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“... This is not an easy book to read, even though it is written clearly and at times elegantly; its authors have swathed and encumbered their interpretations in so many reservations and second thoughts that it takes some attentive detective-work to discover their meaning. One is reminded of the famous lines in which Horace celebrated the daring of the first navigator: Illi robur et aes triplex Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci Commisit pelago ratum Primus ...”

“... a few specific types of painting in a few centres in Italy. Images of Man and Death, by the late Philippe Ariès, is a book of far greater scope, a sort of visual supplement to his celebrated L’Homme devant la Mort, surveying the whole of Western civilisation (which, viewed in detail, turns out, more often than not, to be French civilisation). ...”

“... popularity over the same period of time. Some of the credit must go to a succession of scholars, Philippe Ariès, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie among them, who combined intellectual power with formidable originality and entrepreneurial verve. But it is the kind of history writers like these have publicised that has been ...”

“... quantitative methods in articles of the 1950s, and he still believes in them sufficiently to scold Philippe Ariès because, in his recent book on the history of attitudes to death, ‘there is not a statistic in the whole 642 pages.’ Stone has always believed in combining his statistics with impressions derived from literary – and visual ...”

“... part of the argument that such attitudes must be related to our feelings about many other matters. Ariès is a researcher of genius, and I shall be saying later that his gifts are sometimes the cause of certain faults or excesses. As in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, of which this work is a modern avatar, there is an armature of theory which is almost lost ...”

“... the avid search for them readily leads, not to their discovery, but rather to their invention. Philippe Aries, for example, in Centuries of Childhood, cites Montaigne as evidence for the change in European conceptions of childhood before and after the 17th century. But the terms of Aries’s quotations make it clear that Montaigne himself was well aware ...”

“... children have remained much the same, the concept of childhood has changed dramatically. In 1960 Philippe Ariès published Centuries of Childhood, a book equally influential and infamous for its argument that childhood was an invention of early modernity. Before this, he claimed, Europeans were unsentimental about their children, and accorded them no ...”

“... each perceived the other as atrociously misguided. Dr Li makes some reference to the theories of Philippe Ariès, who has argued that the notion of childhood, and a high valuation of this period of life, are fairly recent historical developments. Ariès’s views have been substantially discredited by later students ...”

“... To follow up another personal comparison, there are two other historians in this volume. Philippe Ariès rates four mentions, justly, for he was the inventor of the theme of death in modern historiography. (None of the four extracts actually reflects Ariès’s contribution to historical ...”

“... scholarly generalisations. Among her more predictable targets are older historians such as Philippe Ariès and Lawrence Stone, who claimed for the 18th century the emergence of a more companionate style of marriage among the prosperous, and a kinder, gentler way of bringing up and perceiving children. She shows, as others have done, that there was ...”

“... directions in subsequent historical research. Elias wrote about the invention of childhood before Philippe Ariès, about cat-massacres before Robert Darnton. Countless virgin territories that he mapped out have since been thickly settled. His analysis of court life and the ‘royal mechanism’, further elaborated in a later book on The Court ...”

“... The Royal Touch; French Rural Society; Feudal Society; F. Braudel: The Mediterranean; L. Febvre: Philippe II and the Franche-Comté’. (Clearly, Febvre had a higher opinion of his own work than he did of his colleagues’.) Just as important as the self-conscious creation of a canon, however, was the conquest of the institutions. In 1947, Febvre became ...”

“... In his novels, the late Gwyn Thomas used to refer to those who frequented the pubs and cafés of small Welsh towns as ‘the voters’. It would certainly be the way to describe the adult population of France who, last spring, voted twice to elect a President (on 24 April and 8 May) and twice to elect a Parliament (on 5 and 12 June). In September they voted in local elections, and in November the referendum on the future of New Caledonia took place ...”

“... to the ‘rituals’ of his title, and engages most fruitfully with the theoretical big guns: Philippe Ariès on changing attitudes towards death, Norbert Elias on the ‘civilising process’, and Foucault on the emergence of the ‘carceral society’. In the last two thirds of the book, the balance tilts towards a more purely political account, in ...”

“... history, and needed to be included on the social historian’s agenda. A pioneering text came from Philippe Ariès: his Centuries of Childhood (1960) is bold in its range, rich in its insights, but frequently generalises well beyond the evidence available at the time of writing. J.R. Gillis’s Youth and History(1974) is another, though less successful ...”