History of Private Life

Entre 1701 et 1703, au début de la guerre de Succession espagnole, Henry Bentinck (1682-1726), vicomte Woodstock, et son gouverneur huguenot, Paul Rapin de Thoyras (1661-1725), entreprennent un voyage pédagogique – le Grand Tour – qui devait les conduire de La Haye dans les Provinces-Unies à travers les États allemands jusqu’en Italie. Nous éditons la centaine de lettres connues de la correspondance qu’ils entretiennent au cours de ce voyage, avec le père du jeune homme, Hans Willem Bentinck (1649-1709), comte de Portland. Ces lettres apportent des informations sur tous les aspects de la vie quotidienne des voyageurs – sur les coutumes des Cours et des villes où ils séjournent, sur les bruits qui couraient à l’époque sur les événements de la guerre, sur les contraintes du voyage, sur les aléas du courrier et sur les rapports personnels difficiles entre les trois correspondants. Notre introduction porte sur ces différents aspects de la vie des voyageurs et sur la notion de « vie privée » que véhicule la correspondance. Nous ajoutons à ce corpus deux lettres inédites de Rapin-Thoyras à Woodstock de l’année 1721 ainsi que plusieurs lettres d’aristocrates qui envoient à Portland leurs commentaires sur le comportement de son fils.

Michaël Green est chercheur à l’Université de Lodz en Pologne, et chercheur affilié au Centre d’études sur la vie privée [Centre for Privacy Studies] de la Fondation Nationale danoise de la Recherche à l’Université de Copenhague. Ses travaux portent, entre autres, sur les minorités religieuses à l’époque moderne, sur l’histoire de l’éducation et sur la notion et la pratique de la vie privée. Parmi ses publications : The Huguenot Jean Rou (1638-1711): Scholar, Educator, Civil Servant (Honoré Champion, 2015), et les articles « The Orange-Nassau Family at the Educational Crossroads of the Stadtholder’s Position (1584 – 1711) » (2019) et « Bridging the English Channel: Huguenots in the Educational Milieu of the English Upper Class » (2018).

Traduction de l’anglais original de l’introduction et de l’apparat critique par Bertrand Marceau, maître de conférences en  histoire moderne à l’université de Reims.

The appearance of portrait miniature is traditionally dated back to the 16th century, though the background for this specific type of portrait can be found both in the history of medal-making and in the medieval illuminated manuscripts. But it was the 16th century which saw the flowering of miniature as a portrait genre, caused mainly by the strengthening of secularism in art. The Reformation processes occurring in Europe at the time also influenced the genesis of forms, techniques, and styles of portrait miniatures. This paper focuses on the factors (related to the Reformation) which affected the formation of the miniature, the English miniature in particular. New images and new perspectives of a model were embodied in the works of such artists as Hans Holbein and Nicholas Hilliard. The rise of the portrait miniature as a new type of portrait, its features, and uniqueness of its properties are explained through the study and analysis of certain political, social, and cultural aspects of the Reformation movement, their contradictions, and combinations in the art of the Early Modern England.

Promenade, se promener, déambuler, errer, se déplacer, se balader, circuler, flâner, marcher ; autant de mots que l’on utilise à loisir comme synonymes, mais qui, à y regarder de plus près, rendent compte de réalités et de déterminants bien différents. Comprendre un mot, et qui plus est dans une époque antérieure, c’est surtout tâcher d’habiller le vocable de référents historiques, de le remettre dans son contexte pour voir se dégager une subtilité étymologique qui renvoie à une réalité. Le déplacement dans l’espace urbain a une longue histoire, il existe une généalogie entre les substantifs français évoqués plus haut. Plutôt qu’une union par des liens synonymiques, il semble qu’il s’agisse d’une hiérarchie familiale séparée par des générations successives. Par exemple, la promenade engendrerait la flânerie qui à son tour engendrerait la ballade et l’errance. Il nous manque, à ce jour, de grandes monographies sur l’histoire des déplacements qui permettraient de tracer d’un geste sûr et précis une ligne entre ces mots, un peu comme un dessin à numéro dont l’image finale ne se révèle que quand le dessinateur a relié tous les points et prend de la distance par rapport à son ouvrage.

