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24 - Books for daily life: household, husbandry, behaviour

from VERNACULAR TRADITIONS

By
Lynette Hunter
Edited by
John Barnard  and
D. F. McKenzie
With
Maureen Bell
Lynette Hunter
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
John Barnard
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
D. F. McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Maureen Bell
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

Many books published throughout the period are concerned with daily life. Books on household work and husbandry were often small format and appear to have been cheaply produced; more carefully printed were those relating to personal behaviour. The former include not only topics such as cookery, sewing, gardening and diets, the same material found in magazines and popular books today, but also chemistry and technology, earth sciences, botany, pharmacy, horticulture and general medicine for familial and daily use. Work inside the home involved the production of everything contained in the equivalent of a bathroom cabinet, kitchen cupboards and the contents of your desk. In addition, at particular times of year at least half of a long working day would be spent on the preservation and conservation of food. Work outside the house, while rather more varied, usually involved keeping chickens and at least a pig. It could also include maintaining horses, hives and a kitchen garden. Household work, usually part of an extended community, was the meaning of the word ‘economics’ at least until 1665. Most things that today we might go out and buy had to be made by oneself or someone one knew. The content of books referring to this kind of daily life remains fairly constant but their publishing history is marked by a gap of nearly all new work in English between 1617 and 1650, after which an explosion of new vernacular works took place. In contrast, books relating to personal behaviour and family relationships have a continuous publishing history yet go through significant changes in status.

Keywords

husbandry booksdaily lifebehaviour bookshousehold books
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, pp. 514 - 532
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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References

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