Catherine Richardson from the Canterbury Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies has secured funding from the AHRC for a research network that will investigate peoples’ experience of household life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the time in which Shakespeare was writing – and consider how we might use this information to enhance our experience of visiting historic properties in the twenty-first century.
The network will use the latest developments in computer science and cognitive science in order to understand how the domestic interior was experienced in early modern England. Dr Richardson and her co-investigator Dr Tara Hamling from the University of Birmingham will bring together researchers in the humanities and sciences, conservators, museums curators and heritage professionals, including individuals from English Heritage, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Historic Royal Palaces and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. We will experiment with, for instance, virtual reality environments that recreate historic atmospheric effects and eye tracking equipment that measures where and for how long we look at our surroundings and see how this technology might be used to reconstruct historical perception. In order to make the task more manageable, we are going to focus on a specific case study – ‘how did early modern men and women respond to decorative textiles in their houses?’
We will be asking the following questions:
- How did someone living in Tudor or Stuart England prioritize, interpret and assimilate the various messages being communicated by the combination of domestic surfaces, materials, colour, form, imagery and texts?
- What was the effect of this combined visual, material and textual dynamic on how people experienced the space in which they lived and on how they thought and behaved?
- How can we use new technologies to interrogate these issues and represent our findings to academics, heritage professionals and visitors to museums and historic houses?
Although the events that comprise this network are only open to its members, we will be recording them and podcasting some of our experiments and findings, so do please revisit this site.
Final Conference:
The final event of the network will be a major international conference held at the Geffrye Museum of the Home. More information about this will be posted here soon.