1st Edition

Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700-1914

Edited By Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen, Anne Montenach Copyright 2015
    276 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    296 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.

    1. Luxury, Gender and the Urban Experience  Marjo Kaartinen, Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton  Part I: Markets and Opportunities  2. Milliners and Marchandes de Modes: Gender, Creativity and Skill in the Workplace  Deborah Simonton  3. Gender and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Grenoble: From Legal Exchanges to Shadow Economy  Anne Montenach  4. Women in the Late-Eighteenth-Century-Copenhagen Luxury Trades  Carol Gold  5. Feminisation and the Luxury of Visual Art in London’s West End, 1860-1890  Kemille Moore  Part II: Metropole and Province  6. Men, Women and the Supply of Luxury Goods in Eighteenth-Century England: The Purchasing Patterns of Edward and Mary Leigh  Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery  7. The Luxury Shopping Experience of the Swedish Aristocracy in Eighteenth-Century Paris  Johanna Ilmakunnas  8. Gender and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Catalonia: Town and Countryside  Belén Moreno Claverías  9. Gender, Craftwork and the Exotic in International Exhibitions c. 1880-1910  Stana Nenadic  Part III: Class and Status  10. A Feminine Luxury in Paris: Marie-Fortunée d’Este, Princesse de Conti (1731-1803)  Aurélie Chatenet-Calyste  11. Favourites of Fortune: The Luxury Consumption of the Hackmans of Vyborg, 1790-1825  Ulla Ijäs  12. The "Díszmagyar" as Representation in the Andrássy Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Budapest  Zsuzsa Sidó  13. The Luxury They Could Not Afford?: Households of Workers in the Industrial Town of Drammen, Norway c. 1900  Hanne Marie Johansen  Afterword: Gender, Luxury and Towns Revisited  Anne Montenach, Marjo Kaartinen and Deborah Simonton 

    Biography

    Deborah Simonton is an associate professor of British History at the University of Southern Denmark, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a visiting professor at the University of Turku, Finland.

    Marjo Kaartinen is a professor of cultural history at the University of Turku and the director of the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

    Anne Montenach is an associate professor of early modern history at Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, UMR 7303 TELEMME (13094 Aix-en-Provence, France).

    ‘The Danish funding agencies have every reason to be pleased with their decision to invest money in the network Gender in the European Town, and the editors have done a very good job in recruiting scholars from all over Europe. I strongly recommend these volumes to a wide audience.’ - Maria Ågren, Uppsala, L'Homme