Material Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries Research Cluster invites you to their inaugural lecture with Dr Kate Smith (University of Birmingham).
Tuesday 17 March 2020
17:30 Playfair Library
Edinburgh
Free but ticketed https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/loss-and-dispossession-in-the-long-eighteenth-century-tickets-88816637955
‘Loss and Dispossession in the Long Eighteenth Century’
Histories of material culture have often focused on questions of presence: how objects in the past were made, purchased, used and repaired. In contrast, Kate Smith’s paper will explore what happened when objects were absent. More particularly, it will examine how eighteenth-century Britons developed systems to deal with loss and what such systems required of them. It will show that, when faced with loss, individuals were called upon to recall their possessions and describe them in full. To make their possessions recognisable to others, and thus increase the possibilities of reclamation, eighteenth-century Britons had to draw out the salient features of missing things. In doing so, they reveal much about what they imagined their possessions to be. The paper considers questions of description, attention, memory and the self to show the complex knowledge, practices and systems constructed and utilised in response to loss.