The five-volume History of Private Life is a comprehensive study created in the 1980s by a group of French, British and American scholars led by the renowned Annales School historians Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. The five-volume book covers the entire history of the West from Antiquity to the end of the 20th century. The second volume covers the private life of Europe during the High Middle Ages. The authors of the book tell how family life and social structure changed in comparison with Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, how complex legal regulations related to everyday life, how the European individual was born and how the life of a private person was reflected in literature. CONTENTS: Instead of a preface (Georges Duby ) 5Prologue. Private power, public power (Georges Duby) 14Chapter 1. Sketches (Georges Duby, Dominique Barthelemy, Charles de La Roncière) 57Private life of the aristocratic houses of feudal France 58Private life of the Tuscan nobility on the eve of the Renaissance 196Chapter 2. The imaginary world (Daniel Renier-Bohler) 375Research of literature 376Chapter 3. Problems (Dominique Barthelemy, Philippe Contamine, Georges Duby, Philippe Braungitein) 489The structure of personal space 490Birth of the individual 611Bibliography 7531. XI-XIII centuries 7532. Literary monuments 7573. XIV-XV centuries 760Alphabetical index 768