The Allure of the Archives Author:Arlette Farge, Thomas Scott-Railton (Translator) An exquisite appreciation of the distinctive rewards of historical research and a classic guide to the personal yet disciplined craft of discovery, now in its first English translation. — Arlette Farge's Le Goût de l’archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old... more » judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. In The Allure of the Archives, she conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past.
This title is part of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. The forward is written by Natalie Zemon Davis.« less