French historian Michel Pastoureau continues his extensive project dedicated to the history of color in Western European societies from Ancient Rome to the present day. The publisher "NLO" has already released books such as "Blue," "Black," "Red," and "Green," as well as "The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabrics."

The new book focuses on the color yellow, which is scarcely present in the daily life of modern Europe and is poorly represented in official symbolism. However, this was not always the case. People of the past saw it as a sacred color — the color of light, warmth, wealth, and prosperity. The Greeks and Romans assigned it a special place in religious rituals, while the Celts and Germans associated it with wealth and immortality.

The decline in the status of the color yellow occurred in the Middle Ages. On one hand, it became the color of bitter bile and demonic sulfur — a sign of deceit, greed, and sometimes even illness and madness. At the same time, there is also a positive yellow: gold, honey, and ripe wheat — symbols of power, joy, and abundance. This book is dedicated to these and other semantic transformations of the color yellow.

Michel Pastoureau is a medieval historian and professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.