Description
Arlette Farge’s Le Goût de l’archive is widely thought to be a historiographical classic. At the same time as combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was once struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was once seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices another way 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.
Initially published in 1989, Farge’s classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research At the same time as sharing astonishing information about life under the Old Regime in France. At once a practical guide to research methodology and an elegant literary reflection at the challenges of writing history, this uniquely wealthy volume demonstrates how surrendering to the archive’s allure can perpetually change how we keep in mind the past.