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国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。我们目前对这些家庭的文化生活知之甚少，部分原因是他们没有什么学术兴趣，部分原因是我们需要探索他们的证据是由不相关的机构-图书馆，档案馆，在线存储库和博物馆-这使得我们不可能看到他们创作和创造的文本，视觉和材料作品，以及他们作为娱乐购买的作品，财产或装饰。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。这是更显着的一些最受欢迎的英语作家，其中包括威廉莎士比亚，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之间的相互关系，可以让我们全面审视作家成长和参与的创作环境。但它也让我们超越这些知名人物，探索这些环境对他们的妻子、母亲、姐妹篇、学徒和仆人的影响--对这些人来说，古典文法学校教育是不可能的，但他们却在他们生活和工作的家庭和城市环境中感受到了它的影响--例如，家庭中的书籍，在墙上画上的格言或图像。通过了解这些家庭的创造力环境和实践，该项目的目标是，特别是与其合作伙伴莎士比亚广场信托基金会，鼓励关于艺术如何帮助克服当今社会流动障碍的辩论。它将提供历史证据，说明并允许我们质疑我们当代的倾向，即将经济企业家精神与鼓励它并从中受益的丰富的美学和文化背景分离开来。清楚地看到这个群体如何影响他们的文化环境，创造社会和政治变革，将提供看待社会地位，该项目将分析五个案例研究社区--班伯里、布里斯托、切斯特菲尔德、伊普斯维奇和斯特拉特福德-论-雅芳--以及其中的一系列特定家庭（从事不同类型的写作，也留下了他们的物质选择和投资的证据），来自省级行政人员，神职人员，活跃于世纪1560-1660年的专业作家和来自医疗、戏剧和印刷行业的个人。我们将研究两个相互依赖的证据：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;物质生产和消费-家庭和城市建筑（建筑、装饰和家具）、服装和个人物品（包括那些用于阅读和写作的）与它们相关联。一起分析，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，以及其制作所涉及的技能和专业知识水平，并与广大受众分享这些材料及其影响。除了为学校和博物馆创建教育资源外，我们的工作还将使我们能够通过数字建模一个时期的房间，并配备当时的声音，灯光和物品，重新创建一个中等生活方式的具体例子。这种数字模型将提供另一种方式来思考“内部”的物质和文本生活的中等排序，并从事这项工作的其他人。

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.