understanding of parenthood. Up to this point the Church had been too busy with her own agenda of sorting out who is orthodox or an infidel, to care much about such mundane matters as marriage (see my review of Caroll's 'Constantine's Sword'). Newly wed couples used to receive without much ceremony an informal blessing under the open sky, on the stairway to the church-entrance. But now marriage had became institutionalized at last and a 'holy sacrament'. The little ones, as the fruit of such commitment, became precious, and their still frequent deaths a source of inconsolable grief. For the first time since Antiquity, we find again infants to be buried in individually marked tombs. Supervision intensified; early tuition was recognized as a means to keep kids out of trouble. Children wore the same costumes as their parents and from early on displayed the airs of their !respective social classes. They no longer exposed their genitals in public and slept in a place removed from their parent's bed. It was not exactly a world of fairies and dreaming under soaring larks, there was little time for this and no space to wax sentimental. The kids were on a mission: to grow up as soon as possible and take their share of responsibility for the family's fortunes. The nuclear family was born out of economic expedience - your own children are more loyal then a hired apprentice; and you save on the wages. The emerging educational system served to reinforce this trend and at the same time developed a new sense of parental commitment. Then came the industrial age and mobilized human resources on an unprecedented scale. The sentimental attachment deepened and in the era of Victorian hypocrisy and a growing life expectancy, the biological learning period was stretched even further and a new myth was born: the myth of innocence and of an infancy in fairyland. !The fashion recognized the need for age related clothing, the age of children's literature was born and parents learned to lie to their children on the facts of life and the birds and the bees. Has this turned out to be a blessing? History's court is still in session, and the replacement of King Arthur, Cinderella and the Dwarfs by Kermit, the Cooky-Monster and Miss Piggy might turn out to be a rather dubious piece of pedagogic progress. Monsieur Aries book certainly deserves its rank as a classic.

Some are historians who judge a book by its accuracy, as a mathematician would judge a treatise on pure mathematics. Some read history for pleasure, as a tourist visits an ancient ruin and is entertained by the stories of the guide. Some (including, in this case, myself) read to answer such questions as that raised in the introduction. Are such structures as the family "hitherto believed to be invariable because they were biological" due to nature or nurture? I would not pretend to judge as a professional historian. As pure entertainment I would rate this below old-fashioned narrative history. If a general reader wants entertainment from the French annalistes then I would recommend the Braudel. It is very France-centered and never ventures outside Western Europe. The tranlation must have presented difficulties since so much depends on the nuances of such terms as "child" and "adolescent" and the use of the second person singular. Sometimes a word such as "greenhorn" is repeated many times, as if it were the usual English expression for a novice or neophyte (was Baldick translating blanc-bec or debutant or dupe? I do not envy. and have every praise for the way in which he has accomplished, his task). So has Aries proved that the special status of childhood and the nuclear family are modern inventions? I still don't know.

This book is a good idea. But there is room for litterature that can tell the same in a more lively way with far fewer words. ...or can tell four time as much with the same number of pages. - The language of most of the authors is such that you wonder WHY they have chocen to say what they attempt to tell in such flowery ways. After a paragraph it's hard to remember "What did he try to tell me now." It's easier to think: "Yes. I can see that you have learnt a hole lot of words, and adjevtives in particular." - I have found litterature about the same topic, put in a different language that manage to do this far better. In fact I've found public reports that with regards to the ability to convey a thought is far more readable.

This is again an extremely full meal as a reading experience, though because of the uniformity of the culture - it does not involve such a fundamental transition as that from paganism to Christianity - it is somewhat less rich than the first volume though equally massive.

Nonetheless, there are huge changes going on: at the start of the Gothic era, there was an explosion of availability of materials on private life. Suddenly there were memoires, fiction, more realistic painted portraits (capturing real character and not just stylized), and sturdier surviving architecture, all of which offer a far more accurate picture of the times than was available during the dark ages. Piecing all of this together is utterly fascinating, as the reader is treated to detailed analyses of the costumes, customs, eating habits, and concerns that are reflected in them. You can get a wonderful idea about the texture of everyday life, though more from the standpoint of aristocrats than more common people.

Unfortunately, due to the overall goal of the writing on private life, the reasons behind these bigger changes are scarcely mentioned and hence little analyzed. While my disappointment of this reflects my own ignorance of the history of the period, it might also serve as a warning to non-specialists who want to know more. THe only chapter I found dull was a very very long one on the common themes of literary sources.

That being said, the book covers written sources, archaeology, and art extremely well: they seem to have been converging on the emergence of the "individual" that occurred just prior to the Renaissance. It is an amazingly interesting story. Indeed, there are so many strands in all of this that I found myself in awe of a period of history that I heretofore saw as far more uniform, as a precursor to the modern era or a disappointing sequel to the astonishing unity and sophistication of the classical era.

Recommended.

This book is a superior history of life in the middle ages. Duby's research is exhaustive and all sorts of interesting tidbits about medieval life are scattered through the book. Also there is a profusion of illustrations from the period which help clarify the social history. From castle architecture to peasant clothing, this book covers it all. I highly recommend it for readers interested in the middle ages.

This book is a good idea. But there is room for litterature that can tell the same in a more lively way with far fewer words. ...or can tell four time as much with the same number of pages. - The language of most of the authors is such that you wonder WHY they have chocen to say what they attempt to tell in such flowery ways. After a paragraph it's hard to remember "What did he try to tell me now." It's easier to think: "Yes. I can see that you have learnt a hole lot of words, and adjevtives in particular." - I have found litterature about the same topic, put in a different language that manage to do this far better. In fact I've found public reports that with regards to the ability to convey a thought is far more readable.

I had a much harder time getting into this volume than the two previous ones. It is far more limited geographically in that about 90% of it is about France and it is also edited rather poorly: many of the chapters are chock full of vague generalizations that require far more historical knowledge than I had to evaluate them (my failing, perhaps, but also an indication of the level of the book). Finally, many of the chapters were far less fun than the ones in the previous two volumes.

That being said, there are absolutely wonderful nuggets embedded throughout the book. This is, afterall, the era when the individual emerges en masse from the "community" mentality of the middle ages, as the absolutist state (and its embryonic legal system) replaces the more relationship-based bonds of feudal communties. This had innumerable consequences, including the development of public schools on a widespread basis and a sense of justice as administered by the state rather than by a feudal lord who demanded personal loyalty.

THere are also many episodes within this that make for great reading. For example, there is a whole chapter on the development of accepted manners for the middle classes and even below, based on those of the court but also on books on etiquette such as one written by Erasmus himself, which astounded me as I learned its various editions were influential for over 300 years on wuch topics as acceptable table manners. THere were also chapters on charivari - a kind of moralistic razzing of newlyweds that combined extortion and youthful exuberance, carried out as they were (sometimes for months) by amoral thugs! Even the notion of childhood - of the child having a distinctive personality with his/her own requirements and needs - was developed in this period. ANd of course, there is the growth of the practive of friendship by choice, so rare in the middle ages, rather than via kinship ties or feudal obligation, which had subordinated most feelings to the survival of the extended clan.

Nonetheless, these delightful chapters are buried in many dull and poorly written ones that were a terrible slog to get through. I was very disappointed by this, having loved the volumes on the ancient world and the middle ages. Perhaps it was marked by the death of the founding editor. I will try the later volumes, but worry they will not measure up. The title is also misleading: this volume is less about the Renaissance than what followed, that is, the period of religious wars and the development of absolutism.

REcommended to those willing to make the effort, but not for the casual reader.