David Gaimster - The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

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.1500c.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.

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.

The Routledge History Handbooks

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST MANDATES

Edited by Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF RACE AND THE AMERICAN MILITARY

Edited by Geoffrey W. Jensen

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF SETTLER COLONIALISM

Edited by Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY HANDBOOK OF MEDIEVAL REVOLT

Edited by Justine Firnhaber-Baker with Dirk Schoenaers

Edited by
Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster

First published 2017

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2017 selection and editorial matter, Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster; individual chapters, the contributors.

The right of Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 9781409462699 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315613161 (ebk)

Typeset in Perpetua

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Section I
Definitions, disciplines, new directions

CATHERINE RICHARDSON, TARA HAMLING AND DAVID GAIMSTER

GIORGIO RIELLO

JOHN SUTTON AND NICHOLAS KEENE

Section II
Contexts and categories

BERNHARD KLEIN

GLENN RICHARDSON

ANDREW SPICER

KATE GILES

CHRIS KING

ANDREW GORDON

ERIN SULLIVAN AND ANDREW WEAR

HAROLD MYTUM

MARIA HAYWARD

SARA PENNELL

DAVID GRUMMITT

FRANCES MAGUIRE AND HELEN SMITH

Section III
Object studies

ANDREW GORDON

DELIA GARRATT

VICTORIA JACKSON

ANN-SOPHIE THWAITE

HANNAH LEE

SOPHIE COPE

HOLLIE CHUNG

PETER HEWITT

JAN SIBTHORPE

LUISA COSCARELLI

MALCOLM MERCER

TARA HAMLING

CLAIRE CANAVAN

Section IV
Material culture in action

RICHARD CUST

ROBERT TITTLER

AMANDA BAILEY

NATASHA KORDA AND ELEANOR LOWE

SUZANNA IVANI

IRENE GALANDRA COOPER AND MARY LAVEN

DAVID KARMON AND CHRISTY ANDERSON

FLORA DENNIS

PATRICIA FUMERTON AND MEGAN E. PALMER

NIGEL LLEWELLYN

LENA COWEN ORLIN

INNEKE BAATSEN, BRUNO BLOND AND CAROLIEN DE STAELEN

ANGELA MCSHANE AND NIGEL JEFFRIES

The great joy of this volume for us has been the way of working it has encouraged between individuals exploring materiality at different stages in their careers and from different perspectives so we must first thank the contributors for being so open to taking new approaches to their encounters with material culture; for thinking, working and in many cases writing collaboratively and for being prepared to do so across boundaries of approach, perspective and discipline.

A good deal of that collaborative working began at a workshop in April 2013 which took place before the Materialities of Urban Life in Early Modern Europe conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, to which many of the writers of the chapters below contributed either physically or virtually. Our thanks to Mark Merry of the Centre for Metropolitan History for developing the idea for this with us, and for planning and hosting it, and to Olwen Myhill for the logistics. The speakers at the conference itself helped to shape our thoughts about what a volume like this needed, as did research students at the universities of Birmingham and Kent, on whom we tried out various incarnations of its contents and shape. Angela McShane assisted us in thinking through the ways the Object Studies might work, and put us in touch with some willing and able writers.

Finally, we would like to thank the staff at Ashgate and Routledge for their help with the various stages of this volume, particularly Lianne Sherlock and Autumn Spalding at each end for easing and supporting the transition, and to Laura Pilsworth, the History editor at Routledge, for going the extra mile with the images which set it apart from the others in this series, but are so vital to its subject.