Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine De' Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780674048997)

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.

Opening with Catherine de' Medici's lavish dairy at Fontainebleau (c. 1560), Martin's book explores how French queens and noblewomen used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers. Pleasure dairies also provided women with a site to promote good health, by spending time in salubrious gardens and consuming fresh milk. Illustrated with a dazzling array of images and photographs, Dairy Queens sheds new light on architecture, self, and society in the ancien régime.

Author: Meredith Martin
ISBN-10: 0674048997
ISBN-13: 9780674048997
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/15/2011
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.59lbs
Size: 9.29h x 6.42w x 0.83d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2011