ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how women’s lives in early-modern Europe were shaped by their interactions with materiality. It analyses how early-modern women engaged in processes of creation, production, exchange, consumption and display of material objects in particular spaces. In doing so, it considers how dynamic inter-relations between women, objects and spaces were active participants and producers of gendered meanings of individuals, practices and things. This approach, which understands socio-material assemblages as both ontologically and epistemologically performative and productive, is informed by theoretical work regarding materiality from archaeological, cultural, and literary studies and feminist analyses.