Everyday Objects

Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings

Tara Hamling, Catherine Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351938112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is about the objects people owned and how they used them. Twenty-three specially written essays investigate the type of things that might have been considered 'everyday objects' in the medieval and early modern periods, and how they help us to understand the daily lives of those individuals for whom few other types of evidence survive - for instance people of lower status and women of all status groups. Everyday Objects presents new research by specialists from a range of disciplines to assess what the study of material culture can contribute to our understanding of medieval and early modern societies. Extending and developing key debates in the study of the everyday, the chapters provide analysis of such things as ceramics, illustrated manuscripts, pins, handbells, carved chimneypieces, clothing, drinking vessels, bagpipes, paintings, shoes, religious icons and the built fabric of domestic houses and guild halls. These things are examined in relation to central themes of pre-modern history; for instance gender, identity, space, morality, skill, value, ritual, use, belief, public and private behaviour, continental influence, materiality, emotion, technical innovation, status, competition and social mobility. This book offers both a collection of new research by a diverse range of specialists and a source book of current methodological approaches for the study of pre-modern material culture. The multi-disciplinary analysis of these 'everyday objects' by archaeologists, art historians, literary scholars, historians, conservators and museum practitioners provides a snapshot of current methodological approaches within the humanities. Although analysis of material culture has become an increasingly important aspect of the study of the past, previous research in this area has often remained confined to subject-specific boundaries. This book will therefore be an invaluable resource for researchers and students interested in learning about important new work which demonstrates the potential of material culture study to cut across traditional historiographies and disciplinary boundaries and access the lived experience of individuals in the past.

Part I: Evidence and Interpretation

1

‘For a crack or flaw despis’d’: Thinking about Ceramic Durability and the ‘Everyday’ in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

Sara Pennell

When the Ceramics displays at England’s Victoria and Albert Museum reopened in September 2009 in their updated, century-old purpose-built galleries on the upper floors of the main Aston Webb building, they contained a ‘major gallery devoted to ceramic materials and techniques’ (as promised in the earlier plans for the re-display).¹ But for all this, there has not been a great break (if you will excuse the pun) with tradition, in the museological focus on the complete ceramic; that is, on the ceramic which, to the average eye is without flaw or the repair of which is so expertly achieved as to be invisible to that average eye. The new galleries are shrines still to the rare survival, be it pre-Christian Chinese artefacts or Bernard Leach studio pieces, rather than to that archaeological commonplace, the potsherd.

Museums like the V&A are tasked in part with presenting us with what is considered to be the epitome of great art and design, the peaks of aesthetic and stylistic art, so it is a little unfair to critique its displays for being insufficiently concerned with the ‘everyday’, the subject of this collection. Yet, for the material category of ceramics, that avoidance of the broken and flawed does conceal from the visitor one of the central weaknesses of ceramic goods: their inherent breakability. Indeed, the focus on styles and shapes (the design approach), and on makers and manufacture (the production approach), has rather dominated that field of early modern historical and archaeological study which has so opened up the worlds of ceramics – and indeed their global significance in early modern trade and cultures – the consumption approach. To take but one recent example, Maxine Berg’s account of the globalisation and innovation of the British ceramic trade and manufacture in the long eighteenth century, is firmly construed as an account of ‘How it was made’ (and sold), rather than how it was used. Although she does cite John Gay’s satiric 1725 verse ‘To a Lady on her Passion for old China’, with its central sentiment ‘They count that woman’s prudence little/Who sets her heart on things so brittle’ (and from which the quotation of my title is also taken), she does so to present an entrée into a more generalised discussion of gender and consumers, rather than into the ways in which ceramics were encountered and co-opted into domestic usage.²

The idiom of broken china was certainly rapidly taken on board by writers of all sorts, as Gay’s poem bears witness. In a strange but perhaps appropriate symmetry, it even turns up in two of the mid-eighteenth century’s most celebrated fictions. In the notorious 1749 novel by John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the anti-heroine Fanny Hill is forced to leave home after breaking a china bowl, the ‘pride and idol’ of her parents, while Fanny’s fictitious opposite in Samuel Richardson’s eponymous novel of 1741, the virtuous Pamela, conceals her ink for her clandestine writings in a broken china cup. While for Fanny, the idolised bowl is more precious to her parents than she is, Pamela’s careful use of the cast-off cup, for a precious but secretive activity, is a device to illuminate her careful valuation and treasuring of what elsewhere in the novel is alluded to as ‘the Lady’s broken China’, of no interest once flawed.³

But this is not a chapter about fictional china; rather it wishes to look at the practicalities which lay behind the literary linkings of cracked vases and cracked virtues. The focus of this chapter is twofold. We need to consider how new goods and materials were incorporated into quotidian domestic practices; and how their differences and shortcomings (compared to existing materials and goods) were managed, in order to understand better how consumers actually came to consume objects like teapots, sugar and slop bowls, those almost talismanic ceramic embodiments of consumer revolutionary goods. As John Styles and Amanda Vickery have recently noted, ‘the availability of new goods and the existence of the surplus to buy them were not in themselves sufficient to ensure that they were bought’.⁴ Looking at this same problem from another disciplinary perspective, the medieval archaeologist Duncan H. Brown has suggested in an essay critical of his own discipline for its obsession with ceramic typologies as the sole point of excavation, ‘[f]unction and the culture of pottery use are rarely considered and have often been viewed as irrelevant’; in other words, we are asking the wrong questions of surviving ceramics.⁵

