Consuming the Past

<p>First published in 2003 <i>Consuming the Past</i> covers pilgrimages to popular festivals from modern spectacles to advertising from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siècle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialisation.</p>