Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

The eighteenth-century salon played an important role in shaping literary culture, while both creating and sustaining transnational intellectual networks. Focusing on archival materials, this book is the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France.

Spas and Salons features the design details of the best and newest beauty shops and spas on the block and uncovers, through interviews with the designers, what makes them so appealing, memorable, and desirable.

Musical salons as liminal spaces: salonnières as agents of musical culture -- Sensuality, sociability, and sympathy: musical salon practices as enactments of Enlightenment --Ephemerae and authorship in the salon of Madame Brillon -- Composition, collaboration, and the cultivation of skill in the salon of Marianna Martines -- The cultural work of collecting and performing in the salon of Sara Levy -- Musical improvisation and poetic painting in the salon of Angelica Kauffman -- Reading musically in the salon of Elizabeth Graeme -- Conclusion.

The first half of the book is a detailed study of how the salons influenced the development of literature. Beasley argues that many women were not only writers, they also served as critics for the literary sphere as a whole. In the second half of the book Beasley examines how historians and literary critics subsequently portrayed the seventeenth century literary realm, which became identified with the great reign of Louis XIV and designated the official canon of French literature. Beasley argues that in a rewriting of this past, the salons were reconfigured in order to advance an alternative view of this premier moment of French culture and of the literary masterpieces that developed out of it. Through her analysis of how the seventeenth century salon has been defined and transmitted to posterity, Beasley illuminates facets of France's collective memory, and the powers that constituted it in the past and that are still working to define it today.

A history of the Ottoman incorporation of Arab lands that shows how gentlemanly salons shaped culture, society, and governance Historians have typically linked Ottoman imperial cohesion in the sixteenth century to the bureaucracy or the sultan’s court. In Empire of Salons, Helen Pfeifer points instead to a critical but overlooked factor: gentlemanly salons. Pfeifer demonstrates that salons—exclusive assemblies in which elite men displayed their knowledge and status—contributed as much as any formal institution to the empire’s political stability. These key laboratories of Ottoman culture, society, and politics helped men to build relationships and exchange ideas across the far-flung Ottoman lands. Pfeifer shows that salons played a central role in Syria and Egypt’s integration into the empire after the conquest of 1516–17. Pfeifer anchors her narrative in the life and network of the star scholar of sixteenth-century Damascus, Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577), and she reveals that Arab elites were more influential within the empire than previously recognized. Their local knowledge and scholarly expertise competed with, and occasionally even outshone, that of the most powerful officials from Istanbul. Ultimately, Ottoman culture of the era was forged collaboratively, by Arab and Turkophone actors alike. Drawing on a range of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, Empire of Salons illustrates the extent to which magnificent gatherings of Ottoman gentlemen contributed to the culture and governance of empire.