Lifestyles and Lifespans: Domestic Material Culture and the Temporalities of Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century England

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between materialities and temporalities in the seventeenth-century domestic household, arguing for consideration of the human-object relationships of daily domestic life within a richer temporal context. Using evidence from account books, inventories and extant objects, we argue that a focus on material culture suggests a complex, multi-temporal, understanding of the domestic setting during this period; that engagement with objects involved situating their trajectories both backwards and forwards in time, and that this multi-temporal understanding was a key feature of daily life. This is a period identified with the rise of the ‘middling sort’ as influential consumers of imported wares and native craft industries; the development of taste in response to international fashions; and an unprecedented degree of investment in domestic building. Yet this was also the first period of cultural antiquarianism with its fondness for the materials of the past. This chapter explores how these forces of tradition and novelty played out for individuals in the context of furnishing and provisioning their households, and how this domestic material culture responded, and contributed, to a sense of being present in longer cycles of time. It highlights the complex dynamic, even tension, between imperatives to acquire, replace, renew and retain certain kinds of fixtures and furnishings according to degrees of social status and stage in the life cycle.