Catherine Richardson (University of Kent, UK)

This paper explores the relationships between textual evidence for material culture and the objects themselves as they might operate within the construction of historical narrative. It examines the possibility of reconstructing experiences of early modern space, arguing that understanding experience is important because it helps us to integrate different evidential and theoretical discourses, and think about how they intersect for individuals in an event – to access the discourses and practices which people bring to bear in their understanding of what happens.

The paper examines narrative’s potential for presenting the statistical information derived from a large-scale quantitative analysis of inventory material. Some kinds of narrative reconstruction seem to offer the opportunity to present such information in a way which has an experiential meaning: reconstructing the ways in which it would have meant at the time, rather than expressing domestic typicality or diversity in statistical terms. It explores how extant material objects might relate to this kind of textual evidence, and how they might affect the way audiences interact with historical narratives. This kind of narrative reconstruction involves dealing with the way both historical subjects and modern audiences visualize events, then.

As part of this equation, the paper addresses historicised ways of seeing. The challenge is to establish a historically-specific kind of ‘attention’, something which captures the multi-sensory aspects of looking, sensing, interpreting and remembering. In the period considered here, this necessarily includes the morality of looking and or interacting, for instance, because these questions are key to contemporary debates about appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. It includes contemporary theories about different kinds of audience – active and passive audiences, not for the theatre, but for everyday events – theories which come out of a peculiarly sensitive early modern interest in what it means to bear witness: the concentrated, impartial, careful looking, listening and committing to memory which this involves. The paper explores how such an activity might sit within traditional disciplinary boundaries, circumscribed by the strictures of evidence and its linkage, but self-conscious in its use of narrative to reconstruct perception.