The exhibition will evoke a Renaissance house 'room by room', not by reconstructing the actual rooms people once lived in, but by bringing to life the context in which the furnishings, furniture and other objects of the time were used. It will be a chance to show important paintings and sculpture within a typical domestic setting, alongside the everyday, but also alongside the decorative arts that were sometimes more highly prized, so questioning our modern hierarchies. Throughout the rooms metalwork, textiles, ceramics and woodwork will be used to suggest a range of different social and economic contexts, not just élite interiors. Whenever possible, the monetary value of objects will be indicated. The spaces will also convey the variety of gender-related domestic experience characteristic of the period, by placing say needlework beside arms and armour.

The exhibition will cover the period 1400-1550 when artistic, cultural and socio-economic changes showed themselves to the full. It will concentrate on Florence - the best-documented Italian centre - but will also provide a meaningful comparative framework (possibly through small 'excursions' to the Tuscan countryside and another urban centre, such as Venice). As a prominent trade centre, Florence is ideally suited to show the great variety of international artefacts and goods available at the time, allowing a break out from an Italo-centric model. The show will open with 15th- and 16th-century paintings and drawings, prints and sculptures representing the domestic space, closing with a small section on 19th- and 20th-century representations (film, paintings, photographs, etc.) of Renaissance and Neo-Renaissance houses.

Book
Comprising a collection of essays organised thematically and integrated with individual entries, this volume provides an opportunity to address questions and issues arising from a variety of disciplines, such as art and decorative art history, architectural history, anthropology, Medieval archaeology, socio-economic history, and literary studies

Themes will include:
• The Construction of Taste
• The Consumption of Good
• Patronage and Decorative Art
• Possessions and their Meanings
• The uses of objects
• Housekeeping, Domestic Management and Displa
• Room layout and Use

How does the Focused Study advance knowledge?
First, this study explores the role of gender in the material culture of the domestic interior at a series of points: in the production of objects, the consumption of objects, the alteration, repair and recycling of objects, the use of objects, and understanding of objects. This project will therefore enable a tracing of the impact of gender through the life-cycle of objects — from desire, through purchase and use, to transformation and divestment.

Second, the study considers the intersection of gendered ideals and practices with material culture. While the project will draw on philosophical work on taste in the eighteenth century, it intends to explore the practices of material culture and the understandings embedded in these practices. Thus, this project will consider how the relationship between the often anxious statements regarding gender and taste, and the lived practices of men and women.

Third, though ‘gender’ is so often used to mean ‘women’, this project will insist on the importance of analysing both women’s and men’s practices and understandings.

Key intellectual questions
• Can we identify masculine and feminine taste?

• How did women and men differ as patrons of art, furnishings and high-design objects?

• Were male and female consumption practices viewed differently? Did women actually shop more than men in the past? Why was shopping considered unmanly, but collecting seen as a sign of virtuous enlightenment?

• How did gender inflect their relationship with goods and did men and women regard their own tastes and practices as gendered?

• To what extent did ‘things’ express or create gendered identities?

• Are there fundamental differences between male and female attitudes to material culture, and did men and women display the same anxieties about their knowledge of and interest in material culture?

• Did men and women use material culture to accrue authority or power in the domestic interior?

• What was the place of objects in Anglo-American culture?

Select bibliography
Margot Finn, ‘Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution’, Social History, vol 25 no. 2 May 2000, pp. 133-155.

Robert W. Jones, Gender and the formation of taste in eighteenth-century Britain: The analysis of beauty (CUP, 1998).

P.King, 'Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', in T.Hitchcock, P.King & P.Sharpe, Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840 (Macmillan, 1997), pp. 155-191.

B.Kowaleski-Wallace, Women, china and consumer culture in eighteenth-century
England', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 no 2 (1995-6), pp.153-167.

Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (eds), The Material Culture of Gender, The Gender of Material Culture (The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, 1997).

Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (Weidenfeld, 1993)

Carole Shammas, The domestic environment in early modern England and America', Journal of Social History, 14 (Fall, 1980), pp.3-24.

Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990)

Philippa Tristram, Living Space: in Fact and Fiction (London: Routledge, 1989)

L.Weatherill, 'A possession of one's own: women and consumer behaviour in England, 1660-1740', Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), pp.131-56.

