Material Culture: Consumption, Collecting and Domestic Goods

What is material culture? How do we define it? And how does it relate to women and the domestic interior? In their introduction to Everyday Objects, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson note: ‘Material culture encompasses the processes by which things and people interact.’ ¹ The study of material culture, then, considers food, clothing and everyday furnishings, as well as books, goldsmith work, altarpieces, and other luxury goods; and it employs close analysis of contemporary archival materials from the point of view of demand and looks at networks of exchange. ² Despite the fact that material objects formed a central part of everyday experiences of individuals and communities in early modern Europe, it is only relatively recently that scholars across a range of disciplines have foregrounded material evidence to study the past.