À télécharger gratuitement: http://difusion.academiewb.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/97995/Holdings

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This text is an attempt to describe, understand and explain how the Portuguese lived the great dates of their lives between 1820 and 1950. I will try to perceive the semantic reaches of the gestures, decoding what is deeply codified. Although using anthropological reflexions, what is presented is a work of Social History.
Este texto é uma tentativa de descrição, compreensão e explicação das formas como os portugueses viveram as grandes datas das suas vidas entre 1820 e 1950. Procurar-se-ão perceber os alcances semânticos dos gestos, descodificando o que é profundamente codificado. Embora se recorra à Antropologia, o que se apresenta é um trabalho de História.
Não é fácil tratar este tema ao longo de 130 anos. Contudo, os perigos de anacronismo afiguram-se menores do que as dificuldades da identificação regional e social dos hábitos e seus significados, numa época em que coexistem práticas e crenças muito distintas no espaço e na pirâmide social. A diversidade e abundância de fontes cresce quanto mais se avança no tempo, mas são sobretudo urbanas, disso se ressentindo os trabalhos já realizados, muito centrados nos grupos aristocráticos e burgueses das maiores cidades. Procurei, pois, dar maior peso ao mundo popular, nomeadamente camponês, sem esquecer que, também nas vilas e aldeias, viviam famílias burguesas.

Little has been written about the personal life of D.F. Malan, South Africa’s first apartheid prime minister. He has been stereotyped as the grim ex-dominee who guided his flock with a rigid hand – the archetypical Afrikaner alpha-male. However, a scrutiny of his private documents reveals a rich tapestry of independent-minded women who dominated his personal life. They include his gifted sister Cinie who became a missionary in the erstwhile Rhodesia; his long-time friend Nettie, who raised his children for him after he was widowed; his step-mother who played the role of pastoriemoeder for the unmarried young Dutch Reformed minister; his young wife who died when pregnant with their third child and his second wife who did not hesitate to tease Churchill about his claims to have swum across the ‘mighty Apies river’. The article dismantles the stereotype by offering an enriching glimpse of D.F. Malan the private man, from the shy youth to the scatter-brained politician who needed women to ensure that he was properly dressed. His views on women are examined: they baffled him on the one hand, but he supported their enfranchisement on the other. Thus, another facet will be added to a man who has been portrayed as intensely one-dimensional.

This article takes into consideration the notion of history as a social construct and interprets (oral) epic poetry as a historical narrative, i.e. a manner in which collective experience and identity are constituted narratively. After a brief review of the relation between oral epic poetry and national history (especially concerning the classical corpus of Serbian oral epic poetry), the attention centers on an analysis of post-folklore (author) epic chronicles, which are shown to be created (thematically, and at the level of the past’s conceptualization) as narratives between “small” and “large” histories. Some of the represented subjects can be interpreted as “canonical” for epic poetry (wars, battles etc.), and thus, unsurprisingly, they project the (collective/national/trans-national) history as heroic (also reflecting the interaction of the domains of communicative and cultural memory). In such a context, as the author shows, the individual, subjective experience does not remain independent from the introduced broader historical-ideological framework, and is constructed both paradigmatically on the synchronous level (one in a series of similar ones) and on the level of linking with the paradigmatic chain of tradition (through direct references to the layers of the epic symbol fund and the epically projected mythical history, or implicitly, through a repetition of situational models). Various types of chronicles that share an orientation towards the interpretation of the past (whether relevant for the broader or the narrower collective, family, or even merely for the individual) also display intersections of the individual and the collective memory. The final part of the text indicates the consequences of shits in the transmission and reception manner in the age of medial culture, which enables those texts that are primarily linked to the domain of family traditions to achieve relevance for a broader circle of bearers of the epic tradition. his phenomenon is also illuminated by the introduction of the recipients’ perspective (via the transcripts of field work conversations) which shows the complexity of the text decoding and reception processes (including various levels of context: author-performer-text and its performance, broader ideological context).

THE ENGLISH CLOSET took on many new shapes and functions as it proliferated in the long eighteenth century. It had origins in sixteenth-century palace apartments designed in enfilade: the lockable room at the end of a series of adjoining chambers had been crucial to the performance and consolidation of absolute power in the Tudor and early Stuart courts. In these secluded places, kings and queens could store valuables and special documents, read, write, or pray alone, and exchange confidences with their most trusted courtiers. Yet closets proved remarkably resilient over the next two centuries, even as power drifted away from the court. In the houses of people of quality and, increasingly, those of the middling sort, private rooms served as prayer closets, cabinets of curiosity, dressing rooms, libraries, art galleries, and impromptu bedrooms; and merging with the bath or privy, closets were transformed into bathing closets, closets of ease, outdoor privies known as earth closets and, eventually, water closets. While multiplying and morphing in material culture, these intimate spaces also made significant appearances in all kinds of writing. The closet was, for example, a metaphor for the space of the mind in empirical philosophy, a symbol of female vanity in satirical poetry, and a setting for introspection, sexual intrigue, and letter writing in fiction. Along with its close cousin, the cabinet, the closet also gave a name and an implicit structure to hundreds of miscellanies or anthologies in eighteenth-century England, from how-to books like The Golden Cabinet of Useful Knowledge to recipe and remedy books like The Queen-Like Closet. Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Culture of the Closet is a course that I developed to explore the functional, narrative, and symbolic roles closets played in eighteenth-century life and literature. Focusing on discourses and practices of the closet especially helps to illuminate the changing parameters of privacy in the period and the centrality of this category to concurrent developments in politics, religion,

