Dairy queens

In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, the author tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden statues have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. The author challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and…