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.

About the Author

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

Reviews

[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.

* H-France *

Oded Rabinovitch shows here, perhaps better than anyone before him, the complexities and importance of kinship in seventeenth-century France.

* H-France Review *

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 *

The Perraults is a dense, subtle, and ambitious book, which should be of interest to all students of 'letters' (in the broadest sense) in ancien regime France.

* American Historical Review *

One of the marks of an innovative and successful monograph is that not only do we think about a familiar subject in an altogether new way when we put it down, we wonder how its insights had not appeared obvious to us before. Oded Rabinovitch's new book does precisely this, offering a stimulating model for future research into literary and scientific life in the early modern period.

* The Journal of Modern History *

[A] major study, offering an excellent model of how to combine historical and literary research by situating literary production in precise political and social contexts.

* History *

An excellent analysis of one family's fortunes that connects Paris with Versailles and the countryside as well as a variety of cultural fields including literature, science, architecture, and finance.

* Sixteenth Century Journal *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501729423
Author Oded Rabinovitch
Format Hardback
Page Count 252
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm