Oeconomy and the Eighteenth-Century House

ABSTRACT

How can we recover domestic practices from the past? Tackling this question takes us to the very heart of the historical task of reconstructing events from past time, and in a particularly acute way. For historians of domestic practice, the perennial methodological questions concerning the availability of sources and the limits of our knowledge are only too familiar. The problem goes deeper, however. History as a discipline is fundamentally empiricist, yet the linguistic turn has generated a debate about the discipline's materialist underpinnings, about how “experience” is formed and how past experience is best investigated. The problem appears particularly clear when focusing on .“practices.” Focusing on middling-sort men and the eighteenth-century house, this article suggests a way to move past a too-common distinction between “prescription” and “practice.” The article argues that combining discourse analysis with careful readings of manuscript sources allow us to come to a better understanding of experience, a state of being that is always both material and discursive.

KEYWORDS:

• methodology
• domestic experience
• eighteenth-century house
• “oeconomy”
• men and domesticity