Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

ISBN-13: 9780521496759 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 418 str.

Chandra Mukerji

Opis

In Louis XIV's France, land took on new importance in politics and court life. A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

Recenzje

"Territorial Ambitions is probably the most ambitious and original study of seventeenth-century France in the service of a sociological argument to be published since Norbert Elias's book on the court society." Peter Burke, Journal of Modern History

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Glossary of French terms; 1. The culture of land and the territorial state; 2. Military ambitions and territorial gardens; 3. Material innovation and cultural identity; 4. Techniques of material mobilization; 5. Social choreography and the politics of place; 6. Naturalizing power in the new state; 7. A history of material power; Notes; References; Index.