Conclusion

Summary

This study commenced with three aims. The first was to gain an insight into the experience of non-elite domestic life in the past, specifically in the early modern period. The second aim was to understand the way in which this culture might have been related to a wider early modern economic and social culture. The third aim was to create a conceptual framework within which the domestic culture could be theorised, interpreted and comprehended.

The inquiry was based primarily on the evidence of probate inventories, not simply for want of better but on the theoretical assertion that human life is founded in material existence, and that it is not only a functional engagement, but one in which actions around objects articulate social relationships and carry conceptual meanings, in turn investing objects and actions with wider significance. An understanding of the objects themselves involved an investigation of the way in which they afford certain possibilities to their users, having been created with certain affordances in mind. But objects are not only acted on by humans, they also assert agency on humans. Following Heidegger and Bourdieu, associations are all important in the creation of meaning, and so an effective reading of the material evidence must be contextual or hermeneutic, observing how objects are situated in relation to other objects in place, and how actions operate through time. The scale of the study is important here, through a detailed reading of a dense body of data allowing the complex interrelation of the many elements in domestic life to be revealed. This approach provides an interpretive framework, applicable not only to this work but to the operation of domestic life in general, addressing the third aim of this study: a concept of domestic culture, comprehending the network of relationships linking the elements of domestic life – material, social and conceptual – in place and through time. If it has proved possible to create an informed picture of early modern domestic life in Thame, not just in its material but also in its social and conceptual dimensions primarily through a contextual reading of the material evidence, then this should provide justification for the theoretical propositions underlying this study and the concept of a ‘domestic culture’.