ABSTRACT
One of the most useful aspects of wills and their appended inventories are the descriptions of the assemblages of material culture with which women surrounded themselves. In order to recreate the settings that formed the exteriors of their lives, the furnishings that decorated those exteriors, and the images of themselves that they saw when they looked in their mirrors, a study of material assets is necessary. Probate inventories provide unadorned lists of collected possessions while wills provide the human connections to those possessions. Although inventories can give us a list of the will-maker’s belongings it cannot give us their emotional context. Only in a will-maker’s testament are items of special importance singled out, those things that linked her to the past, to memorable events, to the people who had shared them, and to those whom she had chosen to carry her memory into the future. Each object curated during the will-maker’s lifetime and personally selected as a bequest had a human value as well as an intrinsic one.
