The Material Culture of Walking: Spaces of Methodologies in the Long Eighteenth Century

There is nothing more real than material culture. One of the aĴractions of the historical investigation of material culture is the very materiality of things: the pleasure of engaging with fragile lace, precious items, mundane crockery or innovative machinery. Such objects have an immediacy that puts historians in contact with the past. They possess a directness that transcends both time and space. It is not by chance that the historical study of material culture has coincided with an interest in everyday life: how people lived, the reality that they experienced, the way in which they interpreted what surrounded them, as well as their values and aĴitudes.