E-Books →Dairy Queens The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette

Free Download Meredith Martin, "Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette "
English | ISBN: 0674048997 | 2011 | 336 pages | PDF | 14 MB
In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, Meredith Martin tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden structures―most famously the faux-rustic, white marble dairy built for Marie-Antoinette's Hameau at Versailles―have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. Martin challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and hermitages, pleasure dairies were crucial arenas for elite women to exercise and experiment with identity and power.