HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

This is a detailed study of the material lives of the middle classes in the pre-industrial era, a period which saw considerable growth in consumption. Breaking new ground in focusing on households and the use of probate inventories, Weatherill has provided a book which gives both a general account of the domestic environment of the period, and a scholarly analysis of the data on consumption patterns.

Tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature, this original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural implications.

"Under the direction of Professor John Brewer, the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library at UCLA have created an ambitious international programme to analyse the material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through its patterns of consumption. Focus on this period allows consideration of a world in which economic and political connections are becoming global, in which an unprecedented range of goods and services are on offer, and in which the old political structures are first subverted and then radically modified.

As an inquiry into the consumption rather than the production of culture, this volume argues that culture does not become culture until it is consumed. Leading US and European specialists explore topics such as the formation of a culture-consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumption and the place of women as consumers of culture.

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects - ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made - came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Divided into six parts this book explores; the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, empires of things, consuming things and lastly the power of things.

Georgians Revealed explores the realities of daily life in the 18th and early 19th centuries through a fascinating variety of objects. The compelling selection traces the Georgians' famous love of shopping and celebrity, gambling and domestic design, and navigates the rules that governed behavior from ballrooms to the sporting world.

In this book the 18th century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artifacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays explores the full range of material culture in the long 18th century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries.

This innovative study examines the place and practice of musical life in eighteenth-century England among the upper classes. Focusing on the home, it shows how domestic music-making was shaped by socio-cultural forces while itself contributing to socio-cultural formation. The evidence examined is extremely broad, but particular attention is given to visual representations of music in paintings, drawings and prints: one hundred illustrations are discussed. The author considers in detail the problematics of imagery itself, analysing both the ideological and the semiotic content of the visual image.

Provides an historical overview of consumption from the ancient world through the modern age. Essays on early modern Europe include:
"Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century 'Britain'" ; "Transatlantic Consumption" ; "Luxury, the Luxury Trades, and the Roots of Industrial Growth" ; "City and Country: Home, Possessions, and Diet, Western Europe 1600-1800" ; "Sites of Consumption in Early Modern Europe"

This edited collection unearths the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring and textile production, illuminating, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, this collection documents the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production.