Se a utilização do cotidiano já era uma arma política proposta por Benjamin contra o sublime apropriado pelo espetáculo fascista (MORICONI, 1998, p. 53), propor uma poética do cotidiano para a contemporaneidade, quando este é dilacerado pelas transformações urbanas e midiáticas, implica enfrentar o embate ético e estético de pensar os espaços e as narrativas da intimidade, especialmente o da casa. Sem repetir a crítica comum de que, por não estar inscrita imediata e diretamente na estrutura produtiva, a cotidianidade seja “despolitizada e assim considerada irrelevante, in-significante” (BARBERO, 2003, p.301), compreendida como espaço de alienação no capitalismo reificador, ou parte de uma cultura do “intimismo à sombra do poder” (COUTINHO, 1990, 30), também procuraremos evitar sua celebração acrítica e populista como espaço de prazer, e portanto, naturalmente de resistência (ver SILVERSTONE, 1997, p. 161/3). Sem aderir necessariamente à politização do cotidiano proposta pelos situacionistas (ver GARDINER, 2000), nem por vários movimentos minoritários; é importante reafirmar com Bakhtin que “a imaginação prosaica pode entender a completude, a contingência, a complexidade e a “confusão’ da vida cotidiana e reconhecer o próprio fenômeno da diferença e da alteridade” (apud idem, 2000, p. 52), sem pretender  que o cotidiano seja, como para Henri Lefebvre “ um tecido conectivo de todos os pensamentos e atividades humanos” (apud idem, p. 2), ou seja,  uma nova totalidade. Mas simplesmente afirmar ou lembrar que o nosso mundo não é “totalmente admininistrado, colonizado pela reificação” (idem, 15), o que já seria um gesto profundamente político.
Para avaliarmos as possibilidades desta poética do cotidiano é que temos que enfrentar o problema do real. O que fazer quando o real se transforma mais e mais em experiência midiática? Seria o Real o último espetáculo como afirma Zizek (2003,31) ou o fim da sociedade do espetáculo como aponta Baudrillard? Estas questões nos serviram como um pano de fundo para marcar nosso interesse neste debate sobre a questão do real na arte contemporânea a partir da presença dos meios de comunicação de massa não só como técnica ou mercadoria mas experiência, afeto, memória.

Стамбена архитектура представља значајан извор за анализу развоја модерног друштва и архитектуре у међуратном Београду. Специфичан тип просторне организације станова и уређења ентеријера током треће и четврте деценије двадесетог века у великој мери одсликава свакодневни грађански живот. Централну просторију у ентеријеру чинио је салон, који је служио за примање гос-тију, представљајући јавни репрезентативни одељак у оквиру приватног животног простора. Салон, заједно с трпезаријом, често је био опремљен луксузним намештајем и предметима чија је сврха била да укажу на интелектуални и материјални статус власни-ка. Салони су били места окупљања интелектуалне елите Београда и одржавања бројних културних догађаја, попут књижевних и музичких вечери. Ово истраживање јавности приватног простора представља допринос разумевању развоја стамбене архитектуре, ентеријера и намештаја у Београду током међуратног периода. кључне речи: ентеријер, архитектура, Београд, 1918–1941, приватност, јавност
abstract: The residential architecture is an important source for the study of the development of modern society and architecture in interwar Belgrade. A specific way of spatial organization of the apartments and their interior design in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century essentially reflect the everyday life. The central room was the lounge where guests were received, serving as a representative public space within the private living one. The lounge, together with the dining room, was often equipped with luxurious furniture and items intended to display the intellectual and social status of the owner. In these lounges Belgrade's intellectual elite gathered; numerous cultural events were organized there, like literary and music evenings. Research on turning private space into a public one represents a contribution to the understanding of the development of residential architecture, interior and furniture in Belgrade during the interwar period.

