Domestic Culture in Early Modern England by Antony Buxton (review)

Despite its expansive title, this book has at its heart a study of 188 probate inventories from seventeenth-century Thame, a small market town in Oxfordshire. Parts of the book concern this local study: Chapter 1 provides the social and economic context of early modern Thame. Chapters 3 to 5 examine in detail the domestic objects recorded in Thame’s probate inventories under the themes of “foodstuff provisioning, processing and cooking,” “commensality and conviviality,” and “rest and security.” Chapter 7 looks at particular examples of Thame households. However, other sections of the book do something much more innovative, exploring and developing an interdisciplinary concept of “domestic culture.” The introduction provides a dizzying tour of approaches from philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology, as well as history, to the house and household, before settling predominantly on Bourdieu’s idea of the “habitus” combined with Geertz’s “thick description” of a small community. Chapter 2 focuses on the multiple facets of early modern households, and Chapter 6 about “the ‘practice’ and domestic culture of the Thame household” applies the ideas developed to the inventory evidence about room use. The wide range of interdisciplinary ideas brought into play is the great strength of the book.

Other aspects of the study are less effective. Despite aspiring to “thick description,” the evidence base deployed is decidedly thin. For the majority of the book, the documents analyzed consist primarily of a small collection of probate inventories, Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615), and woodcut illustrations from ballads. Wills, court documents, and parish records appear only in Chapter 7 and then simply to provide biographies of particular households. Buxton makes little attempt to compare the findings from Thame with other studies of early modern probate inventories to establish their wider context. Although the weaknesses of inventories are rehearsed in the introduction, the fact that small and cheap artifacts, such as wooden spoons and trenchers and small pottery items, are rarely listed is forgotten in the analysis, and no reference to the archaeological evidence of such goods is made.

Even more problematical is the lack of depth in the research into the processes and activities described. Food processing, diet, dining, and cloth production are all discussed without reference to any key works on the subject, ignoring a rich literature about consumption and material culture in early modern England. Moreover, any analysis of domestic culture surely requires a careful consideration of gender issues. Gender is considered in this study, but Buxton’s comments are limited by the fact that inventories reveal relatively little about the subject. Again, an extensive literature is ignored in favor of quotations from Markham and outdated anthropological views (one being that women’s roles were determined by childbearing).

In short, this is a wonderful idea for a book, and the ideas that Buxton parades in the introduction and conclusion show flashes of brilliance, but his analysis fails to bridge the gap satisfactorily between theory and historical evidence.