A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Enlightenment

2021 ◽  

During the period of the Enlightenment, the word ‘home’ could refer to a specific and defined physical living space, the location of domestic life, and a concept related to ideas of roots, origins, and retreat. The transformations that the Enlightenment encouraged created the circumstances for the concept of home to change and develop in the following three ways. First to influence homemaking were the literary and cultural manifestations that included issues around attitudes to education, social order and disorder, sensibility, and sexuality. Secondly, were the roles of visual and material culture of the home that demonstrated themselves through print, portraiture, literature, objects and products, and dress and fashion. Thirdly, were the industrial and sociological aspects that included concepts of luxury, progress, trade and technology, consumption, domesticity, and the notions of public and private spaces within a home. The chapters in this volume therefore discuss and reflect upon issues relating to the home through a range of approaches. Enlightenment homes are examined in terms of signification and meaning; the persons who inhabited them; the physical buildings and their furniture and furnishings; the work undertaken within them; the differing roles of men and women; the nature of hospitality, and the important role of religion in the home. Taken together they give a valuable overview of the manners, customs, and operation of the Enlightenment home.

Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

Cultural history is increasingly informed by the history of material culture—the ways in which individuals or entire societies create and relate to objects both mundane and extraordinary—rather than on textual evidence alone. Books such as The Hare with Amber Eyes and A History of the World in 100 Objects indicate the growing popularity of this way of understanding the past. This book uncovers the forgotten origins of our fascination with exploring the past through its artifacts by highlighting the role of antiquarianism—a pursuit ignored and derided by modem academic history—in grasping the significance of material culture. From the efforts of Renaissance antiquarians, who reconstructed life in the ancient world from coins, inscriptions, seals, and other detritus, to amateur historians in the nineteenth century working within burgeoning national traditions, the book connects collecting—whether by individuals or institutions—to the professionalization of the historical profession, one which came to regard its progenitors with skepticism and disdain. The struggle to articulate the value of objects as historical evidence, then, lies at the heart both of academic history writing and of the popular engagement with things. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that our current preoccupation with objects is far from novel and reflects a human need to re-experience the past as a physical presence.


2021 ◽  

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment covers the period 1600 to 1760, a time marked by the movement of people, ideas and goods. The objects explored in this volume from scientific instrumentation and Baroque paintings to slave ships and shackles encapsulate the contradictory impulses of the age. The entwined forces of capitalism and colonialism created new patterns of consumption, facilitated by innovations in maritime transport, new forms of exchange relations, and the exploitation of non-Western peoples and lands. The world of objects in the Enlightenment reveal a Western material culture profoundly shaped by global encounters. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds.


2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-122
Author(s):  
Jan De Maeyer

BMGN heeft inzake onderzoek en disseminatie van het thema religie een rol van betekenis gespeeld. Die rol nam BMGN veeleer impliciet op, zelden expliciet. Religie stond niet centraal in de redactionele missie, maar was inhoudelijk wel degelijk aanwezig en bij momenten ook heel zichtbaar. Het tijdschrift verbond niet alleen historici, het verbond ook onderzoek van historici en van andere menswetenschappers uit Nederland en Vlaanderen rond het thema religie en stimuleerde op velerlei wijzen de verspreiding van methodologische vernieuwingen en innovatieve inzichten. Jammer genoeg heeft BMGN religie of religiegeschiedenis nooit expliciet geproblematiseerd. Naast een meer klassieke benadering van religie (de werking van de geïnstitutionaliseerde religies of kerken) lag de focus op de rol van religie in het politieke en sociaal-maatschappelijke leven, maar ook in culturele evoluties (identiteitsopbouw of identiteitsconstructies). BMGN dreef veeleer mee met de ontwikkelingen in de religiegeschiedenis, het was geen trendsetter. In deze vaststelling schuilt een uitdaging voor de volgende tien jaar. Bij een feestnummer hoort een wens: religie mag en kan, als inherent onderdeel van de cultuurgeschiedenis, een explicieter onderdeel worden van BMGN. The BMGN has been of great significance in researching and disseminating religion as a theme. The journal tended to assume this role implicitly but rarely did so explicitly. Religion was not pivotal in the editorial mission but indeed present in substance and at times very visible as well. In addition to connecting historians, the journal brought together research by historians, and by extension other scholars of the humanities, from the Netherlands and Flanders in relation to the theme of religion, and encouraged dissemination of methodological innovations and innovative insights in many ways. Unfortunately, the BMGN has never explicitly addressed religion or the history of religion. Aside from a more conventional approach to religion (the effect of institutionalised religions or churches), the main focus was the role of religion in politics and society, as well as in cultural transitions (identity constructions). The BMGN tended to go along with developments in the history of religion and was not a trend setter. This observation embodies a challenge for the decade that lies ahead. A festive issue includes a wish: religion is permissible and acceptable, as an inherent part of cultural history, as a more explicit part of the BMGN.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 195-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riitta Laitinen ◽  
Thomas Cohen

AbstractThe articles in this collection deal with the early modern street—a public space that was never completely separate from other public spaces, or indeed from private spaces. This introduction presents central themes for the following six articles that explore the history of the street in various European towns. Public and private, order and disorder, and control and hierarchy are discussed, and the inextricable link between the material and the immaterial in the history of the street is emphasized.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Greenwood

This article demonstrates the queer potential and pleasure produced by the character Fiyero in Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked (2003). I mobilize two primary frameworks to examine Fiyero’s queerness; the first half of the article views Fiyero in the context of queer theories of temporality and utopia, while the second half is interested in the deep cultural history of gay men’s relationships with Broadway musicals. This analysis produces both theoretical and historical implications of Fiyero’s character as I explore how his representation disrupts heteronormative rituals and aspects of the social order, as well as how he produces a valuable figure for the communities of gay men that have historically developed around musical theatre. The queer possibility of Wicked’s women has been examined extensively in past scholarship – particularly through the insights of Stacy Wolf – and this article expands upon this previous work to account for the role of Fiyero in the musical and the queer possibilities he produces.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber

This chapter presents the historical and conceptual background to the book’s argument. It starts with a history of Ghana, followed by an analysis of the trends that have led to high levels of out-migration, and then to a description of Ghanaian populations in Chicago. Next, it addresses the concept of social trust in general and personal trust in particular, developing a theory of personal trust as an imaginative and symbolic activity, and analyzing interracial relations through the lens of racialized distrust. It concludes by describing the role of religion in the integration of immigrant groups into the United States and the particular religious frameworks that characterize Charismatic Evangelical Christianity in Ghana.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


Author(s):  
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra ◽  
Adrian Masters

Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.


2021 ◽  

A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry covers the period 1800 to 1920. Over this period, sport become increasingly global, some sports were radically altered, sports clubs proliferated, and new team games - such as baseball, basketball, and the various forms of football - were created, codified, commercialized, and professionalized. Yet this was also an age of cultural and political tensions, when issues around the role of women, social class, ethnicity and race, imperial relationships, nation-building, and amateur and professional approaches were all shaping sport. At the same time, increasing urbanization, population, real wages, and leisure time drove demand for sport ever higher, and the institutionalization and regulation of sport accelerated. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.


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