Believing that historians should adopt anthropological methods in order to understand the otherness of previous eras, Robert Darnton analyzes a variety of sources, from grim peasant folklore to Enlightenment philosophy, in order to show not merely what men and women thought, but why they thought it. The result is an evocation of a country where young printers could riotously massacre cats, where a royal inspector of police could labour over intimate, up-to-date files on writers and where the gaudy panoply of a city could symbolize so clearly the infrastructure of a society ridden with nuance and contradiction.