BOOK OF DAYS

Bullis surveys a millennium of daily life in France in this nonfiction book.

In 1975, the author stumbled upon the remains of a disassembled early twentieth century scrapbook that detailed the lives of the ostensibly mundane Lefief family. Sold to Bullis at a French flea market as generic historical ephemera, the materials would have almost certainly been lost to history had the author not clumsily stepped on a 1905 photograph of Jacques and Marie-Claire Lefief. Feeling guilty over his faux pas, he purchased the remains of the small Lefief family archive. As with most members of France’s poor and working classes, there is little recorded history of the Lefiefs, but the author’s accidental discovery sparked a half-century of research and rumination upon fundamental questions of history that form the basis of this book. Contrasted with “the narratives of traditional history,” which prioritize the written records that document the lives of elites, this book uses images, from tapestries of the Middle Ages to the photographs found in the Lefief family scrapbook, to focus on “everyday life” in France from 1003 to 1975. Each chapter focuses on a single day in the life of a fictionalized member of the Lefief family from the 11th through 20th centuries. Prioritizing pictorial representations over textual sources, the book begins with the Bayeux Tapestry. An artistic masterpiece of medieval France, the tapestry is more than 200 feet long and depicts key moments of Normandy’s royal and military history. Its margins, however, illustrate the experiences and lives of common people from northern Europe seldom addressed in written histories. Through Bullis’ perceptive eye, readers are told (and shown) how soldiers cooked their meat, built their ships, and interacted with local peasants. Similar “mundane details of daily life” later made their way into the Book of Days of the 1400s through 1600s. While funded by wealthy patrons for religious purposes, the artisans who produced these works often included detailed images of “how common villagers and rural rustics lived at the time.” The text includes a keen analysis of religious sacramentals (from rosaries to depictions of baptisms) and what they reveal about the experiences of people in the era in which they were produced.

A skilled author of more than a dozen nonfiction works, Bullis is particularly adept at blending learned analysis and research with an engaging writing style that has appeal to both general readers as well as scholars of European history. And while purists may balk at its fictionalized Lefief characters, the book’s historical rigor is backed by an impressive citation schema that includes ample hyperlinks for e-readers. The narrative’s emphasis on appealing to a broad readership is evident in the high-quality, full-color images that adorn nearly every page, including reproductions of historical artifacts, maps, paintings, and photographs. The text also challenges readers to ask serious questions about the nature of history—particularly the ever present query among archivists, genealogists, and historians: “What part of the past is worth preserving and what may be forgotten?” This is a superb example of how to write both longue durée and “history from below.”

A delightful history of the French peasantry and working class as told through visual culture.