Overview

An innovative approach in the field of material culture and consumption studies, Life in the Georgian Parsonage looks at the houses, consumption and lifestyle of Church of England clergy in the long 18th century, linking moral debates and popular representations of the clergy to the material culture of their houses and their motivations as consumers. By focusing on ethical and moral dimensions of consumer practices, it challenges established readings of consumption in the long 18th century as an essentially secular process in which goods were markers of wealth, status and taste, by bringing the clergyman into the frame – their lives, their habits and their homes. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, combining material culture and religious and social history and sitting at the intersection of these fields, Life in the Georgian Parsonage fills a significant gap, enhancing in important ways our knowledge of this group as a crucial but understudied set of 18th-century consumers, while also contributing to understanding the parish clergy of England in the context of 18th-century society and culture. Bringing together a wide range of source material – from probate inventories to personal account books, satirical prints to sermons, diaries to designs for parsonages – the author reconstructs the material lives and household arrangements of the Georgian clergy in glorious detail. Examining the parish clergy over this period of profound social and religious change through the lens of consumption, and consumption through the lives of these clergymen, has a transformative impact both on these areas of enquiry and on our understanding of English society in the 18th century.

Full Product Details

9781350382084

Table of Contents

Reviews

An impressive and ground-breaking book, integrating for the first time the material and moral lives of the eighteenth century parson ... meticulously researched and based on an extensive array of sources. Essential reading for scholars of religion and material culture. * William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University, UK * A major contribution, addressing an important yet understudied topic – the parish clergy in the long eighteenth century – by placing them within a well-developed literature on consumption, domestic space, material culture, and the history of religion ... It is sure to become a standard source. * Stephen G. Hague, Rowan University, USA * Jon Stobart draws a richly textured portrait of the clergy in Georgian England. His landmark study is an enjoyable and necessary reading of clergymen’s identities, social practices, everyday routines, consumption, and material culture of home and household in the long eighteenth century. * Johanna Ilmakunnas, Åbo Akademi University, Finland *

Author Information

Jon Stobart, FRHS, is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and the author of The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020), editor of A Taste for Luxury (Bloomsbury, 2017) with Johanna Ilmakunnas, General Editor of A Cultural History of Shopping, 6 volumes (Bloomsbury, 2022), and co-editor, with Christopher J. Berry, of A Cultural History of Luxury in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). He is also editor of Global Goods and the Country House (2023), author of Comfort and the Eighteenth-Century Country House (2022) and co-author of Consumption and the Country House (2016).

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