A study of the beginnings of the modern diary allows to qualify the current critique of an irrational and pervasive publication of the private in online journals. When – in the second half of the 18th century – the modern concept of the individual emerged, it was common to read out diaries in order to discuss publicly how one should live according to the new ideals of humanity. The online journal therefore does not disrupt the public/private distinction but has to be understood as a return to a practice that had only temporarily been superseeded by the practice of the ‚secret‘ diary. The practice of public and interactive diary writing lays bare the conditions of individualization as such.

Ein Blick zurück auf die Anfänge des modernen Tagebuchs ermöglicht es, die vielfach geäußerte Kritik an der Publikation des Privaten in Online-Journalen zu relativieren. Schon als sich in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts das moderne Konzept der Individualität herausbildete, war es üblich, Tagebücher vorzulesen und zu diskutieren, um sich über die richtige Lebensführung zu verständigen. Das Online-Journal wäre somit nicht als kultureller Bruch zu verstehen, sondern als Rückkehr zu einer Praxis, die durch das geheime Tagebuch vorübergehend in den Hintergrund gedrängt wurde. Im öffentlichen und interaktiven Tagebuchschreiben treten die Bedingungen jeglicher Individualisierung an die Oberfläche.

The high estamount of guilds in Liptov region grew in cities and towns as Nemecká Ľupča, Ružomberok, Svätý Mikuláš and Hybe, which guild regulations interfered with the privacy of its members. Single articles regulated working hours, determined the religious and funeral customs, demeanor or dress, prohibited participation in village dances and contacts with executioners or vagrants. Some regulations interfered in the married life of members. If someone violated article, he could be punished in different ways, for example by fines, imprisonment, lash or excluded fromt he guild.

1848-1849 kultuszának nincs olyan olvasata, mely Alexy Lajos aprólékos,  biedermeier emlékezéseit magába tudná fogadni. A sok tépelődés, az igaz és tiszta szerelem feletti merengés nem a tettek emberét, nem a politikailag tudatos, bátor, aktív életet, hanem inkább a vita comtemplativát, szemlélődő egzisztenciális magatartást jelenít meg. És azt hiszem, talán épp ezt nehéz a történelem művelőinek elfogadniuk, nevezetesen, hogy Alexy egy olyan időpillanatban helyezi a politikai elé a mindennapi kényszernek alávetett mindennapi életet, mely a modern kori magyar történelemben csak nagyon ritkán adatott meg. A napjainkban divatozó felfogás nyomán, a politika szempontjából az aktív, cselekvő életet a szemlélődés elé helyezzük, ám Hannah Arendt figyelmeztet bennünket, hogy ez a beállítódás ízig-vérig modern, azaz a modernitásban élő ember sajátja. A The Human Condition című könyvében rámutat arra a beállítódásra, melynek nevében az antik filozófiai hagyomány többre tartotta a tiszta szemlélődést (vita contemplativa) a cselekvő életnél (vita activa).

Revisiting Richardson's _Pamela_ as a site of "spatial formalism," this essay maintains that the notion of the domestic interior as a setting conducive to psychological interiority requires further materialist analysis.  The interiority of _Pamela_ hinges less on characters' emotions than on its ability to move between different spatial interiors, from the of-cited interiors of domestic architecture to the interiors of spaces that initially register as objects, such as women's detachable pockets as well as books and letters.  Ultimately, Pamela lays claim to her selfhood through effecting a dynamic whereby her movable possessions--her letters and her pockets in particular--become spatial territories of the self that challenge the authority of land ownership conferred to her social superiors.  She effects, in other words, a shift in social relations as defined by property as well as by marriage through her ability to transform the interiority afforded by her everyday possessions into a movable estate of the self.

The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse – the presumption that there was a ‘golden age’ of British coffeehouse society in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries which entered into a state of decline during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and finds it wanting. The article suggests that the history of the coffeehouse public sphere is better understood in terms of a transformation from an early modern ‘performative publicity’ to a Romantic style of public life which reflected changing notions of the relationship between the self and society that have been identified by cultural historians of the Romantic age. Rather than trying to identify the moment of its decline, historians should try to explain the continuing vitality of the coffeehouse, and by extension the coffeehouse public sphere, as they have evolved over the course of the last three and a half centuries.

