Sarah Longair

Leonie Hannan

History through material culture is an excellent guide for students and researchers who wish to use objects as historical sources. Responding to the significant, scholarly interest in historical material culture studies, this book provides the first step-by-step guide to developing historical research based around objects. The book makes clear how students and researchers can use these rich material sources to make important, valuable and original contributions to history. Written by two experienced museum practitioners and historians, the book recognises the theoretical and practical challenges of this approach and offers clear advice on methods to get the best out of material culture research. With a focus on the early modern and modern periods, this book draws on examples from across the world and demonstrates how to use material culture to answer a range of enquiries, including social, economic, gender, cultural and global history.

History through material culture

Women of letters writes a new history of English women's intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. The book argues that many women of this period engaged with a life of the mind and demonstrates the dynamic role letter-writing played in the development of ideas. Until now, it has been assumed that women's intellectual opportunities were curtailed by their confinement in the home. This book illuminates the household as a vibrant site of intellectual thought and expression. Amidst the catalogue of day-to-day news in women's letters are sections dedicated to the discussion of books, plays and ideas. Through these personal epistles, Women of letters offers a fresh interpretation of intellectual life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one that champions the ephemeral and the fleeting in order to rediscover women's lives and minds.

Leonie Hannan

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