Changes in housing, furnishings, clothing and even cooking utensils can all reveal much about the economy and societies of Ireland. Between 1500 and 2000, markets, fairs, shops and exhibitions increased the availability and range of goods. This guide surveys some of the work being done on the subject. It also offers help in how to approach the topic, in identifying the types of sources likely to be most useful--wills, inventories, advertisements, surviving artifacts--and in locating them.--From publisher's description.

Changes in housing, furnishings, clothing and even cooking utensils can all reveal much about the economy and societies of Ireland. Between 1500 and 2000, markets, fairs, shops and exhibitions increased the availability and range of goods. This guide surveys some of the work being done on the subject. It also offers help in how to approach the topic, in identifying the types of sources likely to be most useful--wills, inventories, advertisements, surviving artifacts--and in locating them.--From publisher's description.

Interweaving notions of identity and subjectivity, spatial contexts, materiality and meaning, this collection makes a significant contribution to debates around the status and interpretation of visual and material culture. Material Cultures, 1740-1920 has four primary theoretical and historiographic lines of inquiry. The first is how concepts of otherness and difference inform, imbricate, and impose themselves on identity and the modes of acquisition as well as the objects themselves. The second concern explores the intricacies of how objects and their subjects negotiate and represent spatial narratives. The third thread attempts to unravel the ideological underpinnings of collections of individuals which inevitably and invariably rub up against the social, the institutional, and the political. Finally, at the heart of Material Cultures, 1740-1920 is an intervention moving beyond the disciplinary ethos of material culture to argue more firmly for the aesthetic, visual, and semiotic potency inseparable from any understanding of material objects integral to the lives of their collecting subjects. The collection argues that objects are semiotic conduits or signs of meanings, pleasures, and desires that are deeply subjective; more often than not, they reveal racial, gendered, and sexual identities. As the volume demonstrates through its various case studies, material and visual cultures are not as separate as our current disciplinary ethos would lead us to believe.

Contains essays on food and material culture presented at the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

A detailed study of changing patterns of consumption, showing how these related to wider political, social and economic developments. This book, based on extensive original research, argues that everyday Irish consumption underwent major changes in the 16th century. The book considers the changing nature of imported goods in relation especially to two major activities of daily living: dress and diet. It integrates quantitative data on imports with qualitative sources, including wills, archaeological and pictorial evidence, and contemporary literature and legislation. It shows that changes in Irish consumption mirrored changes occurring in England and across Europe and that they were a function of broader developments in the Irish economy, including the increasing participation of Irish merchants in European markets. The book also discusses how consumption was related to wider political, economic and cultural developments in Ireland, showing how the acquisition and interpretation of material goods were key factors in the mediation of political and social boundaries in a semi-colonised and contested society. Susan Flavin completed her doctorate in early modern history at the University of Bristol.

Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian scholarship, poetry, song, plays and memoirs, produced a series of notable fictions; marked most of all by their ability to fashion from these resources a new vocabulary of cultural identity. This book extends and enriches the current understanding of Irish Romanticism, blending sympathetic textual analysis of the fiction with careful historical contextualization.

Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history