This chapter examines the social and material preparations that households made for an impending birth. Family members were fascinated by the look and size of women’s bellies, so much so that women’s stomachs were often highlighted in portraits and they featured prominently in correspondence. Married women’s ‘big bellies’ were celebrated because they displayed the fruitfulness of the family, whereas unmarried women sought to conceal their pregnant state. The process of buying and borrowing things for childbirth including linen, baby clothes and birthing stools have often been represented as hallmarks of a celebratory and extravagant female culture that excluded male family members. This chapter finds instead that male family members were key players in this material culture. Added to this, correspondence shows that men were active in imagining the appearance and nature of unborn children in ways that embedded them within their family-to-be. This material and emotional investment was, however, entirely dependent on marital fidelity by wives. Men’s domestic and fiscal honour was intertwined with the performance of women’s bodies.

This chapter addresses the evidence for the burial of moneyed laymen. The latter are, perhaps not unexpectedly, both ubiquitous and largely invisible in this collection. The necrosima includes only one hymn specifically addressing the death of a husband and father. By contrast, the majority of its forty “generic” hymns contemplate a male lay Christian subject, mourned by his children, anxious about abandoning his family, and plagued by anticipation of the harsh judgement he might receive. These hymns become a site for working out the necrosima’s theology of possessions – a topic that appears explicitly in some of the collection’s most paraenetically focused hymns, including, for example, madrāshâ 28 (“In funere principum, & Divitis cuiusque”/“On the burial of a prince or some kind of rich man”), but is a prominent theme in much of the corpus. This chapter accordingly examines anxieties about wealth and poverty, and the ethical pedagogy inherent in the necrosima, including its emphasis on charity.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

In the exclusive world of private press publications, book making consists in a practice of gathering a collection and documenting a community of sentiment around Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. This chapter starts with the repurposing of frontispieces in a book acquired by Walpole in 1760, Joseph Ames’s A Collection of Individual Letters, to capture the material culture of specimen collecting that underpins the early history of the book. Book parts function as building blocks for other books, recursive and mobile components in different copies and different titles, from collections of separately printed unique poems and pamphlets gathered under the bespoke title page ‘Detached Pieces Printed at Strawberry-Hill’ to extra-illustrated copies of Description of the Villa … at Strawberry Hill (1774, 1784). Miscellaneous visual and verbal additions to copies of Description mark out the owner and amateur, the sculptor, and the domestic printer’s practice in disciplinary strands of knowledge production (artistic, antiquarian, typographical, classical).

This introduction begins by explaining the role of consumers and consumption in both pre-industrial and modern economies, with particular emphasis on the decisive role of the peasantry. The book is framed within a paradigm shift that recognises medieval peasants as key agents of social and economic change. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the connection between consumption, material culture, and living standards in scholarship, identifying gaps and unanswered questions that this book seeks to address. It also highlights the significance of food-related possessions in the material culture of ordinary people, the region under analysis (the Kingdom of Valencia), and the sources under examination (probate inventories, public auction records, and others). The introduction concludes with a general outline of the book’s four parts and presents the central argument: that peasant decision-making as consumers during the later Middle Ages had a positive impact on the overall economic development of a leading Mediterranean polity – thus revealing the power of peasant consumers.

The notion that curse tablets were used to cause harm whereas amulets were used to provide protection is a misleading oversimplification. Curse tablets have often been removed from the category of religion and consigned to the illusive one of magic. However, the existence of those tablets designated as prayers for justice illustrates that the desires which drove curse tablet creation were varied. To ascertain to what extent the use of curse tablets and amulets fitted in with polis religion, different aspects of them are examined, such as the ritualistic nature of their creation, their use of formulaic inscriptions and evidence for their use, or lack of use, of reciprocity. Examples of amulets and curse tablets are presented from the fourth century BCE through to the second century CE and from a large geographical scope. Examples from across the Greek world illustrate a paradoxical unity and sense of religious community amongst those who engaged in these practices. The incredibly personal nature of the inscriptions on curse tablets and the wearing of amulets provides an insight into Greek religious practice at an individual level.

Chapter 1, ‘Unlocking Capacity’, contextualises and conceptualises the epistolarium in its thematic, stylistic, and comparative implications. The chapter begins by asking how we might engage with major collections of letters beyond traditional fact-mining. How might selected letters, by different hands, be explored as a site of consciousness and creativity? Appraising the leading editions of the letters of our five authors and artists, the chapter considers the traditional purposes of letter-editing. In pursuit of facticity, letter-editing traditionally subsidiarises the expressivity of everyday experience: Letterworlds tackles that critical blind spot. Arguing for an immersive reading of letters that can reveal a deeper human narrative, the chapter reviews pioneering approaches to the everyday across cultural sociology, epistolarity studies, and autobiography studies. The book’s major critical axes are introduced: sensory studies, theories of ‘negative community’, and everyday ethics. The material culture of letter-writing, from stationery supplies, via salutations and signatures, to postal networks, is explored in parallel with letterish creativity and modernist performativity.

In this chapter, differences between quantitative and qualitative studies are presented. Students are taught the basic skills for performing a qualitative study, such as performing interviews, observations, and researching material culture. Methods for analyzing these qualitative data such as finding themes and creating concept maps are discussed. Students are encouraged to use qualitative analytical methods with a quantitative study (i.e., a mixed-methods approach) to help create a richer, more detailed study.

Chapter 3 explores the production of knowledge about Catholicism by people of African descent and their engagement with Iberian and their religious vernaculars. It is based on a small body of Inquisition records, largely relaciones de causas de fe, and one full proceso de fe, the sacrilege case of Felix Fernando Martínez in 1776. The only chapter that focuses on the Caribbean region, it demonstrates the importance of Catholicism in black material and oral culture, whether that be through embrace, questioning, or overt criticism of the Church, Catholic cosmology, and the saints. The religious knowledge production of defendants from the Caribbean, most of whom were free and described as mulato, does not suggest African intellectual genealogies alone. Rather, people of African descent were part of and constructed a vibrant and heterogeneous religious Caribbean and exchanged knowledge about the supernatural, especially Catholicism, with people of all ethnicities. Such speech, and on occasion acts, nevertheless was potentially dangerous to them in the transcultural Caribbean, evidenced by the violent sentences handed down, ranging from spiritual exercises, to forced labour and execution.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from ship to shore in order to explore metropolitan writing that captured the distinctive urban-littoral spaces of the Victorian port city. Forging connections between the urban ethnography of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, with accounts of ‘sailortown’ and its attendant ‘waterside characters’ in novels by Herman Melville (Redburn: His First Voyage), Charles Dickens (Our Mutual Friend), and James Joyce (Ulysses), this chapter reveals the urban waterfront to be an important edge space that functioned as both a working-class habitat shaped by waterside industry and an imaginative locus for a range of nineteenth-century writers. The analysis demonstrates that despite its physical location on the edge of the city, and its peripheral status within literary history, the watery city was a site for the production of new narratives of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.