ABSTRACT
The relationship between leisure and domestic space was at the heart of a series of moralized discourses around wasted time, sin, public order and the lure of the capital city across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. This chapter addresses a gap in the historiography – how domestic space shaped such events. It focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as a key period of development. The chapter identifies the spaces in which leisure activity took place, explores the objects and practices with which it was associated, and locates particular forms of domestic leisure within the social hierarchy. It argues that this early-early modern period, in which material and cultural proliferation of leisure possibilities begins, affected different groups and parts of the country in diverse ways. Being indoors in domestic space for leisure time created groups with shared interests, allowing them to interact to strengthen those interests and further the social, moral, political and aesthetic aims that motivated them.
