Furnishing the Eighteenth Century ─ What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past

Furnishing the Eighteenth Century provides an illuminating, interdisciplinary look into European and American furniture during the century that connoisseurs and collectors consider its golden age. Lavishly illustrated, this lively collection of essays by historians, art historians, and literary scholars examines the ways furniture of this period reflects the global contacts and social rituals developed in eighteenth-century Europe and America. Drawing on literature, painting, account books and death inventories, this diverse compilation explores how and why eighteenth-century men and women on both sides of the Atlantic purchased and used furniture. Ultimately, these essays make the past come alive, showing us what made desks, tables and chairs deeply meaningful in their own time and historically informative today.

Contributors: Donna Bohanan, Natacha Coquery, Madeleine Dobie, Dena Goodman, Mimi Hellman, David Jaffee, Ann Smart Martin, Kathryn Norberg, Chaela Pastore, David Porter, Mary Salzman, Carolyn Sargentson

Dena Goodman is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment and Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, and the editor of Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (Routledge).

Kathryn Norberg teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Rich and Poor in Grenoble and the coeditor (with Sara Melzer) of From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France.