"Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "great century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler an…
"Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "great century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler an…
Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism", Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century."
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, the French nobility of the ancien regime turned their energies to developing the art of sociability, a refined code of manners, and an ideal of gallant, spirited conversation that be…