Alain Boureau – författare

The ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been the "droit de cuissage" or right of a feudal Lord to sleep with the bride of a vassal on her wedding night. This text demonstrates that it is a myth, under contextual examination nearly all the evidence for this custom melts away, yet belief in it has survived for seven hundred years. The text shows how each era turned the mythical custom to its own ends, in the late Middle Ages monarchists raised the custom to rally public opinion against local lords, and partisans of the French Revolution pointed to it as proof of the corruption of the Ancien Regime.

In this book Roger Chartier and his associates explore the history of a cultural practice that has become common and widespread: the writing of letters. They begin by examining the invention of norms for writing letters in the Middle Ages, and the fixing of these norms in popular manuals of various kinds. They then analyse the letter-writing models developed in the ancien régime, showing how these models were linked to court literature, on the one hand, and to the popular books distributed by pedlars, on the other. Finally they discuss the models of letter-writing developed during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, they argue, was a decisive period in the history of letter writing, partly because of the rapid rise in rates of literacy and partly due to broader social and economic transformations, which increased the need for writing letters. By exploring the ways in which practices of letter writing have changed over the centuries, this path-breaking book sheds light on an everyday cultural practice which has created new ways of thinking, of feeling and of relating to others as well as to oneself.

Ernst Kantorowicz was a complex figure whose long incident-filled life seemed to embody many of the contradictions of the twentieth century. A Jew from a disputed area between Germany and Poland who fought on the German side in World War I, he first achieved academic success with Frederick II (1927), a work whose language, in Gabrielle Spiegel's words, "often came perilously close to that of the Nazi party" in its desire to see a reconstituted German nation once again dominant on the world stage. Forced to emigrate when the Nazis came to power, Kantorowicz later became embroiled in controversy when, at Berkeley during the McCarthy era, he refused to sign an oath of allegiance designed to identify Communist Party sympathizers. Resigning from Berkeley as a result of the controversy over the loyalty oath, Kantorowicz moved to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life and where he wrote his masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies. Kantorowicz the historian, however, had no wish to see his own life become a subject of historical study. When he died in 1963, his will directed that all his personal papers be destroyed.Why had a historian so involved in history wished to erase himself from it? In Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian, Alain Boureau confronts this question by writing a unique work which is as much a speculation on the nature of biography as it is a biographical study. In the absence of personal records, Boureau seeks to get at the interior life of this enigmatic individual through the recourse of "parallel lives"-real-life figures and characters from novels of the time who were faced with similar crises and who shared aspects of upbringing, training, and circumstance. This fascinating, nontraditional biography, originally published in France in 1990, appears for the first time in English, translated by Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel.