INTRODUCTION

This paper offers a case study in the interpretation and presentation of a series of rooms in a wealthy urban household in a south-west English city. It arises from an educational project undertaken at St Nicholas Priory, Exeter, by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), supported by the national government initiative Renaissance and by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Like many monuments of this sort, the priory was previously presented as a bare structure, sparsely furnished with a selection of the museum's collection. The aim of the project was to use all available sources of evidence – close examination of the fabric, local archaeological finds, documentary evidence, research into furniture history and food history, and wider studies of the operation of the Elizabethan house – to reconstruct these rooms as furnished and functioning spaces of c. 1600. The approach followed a style of display developed in other British houses of this period, for example by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Shakespeare's Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, by Cadw at Plas Mawr, Conwy, and perhaps most famously in the working kitchens of the 1540s in Hampton Court Palace. We wished to represent the household using site-specific detail and local evidence wherever possible: to recreate Exeter rooms rather than generalized English ones. We also sought to highlight the personal stories of the family identified from documentary study, another feature of the interpretation at Plas Mawr.