Alain Corbin is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Sabbath and heavenly rest2. Eternal rest, the foundation stone of this history3. Rest and quietude4. Retreat and retirement in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, or the art of being able ‘to forge’ a tranquil rest for yourselfInterlude: Charles V5. Disgrace, an opportunity for rest6. Rest in the midst of confinement7. The quest for comfort; new approaches to rest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8. Prelude: rest in the midst of nature9. A rest for the land10. Sunday rest and ‘the demon rest’11. Fatigue and rest12. Therapeutic rest from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuryConclusion

"In this enviably concise and revealing new book, the great French historian Alain Corbin has made yet more new discoveries, not least a “great century of rest” that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Corbin’s insights will continue to provoke reflection and discussion among all those interested in the history of our innermost lives."Robert D. Priest, Royal Holloway, University of London"In some measure this book is a history of the secularization of rest, from the sweet repose of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the rest of the dead in God, through rest as cure to the ills of the soul, to rest as not working, to our contemporary sense of its being a time to lie on the beach or improve our golf game. But it is more than that: a philosophical meditation on the history of how wakeful rest is a state in which one can be quiet and alone with oneself. We may be thankful that Corbin did not rest but wrote this moving book instead."Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley"lively and highly suggestive"Church Times“Engaging … Rest, as Mr. Corbin demonstrates in his subtle and insightful meditation, is complicated.”The Wall Street Journal