Gender, Politics and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

The network project aims at developing co-operation between academic researchers and specialists within cultural institutions. The Group will work together to examine the gendered nature of power relationships constituted through material forms, exchanges and practices within a transnational early modern framework. The Project is lead by professor James Daybell (Plymouth) and Svante Norrhem (Lund)

This transdisciplinary network will study relationships between gender, power and ‘materiality’, defined both in terms of physical objects or ‘material texts’ and the social and cultural practices, and spaces in which they were produced, consumed, exchanged and displayed. It focusses on different forms of elite power across the early modern period in Europe, and encompasses formal and cultural power. Influenced by the ‘material turn’, the network considers objects as social agents, analysing the gendered power embedded within physical artefacts and the social practices of production, consumption and exchange, especially in relation to early modern practices and modern theories of gift-giving . It questions how far materiality made gender positions stable and unstable; and studies objects to reconstruct new networks and gendered forms of power created around object exchange and production. It sees archives as a form of gendered power, and spaces, and their connection with the politics of memory, gift-giving and display. The network views power and materiality through the lens of gender, and the application of diverse approaches bringing into dialogue historians, literary critics, material culture specialists, anthropologists, archaeologists (who bring an understanding of objects and theory), and curators, archivists and conservators. Proceedings will be in English, but in different European settings, allowing access to work ordinarily only available in different languages.