Introduction Special issue on early modern liminal domestic spaces

• Published in: Early modern literary studies pp. 1 - 2A
• Main Authors: Daniel, Robert W, Sheeha, Iman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sheffield Matthew Steggle, Editor, EMLS 01.01.2020
• Subjects: Aristotle (384-322 BC); Culture; Etymology; Historiography; Households; Literary devices; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Surveillance; Thresholds; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 1201-2459; 1201-2459

The most influential works of advice literature and household manuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew heavily on Xenophon's work, which was, in turn, influenced by Aristotle's.3 Here the idea that the household functioned as a microcosm of the State, and that order in the domestic sphere was essential for an ordered commonwealth, was articulated at length. Besides speculating on the potential causes for the central role the household came to play in early modern ideas about order, scholars have productively examined the nature of the representations of domesticity in the cultural production of early modern England. [...]houses were featuring more thresholds, porches, screen passages, doors, windows and staircases than ever before. [...]the etymological meaning of the term 'liminal' is derived from the classical Latin, limen, denoting the threshold of a building or room - the piece of timber that lies below the level of the door.13 If the early modern home was a beating heart, its demarcated boundaries (apertures and casements, stairways and alleyways, gates and gardens) were its arteries, serving as important conduits that circulated vital, and occasionally fatal, life-blood - via its inhabitants and lodgers, visitors and neighbours, strangers and intruders. [...]the late 2000s, much scholarship focused on the 'rites' and 'rituals' that accompanied these transitional moments within the early modern home, whereby little has been said of how these interacted with the physical spaces that surrounded that home.14 Some important strides in revisionist historiography are, however, taking place, whereby a particular focus on spatial geographies and materialist studies is beginning to re-map what we think we know about domestic spaces in the contexts of the people and places that surrounded them.15 This research is teasing out just how much early modern households were socially and architecturally 'liminal' domains.