An innovative and pathbreaking study. Martin demolishes the assumption that pleasure dairies were the frivolous products of a 'let-them-eat-cake' state of mind. They helped shape a range of significant discourses on health, femininity, nobility, pleasure, nature, and utility. Written in clear, lucid prose, this book will appeal to a wide readership. -- Mary Sheriff, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Most of us are acquainted with tales of Marie-Antoinette's faux-pastoral activities-her hamlet at Versailles, equipped with a 'pleasure dairy,' where she dressed as a milkmaid and churned butter with her aristocratic pals. In her meticulously researched book, Martin places this diversion into its historical context. Discussing the tradition that celebrated the virtues of rural living, milk, and maternal care as means of social reform, Martin's wonderful book never fails to surprise and enlighten us. -- Francine du Plessix Gray Dairy Queens is a wonderful book, which I read with sustained pleasure. From Catherine de Medici to Marie-Antoinette, French queens and royal mistresses ordered the creation of dairy farms that became the intersecting sites of important architectural, decorative, and cultural trends. Martin deals with a plethora of subjects in this informed book, ranging from the prestige of milk baths and personal hygiene to politics. Readers will learn something new on every page. -- Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University
Meredith Martin is Assistant Professor of Art, Wellesley College.
An innovative and pathbreaking study. Martin demolishes the
assumption that pleasure dairies were the frivolous products of a
'let-them-eat-cake' state of mind. They helped shape a range of
significant discourses on health, femininity, nobility, pleasure,
nature, and utility. Written in clear, lucid prose, this book will
appeal to a wide readership.
*Mary Sheriff, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill*
Most of us are acquainted with tales of Marie-Antoinette's
faux-pastoral activities—her hamlet at Versailles, equipped with a
'pleasure dairy,' where she dressed as a milkmaid and churned
butter with her aristocratic pals. In her meticulously researched
book, Martin places this diversion into its historical context.
Discussing the tradition that celebrated the virtues of rural
living, milk, and maternal care as means of social reform, Martin's
wonderful book never fails to surprise and enlighten us.
*Francine du Plessix Gray*
Dairy Queens is a wonderful book, which I read with sustained
pleasure. From Catherine de Medici to Marie-Antoinette, French
queens and royal mistresses ordered the creation of dairy farms
that became the intersecting sites of important architectural,
decorative, and cultural trends. Martin deals with a plethora of
subjects in this informed book, ranging from the prestige of milk
baths and personal hygiene to politics. Readers will learn
something new on every page.
*Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University*
[A] brilliant and gorgeous new book...Until now, little has been
written about the pleasure dairy and this is certainly the first
I've heard of it. An explanation for its disappearance from our
cultural history and consciousness is that almost all of the actual
buildings no longer exist. But the pleasure dairy's gender coding
and associations with female exclusivity and power is likely
another reason. It is a testament to Meredith Martin's talent as
both writer and scholar that the pleasure dairy has now become so
vivid in my imagination, a part of our political and cultural
history, that I feel as if I have always known about the
phenomenon, Martin's book serving as an exquisite reminder.
*Bookslut*
Marie Antoinette herding sheep and milking cows in the peasant
hamlet that she built at Versailles seems the least likely subject
for an essay in cultural history. Yet, as Martin shows in her
stunning work of scholarship, the queen's interest in pastoral
retreats--dairies in particular--was an established and complex
court tradition going back to Catherine de' Medici in the 16th
century. Martin argues that Catherine, a foreign consort to Henri
II, and thus particularly vulnerable to the machinations of a
chauvinist court, erected a dairy at her estate to ally herself to
ideas of regal fertility, purity, and maternal care as a means of
deflecting criticism. Later, during the reign of Louis XIV, the
aristocrats who resisted the Sun King's efforts to centralize power
at Versailles constructed at their country properties "pleasure
dairies" and picturesque gardens as symbols of their repudiation of
courtly life and affirmation of feudal order. By the mid-18th
century, reformist ideas about responsible child-rearing and proper
sanitation encouraged Mme. Pompadour to reintroduce dairies to
Versailles. Marie Antoinette's seemingly frivolous exercise in
peasant rusticity, then, should be seen as a continuance of elitist
expressions of virtuous behavior.
*Choice*
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