The Tale of the Cat. Tracing French Cultural History

Author: Dain
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: In the 1730s, a group of printing apprentices in Paris launched a revolutionary cat-slaughter ritual, torturing and killing all the cats they could find, including their master's pet cat. How could such a cruel ritual seem "funny" to them? Dain explores hidden historical truths and the state of the human psyche in the shadows of non-authoritative texts: a "complete" survey of the city by a middle-class citizen, an extraordinary archive preserved by a detective, the preface to the Encyclopédie, and the evaluation of a contemporary reader of the best-selling author Rousseau. This book examines the way of thinking in 18th-century France. It seeks not only to state what people thought but also how they thought—how they made sense of the world, gave it meaning, and infused it with emotion. This line of inquiry is called "mental history" in France, also known as "cultural history," as it treats one's own civilization in the same way anthropologists study foreign cultures. It is the history observed with meticulous attention like ethnography. Under the author's writing strategy of essays with a strong literary interest, readers are guaranteed an enriching and enjoyable reading experience.