Lifestyles and lifespans: domestic material culture and the temporalities of daily life in seventeenth-century England

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between materialities and temporalities in the seventeenth-century domestic household. We argue that a focus on material culture suggests a complex, multi-temporal, understanding of the domestic setting during this period; that engagement with objects involved situating their trajectories both backwards and forwards in time, and that this multi-temporal understanding was a key feature of daily life. Picking up on Daniel Woolf’s observation about early modern England, that it experienced a changing historical culture - an uneasy accommodation to change that went hand in hand with shifting attitudes to the acceptability of novelty and innovation – we see the seventeenth century as a fascinating, often contradictory, period of flux. It was during this century of accelerating change in physical, social, religious, and economic environments that the transition from medieval to modern habits of thought and consumption occurred, with some fundamental shifts in the nature and understanding of domestic fabric and furnishings. This is a period identified with the rise of the ‘middling sort’ as influential consumers, the proliferation of imported wares as well as native craft industries, and the development of taste in response to international fashions. It is also associated with an unprecedented degree of investment in domestic building; the ‘great re-building(s)’ of ancient housing stock. Yet this was also the first period of cultural antiquarianism with its fondness for the materials of the past; Woolf has pointed to the role of the exchange of antiquities and the growing quantity of published historical material in producing a new consciousness of the past in relation to contemporary concerns. We are interested in how these forces of tradition and novelty played out for individuals in the context of furnishing and provisioning their households, and how this domestic material culture responded, and contributed, to a sense of being present in longer cycles of time.