L.Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London, 1988)

So wrote the traveller John Byng in the 1780s when he encountered the pernicious effects of female taste on yet another English interior. He was certainly not alone in his horror of feminine domination. Indeed many of the key stereotypes about female taste and aesthetic allegiance were minted in this period. Fussiness of ornament, greater delicacy or even fragility in furniture, and a yen for lighter colours were all associated with women in the male literature on design; clichés which abound in marketing and design circles to this day. Justified or not, the widespread complaints about a stylistic feminisation of the interior are suggestive of the control at least some women sought to exercise over their surroundings and should alert historians to the fact that here was an issue which troubled contemporaries.

How does the Focused Study advance knowledge?
The object of this study is to explore the female relationship with the domestic interior in the long eighteenth century in England and Wales, a subject that has rarely been researched by scholars, whether social and cultural historians, women's historians, art historians, or architectural historians, although this has not prevented generalisations from proliferating. A tradition arising out of some British and American women's history emphasises the incarceration of the middle-class female in the separate sphere of home some time in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries (chronologies vary). It presents all aesthetic endeavour in a domestic setting as mere gilding on the cage. For historians of art and design, these domestic endeavours are often a source of disappointment. Women's own productions were neither useful, nor were they art.

This emerging consensus can be questioned at many points. The chronology of economic change on which it draws is suspect, while the narrative of separate spheres is a dubious one too. The notion that élite women voiced no interest in architecture and interiors before the 1760s is, in the absence of any substantive research, an argument from silence. In any case, given the persistent muttering about the effeminisation of robust masculine taste and the fact that women had long been considered responsible for the management of the household in all its aspects, it seems inherently implausible that they did not exercise a considerable degree of control over the way interiors were designed, furnished and decorated much earlier. The gloomy tale of a decline in useful domestic accomplishments (needlework, book-keeping) in the gaudy face of fashionable accomplishments also needs close examination. The contrast between usefulness and meaninglessness is suspect. Does a seventeenth-century tapestry have any more inherent utility than an early nineteenth-century embroidered foot-stool? The full range of women's domestic practices from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century needs to be considered.

To do this will require a proper examination of the domestic arrangements and practices of women further down the social scale than the noble and the genteel, who are the subject of what little work currently exists on the eighteenth century. Here there is an almost complete absence of serious studies with an empirical dimension. Economic historians have devoted much attention to female domestic labour as a crucial element in commercial manufacturing before the factory. This has recently led some of them, like Jan de Vries, to reflect on the relationship between paid and unpaid female labour in the home, building on earlier discussions by pioneers of women’s history like Ivy Pinchbeck and Alice Clark. But the key questions concerning the furnishing, use and meanings of plebeian domestic spaces remain largely unresearched.

Scope, approaches and sources.
The project will explore women's relationship with the domestic interior in all its aspects and at all social levels: from the changing use of rooms over the course of the day to the ways paintings and engravings of interiors invoked (or challenged) conventional expectations of domestic order; from the prodigious scale and range of women's decorative work (embroidery, water colours, furniture painting, shell-work, paper silhouettes, sea-weed collage, etc. etc.) to interiors commissioned by independent women patrons, like the Parminter sisters at A La Ronde or Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby at Plas Newydd. Crucially it will address the question as to whether, as the misogynists complained, there was a distinctive female taste. To address these issues, it will clearly be necessary to consider men’s relationship with the domestic interior, itself a subject that has received little explicit attention from historians. Nevertheless, the focus of the study will remain women, who had particular responsibility for the domestic in both eighteenth-century precept and practice. Limiting the scope of the project in this way will also render it manageable.

The study will involve a critical assessment of existing but scattered published work on eighteenth-century objects, architecture, aesthetics, and consumption. It will also entail extensive primary research on, inter alia, painted and printed images of interiors, on women's magazines and fashionable journals like The World and the Town and Country; on contemporary design and architectural commentary; on travel literature, diaries and family correspondence; on inventories and court records; on housekeeping manuals, surviving shopkeepers accounts; and, of course, on surviving buildings and objects.

Key intellectual questions
• Did women’s cultural association with the domestic sphere translate into control of the look and use of the domestic interior?

Jan de Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe,’ in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods.

Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (Routledge, London, 1988)

Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, Yale University Press, 1991