The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe (review)

This interdisciplinary collection of essays takes as its starting point the belief that material culture provides rich access to the most personal and meaningful events of people's lives, and that lost cultural beliefs are embodied in everyday utilitarian articles not usually defined as "works of art." These common objects, which sometimes sneak into museum collections through the back door, are often quite beautiful in and of themselves. However, they are often treated as irrelevant to historical discourse precisely because they belong to the domain of women, who traditionally serve as caretakers of the intimate worlds of marriage, family, and sex

Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Everyday life · Point (geometry) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity