Catherine Richardson

Looking at Domestic Textiles: An Eye-Tracking Experiment Analysing Influences on Viewing Behaviour at Owlpen Manor

Decorative textiles were once ubiquitous and important, occupying a significant social and cultural space in the early modern interior, yet their impact upon how individuals engaged with domestic spaces is largely unknown. One way of approaching their impact is through an exploration of how present-day individuals engage visually with them in relation to other objects as they walk around an historic space. This article reports on one such investigation, an eye-tracking study which explored responses to the narrative hangings in Queen Margaret’s Chamber at Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire. Using eye-tracking equipment, we compared the viewing behaviour of two groups of participants, to whom we gave key information before they entered the room. We found that both the expertise of the viewers and the information provided influenced their viewing behaviour. Our findings highlight the importance of individual understanding and information provided to viewers when engaging with historic spaces, and can inform museum and heritage practice as well as enhancing our comprehension of how viewers engage with such textiles in historic spaces.

Clothing, Culture and Identity in Early Modern England: Creating a New Tool for Research

Abstract During the period c. 1560–1640 developing markets and modes of production introduced new fabrics and forms of dress to English society. Legal, religious and social changes also altered the world of clothes, fuelling intense debate on the morality of clothing, and on dress and religious and gender identity. Understanding of the consumption, uses and place of clothing within the culture of early modern England remains very limited, however. This project therefore aims to produce an online database which will give direct access to the everyday life of clothes, and to the clothing communities of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.

A Tudor cupboard at Cotehele, Cornwall

The presence of the remains of a Tudor cupboard displayed at Cotehele (Cornwall) has for many years been explained by the marriage of Catherine, the widow of Sir Gruffydd ap Rhys (the son of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a leading figure in south Wales during the reigns of both Henry VII and Henry VIII) to Sir Piers Edgcumbe in 1523; thus dating this piece of furniture to the 1520s. By contrast, costume experts have always considered that the piece should date to the middle or later sixteenth century. This paper links the Cotehele cupboard to other pieces of carved work from the Welsh March in Shropshire—at Lower Spoad Farm, near Clun and in the church at Llanfair Waterdine—suggests an association with two of the major landowners there, the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury; and places the cupboard in the context of Queen Marys reign.

Early modern plays and domestic spaces

This article investigates the representation of the domestic interior on the pre-Restoration English stage. It argues for the very specific nature of theatrical representations of the interior, and for a strong and meaningful connection between the household on and off the stage. Contrasting early modern representations with medieval and post-Restoration ones, it defines this period as uniquely interested in personal domestic space whilst employing no scenery with which to produce a sense of its enclosed nature. Within these constraints and possibilities, it is argued that the household is employed differently on stage within the genres of city comedy and domestic tragedy.

Continuity and Memory: Domestic Space, Gesture and Affection at the Sixteenth-Century Deathbed

This essay focuses on men and women’s last moments of domestic life – on contemporary discussion of the final rituals and processes they went through before they left the household for the last time at their deaths. It analyses cases brought before the church courts in the latter half of the sixteenth century to question the validity of last wills and testaments. These moments are crucially concerned with continuity – with the passing of ownership over spaces and objects from one generation to the next. The legal concerns around the making of a will relate to the testator’s sanity and freedom from undue influence, and the document’s status as the final expression of the dead person’s wishes. As areas of contention, these aspects of the deathbed scene were probed by the courts, and deponents were required to concentrate on detailed descriptions of them. The majority of depositions, therefore, relate events in the room in which the death took place, and record in great detail the speech, movement and gestures through which the dying person expressed themselves to those present. Rather than being dry assertions of soundness of mind, then, the depositions give detailed and vivid descriptions of events that are situated with meticulous firmness within the spaces and routines of the early modern house. They bring information about the extent to which the testator was still fulfilling their domestic roles to bear in order to answer these questions indirectly, but they also provide evidence of the relationships between those involved in the testator’s death in social, emotional and physical terms – a unique and invaluable record of non-elite responses to the domestic environment for this period. The overall aim of the essay is to explore the way stories told about a death depend upon the physical context of the house to generate their meaning. In this way it gets to the heart of the binaries of ease and unease, and security and anxiety, by exploring the level of comfort which the house provides, and the extent to which men and women at points of extremity are perceived by those who come to witness their wills and to tend to them in their sickness to inhabit their domestic spaces in regular or irregular ways.

Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles

Abstract The article introduces and contextualises this special issue on ‘Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles’, which comprises a series of essays that draw on the activities, research findings and insights of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network, ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500–1700: The Case of Decorative Textiles’. Critically evaluating the results of the network’s findings, the paper situates them within a broader investigation of the role of decorative textiles in shaping the experience of domestic interiors in the past and present, and explores new ways of reading such objects in the context of the household. It examines the historiography and current range of approaches to the study, interpretation and exhibition of historic textiles, and analyses the insights offered by bringing together different disciplinary and professional perspectives. It argues for the key significance of these textiles for both historical and modern perceptions of the domestic interior and for the importance of collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to researching them in order to understand how they functioned in the early modern period and to inform new directions for their display and presentation in the present.