Academic and popular interest in early modern built environments has tended to dwell on the opulent: the court, the royal living quarters, the cathedral. In contrast, in Domestic Culture in Early Modern England Anthony Buxton attends to the lives of the non-elite, telling their story through the study of seventeenth-century homes in the Oxfordshire market town of Thame. Examining probate inventories, Buxton lends material support to historical narratives that trace the decline of traditional hospitality, the ascendancy of privacy and comfort, and the increasingly gendered nature of household work. These homes may never attract the hoards of tourists who throng to Hampton Court and Leeds Castle, but Buxton's study nonetheless intrigues in its attention to the domestic spaces of English men, women, and children whose lives reflect and respond to important developments in the history of England and of domesticity itself.
In the introduction Buxton reviews the historiography of domesticity, offers a theoretical framework, and describes the characteristics of probate inventories. Citing studies that focus on the domestic as a site of elite social life, he argues for a more capacious account that begins with exploring links between non-elite physical domiciles, the emotional lives of their inhabitants, and the social world outside the home. His approach, largely anthropological and ethnographic in nature, draws on Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and, most especially, Pierre Bordieu's notion of the habitus, a model that attempts to account for how habitual relationships with objects reveal human relationships and values. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs also plays a major role, as do the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, both of whom have considered relationships between the material and the conceptual. Evidence from probate inventories, which list furnishings in rooms, presents an opportunity to test these theoretical models with respect to life in Thame. While Buxton acknowledges the limitations of the inventories and the challenges involved in interpreting them, he makes a strong case for their importance as windows onto the relationships between human beings and their everyday objects.
In chapter 1 Buxton accounts for the wider world that shaped the Thame household's material, emotional, and social constitution. This background includes a survey of the natural environment, a description of the settlement of Thame and its market economy, and a summary of the town's social and moral culture. Buxton notes that seventeenth-century Thame was still an agrarian society in which the land defined the lives of his inhabitants; this fact bears out in the disruptive effects of enclosure laws which inspired distrust of landowners. At the same time, Buxton also cites evidence of increasing social mobility and desire for material comfort, developments assisted in part by the expansion of markets to include luxury goods. In chapter 2 Buxton follows with a general description of the family and servants as social and economic unit, typical relationships among dwellers, and the unit's relationships with the community. The Thame household, like others in early modern England, mirrored the ideal state through the patriarchal model of father as lord of the home who held authority over the wife, children, and servants. Buxton complements this overview with a brief look at the construction of some typical dwellings which not only held household members in close proximity but stood closely alongside other domestic units.
The ensuing four chapters investigate the contents of the households themselves with particular emphasis on what these objects tell us about relationships within the domestic unit and the unit's relationship with the community. In chapter 3 Buxton addresses foodstuff provisioning, processing, and cooking, extending to a discussion of the early modern diet as well as the gendered nature of food preparation which, as contemporaneous household manuals confirm, assumed a great deal of skill on the part of women. With chapter 4, Buxton segues nicely into a discussion of commensality and conviviality, describing the seating, dining tables, cushions, and washing basins necessary to provide hospitality. Chapter 5 studies objects providing rest and security—sleeping furniture, bedding, warming pans, and storage furniture; one fascinating revelation emerges in the discussion of locks, which show not only concern about burglary from outside but increasing wariness toward servants thought to be potential pilferers. Chapter 6 examines the naming of household rooms—halls, chambers, parlors, kitchens, lofts—and the dressing of these spaces with painted cloths, curtains, carpets, and paneling. Each chapter is supplied with copious illustrations—woodcuts, drawings, photographs, and charts—to help the reader visualize the look and feel of each object in its assigned space.
Coming to the aid of readers who might get lost in all this detail, the final two chapters expand outward to the town itself and offer some conclusions about Thame's relevance for all of early modern England. In chapter 6 Buxton applies the data provided in previous chapters to a comparative analysis of households from different groups: those of a yeoman, husbandman, laborer, artisan, trading artisan, trader, cleric, gentleman, and widow. Line drawings suggest possible layouts for each home and the probable placement of each object. In chapter 7 Buxton pulls the discussion together to argue that the households of seventeenth-century Thame exhibit an expanding economic base in which material possessions increasingly defined the status of their owners.
Buxton's analyses mainly confirm what we already know about the historical trajectory of seventeenth-century England: that traditional hospitality was waning and that material culture played a growing role in the quest for social mobility. However, previous accounts of these developments—particularly those based in literary interpretation—gain much strength from the kind of painstaking material analysis offered here. The level of detail Buxton supplies and the methodological rigor of his approach inspire admiration; furthermore, the wider application of this detail to comparison among different status and occupational groups vividly shows how each household reflects and constitutes a given subject's everyday life. For this reason, early modernists of all disciplines can benefit from consulting this a guide to the great variety of objects that populated non-elite experience.
