ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potentially problematic issues of uniqueness, scale and association in the historical study of material culture. It explores how historians can use approaches developed in micro history to think through the problem of typicality of the objects central to material culture studies. The chapter examines how research into the associations of singular objects, especially their material and spatial contexts, can offset the apparent problems that arise when material cultural analysis concentrates on single object or category of object. The association between the practice of consumption and the materiality of that consumption for early modern England has depended on viewing material goods at two quantitative extremes: either as numeric aggregation of probate inventory or trade data presence; or as singular 'case study' based on a surviving object. Material culture historians have anxieties about the first approach more than they have the second, seeing in textual quantification of objects a poor proxy for the variety and range of objects.
