Professor Catherine Richardson: Experiencing Life in the Early Modern House

Friday 28 April, 7 - 8.30pm, OS.0.01, Michael Berry lecture theatre, Old Sessions House

How do we know what it felt like to live in an early modern house – the sights, sounds and smells, the levels of light, warmth and comfort? How do we know what objects it was filled with and what they meant to the inhabitants, and what those men, women and children got up to inside? What evidence do we have for spaces that are so central to understanding the similarities and differences between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own, and how can we bring these spaces back to life? Catherine Richardson sets out to give some answers, and in doing so tells stories from the hilarious to the tragic.

Catherine Richardson joined the University of Kent in 2007 and is Professor of Early Modern Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between texts and the material circumstances of their production and consumption – on the movement between living and writing, between experience and narrative, in both the past and the present. Central to this work has been understanding early modern material culture - the way it was produced and consumed, and how the material qualities of cultural life shaped its other aspects.