Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, C. 1550-1640 (Studies in Design and Material Culture)

Description

Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Examining a range of manuscript, visual, and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment, and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces affected their own individual and collective identities. The book identifies a significant cultural development previously overlooked by historians: a movement to enlarge, beautify, and rebuild livery company halls in the City of London from the mid-sixteenth-century to the start of the civil wars. By exploring these re-building projects in depth, it throws new light on artisanal cultural production and self-presentation in England's most diverse and challenging urban environment. Craft company halls became multifunctional sites for knowledge production, social and economic organisation, political exchange, and collective memorialisation. The forms, uses, and perceptions of company halls worked to define relationships and hierarchies within the guild, and shaped its external civic and political relations. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, Crafting identities engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design, and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural, and urban history, and those interested in design and architectural history.