The Perraults

In this work, Rabinovitch offers a detailed portrait of the social mobility of the famous Perrault family. Taking his cues from studies of family academies, literary circles and network theory, he deftly makes use of notarial documents, manuscripts and printed works to construct a history of the careers of the four Perrault brothers, Pierre, Claude, Nicolas and Charles, that illustrates the ways in which their careers overlapped and connected. He argues that ‘kinship networks played a crucial yet seldom examined role in the cultural and intellectual ferment of seventeenth-century France’ and that consideration of these men’s careers takes us ‘straight into the heart of the problem of explaining cultural and intellectual change in early modern Europe’. Instead of beginning with consideration of the impacts of the prominent seventeenth-century institutions of salons and academies on their members’ literary and scientific work, in this case that of the Perrault brothers, Rabinovitch begins with analysis of the ‘family strategies’ that enabled them to rise to their prominence in such institutions.

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