Preliminary Programme

Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 30 March 2016 8.30 - 10.30
D-1 MAT01 Country House and Comfort in Early-Modern Europe
Aula 1, Nivel 0
Network: Material and Consumer Culture Chair: Mark Rothery
Organizers: Johanna Ilmakunnas, Jon Stobart Discussant: Gudrun Andersson
Johanna Ilmakunnas : Comfort, Sociability and Skills: Gendered Elite Handiwork in Eighteenth-century Swedish and Finnish Country Houses
Handiwork, especially needlework and other textile work, played a key role in early-modern elite culture. Apart from being women’s never-ending task and socially gendered activity, handiwork acted both as a means for comfort and as a source of comfort. With a needle, thread, precious materials and embroidering skills elite women ... (Show more)
Handiwork, especially needlework and other textile work, played a key role in early-modern elite culture. Apart from being women’s never-ending task and socially gendered activity, handiwork acted both as a means for comfort and as a source of comfort. With a needle, thread, precious materials and embroidering skills elite women created comfortable materiality and visible representations of well-being, wealth and taste at home in the country house. These places were key spaces for aristocratic sociability, in which handiwork was part of mix-gendered social life. While scholars have been mostly interested in feminine handiwork and textile work, in early-modern Europe handiwork was also a masculine sphere: elite men spent time in manual work, such as turning or other woodwork, sometimes also needlework, often a source of emotional comfort.
This paper will explore gendered elite handiwork in the eighteenth-century Swedish and Finnish country houses, focusing on how handiwork linked to comfort, well-being and material culture. It analyses handiwork as a key issue in elite mix-gendered sociability, and seeks to answer to what was the role of skills in performing handiwork crafts and creating comfort for country house sociability. (Show less)

Cristina Prytz : The Appearance of Comfort: Personal Reflections on Comfort in England and Sweden in the 1780s
In his classic study Life in the English Country House (1978) Mark Girouard used the country house as an reflection of the lives and identities of elite landowners. Since then works on consumption practices and material culture of the elite has turned our attention toward the country house as lived ... (Show more)
In his classic study Life in the English Country House (1978) Mark Girouard used the country house as an reflection of the lives and identities of elite landowners. Since then works on consumption practices and material culture of the elite has turned our attention toward the country house as lived space. But how culturally and economically contingent was the idea and ideal of of the English country house? In this paper the concept of comfort is used to analyse variation across space. This will be achieved through a comparison of how a small number of men and women from two contrasting countries – England and Sweden – wrote about and used comfort as an idea in the late eighteenth century. From a source material consisting of published manuscript journals, memoirs and correspondence the discussion focuses on three main issues: what kind of emotional well-being and/or physical ease did the writers describe, to whom did it relate and how did the descriptions differ with gender or location. (Show less)

Jon Stobart : The Discomforts of Home, or How to Endure Life in the English Country House
Comfort, both as an idea and ideal, has recently risen to prominence in the literature on eighteenth-century domestic life, especially in the country house. Physical comfort is linked to changes in the nature of furniture and furnishings and to the introduction of various new technologies from bath stoves to argand ... (Show more)
Comfort, both as an idea and ideal, has recently risen to prominence in the literature on eighteenth-century domestic life, especially in the country house. Physical comfort is linked to changes in the nature of furniture and furnishings and to the introduction of various new technologies from bath stoves to argand lamps. Emotional comfort, meanwhile is seen as deriving from familiar objects and company, with particular emphasis placed on family. What has received rather less attention is comfort antonym: discomfort. What did it mean to feel discomfort or to be uncomfortable? How was it manifest and experienced, and how was it avoided? In what ways were physical and emotional discomfort connected?
This paper explores these questions in the context of the English country house. Drawing on evidence from Audley End, Stoneleigh Abbey and Charlecote Park, it focuses in particular on the language used to describe and communicate discomfort, and on the ways in which both physical and emotional discomfort was mitigated. This casts new light on the country house as lived space and on the attitudes of owners to the material culture of ancestral homes. (Show less)



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