In BOURGUEIL TAPESTRY (A history of everyday life in France 1003-1905)—an unusual, striking approach to social history—author Douglas Bullis takes readers through 900 years of everyday life of French common people. Century by century, Bullis renders uneventful scenes like 11th-century farming, medieval abbey life and a 16th-century market with the same vivid radiance present in the Medieval illuminations that sometimes accompany and underlie his text. Noteworthy events—like the consecration of Chartres or the Battle of Crécy, that bend the small lives depicted here—are mainly in the background, lurking behind breakfast. Arguably, this is how most of us live most days now, and how most of our ancestors lived before us. Bullis suggests he is telling this long history through the lives of the Lefief clan. Indeed, Lefiefs are sketched into every chapter. But their individual stories are less important than their service as unifying principals for Bullis’ extraordinarily lyrical presentation of the sights, smells, sounds and preoccupations, “the sun and the wind and the dusk and the summer…” in the lives of ordinary French people living in each of the last nine centuries. The volume casts a lovely light.
In addition to his lyricism, Bullis writes with an economy that makes his work accessible. He has recreated—in less than 50,000 words and 200 well-illustrated pages—a near-thousand-year history in a rich, meaningful and memorable way. He has a talent for selecting and concisely describing the drama inherent in small, common moments. This brings the history to life—a gift to a modern audience accustomed to short forms and chilly recitations of metadata. Finally, Bullis’ use of artwork contemporary to this 900-year history is a creative, fascinating entry point. He has married art and a gift for lyrical storytelling to present a distant and foreign past that is as fresh as looking out the window today to create a luminous gem of a book for readers intrigued with the history of France in specific, and the social history and lived daily experience of common people in general.
BOURGUEIL TAPESTRY (A history of everyday life in France 1003-1905), Douglas Bullis’ excellent social history of the fabric of French, is a lyrically written, beautifully imagined and unique approach to understanding the day-to-day experience of French common people.
~Ellen Graham for IndieReader