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.
The Routledge handbook of material culture in early modern Europe
Introduction / Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster -- Global things: Europe's early modern material transformation / Giorgio Riello -- Cognitive history and material culture / John Sutton and Nicholas Keene -- Maps and material culture / Bernhard Klein -- The royal court / Glenn Richardson -- The material culture of early modern churches / Andrew Spicer -- Public buildings in early modern Europe / Kate Giles -- Domestic buildings: understanding houses and society / Chris King -- Materiality and the streetlife of the early modern city / Andrew Gordon -- Materiality, nature and the body / Erin Sullivan and Andrew Wear -- Mortuary culture / Harold Mytum -- Clothing / Maria Hayward -- Getting down from the table: early modern foodways and material culture / Sara Pennell -- Arms and armour / David Grummitt -- Material texts / Frances Maguire and Helen Smith -- The material culture of lineage in late Tudor and early Stuart England / Richard Cust -- The malleable moment in English portraiture, c. 1540-1640 / Robert Tittler -- Is this a man I see before me?: Early modern masculinities and the new materialisms / Amanda Bailey -- In praise of clean linen: laundering humours on the early modern English stage / Natasha Korda and Eleanor Lowe -- Early modern religious objects and materialities of belief / Suzanna Ivanič -- The material culture of piety in the Italian Renaissance: re-touching the rosary / Irene Galandra Cooper and Mary Laven -- Early modern spaces and olfactory traces / David Karmon and Christy Anderson -- Musical sound and material culture / Flora Dennis -- Lasting impressions of the common woodcut / Patricia Fumerton and Megan E. Palmer -- Baroque sculpture: materiality and the question of movement / Nigel Llewellyn -- Rights of privacy in early modern English households / Lena Cowen Orlin -- Antwerp and the 'material Renaissance': exploring the social and economic significance of crystal glass and majolica in the sixteenth century / Inneke Baatsen, Bruno Blondé and Carolien De Staelen -- I say 'shard', you say 'sherd': contrasting and complementary approaches to a piece of early modern 'Venice glass' / Angela McShane and Nigel Jeffries.