Year:    2011

Author:    Eibach, Joachim

Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Vol. 38 (2011), Iss. 4 : pp. 621–664

Abstract

An Open House. Communication Practices in Early Modern Europe

The article addresses the history of family, house and household. With the key category of the ‘open house’, two aims are pursued. Firstly, the article discusses the basic ways of communication between the actors in the house and their social environments during the early modern period. Secondly, a new concept is proposed for the study of the daily practice of living and dwelling in historical societies. In order to characterize the relevant impact of spatial arrangements, the term ‘house’ is preferred in contrast to the well-established term ‘household’. The proposed concept refers to recent discussions in social and cultural studies on the categories of ‘performance’, ‘social construction of space’ and ‘communication’ as a structured way to select social meanings. The analysis is based on four empirical examples: 1) the change of the spatial arrangement of the ‘house’ with special regard to so-called public and private spheres from the 17th century onwards; 2) the relevance of neighbourhood (‘next neighbours’) for both social integration and social control throughout the early modern period; 3) the practice of the washing day as an example for the public performance of domestic economy; 4) the role of marital and other courts as a new means to observe the behaviour of spouses from the 16th century onwards. In contrast to the contents of normative sources, a focus on the practice of communication reveals a certain transparency of almost all action in the house. We may even speak of a culture of visibility, in which performative events and repetitive rituals played an important role. Furthermore, certain rooms of the house were much more accessible for outsiders than they were in the 19th century bourgeois society. Therefore, we can detect a twofold openness of the house. Observations and interventions came from both the immediate social environments and law-based institutions. Albeit in the course of the examined time period, system integration by institutions and experts increasingly overlapped social integration in the neighbourhood etc. It was the social elites who first successfully attempted to cut the links between their dwellings and its direct social environments. However, their concept of social rank was based on the representation of honour, which implied other characteristic ways of openness.