Julie de Groot's At Home in Renaissance Bruges: Connecting Objects, People and Domestic Spaces in a Sixteenth-Century City is a welcome addition for scholars of early modern art, craft, and design, Netherlandish social history, and material culture studies.
From the mid-1400s to the late 1500s, Bruges transitioned from an international hub to a more regionally focused provincial center and lost political and economic sway to Brabantian Antwerp. De Groot asks with this volume: What was the impact of these major transitions on people's lives and their intimate moments inside their homes? She identifies “the middling sort” as her focus, neither the top nor the bottom of the social and economic strata, but rather a diverse population ranging from laborers and artisans to formally educated merchants and working professionals.
The author cites the foundational work of Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre and his followers’ discourses about the social production of space. She positions her book in response to Alexa Griffith Winton's application of Lefebvre to the history of the interior, arguing that the early modern person responded to the spatial and physical circumstances of their house, and they activated this architectural space through adapting it to their needs, thereby making it a home.
De Groot argues that many prior scholars have made a false assumption that domesticity and concepts of home were somehow a product of the nineteenth century. She instead draws on recent work on medieval domesticity that reveals what many premodern scholars already know: home is an evocative concept across geographies and times. Within the field of early modern Netherlandish studies, De Groot also reinserts Bruges as a productive counterpoint to the many studies focused on Antwerp as a case study for early modern southern Netherlandish culture.
The author is up-front about using a general and summative approach, rather than focusing on specific case studies (17–18). She relies on a wide variety of sources to reconstruct the experience of the home in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges, including archeological evidence, recorded floor plans, architectural designs, and posthumous and confiscation (related to debt collection) inventories. De Groot also engages with a plethora of actual and described material culture from the era, including paintings; illustrated manuscripts; chairs, beds, and other furnishings; cushions, tapestries, and linens; and manuscripts and manuscript illustrations.
The volume is organized into two sections. Part 1 focuses on home interior spaces, paying close attention to the overall layouts of houses and divisions of various labors and activities into different rooms and areas. Those with workshops or shops situated on the first floor of their house, a common practice in Bruges and other urban centers during the period, created the ground floor as a commercialized area fairly separated from private domestic spaces. Meanwhile, the cantoor, somewhat comparable to our modern-day concept of the home office, was a more permeable space in which a variety of trade and work-related activities were performed, but which also sometimes served as a space of reflection, personal study, and the construction of identity. Kitchens and salettes (small rooms for receiving guests), dining rooms, and bedrooms all emerge as their own more private, gendered, and yet still versatile spaces activated by different members of a household during particular times of day.
Part 2 turns to the material culture of artworks and decorative objects that adorned people's homes and how these home goods were mutually functional and aesthetic items that impacted individuals’ interactions with them. Paintings are discussed not as unique artworks, but instead used to explore where these paintings might have been situated within the home, as well as to look for evidence of art and objects in home spaces depicted. There are many intriguing discoveries and conclusions throughout the volume. As one example, residents of Bruges markedly shifted in their color preferences for decorative textiles, from favoring primarily blue with a relatively small portion of red in the mid-1400s to blue disappearing completely and being overtaken by an overwhelming preference for green by 1600 (203–06).
De Groot's multidisciplinary and refreshingly object- and people-centered approaches make for a fascinating read, and I look forward to her subsequent planned work delving into clusters of source materials for more specific case studies. Backmatter includes appendixes with archival references and thirty-one full color figures.
