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The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research.
The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe - a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels.
There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500-c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods - between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds - and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience.
Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: 'Definitions, disciplines, new directions', 'Contexts and categories', 'Object studies' and 'Material culture in action'.
This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.
List of contents
SECTION 1: DEFINITIONS, DISCIPLINES, NEW DIRECTIONS Introduction Chapter 1: Global Things: Europe's Early Modern Material Transformation Chapter 2: Cognitive History and Material Culture SECTION 2: CONTEXTS AND CATEGORIES Chapter 3: Maps and Material Culture Chapter 4: The Royal Court Chapter 5: The Material Culture of Early Modern Churches Chapter 6: Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe Chapter 7: Domestic Buildings: Understanding Houses and Society Chapter 8: Materiality and the Streetlife of the Early Modern City Chapter 9: Materiality, Nature and the Body Chapter 10: Mortuary Culture Chapter 11: Clothing Chapter 12: Getting Down from the Table: Early Modern Foodways and Material Culturen Chapter 13: Arms and Armour Chapter 14: Material Texts SECTION 3: OBJECT STUDIES Object Study 1: The Panyer Alley Boy Object Study 2: Abraham Ortelius, his epitome of the theatre of the worlde Object Study 3: 'The Persian Sibyl' Banqueting Trencher ".../part contents
About the author
Dr Catherine Richardson is a Reader in Renaissance Studies at the University of Kent, UK.
Dr Tara Hamling is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Professor David Gaimster is Director of the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Summary
The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe offers a comprehensive multi-disciplinary examination of current research in the field and presents a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of research on material culture in the early modern period.
