This monograph shines the spotlight on an art deco jewellery designer whose name has come to stand for the most dynamic of 20th-century styles - Jean Després. Many of his designs and drawings are reproduced here for the first time, showing his creative process.

"If anyone wants to understand the fate of France in the 20th century, this is the book to read." --Arthur Herman, historian and bestselling author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. In 1906, Fran�ois Coty became a multimillionaire within two years of creating his first perfume, the legendary La Rose Jacqueminot. In the 30 years he ruled his perfume and cosmetics kingdom, Coty became France's first billionaire, acquiring unimaginable wealth during the most devastating war in the history of Europe, World War I. Born in Corsica next door to the home where his idol and distant relative Napoleon Bonaparte was born, Coty, with his unshakable charisma, ingenuity, and of course, his incredibly sensitive "nose," revolutionized the world's fragrance and cosmetics industry. Now, for the first time, comes this stunning biography of France's fragrance king, the incredible story of the ambitions, loves, losses, and triumphs of one of the 20th century's most famed yet enigmatic entrepreneurial geniuses.

Family and Farm is the history of the communautes, the large patriarchal households of central France, from the close of the medieval era to the nineteenth century. These households were unique in that they often included as many as twenty members, holding property in common. Far from having roots in any cultural bias or folkloric tradition, the communautes were organized to enable individual families to meet the demands imposed by the social, economic, and physical environments in which they lived. The book examines household composition, the role of kinship, inheritance and successive strategies, and the nature of interpersonal relations. The period covered by the study includes the collapse of feudalism, the rise of the modern state, the French revolution, and the emergence of agrarian capitalism. Each crisis posed fundamental problems of survival for peasant families, and the organization of households constituted a crucial means by which that survival was ensured.

This latest volume brings the project up to date, with entries on almost 500 women whose death dates fall between 1976 and 1999. You will find here stars of the golden ages of radio, film, dance, and television; scientists and scholars; civil rights activists and religious leaders; Native American craftspeople and world-renowned artists. For each subject, the volume offers a biographical essay by a distinguished authority that integrates the woman's personal life with her professional achievements set in the context of larger historical developments.

Why has jewellery and body adornment often been marginalized in studies of modernist art and design? This study explores the relationship between jewellery, modernism and modernity from the 'jazz age' to the second world war in order to challenge the view that these portable art forms have only a minor role to play in histories of modernism. From the masterworks of the Parisian jewellery houses to the film and photography of Man Ray, this study seeks to present jewellery in a new light, where issues of representation and display are considered to be as important in the creation of a modern 'jewellery culture' as the objects themselves. Drawing on material from museums, archives, contemporary journals, memoirs, literary and theoretical texts, this study shows how the emergence of modern jewellery began to seriously question conventional notions of body adornment.

At the Edge of Reformation springs from Peter Linehan's continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal, on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatisation of the church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected archival material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, Linehan makes use of the also unpublished so-called 'secret' registers of the popes of the period. The issues this volume raises ought to be of interest not only to students of Spanish and Portuguese society but also to those interested in the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe as well as of the activity in that period of the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law as God's vice-gerent in his.