So, what questions should we be asking? What are the issues that the early modern potential consumer of ceramic goods would have turned over in his (or as likely, her) mind before purchasing new earthenware plates or decorative ceramic items? Obviously, this does depend in part on the type of good, but durability must surely have been a consideration for functional and decorative objects alike. Thus the questions might have been: how long is this going to last? How much am I willing to spend on this, if it has this inbuilt weakness? And, if it is damaged or breaks, what shall I do with it?⁶

These questions in turn expose the difficulties of distinguishing between types of consumption, and categories of material culture tied into those ‘different’ spheres of consumption. It has become a commonplace of consumption historiography to view the acquisition of the non-necessary by larger sections of the non-elite as the significant paradigm shift taking place sometime in the period circa 1600–1800. Initially, this shift was discussed in terms of a recalibration of what was construed as ‘luxurious’ and non-quotidian, and the sectors able to access goods which could be denoted as luxuries.⁷ But more recently historians such as Styles, Vickery and Maxine Berg have refined this approach; consumption of this wider range of non-necessary goods occurred not because these new consumers wanted to buy into a luxury ethic, but because the goods they purchased were now seen as useful and appropriate. Usefulness does not necessarily mean that the goods were purely functional (although the clothing that Styles studies was a functional necessity to some degree, even if its quality and variety were not). Rather, the cultural constructions of what was necessary to perform a certain type of activity, be it domestic or not, made many of these goods ‘conveniencies’, a word which contemporarily united those values of tasteful decoration, utility and, increasingly, hygiene.⁸

Once we start to view consumption practices of the long eighteenth century as being concerned as much with ideas of utility and decorum (a signal contemporary value in matters of conduct and social performance, but which material cultural historians are only now beginning to recover and explore),⁹ as with luxury and emulation, the ability of consumers to live with and through the material culture they acquired and owned is dependent as much on its fitness for purpose, as its visual impact. ‘Fitness for purpose’ does sound anachronistic here, but it encapsulates the evaluations made of a good (or group of goods) as yet unowned, by the potential owner, and how it/they will be accommodated in the setting of their envisaged possession; by ‘setting’ I do not just mean the notional ‘domestic interior’, but also the emotional and sensory settings of the potential consumer/owner.

The other concern raised by a preoccupation with the unbroken in material culture is our failure thereby to engage fully with ephemerality in the (material) historical record, and how non-durability has a part to play in that record. There is an overwhelming ‘presumption of object durability’ (to use Colloredo-Mansfield’s phrase) at work in historical practice generally, and material culture history in particular,¹⁰ about which we need to be more transparent in our research practice. As Dan Hicks and Audrey Horning assert, history is widely acknowledged as a discipline studying ‘people and things in flux’, but our preoccupation with the surviving, whether document or dish, leaves us little historiographical space to consider the discarded, the non-surviving, the ‘flows of substances’ and text that wash across time.¹¹

The irony here of course, is that it is broken, discarded ceramics – from prehistoric pots to the Victorian and Edwardian blue-and-white landfill I regularly dig up in my garden – that presents probably the largest category of manufactured material cultural evidence available for study by archaeologists and historians to date (plastics may supersede them in the future however). It is the very breakability of ceramic goods, harnessed to the longevity of the core material (unlike most metals, wood, leather or textile, ceramics do not deteriorate greatly over time in archaeological conditions), which provides us with material for our research into their cultural, economic and technological values to past societies.

When we look to Anglo-American studies of consumer behaviour in the long eighteenth century, the centrality of ceramic goods as evidence of there having been a ‘consumer revolution’, as well as other types of revolution (for example, the notion of the ‘Georgianization’ of social practices as proposed by historical archaeologist Mark Leone and others),¹² is unassailable, even as some of those accounts ignore the fractured material basis for such conclusions. Weatherill, for example, deems china hot drinks goods as amongst those achieving the ‘most rapid growth’ in ownership by decedents in her inventory sample between 1660–1725, while Paul Shackel sees the coming of modernity in the multiplication and increased quantities of differently sized creamware dinner plates and dishes on the eighteenth-century Maryland dining table.¹³

The key – and debatable – definition for my purposes is that provided by Carole Shammas in her quantitative account of the pre-industrial consumer; she characterises the new ceramics as belonging to a category of commodities that ‘did first enjoy a mass market at this time’. However, she goes on to qualify this category which she has earlier termed as ‘durables’, as containing ‘goods [which] might be classified as semi-durable, in the sense that, if routinely used, they would require early replacement’.¹⁴ Shammas later elaborates this term when she discusses the shift from use of ‘sturdy durables’ at table (by which she means treen, pewter, hide, horn and so on): ‘This shift involved the replacement of quite sturdy durables with more decorative but more disposable crockery and glass. Households prized these new commodities for their utility in everyday life, and less for their investment value.’¹⁵

‘Semi-durables’ thus gained their place in the household through their utility valu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents: Themes
• Table of Contents: Objects
• List of Illustrations
• List of Colour Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Evidence and Interpretation
• Part II: Skills and Manufacture
• Part III: Objects and Spaces
• Part IV: Sound and Sensory Experience
• Part V: Material Religion
• Part VI: Emotion/Attitudes towards Objects
• Index