The history of ice in medieval Arab societies is obscured behind a mosaic of a variety of references and scholarly citations. Beyond al-Qalqashandı’s reference to organised ice trafficking in fourteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, we do not have conclusive
evidence on the origin and use of ice as a consumer product. In this paper we trace its presence based on three genres of references: historical and literary quotations, medicine and literature pertaining to food. These references allow us to consider the extent of ice consumption in the Arab world before the ninth century, as well as the existence of an organised trade throughout the Middle Ages from that time. However, contrary to the Persian world, with its well-documented Iranian yakhchals, we still know virtually
nothing about ice-houses in medieval Arab societies. We also know very little about the profession of the thallâj or ice-seller, or whether the widespread consumption of ice that originated in Spain in the sixteenth century was in fact a legacy of an earlier trade in al-Andalus.

Based on central archives and on the case study of Kalinin province, the paper examines two forms of extralegal punishment that the Soviet state inflicted upon civilian collaborators or so called during the WW2, and tries to determine whether this retribution resembles the socio-political cleansing that happened in other parts of freed Europe at the end of the war. The dynamics of the first type of sanction make it quite similar to its European counterparts: people being punished out of the courts for developing friendly or intimate relationships with the invader. The second case studied here – relegation of traitors’ families in distant provinces of the Soviet Union - differs markedly from the European context. If both practices originate from the Soviet 1930s or even 1920s, at least one of them clearly follows a common European logic in the symbolic and the will of national purification of the society that it entails. As for the people punished for maintaining private relationships with the enemy, it appears that the security imperative far less matters for the Soviet authorities than the moral and cultural impact on the local communities. Indeed, such a behavior aroused as much indignation in USSR that in other occupied countries and as elsewhere, there was a need to sanction these persons, even only symbolically, in order to restore the norms of the society. But notably, the State did not understand this demand right away, being focused on political deviance more than moral ones. The punishment of the family of one labeled “traitor’ was not a novelty whatsoever. But in this precise case the extension of this kind of sanction to the family of collaborators came along with the creation of exceptions to the rule. That way, having a fighter in the family redeemed the presence of a traitor.

La societat medieval s’estructurava en un conjunt funcional d'unitats diverses: laborals, familiars, religioses. Pel que feia a la seva integració en aquestes esferes, els lliberts no foren una excepció. Per a ells, a causa del seu caràcter extern a la comunitat, tot i que fes molts anys que visquessin a la ciutat, fou de gran importància introduir-se en aquelles unitats com a via d'integració social un cop esdevenien persones lliures. Aquesta comunicació analitza a través de fonts notarials la utilització del matrimoni tant per part dels esclaus, per aconseguir l’alliberament, com per part dels lliberts, per facilitar la seva integració a la societat de la Barcelona del segle xv.

En la política de promoción de las monjas mendicantes que desarrollaron los reyes de Castilla se percibe una tipología de “fundaciones en relación” con mujeres. Alfonso X y Pedro I colaboraron con sus amantes, Mayor Guillén y María de Padilla, y el segundo también con sus hijas, Beatriz e Isabel, para dar origen a monasterios de la Orden de Santa Clara o de sus formas previas. Estas páginas analizan unos procesos de fundación que enlazan lo personal y lo familiar con lo político, visibilizan formas de interacción entre los sexos y desvelan algunas de las fisonomías adoptadas por las religiosas que constituyeron la institución clarisa, una orden religiosa exclusivamente femenina en la que tuvieron gran peso las mujeres como agentes históricos.

Introductory text to the catalog of the exhibition "In the Name of the Saints: Viceroyalty Sculptures and Private Devotion" of the Joaquín Gandarillas Infante Collection of American colonial art, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes.

Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.

Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.

Le Paris de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle compte près d’un demi-million de personnes, des hommes, des femmes qui tous ont leur quotidien, leur quartier, leurs amis, leurs espoirs, leurs déceptions et leurs drames. À l’occasion, au détour d’une rue, ils achètent du papier et inscrivent sur celui-ci des traces de leur existence. Ils se livrent, mais rarement dans l’idée de passer à l’histoire : ils notent pour expliquer, pour se rappeler ou encore pour informer des amis ou de la famille. Enfouis dans des boîtes d’archives et livrés à la poussière du temps, les trois textes qui constituent ce recueil (Détail de tout ce qui c’est (sic) passée Depuis le 30 mars 1774 ; Voyage qui n’est point sentimental, comme ceux de Mr Stern anglois ; Comptabilité d’une bourgeoise anonyme) revivent aujourd’hui et éclairent, chacun à sa façon, l’ordinaire de la vie parisienne.