We’re delighted to announce our next big project…
The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort: writing and material culture, 1560-1660
What was Shakespeare looking at when he wrote? What kind of room was he in? How was it decorated and furnished? What was he sitting on, resting on? Where did these materials come from, who bought them and how much did they cost? What could he hear inside and outside the house? What food could he smell cooking elsewhere in the building? What could he look forward to doing once he finished his work? What other types of text might he have written that don’t survive? How similar was he to his neighbours in these practices?
David Mitchell as Shakespeare in the BBC series, Upstart Crow. The room looks a little dull but they may be right about the chicken…!
We tend to treat writing as an intellectual rather than a located practice. But our environments condition our behaviour and thinking and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writing took place in domestic and civic spaces that also reflected other forms of cultural engagement, taste and habits. Few of these spaces retain their original form or appearance, so we need to reconstruct them in order to explore their impact.
First-floor room in an extension of c.1620 to urban house from Reigate, now re-erected at the Weald & Downloand Living Museum. We’re going to fill it with things – digitally!
The project is not especially concerned with Shakespeare – he is one of several examples of ‘middling writers’ we are interested in. We will examine the wider cultural lives and material investment of a range of people, including preachers, jobbing authors, urban administrators, poets and biographers, who were relatively well off and had status in their local communities, but were not members of the court or county elite. Surprisingly little research has engaged with the full cultural experience of this middling level of society – how their writing related to their wider aesthetic choices, purchases and patterns of living, relations that would have created a particular form of social identity.
Detail of sixteenth-century wall painting from Church Street, Ledbury
Understanding the nature of this cultural identity – how their literary, artistic and material production and consumption related to one another – lets us examine fully the creative environment in which the writers grew up and participated. But our project also allows us to reach beyond these well-known figures, to explore the impact of those environments on their wives, mothers, sisters, apprentices and servants – individuals for whom a classical grammar school education was not a possibility, but who nevertheless experienced its impact in the domestic and urban environments in which they lived and worked – for example as books in the household, sayings or images painted on the walls.
Portrait of Joene Goldstone, a prominent citizen’s wife of Gloucester, 1570s, oil on panel, Gloucestershire Museums.
This is a three-year project, funded by the AHRC, working together with Graeme Earl at King’s College London and with our partner organisations, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and The Weald & Downland Living Museum. There’s more information on the project website here.
The project launches in April 2019…. We are currently advertising for two Postdoctoral Research Associates: details of the first, based at Kent is available here. The second position, based at Birmingham, will be advertised shortly.
Material Histories 