Red: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau's Red is a scholarly cultural history of the color by a historian whose career has been built specifically on tracing the symbolism and social meaning of individual colors across European history, including the practical history of dyes such as kermes and cochineal that made red pigments and textiles possible. Its authority rests on that career long specialization and on Princeton University Press's standing as an academic publisher, and the book is widely used as a reference for how a given period and culture actually understood and produced the color rather than for a universal, ahistorical symbolism. Its limit is scope, a European centered cultural history rather than a global comparative study, so a claim about red's meaning in a tradition well outside that frame, an East Asian or Indigenous American context for instance, needs a source that specializes in that tradition directly rather than this book's own comparisons.