Locating Privacy in Tudor London

ISBN-13: 9780199226252 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 368 str.

Lena Cowen Orlin

Opis

Locating Privacy in Tudor London asks new questions about where private life was lived in the early modern period, about where evidence of it has been preserved, and about how progressive and coherent its history can be said to have been. The Renaissance and the Reformation are generally taken to have produced significant advances in individuality, subjectivity, and interiority, especially among the elite, but this study of middling-sort culture shows privacy to have been an object of suspicion, of competing priorities, and of compulsory betrayals. The institutional archives of civic governance, livery companies, parish churches, and ecclesiastical courts reveal the degree to which society organized itself around principles of preventing privacy, as a condition of order. Also represented in the discussion are such material artifacts as domestic buildings and household furnishings, which were routinely experienced as collective and monitory agents rather than spheres of exclusivity and self-expression. In 'everyday' life, it is argued, economic motivations were of more urgent concern than the political paradigms that have usually informed our understanding of the Renaissance. Locating Privacy pursues the case study of Alice Barnham (1523-1604), a previously unknown merchant-class woman, subject of one of the earliest family group paintings from England. Her story is touched by many of the changes-in social structure, religion, the built environment, the spread of literacy, and the history of privacy-that define the sixteenth century.

Recenzje

In Locating Privacy, Lena Cowen Orlin has redefined our understanding of early modern material culture, telling a story not only about objects and spaces, but also about the people who lived with and within them. Moving easily among such diverse sources as paintings, peepholes, building plans and legal records, Orlin takes us beyond Aries, Hoskins and Girouard to re-claim privacy as a central arena through which social changes were resisted, accommodated and acknowledged. A triumph of interdisciplinary studies, this is a book that will be admired by historians, literary critics, art historians and scholars of gender.

O autorze

Lena Cowen Orlin is Presidential Research Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, and former Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994) and Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (1995). Her edited collections include Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll (2006), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (with Stanley Wells, 2003), and Material London, ca. 1600 (2000).