The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort: writing and material culture 1560 - 1660

这个项目旨在改变我们对阅读和写作方式的认识，使之适应现代早期英格兰一个非常重要但研究不足的群体的日常文化生活——中产阶级——有文化的城市家庭，他们的成员经常以写作为生。目前，我们对这些家庭的文化生活所知甚少，部分原因是这些家庭没有什么学术兴趣，部分原因是我们探索这些家庭所需的证据是由图书馆、档案馆、在线存储库和博物馆等互不相关的机构保管的，这使得我们不可能把他们创作和创作的文字、视觉和材料作品，以及他们作为娱乐、财产或装饰购买的东西放在一起。因此，与他们的精英同行不同，我们对中等审美实践没有连贯的看法，这将使我们能够充分理解他们的创造力。这一点更值得注意的是，一些最受欢迎的英语作家，其中包括威廉·莎士比亚，都是这个群体的成员。了解他们的文学、艺术和物质生产与消费是如何相互联系的，我们就可以充分审视作家们成长和参与的创作环境。但它也允许我们超越这些知名人物，探索这些环境对他们的妻子、母亲、姐妹、学徒和仆人的影响——这些人不可能接受古典文法学校的教育，但他们在生活和工作的家庭和城市环境中却受到了影响——例如，家里的书、谚语或墙上的画。通过了解这些家庭的环境和创造力的实践，这个项目的目的是，特别是与莎士比亚出生地信托基金会合作，鼓励人们讨论艺术如何帮助克服当今社会流动的障碍。它将提供历史证据，证明并允许我们质疑我们当代的趋势，即将经济企业家精神与丰富的美学和文化背景分离开来，这些背景鼓励并从中受益。清楚地了解这个群体是如何影响他们的文化环境来创造社会和政治变革的，将为我们提供新的视角来看待当今社会地位、创造力和艺术之间的关系。该项目将分析五个案例研究社区——班伯里、布里斯托尔、切斯特菲尔德、伊普斯维奇和埃文河畔斯特拉特福——以及其中的一系列特定家庭（从事不同类型的写作，也留下了他们的材料选择和投资的证据），这些家庭来自1560-1660世纪活跃的省级行政人员、神职人员、专业作家和医疗、戏剧和印刷行业的个人。我们将研究两种相互依赖的证据：文学生产和消费，如这些群体贡献的家庭、个人和城市行政档案；和物质生产和消费-家庭和城市建筑（他们的建筑，装饰和家具），服装和个人物品（包括那些阅读和写作）与他们有关。综合分析，这些信息将使我们能够重建中等审美和抄写文化的全部范围，以及其生产所涉及的技能和专业知识水平，并与广泛的受众分享这些材料及其含义。除了为学校和博物馆创造教育资源外，我们的工作还将允许我们通过数字建模一个时期的房间，完成当时的声音，灯光和物体，重新创造一个中等生活方式的具体例子。这种数字模式将提供另一种方式来思考中等类型的物质和文本生活，并让其他人参与到这项工作中来。

This project aims to transform our sense of the way reading and writing fitted into the everyday cultural lives of a very important but under-researched group in early modern England - the middling sort - the literate urban households whose members often wrote for a living. We currently know very little about the cultural lives of these households, partly because they have been of little scholarly interest, and partly because the evidence we need to explore them is cared for by unconnected institutions - libraries, archives, online repositories, and museums - which makes it impossible to see together the textual, visual and material work they authored and created, and that which they bought as entertainment, possessions or decoration. Unlike their elite counterparts, therefore, we have no coherent view of middling aesthetic practices which would allow us to understand their creativity fully. This is even more remarkable as some of the most popular writers in English, among them William Shakespeare, were members of this group. Understanding how their literary, artistic and material production and consumption related to one another lets us examine fully the creative environment in which the writers grew up and participated. But it also allows us to reach beyond these well-known figures, to explore the impact of those environments on their wives, mothers, sisters, apprentices and servants - individuals for whom a classical grammar school education was not a possibility, but who nevertheless experienced its impact in the domestic and urban environments in which they lived and worked - for example as books in the household, sayings or images painted on the walls. And through understanding the environments and practices of creativity for these families, this project aims, with its partner the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in particular, to encourage debate about how the arts might help in overcoming barriers to social mobility today. It will provide historical evidence that speaks to and allows us to interrogate our contemporary tendency to dissociate economic entrepreneurship from the rich aesthetic and cultural contexts that encourage it and benefit from it. Seeing clearly how this group influenced their cultural environments to create social and political change will offer new ways of looking at the relationships between social status, creativity and the arts in the present.The project will analyse five case-study communities - Banbury, Bristol, Chesterfield, Ipswich and Stratford-upon-Avon - and a range of specific households within them (ones engaged in different types of writing that also left evidence of their material choices and investments), drawn from the families of provincial administrators, clerics, professional writers and individuals from the medical, theatrical and print trades, active in the century 1560-1660. We will work with two mutually-dependent strands of evidence: literary production and consumption such as the household, personal and urban administrative archives to which these groups contributed; and material production and consumption - the domestic and urban buildings (their architecture, decoration and furniture), clothing and personal objects (including those for reading and writing) with which they were associated.Analysed together, this information will allow us to reconstruct the full range of middling aesthetic and scribal culture, and the levels of skill and expertise involved in its production, and to share these materials and their implications with a wide audience. In addition to creating educational resources for schools and museums, our work will allow us to recreate a specific example of a middling lifestyle, by digitally modelling a period room, complete with the sounds, lighting and objects of the time. This digital model will give another way to think 'inside' the material and textual lives of the middling sort, and to engage others in this work.