The Perraults: A Family Of Letters In Early Modern France Hardcover

Oded Rabinovitch

In The Perraults, Oded Rabinovitch takes the fascinating eponymous literary and scientific family as an entry point into the complex and rapidly changing world of early modern France. Today, the Perraults are best remembered for their canonical fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," most often attributed to Charles Perrault, one of the brothers. While the writing of fairy tales may seem a frivolous enterprise, it was, in fact, linked to the cultural revolution of the seventeenth century, which paved the way for the scientific revolution, the rise of "national literatures," and the early Enlightenment. Rabinovitch argues that kinship networks played a crucial, yet unexamined, role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of the day, which in turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. Through skillful reconstruction of the Perraults' careers and networks, Rabinovitch portrays the world of letters as a means of social mobility. He complicates our understanding of prominent institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as the very notions of authorship and court capitalism. The Perraults shows us that institutions were not simply rigid entities, embodying or defining intellectual or literary styles such as Cartesianism, empiricism, or the purity of the French language. Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies, and practices of writing.

9781501729423

English

Cornell University Press

15 November 2018

252

Oded Rabinovitch is lecturer in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University.

[Rabinovitch's] Examination of the Perrault family provides the means to gain a deeper understanding of notions of authorship, the role of the royal court, and family power dynamics. * Choice * "Watching the progress of the Perraults as it is described here is fascinating. With considerable economy but with much significant detail, the author has rebuilt the web of networks that made a remarkable literary family. The astute use of documents is a strong point of the book, along with Rabinovitch's imaginative use of fairy tales to support his cogent argument about the pervasive importance of kinship." * Malcolm Greenshields, H-France, 19 (2019) * "This is a remarkable book: beautifully written, deeply learned, extensively researched and documented, it is packed with fresh insights that change our understanding of intellectual production and social history in the early modern world." * European History Quarterly * "This is a remarkable book: beautifully written, deeply learned, extensively researched and documented, it is packed with fresh insights that change our understanding of intellectual production and social history in the early modern world." * Peter Sahlins, European History Quarterly 49(4) * "An ambitious undertaking that provides an array of lenses through which to view the fortunes of the Perrault family during the seventeenth century." * Julie D. Campbell, French History, July 2019 * "Oded Rabinovitch shows here, perhaps better than anyone before him, the complexities and importance of kinship in seventeenth-century France." * H-France Review * "Rabinovich gives us a nuanced appreciation of salon culture and of literary sociability." * Social History *