Over the past three decades, the study of material culture has become a pervasive feature of historical scholarship. From art to shoes, from porcelain to glass, ‘things’ are increasingly viewed as a useful medium through which to reconstruct what mattered to historical actors in everyday life. Taking its lead from this vast scholarship, this discussion examines how material culture was integrated into a programme of devotion, edification and religious instruction within England’s episcopal palaces, a group of buildings in which the relationship between the material and the spiritual was particularly fraught. Adopting a long chronological span, from 1500 to 1800, it analyses how that relationship evolved into the eighteenth century, a period noted for its proliferation of things and apparently ‘secular’ character.