Awards

• Nominated for American Society for 18th-Century Studies Louis Gotschalk Prize 2012
• Nominated for David H. Pinkney Prize 2012
• Nominated for J. Russell Major Prize 2011
• Nominated for Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History 2011
• Short-listed for Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize 2011
• Shortlisted for Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize 2011.

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780674048997

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Reviews

[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.--Jenny McPhee Bookslut (05/01/2011)

Author Information

Meredith Martin is Assistant Professor of Art, Wellesley College.

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