History of Rooms

From antiquity to the present day, Michelle Perrot traces the genealogy of this space, real or imagined, and explores some of its forms over the centuries: the king's bedroom, the hotel room, the marital bedroom, the child's bedroom, the servants' bedroom, the sick and dying bedroom, the bedroom of all kinds of recluses, and the bedroom of the solitary, such as the artist and the student. The history of the bedroom, and its tangle of private secrets, encompasses power relations and relationships of love, evokes daydreams, desires, sleepless nights, labor, and the anguish of the dying breath.