ABSTRACT
In the margin of growing historiographical interest in the ‘business of everyday life’ and unpaid work in pre-industrial economies, material culture historians discovered more modest places of mundane everyday work, such as the kitchen. The latter, for a long time considered as the ‘Cinderella of material culture’, enjoys growing interest and in that process its central role in pre-industrial domesticity is unveiled. Moreover, the kitchen fireplace was also burdened with high symbolic value, as is evidenced by the sporadic crucifixes and the mantelpiece paintings that could be found in its vicinity. While economic constraints forced quite a few inhabitants into this category, richer inhabitants – for various reasons – also opted for such living arrangements. As a result of this social variance, this category hardly reflects a social group. The bulk of the remaining probate inventories were divided into three major social groups with a greater homogeneity.
