Paris: An Electronic Tour of the Old City Ebook

This electronic book offers an interactive tour of Paris before the French Revolution. It spans the history of the city, offering first-hand accounts from its origins in Roman Lutetia, through Carolingian and later medieval texts, to important descriptions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Prof. Berger expands out to the wide variety of sources available from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from urban descriptions to authors who portray the people of the city, their trades and festivals, street life and ceremony. Sections on the Parisian underworld of poverty, crime, and marginality document the growing pains of the modern metropolis; while the work of Paris’ satirists help round out the picture of a society in constant change. In the later parts of the e-book, eighteenth-century residents and travelers provide comparisons of Paris to that other great capital: London; describe the city’s expanding faubourgs, bring us through cafe society and the dangers and attractions of Paris at night. The collection concludes with accounts of the city and its life at the beginning of the Revolution. Throughout the book, the heart of the city- and of these images and readings – remains the Seine; and the reader will come away from this e-book with a new awareness of how important to the city and its soul that river has always been. The collection includes writers as diverse as Emperor Julian the Apostate, Abbo of St. Germain-des-Prés, Jean de Jandun, Christine de Pizan, Alberto Vignati, Arnold van Buchel of Utrecht, Henri Sauval, Paul Scarron, Sebastiano Locatelli, Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, and Henry Swinburne. They offer classic urban descriptions and praises, diaries, handbooks for tourists, political and economic analysis, literary essay, and first-hand reportage. Paris: An Electronic Tour also takes full advantage of the interactive capability of electronic media. It offers 46 color and black & white illustrations: paintings, engravings and sketches of cityscapes, exterior and interior views of individual building, street life, trades and craftspeople, processions and other outdoor rituals, historical maps and perspective views, all zoomable to enable detailed examination at higher resolutions. Sections on the visual interpretation of Paris make these images not mere illustrations but important visual documents that both parallel the texts and help bring the reader to a deeper understanding of the historical center. Artists include the Limbourg Brothers, Jean Fouquet, the Master of St. Giles, Truschet and Hoyau, Étienne Martellange, Jacques Callot, Abraham Bosse, Étienne Jeaurat, Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Raguenet and others. This electronic book provides three interactive maps of the city, c. 1400, c. 1600 and c. 1800. Color-coded keys on each map bring the reader to the images created from those viewpoints and thus also provide a visual index to the illustrations and the city plans. This e-book is fully searchable and can be navigated page-by-page like a traditional print book, accessed via the interactive table of contents of texts or images, through the bookmarks of chapters and sections, or through the page-search feature. Hyperlinked references bring up the appropriate notes to the text and introductions, and a Bibliographical Guide completes the edition. Loaded onto a laptop computer this e-book provides the perfect companion to the student, the jet-seat or arm-chair traveler, or any lover of Paris.