Material Culture and Social Life in the Early Modern Home, 1500–1700

This course explores the development of domestic space across a wide social spectrum from the urban burgher in the mercantile centers of northern Europe to the landed gentry and nobility of England, whose “prodigy houses” of the later sixteenth century offered an extraordinary expression of a new domestic and civil ideal of living. The course will chart changing notions of personal comfort and forms of social signification among these disparate communities, and set the various accoutrements of living, including furniture and furnishings, interior architecture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, and the other decorative features and accessories of domestic life—within the broader moral, political, ideological and economic frameworks of the societies that produced them. These frameworks will include the humanist-driven theories of the household as a place for the inculcation of the virtues and education deemed necessary for private and public life; the particular role of women in the running of the home; and, more broadly, the family as the political bedrock of the state. In the wake of the Reformation, the domestic realm took over many of the impulses behind traditional church decoration and became in effect, a new locus of moral instruction. The objects with which contemporaries chose to surround themselves were thus often charged with ethical meaning, not just symbolically through their decoration, but also dynamically, in terms of social usage. In an age of increasingly codified social behavior, when good conduct and manners were assuming importance in the expression of moral character, the artifacts of domestic living and the social rituals which developed around them, took on a new importance in the expression of personal and familial virtue. Knowledge of German, French, or Dutch is an advantage but not essential. 3 credits. Satisfies the pre-1800 requirement.