Download Free A Taste For Luxury In Early Modern Europe Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Taste For Luxury In Early Modern Europe and write the review.

Jon Stobart and Johanna Ilmakunnas bring together a range of scholars from across mainland Europe and the UK to examine luxury and taste in early modern Europe. In the 18th century, debates raged about the economic, social and moral impacts of luxury, whilst taste was viewed as a refining influence and a marker of rank and status. This book takes a fresh, comparative approach to these ideas, drawing together new scholarship to examine three related areas in a wide variety of European contexts. Firstly, the deployment of luxury goods in displays of status and how these practices varied across space and time. Secondly, the processes of communicating and acquiring taste and luxury: how did people obtain tasteful and luxurious goods, and how did they recognise them as such? Thirdly, the ways in which ideas of taste and luxury crossed national, political and economic boundaries: what happened to established ideas of luxury and taste as goods moved from one country to another, and during times of political transformation? Through the analysis of case studies looking at consumption practices, material culture, political economy and retail marketing, A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe challenges established readings of luxury and taste. This is a crucial volume for any historian seeking a more nuanced understanding of material culture, consumption and luxury in early modern Europe.
This book unravels the complex interaction of the paradigms of luxury and greed which lie at the origins of modern consumption practices. In the Western world, the phenomenon of luxury and the ethical dilemmas it raised appeared, for the first time since antiquity, in early modern Italy. Here, luxury emerged as a core idea in the conceptualization of consumption. Simultaneously, greed - which manifested in new and unrestrained consumption practices - came under close ethical scrutiny. As the buying power of new classes gained pace, these paradigms evolved as they continued both to influence, and be influenced by, other emerging global cultures through the early modern period.00After defining luxury and greed in their historical contexts, the volume?s chapters elucidate new consumptive goods, from chocolate to official robes of state; they examine how ideas about, and objects of, luxury and greed were disseminated through print, diplomacy, and gift-giving; and they reveal how even the most elite of consumers could fake their luxury objects. A group of international scholars from a range of disciplines thereby provide a new appraisal and vision of luxury and the ethics of greed in early modern Italy.
Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.
Piero Camporesi is one of the most original and exciting cultural historians in Europe today. In this remarkable book he examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe, exploring their everyday preoccupations, fears and fantasies. Camporesi develops the startling claim that many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products, administered even to children and infants, was widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural figures. Through a careful reconstruction of the everyday imaginative life of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a vivid and disconcerting image of early modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams. Bread of Dreams is a rich and engaging book which provides a fresh insight into the everyday life and attitudes of people in pre-industrial Europe. Camporesi's vision is breathtaking and his work will be much discussed among social and cultural historians. This edition includes a Preface by Roy Porter, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.
Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot, the 'Man in the Iron Mask' and the 'Devils of Loudun' have offered some of the most compelling images of the early modern period. Conspiracies, real or imagined, were an essential feature of early modern life, offering a seemingly rational and convincing explanation for patterns of political and social behaviour. Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe examines conspiracies and conspiracy theories from an interdisciplinary perspective, by combining the theoretical approach of the history of ideas with specific examples from the period. Each contribution addresses a number of common themes through a series of original case studies, examining why certain groups were perceived in conspiratorial terms, and how far, if at all, these attitudes were challenged or redefined by the enlightenment.
Since the 16th century, Paris has been a leading arbiter of taste and the ultimate source of luxury goods for Europe and the world. However, the origins of the luxury trades of Paris and their role in the wider economic development of France and Europe have been relatively little examined by historians. This volume provides an entry into some of the many questions raised by the growth of the luxury trades, by bringing together eight detailed case studies of specific trades with five more wide-ranging and theoretical contributions. It therefore offers both the results of entirely new research and a range of new perspectives and methodological reflections on the subject as a whole. Essential to economic and social historians of Early Modern France, the book will also be of interest to all students of material culture.
'Luxury in the 18th Century' explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, and provides a broadly-based account from a variety of perspectives, addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, the principles of art and taste, luxury as 'female vice' and the exotic.
This richly illustrated book applies the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Freedman gathers essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste.