New from Yale University Press: A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson.About the book, from the publisher:
This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family’s investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence.Tara Hamling is senior lecturer in history at the University of Birmingham. Catherine Richardson is professor of early modern studies at the University of Kent.
--Marshal Zeringue
